“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

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

After having a conversation with a brand marketing manager this weekend about how she and the other marketing managers at her company interact on campaigns I’ve come to the following conclusion: “Integrated Marketing is like Communism. It sounds great on paper, but doesn’t work in reality.” (Update: Unless you you are JoinRed.com)

The What Have I Been Reading Reading List:

• Putting the Fun in Functional - Using Game Mechanics for Social Software – An excellent presentation on how successful social media sites like MySpace are like a game (via: Web Strategy by Jeremiah):
• Collecting: Impressive collections = bragging Rights
• Points: Redeemable points drives Loyalty & Social Points expree svalues of the “game”
• Feedback: Draws attention through movement & change and accelerates mastery
• Exchanges: Are structured social interactions
• Customization: Increases Investment and creates barriers to exit
• 6 Minds on Why Blogging Matters: Including - Peter Blackshaw of Consumer Generated Media: “Advocates for Blogs, myself included, talk a mean and persuasive game of customer intimacy, community, engagement and so-called “participation.” The problem is that that vision is often at extreme odds with the company or brand’s existing listening infrastructure: consumer affairs (call center, feedback forms, online surveys).” Eric Kintz of Marketing Excellence: “Marketers have become fixated on big influencers in the second part of the twentieth century: national newspapers, broadcast TV networks and star radio personalities. Now the pendulum is swinging back and marketers should start paying attention to Bloggers-influencers. Marketers will need to identify first the new key Blogger-influencers in their space… and treat them more and more like some of the other influencing constituencies such as analysts or journalists.” Also included are: Dan Greenfield of Bernaisesource, Will Waugh of Marketing Maestros, David Churbuck of Churbuck and David Armano of Logic + Emotion
• Advertising & Social networks: Bakespace, Classmates and Dates, oh my. Finally an article that explains the different advertising options in social networks (without me having to search). See also: The Score: Social Networking Sites
• Viral Seeding of Video Clips Beats Video Banner Advertising – I just came across this post about a Benchmark test from Universal McCann stating that ,“viral seeding drove 14 times more views than video banners.” While the view of the writer is obviously skewed toward Viral (it is from a Viral company), it would be good to see the actual study.

The I Also Glanced Over Reading List:

• Hidden Market Research on Ebay, Amazon, and Others (via: Media 2.0)
• University Study Reveals Rich Data on Bloglines Feeds
• Quantcast Open Ratings Service
• How to dominate image searches

The Too Cool: Goes to IBM’s use of In Banner Video Chat: You can video chat with sales reps via the banner ad. LiveBanner, is from AVivocom.

“Liberty you’re so free / Why don’t you come for me / Take me away from the Rat Race” – Liberty Jones – The Shakes

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

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

Note to self regarding Caltrain: Do not put your coffee lid down in order to add sugar to your coffee. You may get really sick and be out of work for nearly a week. Ok, that may not have made me sick, but that is what I’m going with.

 Note to others regarding Caltrain: If you are riding Caltrain, do not do work. Especially if you ride between all the tech stops from San Francisco to San Jose. This means you Yahoo Guy; completing your Powerpoint presentation on the train, bad idea. And you too Quicken Girl; reading your corporate email on the train, not a good idea. 

And speaking of riding the train: So I’m going through my normal morning blog reading ritual on the train on the way to work, when I click over to the post CSS History Stealing Applied to Black Hat SEO. I see that he’s having a contest: Whoever creates a funny description for his site that incorporates his key target phases in 300 charaters or less wins $250.00. So following the process I usually use for Meta Description Copywriting I created the winning description. $250 for 5 minutes of work, can’t beat that. My Shoe Closet The City of San Francisco Traffic Court, thanks you.

BTW: You know you need a break from Search Engine Optimization when you win a contest and they ask you what Anchor text you want for the link back to your site and you ask for the text surronding the link as well! SEOs gotta love’em. And speaking of SEOs, see also: Thanks for the Game: It’s Been Fun Beating You.

The What Have I Been Reading Reading List:

• Forrester has been on a roll lately. From: How Consumers Find Web Sites In 2006. Generations’ Media Habits Shape Their Site-Finding Behavior: “To plan effective integrated campaigns, marketers must start with search and layer on site messaging in the media that resonate with target consumers: buzz, blogs, and banners for Gen Yers, deep search and word of mouth for Gen Xers, print and product packaging for Boomers, and the written word for Seniors.On “How consumers have found websites that they have visited in the past month”: 71% from general search engines (Why Search Engine Marketing is important), 46% from a link on another website (Why link building is important), 41% word of mouth.” (Emphasis is mine). Forrester Recomends that Marketers should:

1. Use search engine optimization as the backbone. All consumers favor search as the best way to find Web sites. Smart marketers will prioritize their search optimization efforts to ensure high relevance and ranking.
2. Orchestrate media channels by generation. Search is an essential part of the marketing mix, but marketers must leverage generational IQ to make smart choices about what other channels to include and how to portion the dollars.
3. Design creative to bridge cross-channel gaps. To capitalize on an optimal media mix, marketers must ensure that their creative goes the extra mile to help consumers bridge the gap between channels with which they’re engaged and the Web site itself.

• Also from Forrester: Profiling Social Network Users In Europe: “Social network sites are used by 17% of the European online population: In the UK, 34% of online consumers are members, making them Europe’s biggest users of social network sites. Users are young, Net-centric, and have bought into the social computing vision — they are heavy users of RSS, blogs, and podcasts in addition to being members of social networks. Almost 70% of social network users go online daily — compared with 52% of all Internet users in Europe. Around 19% of social network users have listened to podcasts and 10% subscribe to RSS feeds. MSN was one of the top three players in all the countries we surveyed — building its social networking presence on the back of its successful Web portals.”
• The 3 corners of radical trust: “But this media [the internet] requires a level of interaction where all other mediums have not required before. Most of the time, some sort of front end, basic interaction with a “flash toy”, game or otherwise seemed enough to keep the consumers coming to a site. But in reality, these offered little to no true communication with the client. In the end, the interest dissolves and the flash bit is used less and less. The sites that have offered true forms of consumer dialogue are the ones that are winning.” I’m currently on an online marketing mental tanget: What makes a site useful? Good to see others are pondering this. See also: Listening to the Pulse of the Internet
• Public Relations Social Link Invasion: “But what can happen is in our zeal to make it easy for people to share content (or in this case, press releases) we encourage social media spam in the form of “illogical submissions” to venues that aren’t really appropriate. Thus embedding quick submission links to certain venues can create a stream of inappropriate submissions.” Thanks Eric. See also: Vote for ChangeThis Manifesto on Social Media Optimization.

The I Also Glanced Over Reading List:

• 18 Questions Your CEO Forgot to Ask When Building Your Website. This post highlights why Internet marketing Consultant, Todd Malicoat is on everyone’s Blogroll (he’d be on mine if I ever got around to adding one): he creates resource posts that you bookmark and comeback to over and over. If I were a business, especially one with limited resouces, I would bookmark this post.
• Cool Tools: Ning - “A platform for creating and sharing Social Web Apps… you have the power to create your very own Social Web App in a few easy steps.” (via: Conversation blog). See also: Slideshare: “A kick-ass! new way to share slideshows on the web.” (via SEOmoz). BTW: : I love that that is the description that they write on their slideshare blog!
• Web 2.0: Problems of Measurement

The Too Cool: Goes to Big Spaceship’s Flash Effects Engine (via: Three Minds@Organic). From the Three Minds Blog, “Originally created for the Nike Air ‘Lift-off Experience‘, our friends at Big Spaceship have now opened up the source code for public consumption. It is an engine that allows you to experiment with Flash effects ranging from blend modes to bitmap filters. You then have the ability to take your creation and implement it on your own site or project. The latest release allows the integration of video and your own background images.”

“My heart is like a marching band / I’m a fan in the stands / Yes I am ”- Morris Brown - Outkast

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