written by Mike McPhaden

Google. Facebook. YouTube. That’s where an embarrassing amount of my time goes, and I’m not alone. Which is why there are a lot of awfully brainy people out there, trying to figure out how to use the web to sell everything from soap to, well, soaps.

Mitch Joel (President, Twist ) has been called a “rock star and digital marketing visionary.” His talk to a crowd of groggy industry types (at the ungodly hour, by Just For Laughs standards, of 11 am) was an avalanche of facts and insights into the web, and how we should be using it to reach our audience.

The highlights:

– This year, $7 trillion will be spent worldwide online. (For a little perspective, a trillion seconds is over 220, 000 years.)

– What activity do 40% of people do while watching TV? Surf the web? Cook? Macrame? Nope, the answer is sleep. Unless people have something to click or interact with, they’re zoning out.

– in homes with broadband, 48% of their leisure time is spent online. People want real interactions with real people. They want to interact.

-free up your content. Let people share it, comment on it, and remix it. Online video was around long before YouTube, but they were the first to build a community of commenters and repeat visitors to their site.

– don’t think in demographics, think in tribes. Don’t think about age, think about attitudes. Don’t ask how many people can you reach, ask how you can reach just the right people.

– We need to stop marketing stuff to a certain age group and gender and start making sure our products are found when our tribe searches for it.

– search is everything. Everyday, 20% of all Google searches have never been done before.

– every 60 seconds, eight hours of content is uploaded to YouTube. Last August, for the first time, the #1 web activity changed from communication (email, etc) to viewing content.

– half of YouTube’s audience is over 34. It’s not just kids in the basement, so stop treating it as such.

– on the web, older content is more powerful. The longer it’s on, the more it’s linked to, and the better it performs in searches. Sixty percent of traffic to Wired.com is not to the latest gadget-love stuff on the homepage, it’s to stuff deep in their archives.

– Your site’s homepage is not really its homepage. It’s whatever the first Google hit is. Your product is not what you say it is, it’s what a Google search says it is. “If you’re not appearing, you’re disappearing.”