“As much as people want to connect through the Internet, the practice also can have the opposite effect: Social Networking Fatigue,” so says the article Social Sites Becoming Too Much of a Good Thing (via: SteinBlog). It’s been noted in Compete Inc’s paper on Social Commerce that marketers are facing the challenge of Social Saturation:

“While social networking sites continue to grow, online socialites are reaching the limit of how many online communities they want to participate in. The average online socialite currently frequents three social networking sites; when polled, these same socialites stated they would consider participation in up to four communities.”

I’ve often thought that it would be a great if people could port their digital persona from network to network; then the burnout rate would be lower. Wouldn’t you love to go over to a new social network and be able to have the basics of your digital identity and related network contacts added without much work on your end?

In a Knowledge at Wharton Podcast earlier this year, on the topic of portable reputation and identity across communities Julie Herendeen, vice president of Network Products at Yahoo, said:

“Openness is the direction that the web is moving. Identity does belong to the user and we really want to be as open as possible with identify while protecting users privacy. What can syndicate in identity? And what things remain unique to the site?”

But is openness the direction of Social Networks?

Ever since I blogged about ID+ last year - which would have reproduced inter-personal networks on digital accounts that were connected in an open peer-to-peer network, enabling new and more effective ways of working - I’ve been waiting with baited breath (well not quite “baited breath” but you get the point) for the day when an online persona could be taken across platforms. Alas, the ID+ site seems to have disappeared; and if Jay Stevens, vice president of sales and operations with MySpace, comments about Bebo, Facebook and MySpace being “unlikely to ever offer an open platform for users to integrate the services offered by these sites” at a recent Marketing conference are any indication, openness is not the direction that Social Networks are moving.

Yesterday I had a conversation with Alf Watt of iStumbler on the train ride home about the very topic of Social Network burnout. Alf, who also works at the Social Networking site imeem (which combines Social Networking with Instant messaging) burst my bubble on the whole idea by pointing out the privacy issues. I guess we can still dare to dream.

The What Have I Been Reading Reading List:

• Online Marketing Ranks Second to In-Person for B2B in 2008 - “Business to Business marketing, in order to be competitive in the Web 2.0 environment, has to be ahead of the trends. According to the Direct Marketing Association, says the report, by 2008 online marketing efforts will be the dominant media for business-to-business initiatives. Traditional direct mail, industry print, and events and promotions will take a back seat to more efficient and sophisticated online efforts.” (Download PDF). See also: Marketing 2.0 : Omniture to Unveil “Plug and Play” Online Marketing Technology
• Plugging In: Can E-Commerce Leverage Social Networks? (via: Media 2.0) “Across the rest of the Internet, meanwhile, including the Web 2.0 realm of social networking, eBay is extending its reach thanks to the work of some of its 1,000 third-party developers. The developers program, now in its sixth year, has created scores of plug-ins and other tools to help people sell, with 25 percent of all eBay listings now being generated through third-party tools.” See also: Can’t Find That Dress on the Rack? Retailers Are Pushing More Shoppers to the Web “Daniel Corsten, a former visiting professor at Wharton who now teaches at the London Business School, says he’s not convinced the new strategy of pushing in-store customers to the Internet will work. ‘What happens is the store turns an impulse buy into rational buying. You come into the store and you want to buy something, but it is not there. You realize you were intrigued about buying [the item], but now you have to rationalize it. This breaks the purchasing process. All of a sudden you think twice.’” While I would general argue that it is a great idea for retailers to push low-selling merchandise and special orders via the web, I can’t help but agree with the quote above.
• A Role for Time and Query Quality in Search Results – “I’ve had people ask me if it was worth keeping older articles and documents on their web sites, especially when information in those documents might become outdated. My response has been that as long as the pages clearly indicate what time periods they are relevant to, and that if the site owners include updated information, it’s easy for people to know that, and find that new information, it can be helpful to them to keep those pages.” Measuring the Quality of Queries, Adding Time to the Determination of Quality and Yahoo Temporal Relevance, oh my. It is posts like this that make Bill’s Blog a must read.

The I Also Glanced Over Reading List:

• Second-Life Makes the (Virtual) Travel Section of the New York Times. See also: Drawing Up a Virtual Marketing Plan (via: Managing the Gray)
• Yahoo! Search Crawler (Yahoo! Slurp) - Supporting wildcards in robots.txt
• SEO Salaries - How Much Should You Make
• Landing Pages for SEO

The Too Cool: goes to Timeline. The Ajax Widget for Visualizing Time-based Data. From the site, “Timeline is a DHTML-based AJAXy widget for visualizing time-based events. It is like Google Maps for time-based information.” (via: http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2006/11/timeline_ajax_w.html)

“I hope you’re eating something that will fill your soul and mind – I Know - Raphael Saadiq

Posted by: Natasha “That Girl From Marketing” Robinson

As much as I would love to attend The SF New Tech November Meetup I am feeling beat, I have emails to respond to and ANTM to watch (ok, so I kid about needing to respond to emails…).

The What Have I Been Reading Reading List:

• HP: Social networking not marketer friendly: “For Mary Bermel, Director Interactive, HP, the new pull paradigm means HP must create content of value to users so they want to engage with the brand and take the effort to ‘pull’ information from HP. Bermel is not convinced, however, that HP should be engaging in “pull” marketing at social networking properties such as MySpace and Facebook.” (Via Media 2.0) The interesting thing is that other than business with HP, the only “personal relationship” that I would even have with HP is via Social Media a’la: Erik Kintz’s (VP of Global Marketing Strategy & Excellence for HP) Blog. So I do see the value in “being there”; as I consider the HP blogs a way of HP “being there” in social media. Update: I’m currently listening to the Web Seminar: Using New Media Tools for Marketing to IT Professionals: Blogs, Podcasts, Video, RSS and Social Networking – and Mary tells us that contrary to what she has been quoted as saying, HP is not afraid of social networks. See also: Social Media: A Splash of Cold Water and User-Generated Revolution
• How to Write a Social Media Press Release, Why, and What It All Means - “New technology and poor writing, still equal a bad press release. Social Media Press Releases do not replace traditional releases, they complement them - much in the same way that Social Media activities and campaigns work best in concert with traditional PR initiatives.” See also: The Ten-Bullet Objective for Social Media News Releases
• Optimizing PDFs for SEO: Ok Matt, I’m going to need you to create an RSS feed that I can automatically download to my brain, so I can just mindmeld your Blog posts. BTW: In regards to PDF optimization, I would also: Add relevant info to both the Document Properties and Document Metadata.

The I Also Glanced Over Reading List:

• Optimizing Paid Search Campaigns via Keyword Insertions, Keyword Expansion and Targeted URLs pays off for Advertising.com
• Optimizing Sitemaps Feeds for Yahoo (via Search Engine Watch)
• On, On To Social Marketing

“Sweet dreams till sunbeams find you / Sweet dreams that leave all worries behind you” – Dream a Little Dream of Me – Louis Armstrong

Posted by: Natasha “That Girl From Marketing” Robinson

I have so many notes from yesterday’s SF Tech Session on Social Bookmarking, that I’ll need more time to coordinate my thoughts. In the meantime, you can check out Daniel Riveong’s excellent recap: Social Bookmarking Talk at SF Tech Sessions as well Niall Kennedy’s Bookmarking and Social Sharing Trends (gosh I felt like a groupie meeting him, since I’ve been such a fan of his Blog).

BTW: Continuing my decent into Conference Junkiedom, tomorrow I’ll be attending The SF New Tech November Meetup (Also at CNET) featuring Bart Myers from the User Generated Content platform GUBA, Veronica Belmont from CNET TV, Jessica Hardwick of community-driven swapping site Swap Thing and Alf Watt of iStumbler the wireless discovery tool for Mac. Soon, I’ll be doing Online Marketing for conference passes - lol!

The What Have I Been Reading Reading List:

• Marketing Strategy Is the Foundation for Business Success: “But today, strategy is out, and execution is in. This emphasis on execution at the expense of strategy is on the rise in marketing organizations as well. They want the marketing team to simply go out and execute a marketing plan. However, attractive packaging, when combined with content that is not well thought out (or more importantly, not on target strategically), will fall flat on its pretty little face. Because a “pretty face” will only go so far, it’s extremely important to spend the upfront time to be sure that your marketing programs are built on a solid foundation, that you have nailed down the key elements of your marketing strategy, and your team can clearly articulate them—before going off to create those highly visible (and often highly expensive) marketing deliverables.” This could easily be about Search Engine Marketing! See also: The Paris Hilton Law of Visibility - “Which states that even the least attractive content can be the most visible with the right media attention.”
• The SBS Interview: Jon Glick of Become.com pt. 1 – I would love to pick just one quote, but the whole thing must be read. If I has to pick just one it would have to be: “You can please all the engines; look how well Wikipedia is doing. It’s all of the fundamentals: great content that attracts users, in-links and great anchor text in droves. The joke at SES was now that Google indexes Wikipedia they only have to figure out what the other nine results will be.” And, “I would advise sites to start by optimizing for Google, but follow on with specific steps designed to help with the other engines. For example, adding RSS for your site will get you more aggressive and frequent crawling by Slurp and title tag optimization will pay big dividends in MSN.” Ok, that was two. This is an excellent interview… really surprised there isn’t more linkage to it. Good work Matt.

The I Also Glanced Over Reading List:

• Search still most efficient by far at acquiring customers: “At an average cost per acquisition of $8.50, Internet search was shown to be more than twice as efficient as the next-best marketing channel in a study of five channels by Piper Jaffray & Co. The study, “The New eCommerce Decade: The Age of Micro Targeting,” which was released earlier this month, compared the customer acquisition costs of search, Yellow Pages, online display ads, e-mail and direct mail. Yellow Pages came in as the second-most efficient at $20 per customer acquisition, followed by online display ads, $50; e-mail, $60; and direct mail, $70.”
• The Predictive Power of Online Chatter– Heavy reading… will have to table till the weekend. (via Zero Influence)
• Disney’s Web Strategy: Build, Not Buy (via: I Want Media)

The Too Cool: Goes to the Strange Kiss Designer Toys and Art Prints (via: Factory City, a Blog I discovered after sitting next to Chris Messina yesterday). “Strangekiss is all about bringing the ART back into ART! We proudly represent many artists….In the near future, we will introduce the Street Art section showcasing the origins of Los Angeles and New York Street Art from the grand old Pan Pacific in Los Angeles to The Bronx and the electric culture that was developing there.” – How cool is that?! Just what I need, another cool site to blow my hard earned money on.

“You’ve got your life, you’ve got your health / So quit procrastinating and push it yourself” – In Due Time - OutKast

Posted by: Natasha “That Girl From Marketing” Robinson

Thank God It’s Friday. And if you are going to the Blogger Happy Hour in San Francisco after User Research Friday, I’ll see ya then.

The What Have I Been Reading Reading List:

• Technology Enables Product Placement in CGM – New term alert: Plinking – “Plinking is the process of adding a product or service link to a visible object or image in a video. When deployed, it will have an interface for users to upload and tag video. Users will freeze a single frame and define an area where the product is located. It can be any product from an iPod to particular jacket or pair of jeans. Once tagged, the item will be clickable throughout the runtime of the video, and will link to an e-commerce page.”
• MySpace, ByeSpace – Registrations are slowing has critical mass been reached? Or have all the older people showing up slowed signups? Or is it that the spammers have been stopped. (Via: iMedia Connection) “There’s no question, however, that MySpace’s recent popularity has brought with it a proliferation of spam that has annoyed some users. Many advertisers take advantage of the “friend request” function and send out requests that are really just advertisements. And programs have cropped up that can automatically send mass friend requests to MySpace users — in short, a new generation of email spam.”
• An Introduction to Microformats (via: Micropersuasion) “Microformats are small and gentle syntactic touch-ups for your web pages. They have one major purpose: to make your data readable by both man and machine. They are the technical diplomats of the Web; allowing the same piece of data to be shared among many applications and people.” Ever since I first heard about Microformats on a Social Media Club podcast, I’ve been intrigued. This is one of those posts that I will have to print out and read over the weekend. A good example of a Microformat is the XFN (XHTML Friends Network) which I never realized this was a Microformat.
  
• Kickstarting RSS: How to Make the Right Decisions to Reach Your Target Market: “In this article, we look at five such issues that you should consider in planning your feed marketing communications.

1. Deliver Relevant Content By Identifying and Targeting Your Audience
2. Don’t Confuse Your Customer By Offering Too Many Feed Choices
3. Content Strategy Can Affect Subscription Levels and Loyalty
4. Know how often you will update your feed
5. Make Sure Your Website Visitors Find Your Feeds”

The I Also Glanced Over Reading List:

• Long List of Link Searches – Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz, does it again – he has created yet another highly linkworthy piece on using Link Searches for Competitive Intelligence.
• Advertising Mix n’ Match: Examining the Coalescence of Branding and Search Engines Online “A survey conducted by The Dieringer Research Group found 45% of adults say their brand opinions have changed as a result of advertising and other product information found online.”
• Second Life Takes Off, Gains Interest of Older Generation
• Wiki Showdown at Web SIG

“Finally the weekend’s come and everything is goin’ down” – Thank God It’s Friday - R. Kelly

Posted by: Natasha “That Girl From Marketing” Robinson

Last night I read Yet Another Press Release (YAPR) about a major brand’s launch into Second Life, and thought to myself, “Gosh, what’s the purpose at this point, especially if you aren’t offering anything to the community other than a virtual replication of your big corporate brand.” Then I read Sense.PSFK’s piece: There’s Gold In Them There Virtual Hills?. 

This is probably one of the best pieces I’ve read about the corporate Second Life land grab. It includes the author recounting a less than stellar encounter with some “virtual” employees of global ad agency Bartle Bogle Hegarty (who had a We’re in Second Life Press release a short time ago).  As well as this choice observation:

“Both media and business need to understand the motivations of individuals within Second Life to glean any useful answers from it. Basically there are two lenses you can examine Second Life through, two viewpoints if you will: as an Immersionist, or as an Augmentationist. So far, mainstream reporting of Second Life has tended to blur the two to great confusion. The Immersionists want Second Life to be a world in itself that should be a complete escape from ‘Real Life’.The Augmentationists view Second Life as just another online interaction tool. Though, that isn’t to say that the two viewpoints can’t co-exist. It’s just that the subtleties of the two viewpoints are not explained to the reader. So is it any wonder some people just don’t GET Second Life?”

If you are interested in the virtual world marketing I recommend reading Iiya Vedrashko’s (80 page Thesis - PDF) Advertising in Computer Games.  And if any of you marketers out there are considering seeing what this whole “virtual world” thing is about, you may want to book a virtual tour guide for travel (What will they think of next) (via: ConversationBlog).
 

The What Have I Been Reading Reading List:

• Advertising in Second Life: My favorite rules on advertising in second life: 1.  Don’t think your cute little dorky guy that you have as a logo or mascot in RL is going to fit in the virtual world just because it’s cute and dorky. 7. Avoid having your employees look like these MOU dudes who look like they’re serving 5-10 upstate.  8. Don’t build a big-ass pretentious build and have a hugely hyped media event with a one-hit-wonder and then leave the build out to moulder on an empty sim for weeks later.  9. Every avatar has a t-shirt — some of them put it on and never take it off because it needs no washing! Make sure it’s your company’s logo!.  See also his response to The Second Life Optimization article: Do’s and Don’ts for Big Business Marketers
  
• I commented yesterday on ThreadWatch that as online marketers we should take a holistic view of online marketing.  If you are in the consumer electronics space - especially for high end goods – new research shows  this is all the more important.
  

From: Affluent Consumers Buy Electronics Online (via: WebProNews) 
 - 93% of US affluent consumers research upcoming consumer electronics purchases
 - 62% used both product Web sites and search engines to do so
 - 27.5% used e-mail newsletters as part of their research process.
more than half of US affluent consumers plan to make computer purchases online.

From: Online Research Drives Electronic Studies
 - 77% of consumer electronics purchases are influenced by internet research  
 - 45 percent of those who research online and purchase offline use a search engine during the information-gathering process.
 - ‘Searchers’ defined as those who use search to research CE goods, represent 47 percent of the offline and online purchasers surveyed…. are likely to advocate brands by word-of-mouth and are 114 percent more likely to consider internet display advertising in their research process.

• 30% of MySpace Users Create Most Content – Research from Kelvin Beecroft, head of Mashable Labs. “MySpace gets lots of criticism for flaunting the 100 million+ registered users they have. While that most likely is an accurate number of accounts, those generating the actual content on MySpace are likely far fewer.  I took it to task to find out just how many of those users are truly building MySpace with user-generated content. In applying the ranking formula we eliminated over two-thirds of those user accounts, leaving 362,824 user accounts in which to test for the presence of video links.  Thus we narrowed the sample down to 30.19% of the original sample by eliminating inactive and marginally active users. The interesting thing we discovered is that 84.22% of all the video links found in the original, larger sample was in this small group of active users.” Much like the comments in this post,  I’m confused too.  Guess it will all make sense when they publish the full study. See also: The oldie but goodie, Top 100 Digg Users Control 56% of Digg’s HomePage Content
  

The I Also Glanced Over Reading List:

• ‘Swarm-Based’ Collaborative Filmmaking -  ”The first truly collaborative instance of indie filmmaking and online distribution using the Creative Commons copyright model, thus encouraging free download and fan ‘remixes’.”
• Tutorial: Automatic Sitemap in WordPress
• How-To: Earn Brand Loyalty in Social Networks 

“I never ran from adversity, instead I ran to it / Fear ain’t in the heart of me I learned just do it” – The Good Life – T.I.

Posted by: Natasha “That Girl From Marketing” Robinson

Ok, so I’m watching VeggieTales Saturday morning (Yes, I watch it and I’m not afraid to admit I like it!) when I see a commercial for Bling Bling Barbie. When I was growing up they had Career Girl and Astronaut Barbie. Now they have Ghetto Fabulous Barbies ala Little Kim or JLo. Next thing you know they will have a Video Hoe Barbie action figure complete with drop-it-like-its-hot booty shaking. Wow, I’m so disappointed that this is being marketed by the Barbie brand.

The What Have I Been Reading Reading List:

• The Failure of Friendster: ”Roughly once a week, David L. Sze, a venture capitalist at Greylock Partners, hears from entrepreneurs who say they have the next MySpace, the copycat social networking site that has trounced Friendster. ‘The counter to that is, “Tell me why you aren’t going to be the next Friendster,”’ Mr. Sze said. ‘It’s become the iconic case of failure.’ But why and how Friendster missed the mark is a salutary Silicon Valley tale so instructive that Mikolaj Jan Piskorski, an assistant professor at the Harvard Business School, uses the company’s inglorious fall as a case study in his strategy classes” Ouch! “The team now running Friendster valiantly soldiers on, hoping that it can position the company as a site for an older demographic group — people 25 to 40 — who do not have the time or inclination to spend hours each day on MySpace.” Guess they don’t realize that More than Half of MySpace Visitors are Now Age 35 or Older. See also: Social Networks See Back-to-School Drop (via: smo)
• Big Media Gets a Second Life “Big media’s land grab is well under way in Second Life, the online realm where real people, under the guise of avatars, mill and mingle and, in some cases, make a living. The game’s audience, swiftly approaching 1 million, is growing at about 38% month over month, according to its creator, Linden Lab. The outfit expects to add 200,000 to 250,000 new players—many of them the coveted younger early adopters—in October alone. And like so many other companies already setting up shop in Second Life, news organizations and other media outlets don’t want to be left behind. As the virtual world grows up in the coming 12 months, it’s only going to get more attractive to companies that want to send a multimedia message.” See also: Reuters Second Life Bureau

The I Also Glanced Over Reading List:

• Consumer Generated Media & Brand Monitoring Vendor Evaluations (pdf) (via: Attention Max)
• Microsoft Live New Link Operator - LinkfromDomain
• Web Numbers: What’s Real?
• LinkedIn, Anyone? See also: Radical Trust Website Review: LinkedIn
• LEWIS Wins Global PR Campaign For Second Life (via: For Immediate Release podcast)

“What happened to the dreams of a girl president /She’s dancing in the video next to 50 Cent” – Stupid Girls – Pink

Posted by: Natasha “That Girl From Marketing” Robinson

You don’t realize how much you live by the internet until you can’t get yours to work (sigh). And can anyone tell me why my internet connection will work on my Apple Powerbook but not on my IBM Thinkpad?? Just another reason why macs are better.

The What Have I Been Reading Reading List:

• The Future of the Micro Site – Consumer Generated Content: (via: Marketing Vox) As I was about to reply to Collin about an off the Blog conversation regarding my feelings on Microsites, (Yes, you do need to blog what you wrote, good stuff) I came across an article about the report from JupiterKagan “Microsites Becoming More Popular” (I can’t seem to find this report, anyone know where I might find it?). “An important component to campaigns that include microsites will be the movement toward consumer-generated content, 34% percent of advertisers planning to use microsites intend to use consumer-created content in their overall marketing efforts. Advertisers who plan to use microsites are planning to use weblog and viral advertising nearly three times as much as those advertisers who are not planning to use microsites. While only 30 percent of companies whose annual revenues exceed US $500 million used promotional microsites in the past year, 45 percent of such companies plan to use them in the coming year. The movement toward consumer-generated content will be an important component of microsites. Such sites are dependent on viral promotion, and allowing users the ability to add their own created content is a great way to engage users and get them talking about the campaign.” In the article they note the microsite created by Organic for X-Men: The Last Stand on MySpace.com as a microsite example, you can read more about the campaign on Search Engine Lowdown. See also: How-To: Harness Word of Mouth as a Media Channel
• U.S. Teens Graduate From Choosing IM Buddy Icons to Creating Elaborate Social Networking Profiles “Over a three-year period, the top sites among teens 12-17 have shifted from those offering a selection of instant messaging buddy icons to those providing assistance with social networking profiles and page layouts. In September 2003, the No. 1 site among teens was Originalicons.com, with teens composing 77.6 percent of its unique audience. In September of this year, sites offering tools to improve social networking profiles with song lyrics, pictures, quotes and layout designs won out with those ages 12-17. PLyrics.com ranked No. 1 among teens, who made up 68.4 percent of its unique audience.
• S–Commerce: Beyond MySpace and YouTube; A new approach for brands to participate in social networking (download the PDF - New Research Reveals Next Wave of Social Networking Opportunities) “s–commerce” - seamlessly integrating commercial and social web. (via: Click Z ) “S-commerce innovators are using one of six strategies to integrated consumers into their sales and marketing efforts: Branded micro-sites; customer reviews and ratings; online customer forums; peer-to-peer transactions; product-focused blogs; and community-created products. By understanding why people seek out social sites and the factors that shape their participation, marketers can explore and create new ways for their brands to thrive within the social web.”

The I Also Glanced Over Reading List:

• Internet Users Watch Less TV: If you have an Internet connection at home, odds are you’re watching less television. Maybe as much as 25% less. Yahoo users are watching less. MySpace.com much (less), the difference is 20%.” (via: Media 2.0). See also: Mobile and Web TV Are the Future for Disney Media: “Content delivered via wireless devices still has the potential to be a big winner, Disney executives believe, despite the company’s decision to shutter its ESPN Mobile venture late last month.”
• SEO is a Business School of Thought - Not a Process “Many “SEO’s” have went through a fairly specific lifecycle of becoming successful entrepreneurs. Stumble into the web. Learn SEO fundamentals. Apply SEO. Rinse. Repeat. SEO’s are the brains and inspiration behind many web 2.0 business models. Sometimes these innovators aren’t even aware that they are applying SEO principles.”

The Too Cool: Goes to (if true) Calorie-Burning Beverage Enviga. “Coke, Nestle claim that it can boost a drinker’s metabolism. Coca-Cola and Nestle are preparing to launch a carbonated beverage that burns calories. The brand uses a blend of green-tea extracts known for boosting metabolism called Epigallocatechin gallate (EGCG).” I’ll believe it when I drink it.

“No matter what goes on I’m still getting mine/ No matter the year/ No matter the place/ No mater the time” - 1-9-9-9 - Common

Posted by: Natasha “That Girl From Marketing” Robinson

My Imaginary IM Message to News Media and Blogs today : OMGICRASAGAYT!

Translation: Oh My God, I Can’t Read Another Story About Google and YouTube!

The What Have I Been Reading Reading List:

• Optimizing Online Retail Word-of-Mouth Techniques (Sorry they have not put the latest newsletter up yet) – Neilsen/Netratings reports that “More than 75% of online shoppers recommend retail sites and 55% forward a retailer’s e-mail marketing message to friends and family.” Interestingly enough, “Heavy frequency of recommendations does not equate to heavy online spending, Online spending actually declines as consumer recommendations & reviews become too frequent, so numerous messages may distract customers from promoting your site.” Who would have guessed that. See also: Consumer reviews drive online sales: “Some 77 percent of online shoppers use consumer generated product reviews/ratings. Online buyers who find user-generated product ratings and reviews useful spend more online than the average. Buyers who write consumer reviews make up only 20 percent of online shoppers but account for 32 percent of all Internet sales.”
• As a follow up to the research on : How Consumers Find Web Sites In 2006. Generations’ Media Habits Shape Their Site-Finding Behavior, check out: Search Engine Usage by Age Groups (via: Shimon Sandler – there is a redux there as well) and to the Derrick Daye who asked about Search Engine Usage by Gender, check out: How Gender Affects Search

The I Also Glanced Over Reading List:

• Three Dynamics of Viral Marketing: 1. Viral marketing does not spread well . 2. The probability of viral infection decreases with repeated interaction 3. Viral effectiveness varies depending on price and category
• Impact of Ad Copy on Click Through Rates. See also: The search world and display advertising world reside in different universes -
• Well, I’ve found out on RentOMeter (via: The Daily Searchcast) that that my rent for a 1 bedroom in the 94103 area code of San Francisco is a bargain. Good to know. I definitely had sticker shock after moving here from Atlanta where the most I paid for a 1 bed room was $800.00.
• Intel Partners with Second Life. See also: First Look at the Bartle Bogle Hegarty’s Office in Second Life

“You’ve got a new horizon its ephemeral style / A melancholy town where we never smile” - Feel Good Inc - Gorillaz

Posted by: Natasha “That Girl From Marketing” Robinson

The study of the month goes to: Tapping into the Super Influencer: What You Need to Know to Engage the Elusive Young Customer(PDF), found via: Some 13-34s Show High Brand Loyalty: “CNET and Starcom questioned more than 10,000 young people through ethnographies, followed by online surveys and conversations. A small but significant portion of the respondents–between 15 and 20 percent–fell into a category dubbed “Brand Sirens.” Those sirens have a profound network effect on marketing through their ability to influence friends and family via word-of-mouth, viral video and applications such as instant messaging and Blogs, among other media.”

Lots of good stuff in the study, including: How To Insert YOUR Brand Into THEIR Conversations:

• Recognize that word of mouth driven by technology has greater impact than ever before
• Pitch the niche
• Follow the content that they are passionate about
• Give them control
• Connect with honesty, humor and social responsibility
• Rethink Reach: The New Reach and Frequency: Audience (influencers/sirens) X Number of conversations generated by them

Side Note: Some this did remind me of the Leveraging Social Media session from Search Engine Strategies. Such as what Gary Stein said about Marketing to Cliques (You can download his presentation at that link):

• Tightly define your group - What do these people think about
• Don’t be afraid to show features - Let the group come to their own conclusion about what they want to use – more features better
• Support the community
• Clone the tactic with like groups when you know what works

As well as what Scott Meyer of About.com gave as the definition of Success in Social Media: Engagement + Authenticity * Target Audience Reach

See also:

• BuzzLogic Platform Maps Top Online Influencers: “The Web-based application joins other ‘listening’ platforms now offered by companies like Cymfony, Nielsen BuzzMetrics, Waggener Edstrom and Umbria. BuzzLogic hopes to differentiate itself from those offerings by focusing on identifying the top handful of influencers — not merely the most popular, in terms of traffic or inbound links — within customer-specified ‘conversations’.”
• Call for Comment: Social Media Disclosure: “Most consumers believe that content in environments like MySpace or YouTube has been created by non-marketers (Do they?). WOMMA’s goal is to establish actionable guidelines and best practices for marketers working in this media. Join us Wednesday, Sept. 27, at noon EST for a full telephone briefing on the issues surrounding social media disclosure. Call 1-512-225-3050 and enter code 495675# to participate.”

The What Have I Been Reading Reading List:

• Verizon Plans No-Holds-Barred Blog To Engage Consumers : “DeVard acknowledged that Verizon is playing catch-up in the fields of online and social networking. ‘We were asleep at the wheel a bit.’ Verizon will spend 15 percent of its marketing budget online this year, and she said that may not be enough. DeVard said it is critical to allocate a percentage of the marketing budget to experiment with innovative tactics so you can understand how they work for your brand. See also: Blog Ads Must Get Buzz To Work: “New clues about online ads suggest we ‘don’t tell the audience what they should believe, or give them a question that they can answer themselves.’”
• Creative that Makes Friends with Social Networks: “Social Media is a Hungry Mouth, and if you get the audience on your side, you have to feed it. …The notion that the Internet is no longer about creating destination points, but is increasingly about creating content for circulation.” See also: Rules of Engagement – How Brands Join Conversations: “Question from the audience: How do you jumpstart a conversation when it doesn’t exist? Answer from panelists: Send bloggers samples to get them talking about your brands, create widgets that people can interact with on the site, know your influencers.’ Reprise Media, Thank you for Blogging the Online Media, Marketing & Advertising Conference!!! BTW: Make sure to check out this oldie but goodie:User-generated content uncovered: Power to the people
• A Viral Campaign Done Right Ain’t Cheap, Easy : “Here’s the bottom line: mounting a viral campaign requires not only social media, which provides remarkable new tools, but also integration with offline marketing, from street teams and guerilla marketing, to billboards, TV, radio, and print. New media marketing is simply not a substitute for all others. It’s a tool: one of the best ever created. But doing it right ain’t cheap, or easy.” See also: Advertisers Seek Safe Havens on User Sites

The I Also Glanced Over Reading List

• SEOmoz’s Day with Andy Beal: A SEO Consulting firm gets consulting – This is a great read for anyone running an SEO business and many will especially be able to relate to the following: “Transitioning from consulting-based services into a true SEO-product company. It took me several hours to wrap my head around the concept that, as valuable as my consulting can be, it will always be a trade of time for dollars and a system that can’t scale. Building SEO products that can be managed by our team (with my oversight), however, is something we can grow.”
• An SEOs Guide to Proxies - FAQ : After reading about proxies in the SEM 2 .0 discussion on ShoeMoney’s Competitive Adwords Tool recently, I find this timely.
• Sneaker Play- OK fellas, start snapping pictures of your classic Jordans for uploading…it’s a social networking site for sneaker freaks (via: AdRants)
• Does Google Maps have a sandbox? (via: SEO by the SEA )
• Second Life’s Fashion Economy

Posted by: Natasha “That Girl From Marketing” Robinson

Are Microsites the Brochure sites of yesteryear? Like a new toy for Christmas, we wait with anticipation for it to arrive, someone pays a lot of money for it, and once it arrives we play with it, show it to all our friends, they “ohh” and “ahh” over it and then soon all the shine is gone and we move ont the next one… and someone wonders why they paid so much for a toy that no one longer plays with. Of course, at less than 100k companies can afford to build and burn microsites (I’ll save my thoughts on how companies can build and burn sites, yet balk at the price of SEO services for another date.).

When I think of the microsites that will have a long shelf life, I think of Dove’s Campaign For Real Beauty and Converse’s ConverseGallery.com. What do these microsites have in common? They have moved from simply being glorified brochures to giving people a way to interact. Is the point where I mention Consumer Generated Content or Social Media Optimization (SMO post count:2)?

The What Have I Been Reading Reading List:

• Consumers exposed to both display and search ads convert at higher rates – “Consumers exposed to both display and search advertising converted at a 22% higher rate than those using search alone, according to a study from the Atlas Institute. Atlas also found that search-click-only users converted at a rate 3.3 times higher than the display-click-only group. Combined display and search clicks converted at a rate 4 times higher than display click only.” See the full PDF: The Combined Impact of Search and Display Advertising
• Gender Marketing Web Design Differences – “If your target is men, make them happy now because they’ll probably forget you before the next page loads or they leave the store. …Women want to know more up front than a man does; men are more willing to gamble a bit in the hopes of a greater reward. Women will gather together but will make their individualized decisions in the end. Men, on the other hand, will make ‘individual’ decision based on following the herd” See also: The Power of Personas
• Top 21 Signs You Need a Break from SEO – (via the Daily Searchcast - And yes Danny, you have gotten funnier) “The S, E, and O keys on your keyboard are broken. When your son tells you he wants to go play in the sandbox, you fear you won’t see him again for eight months. And this one is actually a great idea. …your brilliant idea for 2007 is to create an alter-ego for yourself called ‘SEO Shaft.’ Your blog’s tagline will be ‘Can ya Digg it?’” I’ll add my own: You need a break from SEO when you read a post about an SEO idea and then buy the domain. See also: You Know You’re Working Too Hard…

The I Also Glanced Over Reading list:

• Viral Ads: It’s an Epidemic (via: Church of the Customer Blog)
  
• Estée Lauder Launches 1st Online Campaign – Welcome to 1999, I mean 2006.
• Scripps Network Opens Online Marketplace

The Too Cool: Goes to Graffiti Research Lab. I have a love of Graffiti and Street Art - my previous logo for this site should have given a hint (I need to find a way to incorporate that here) - so this is too cool. From the website: “The Graffiti Research Lab is dedicated to outfitting graffiti writers, artists and protestors with open source tools for urban communication. The goal of the G.R.L. is to technologically empower individuals to creatively alter and reclaim their surroundings from commercial and corporate culture. G.R.L. agents are currently working in the lab and in the field to develop and test a range of experimental technologies for the state-of-the-art graffiti writer. This site documents those efforts with video documentation and DIY instructions for each project.” WHAT!!! How cool is that?! (via: PSFK)

“They say I should be more focused / and be more patient /and find a better way to let off my fustrations” - Doin Me - Little Brother

Posted by: Natasha “That Girl From Marketing” Robinson