“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

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

Dear God, it’s me Natasha, please don’t let me start seeing articles calling Second Life Optimization, SLO in the near future. And please forgive the SEO in me who could not resist buying the domain names SecondLifeOptimization.com… ah hem and VirtualWorldOptimization.com. (FYI:  C.C. Chapman of Managing the Gray owns SecondLifeMarketing.com and VirtualWorldmarketing.com)

The What Have I Been Reading Reading List:

• Second Life Optimization – “Yet as with so much of emerging media, I’ve learned to stop questioning why people use it and to start embracing what can be done with it. …The universal principle of search engine marketing applies: You want to be there when they’re looking for you.” See also: Bridging Second Life and Amazon.com. Virtual World Optimization Shortlist:
• Title Tags should include a few important keywords
• Descriptions: Adding keywords to the description can help virtual stores come up for relevant searches
• Link Optimization: In Second Life, if marketers own multiple properties, they can include billboards for visitors to teleport around to each one.
• Advertising: An advertising network for Second Life, MetaAdverse, allows property owners to post billboards, and marketers can advertise on them and track the visitors.
• Moms Respond to Word of Mouth Marketing: “Most moms–67%–would rather get information from a peer than a celebrity mom. The best way to reach them is not through daytime TV–who’s got time to watch?–but through their friends; one study found 91 percent of mothers prefer easy-to-find brands that other moms recommend.”
• Video, social networks to surge in ‘07: “Social networks are estimated to attract $280 million in ad dollars this year, according to eMarketer. Online video-sharing sites are estimated to attract about $385 million. EMarketer estimates that $15.9 billion will be spent in online advertisements in the U.S. this year. That means social networks and video-sharing sites only attract about 1.8% to 2.5% of total online ad spending. Will the gap close?” (via: I Want Media) See also: Boost Mobile pushes it’s phone-based Mobile Social Network, Hookt

The I Also Glanced Over Reading List:

• Overlooked Link Building Opportunities – Discounts via Customer Service for web site mentions. What a great idea!
• Branding via Search Ads: “Now, some advertisers are taking a broader view of search, buying terms they want consumers to associate with their brands, even though the searchers clearly aren’t hunting for their products.” See also: Does anything come close to SEM for online customer acquisition?
• 68 million U.S. Internet users performed an Internet Yellow Page (IYP) search online in July “This represents a 46 percent increase versus year ago. Yahoo! Sites and Verizon SuperPages garnered the largest share, with 23.9 percent and 20.1 percent, respectively.”
• Social Bookmark Scripts & Widgets - Thanks for the code… now I just have to implement it
• Spy Fu Competitive Research Tool (Similar to GoogSpy)

The Too Cool: Goes to the YouTubers Video. It is a 9 minute short film about the YouTube community compiled from snippets from YouTube videos that is a video response to The Beauty of Being Human Video. It’s like watching a great documentary short on a sub-culture. I can only agree with Pete Blackshaw it is “captivating”. Of course the SEO in me, thinks Mick B, the creator should have also dropped a URL in the end of the video so I could find out more.

“And you may ask yourself / Where does that highway go? And you may ask yourself / Am I right? Am I wrong?” - Once in a Lifetime - Talking Heads

Posted by: Natasha “That Girl From Marketing” Robinson

Well more news seems to be coming in… guess everyone is back from conferences, events, yahoo, etc.

The What Have I Been Reading Reading List:

• The Trifecta of Multimedia Search: The current state of video search, The current state of audio search and The current state of image search. Niall, you rock! I need to print these posts - they are that good.
  
• Choice Kills Conversion: “Users are coming to your site or landing page with a goal in mind. Optimization is the work of anticipating that goal and finding the right messaging so the user knows this is the place to fulfill it. Optimization is not about asking questions or presenting choices. Nor is it, in my opinion, about trying to persuade users to behave in a certain manner. You should have done that work BEFORE the user got to your page.” See also: Google Website Optimizer program. The Website Optimizer allows you to optimize your landing pages
• Freemiums: 9 Tips from VCs to make Your Freemium Service Soar (via: SteinBlog) “1. Have a product or service that truly stands out 2. Know your upselling plan from the beginning. 3. Once you’ve decided that a product will be given away for free, don’t change your mind. 4. Access to your product should be just one click away. 5. Make sure the major bugs have been exterminated. 6. Harness the collective intelligence of your users. 7. Keep improving the product to give users more reasons to stick with it. 8. Identify a range of revenue sources. 9. Timing is everything”

The I Also Glanced Over Reading List:

• DuggTrends (via: Micro Persuasion) Cool tool to plot Digg Trends and Forcasting which stories will make it to the front page of Digg
• Organized Wisdom - The collaborative health information community. (via: WOMMA). Good idea, especially in light of all the information on the use of the internet in health care research. See: More Americans rely on the internet for important health information, Eight in ten internet users have looked for health information online and Blogs and health care
• What Kind of Ad network is Right for You – Excellent article showcasing the different types of ad networks.
• Top 5 Search Marketing Opportunities for 2007 – PDF. I like the new chart that they have on SEO vs. PPC Conversions which includes average website conversion rates.
• David Armano’s Excellent Presentation: Blog’s Eye View (Power Point)
• Loyalty Programs Can Be a Waste of Money
• Second Life Hits One Million Accounts

Too Cool goes to: The Making of HP Hands. Pretty cool video on the creation process of those cool HP Celebrity hand commercials.

“A note to my opponents / Yeah I got now and I always got next ‘cause I seize every moment / I’m an opportunist with ambition / Keep an eye on that number one spot before it wind up missing” – We Got Now – Little Brother

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

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

Normally I would have filed this under Too Cool, but it deserves top billing.

Much like today, in Middle School and High School I spent 2 hrs a day on the train. Had Blogs been around then, I’m certain I would have been Blogging and/or Blog hopping, as I do today. But since they weren’t, I filled the hours on the train with Spy Magazine. It is the only magazine I loved other than Mad Magazine (the only magazine I’ve loved since is Radar… sometimes). I’ve always wondered why they never brought it back and why they never did a book. I wonder no more: My Coffee Table prayers have been answered because, coming soon is Spy: The Funny Years via: Vanity Fair.

The What Have I Been Reading Reading List:

• Brands could be creating things that are actually useful “For the most part, big brands and agencies are still trying to apply old-school formulas to the Web. Even though brand and agencies claim to understand the social power of the Web, at the end of the day they’re still only creating one thing: entertainment. You can spend millions on a flashy ‘interactive’ campaign that people try to ignore or you can put that money towards building something that could actually improve their lives; something that they could use and interact with every single day; something that they’d actually seek out. At a time when people are constantly asking ‘what’s in it for me?’, isn’t it blatantly obvious that the best way to engage someone is to be useful to them?” Thanks Jack! (via: Marktd)
• Web Analytics Toolkit (via Attuned) “Intended for Web Analytics professionals at beginner and intermediate levels, the toolkit provides a simple framework to set up an Web Analytics initiative and informs the readers about how to put the steps of the framework into action.” Great read. What I like most about this into to Web Analytics is the links to additional resources. Actually it reminds me of IBM’s Search Engine Optimization Basics Series
• Future of the Internet – (via: MediaPost – what is up with their linking policy – I can’t be the only one who hates reading things there only to have to search for the source.) Pew interviews analysts on predictions for the internet in 2020. You may laugh as much as I did if you repeat, “In the Year 2000” a’la Late Night with Conan O’Brien as you read the PDF.

The I Also Glanced Over Reading List:

• How Software Platforms Revolutionize Business “The broad lesson here is that ingenious product design can take you very far; however I am willing to take a bet that in any multi-sided market, sooner or later, even the best product design will end up subordinated to the best multi-sided platform in town.” See also: Why they don’t upgrade (and what to do about it)
• Newsweek to Team Up With Kaplan to Offer Online M.B.A. See also: DMA Certification Program in Search Engine Marketing
• Video 2.0 - Second Life Machinima + Youtube. See also: IBM holds Alumni meeting on SecondLife
• Study: Teens Use Web for News

Posted by: Natasha “That Girl From Marketing” Robinson

AKA: Why, in spite of my better judgement, I will use the term Social Media Optimization in every post for the next month…

What is Social Media Optimization(SMO)? Well it is the new term dujour in online marketing. When I read the first article mentioning SMO a month or so ago, I thought “Cool, I like the concept”. Then I began seeing it everywhere.

And now I cringe when I read about SMO…everywhere! I cringe because here we go again, with yet another acronym with a nebulous definition in the online marketing industry. I cringe because I know it will be a topic of a panel at whatever is the next Online Marketing Conference. I cringe because I will be forced to read it everywhere. And, I cringe because of all the bandwagoneers who rush to use the term because it is the term dujour. And I especially cringe because… well if ya can’t beat ‘em….

The Online Marketing industry especially Search Engine Marketers suffer from Next Big Thing Syndrome. How many times have we read: “(insert tool, technology or new marketing term) is the Next Big Thing.” I believe it was not that long ago that I read that RSS was the Next Big Thing and Blogs were the Next Big Thing and Social Networks are the next Big Thing and SEOPR and Linkbaiting and so forth and so on.

But here’s my issue: while I have read articles on what Social Media Optimization is, and why you should implement social media optimization, I have yet to read an article on how a company allocates budget to include Social Media Optimization in their next campaign. Anyone? And don’t even get me started on the question that we all know a client will eventually ask, “So how many visitors do I get for that?”

And on that , I’ll leave you to ponder a quote from the article: Viral Smoke n’ Mirrors: Comparing Stunts vs. Buzz in a Viral Marketing Campaign:

“Many clients and agencies are missing the point – mistaking the means for the ends. The means are a well thought-out marketing program that might include a viral component. The end is the ever-elusive and often ill-defined buzz. Good viral campaigns make you stop and look. They sneak up on you. You have an ‘aha’ moment of realization. Stunts make you look, but you quickly forget. Viral campaigns make you wonder who’s behind them. Stunts often have nothing at all to do with the company paying for them. Smart viral campaigns take advantage of the intimate connection between a brand and the community.”

The What Have I Been Reading Reading List:

• Should B2B Marketers blog? - “Of the marketers who told us that they use these emerging tactics today, over 70% said they planned to boost their spending on social computing tactics during the next 12 months. Successful blogs have two interconnected ingredients, a community that finds reading the blog -– and contributing to it — valuable. From our own experience at Forrester, blogs are a bit like children –- they demand constant attention and nurturing to grow up properly –- so deciding to initiate a blog is not a decision taken lightly. Questions marketers should answer are: What is the purpose of the blog? Who is the audience? Will the blog encourage participation? And, who should own the blog’s content?” See also: These lists of Corporate Blogs: Fortune 500 Business Blogging Wiki, A List of Business Blogs & Corporate Blogs in Europe
• Benchmark Study on the Internet’s Influence on Consumer Moviegoing: “The study found that these moviegoers recall television advertising, trailers and word-of-mouth as the most important sources of what MarketCast called “first awareness”–essentially the first introduction of a movie to a potential consumer. However, in between first awareness and the point of sale–during the critical period in which consumers learn more about movies, winnow their choices, and look up showtimes and theater locations–the Internet’s influence is vast. MarketCast found that 49% of moviegoers surveyed actively research a movie after first hearing about it; and of these, seven in ten go the Internet. “(via Marketing Pilgrim). See also: Google’s Treasure Trove of Industry Market Research

The I Also Glanced Over Reading list:

• Adidas Opens Second Life Store
• If You Want Visitors To Come Back, Send Them Away
• Social Networking Can Work For Businesses - (via media 2.0 blog)
• A look inside the Monitor110 research suite
• Game publishers need to better understand how to exploit market research

“In the real world, these just people with ideas/ they just like me and you /when the smoke and cameras dissappear”. Hip Hop - Dead Prez

Posted by: Natasha “That Girl From Marketing” Robinson