“It’s FU time.”

That’s the message from UNTHINK, which seems to be poised to take on Facebook (and Google+) in a big way, at least judging by the video above.

PR News Channel and Storyful report and provide several more videos.

Whether UNTHINK will provide a real social media alternative is impossible to say. No one knows (yet) what they are other than that they have a ton of energy, great production values and have a brobdingnagian bone to pick with Facebook.

One thing is certain: For now, this is worth close attention … so you might want to go to their site and sign up for an invitation code.

(Hat tip to the interwebs’ best teevee blogger, Joe Bua.)

I was cleaning out my office closet this morning and found a copy of Marketing Sherpa‘s Email Marketing Metrics Guide for 2005. Among the many dozens of charts in there was one that measured 2004 email open rates by industry. I thought it would be interesting to compare those rates with more current rates, and found this post from MarketingProfs that provides 2010 open rates.

One of the problems with comparing open rates then and now is that industry sectors aren’t exactly the same. Still, looking at the now-numbers above and the then-numbers below is interesting, if nothing else:

Manufacturing: 46%
Finance & Insurance: 44%
Professional Services & Consulting: 40%
Technology: 40%
Healthcare and Social Assistance: 32%
Marketing: 43%

The same problem exists with that more valuable metric, click rates: The industry sectors aren’t exactly the same, not even from page to page within the Sherpa report. Still, it’s an interesting journey down memory lane:

Business Products & Services: 6.7%
Consumer Products: 9.5%
Consumer Services: 9.3%
Financial Services: 11.8%
Travel: 8.3%
Retail & Catalog: 7.1%
Business Publisher: 7.3%
Consumer Publisher: 9.6%

All in all, I think it add up to one more piece of evidence (as if any more were needed) about how much more competitive email marketing has become over the past half-decade.

According to Ticketmaster, that is, which recently disseminated the following information to their marketing partners:

We analyzed our social media campaigns across 2.2 million fans in our online communities and by following these easy tips, we believe you can generate even better results:

• Don’t saturate your community. Post 2-3 messages per day with a balance of 1/3 of the messages dedicated to fan engagement (questions and content designed to create conversation around entertainment and live events) and 2/3 dedicated to marketing events and sponsors.
• Choose the best days of the week. Marketing messages posted on Monday, Wednesday and Sunday afternoons drive 50% more ticket sales than other days of the week.
• Seek engagement. Marketing messages that include a question at the end increase revenue by 33% and engagement by 70%.
• Offer content. Marketing messages with photos drive 2X as many ticket sales as those without photos.
• Keep it simple. Adding more than one link (for example, YouTube link plus ticket link) decreases individual link clickthroughs by 40%.

A lot of this advice is pretty universal to all social media efforts, but I find that second bullet point particularly interesting. I wonder if other industries are experiencing the same sort of spikes on Monday, Wednesday and Sunday afternoons or if that’s unique to ticket sales. Hmmmmm.

Forbes reports on a Forrester study projecting that online ad spending will eclipse teevee ad spending by 2016. Why, it seems like just last year that online ad spending eclipsed print ad spending … hey, wait, it was.

The mix is the good stuff, but Pat O’Brien’s also has a hurricane recipe on its site. After all, those folks in N’awlins know how to deal with weather like this.