In 9 Of 10 Industries Search Tops Lead Generation, Social Shortens Marketing Cycles

Read this very detailed look at marketing analytics.

First Touch: In 9 Of 10 Industries Search Tops Lead Generation, Social Shortens Marketing Cycles - MarketingLand

In a new paper, Bizible analyzed data from the more than 480,000 leads that have been tracked through its Salesforce marketing analytics platform to provide insights on how marketers should be thinking about attribution modeling and why the traditional last-click model is broken. 

When looking at last touch only, Bizible found that search accounted for 41 percent of the leads generated. Yet, when considered by first touch, search, in fact, drove 56 percent of the leads. 

Furthermore, the combination of search first touch and search last touch was the most productive sequence for lead generation, accounting for 37 percent of all leads from first/last touch combinations.

Google Political Video Search

Google is rolling out a new service that should be interesting. It's a video search tool that parses the text of political speeches and makes it searchable. Here is the link to the announcement on Google's blog:

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/07/in-their-own-words-political-videos.html

Here is a snippet of what they say:

Our teams have been working to develop tools to make it easier for people to track election-related information. A few months back, YouTube encouraged everyone to participate in the discussion process through the CNN/YouTube debates, Google Checkout offered an easy and fast way for individuals to make contributions to political candidates, and the Geo team created maps and layers to inform voters during elections.

Today, the Google speech team (part of Google Research) is launching the Google Elections Video Search gadget, our modest contribution to the electoral process. With the help of our speech recognition technologies, videos from YouTube's Politicians channels are automatically transcribed from speech to text and indexed. Using the gadget you can search not only the titles and descriptions of the videos, but also their spoken content. Additionally, since speech recognition tells us exactly when words are spoken in the video, you can jump right to the most relevant parts of the videos you find. Here's a look:

Kind of cool, eh? I mean, if you are really big political nerd, that is...