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Today In Online Marketing | Wednesday, June 18, 2008

• 5 ways to ruin your industry reputation By Sean Cheyney | iMediaConnection.com. “Why is it that some people appear to repel business while others have an abundance of business everywhere they look? On both the buy side and the sell side, a handful of missteps can ruin your industry reputation and leave you fighting an ongoing uphill battle towards your business objectives.”

• Online Ad Prices Continue To Reflect Weak Economy By Tanya Irwin | MediaPost.com. “Internet ad revenue declined by 0.7% in the first quarter of 2008 from the previous quarter–but at $5.8 billion, still represented the second-highest total on record, the Interactive Advertising Bureau said Tuesday. “

• How To Solve The Myspace/Facebook Revenue Problem: Sell Stuff By Sean Ryan | AlleyInsider.com. “What’s become clear in the past 24 months is that the rise of social network services (SNS) is changing the face of the consumer Internet through a massive user base combined with enormous engagement metrics. What is obvious is that advertising alone isn’t going to pay the freight for these services, at least not at the rate their owners would prefer. Yesterday’s NYT article (and many others) about MySpace’s quest for advertising revenue points out the same dilemma, but without providing any solutions, outside of better targeted advertising.”

Posted in Ad Networks, Advertising Agencies, Media Buying, Monitization, Online Marketing, Recession Marketing, Social Networking | No Comments »

Today In Online Marketing | Tuesday, June 16, 2008

• Hydra Network Debuts Transparent CPA Network By Tameka Kee | MediaPost.com. “Cost-per-acquisition (CPA) ad network provider Hydra Network has added another facet to its roster of advertising options. It’s Hydra Elite, a fully transparent network compiled of nearly two dozen high-volume publishers in the display, email and search channels.”

• Social Networking Gets a Sanity Check By Om Malik | Gigaom.com. “Today there are numbers out from comScore that indicate plateauing growth for the big two — MySpace and Facebook — in the U.S. Last week, Revision3 canceled “SocialBrew,” an online video show dedicated to social networking. Meanwhile, Monster killed its Tickle social networking service (first reported in April by TechCrunch), following closely on the heels of CondeNast’s shuttering of Flip and Verizon’s decision to close up its virtually unknown network, which had managed to garner a mere 18,000 members. (Verizon has shifted its community to Facebook.)”

• MySpace Wins Legal Battle Against “Spam King” By Kristen Nicole | Mashable.com. “MySpace has just released a statement saying that it has won its lawsuit against Media Breakaway and its founder Scott Richter, for their spam attacks on MySpace. Last Friday, the American Arbitration Association awarded MySpace over $6 million in damages and attorney fees, as well as the entering of a permanent injunction against Scott Richter and Media Breakaway.”

• MySpace Might Have Friends, but It Wants Ad Money By Brian Stelter | The New York Times. “When the News Corporation added MySpace to its portfolio nearly three years ago, it expected that if its base of 16 million users kept growing — and each user kept adding friends, sharing photos and swapping flirty messages — the advertising dollars would roll in.”

• Targeting By Interaction By Phil Leggiere | MediaPost.com. “Behavioral targeting has largely been geared to increasing the odds that ads will be served and seen by the right prospects. So far, so good. Unfortunately, as Ian Swanson, CEO of Sometrics, explains below, too often behavioral targeters think their job ends when an ad is served. With social networks in particular, he says, that’s precisely where the real work begins.”

• RockYou’s Jia Shen: Bigger Than Slide By Bambi Francisco | AlwaysOn.com. “In a world where marketers care more about engagement than passivity, RockYou, a top application maker on social networks, has a great shot at being the place to distribute ads to reach today’s youths. The trick is innovating faster than RockYou’s oft-mentioned rival, Slide, and building a bigger and better ad sales team. To that end, RockYou, which raised $35 million at a roughly $230 million valuation, plans to double its staff to 100 people by the end of this year, Jia Shen, RockYou’s 28-year-old co-founder and CTO told me in this interview.”

Posted in Ad Networks, Affiliate Marketing, Behavioral Targeting, Fraud, Legal, Monitization, Social Networking | No Comments »

Today In Online Marketing | Monday, June 16, 2008

• What media buyers need to know about video By Dawn Anfuso |iMediaConnection.com. “Recent statistics make it clear that a major player in the future of media buying will be video. Although video advertising accounted for only 2 percent of all online advertising spending in 2007, according to the IAB Report on Interactive Advertising, eMarketer predicts that spending on online rich media and video ads together will account for nearly one-fifth of all online ad spending by 2012, up from 9.7 percent of all online ad spending in 2007.”

• Social Networks and Spam eMarketer.com. “In the past 12 months, more than four-fifths of social networking site users said they received unwanted (or spam) “friend” invitations, messages or postings on their social or professional network account, according to a Cloudmark-commissioned poll conducted by Harris Interactive.”

Posted in Media Buying, Social Networking | No Comments »

Today In Online Marketing, Friday June, 13 2008

• Almost 75 per cent of Canadians use Internet By LuAnn LaSalle | The Toronto Star. “MONTREAL–Almost all 16- and 17-year-olds in Canada have used the Internet either for doing school work, sending text messages, playing video games or listening to music, according to a study released today.”

• A new flavor of Google Trends By Heej Hwang | Google. “The latest version of Google Trends is now live! If you’ve used it in the past, you know that Google Trends can be used to see how popular certain search terms are across geographic regions, cities, and languages. With our latest update, you can now see numbers on the graph download to a spreadsheet. (Note: Both these functions are available after you’ve signed in to your Google Account.)”

• A Flashy Facebook Page, at a Cost to Privacy By Kim Hart | The Washington Post. “Facebook fanatics who have covered their profiles on the popular social networking site with silly games and quirky trivia quizzes may be unknowingly giving a host of strangers an intimate peek at their lives.”

• Work Less, Give Your Customers Less… and Succeed Like 37Signals By Bill Taylor Harvard Business Publishing. “’ve always believed that the first step in any successful venture is to establish a clear definition of what it means to succeed. And there’s something about business that convinces most executives that being successful means doing more: generating more revenue, hiring more people, launching products with more features. If you want to win big, the only choice is to “one-up” your competition and “out-do” your rivals. Right?”

• A Practical Guide to Branding By Karen E. Klein | Business Week. “Define your brand identity—your product’s “personality”—before you spend a dime on advertising or marketing”

• 5 Perfect ‘Spare-Time’ Online Businesses By Yanik Silver | The Washington Post. “With all the doom and gloom news about the economy, there’s never been a better time to make an extra paycheck online with a minimal amount of time and effort.”

• Is Google Making Us Stupid? By Nicholas Carr | The Atlantic. “Maybe I’m just a worrywart. Just as there’s a tendency to glorify technological progress, there’s a countertendency to expect the worst of every new tool or machine. In Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates bemoaned the development of writing. He feared that, as people came to rely on the written word as a substitute for the knowledge they used to carry inside their heads, they would, in the words of one of the dialogue’s characters, “cease to exercise their memory and become forgetful.” And because they would be able to “receive a quantity of information without proper instruction,” they would “be thought very knowledgeable when they are for the most part quite ignorant.” They would be “filled with the conceit of wisdom instead of real wisdom.” Socrates wasn’t wrong—the new technology did often have the effects he feared—but he was shortsighted. He couldn’t foresee the many ways that writing and reading would serve to spread information, spur fresh ideas, and expand human knowledge (if not wisdom).”

• Google’s Joe Kraus on How to Make the Web More Social By Knowledge @ Wharton. “Can the Internet be made more social? This is a question with which Joe Kraus, director of product management at Google, constantly has to grapple. He believes every killer app on the web — instant messaging, e-mail, blogging, photo-sharing — has succeeded because it helps people connect with one another. For Kraus, this means the Internet has an inherently social character, but it can be enhanced further — an area he continues to explore through Google initiatives such as Open Social and Friend Connect. Wharton legal studies professor Kevin Werbach spoke with Kraus recently about the increasing socialization of the Internet. Kraus will speak about social computing at the Supernova conference in San Francisco on June 16.”

Posted in Monitization, Search Marketing, Social Networking | No Comments »

Today In Online Marketing | Wednesday June 11, 2008

• A new flavor of Google Trends By Heej Hwang | Google. “The latest version of Google Trends is now live! If you’ve used it in the past, you know that Google Trends can be used to see how popular certain search terms are across geographic regions, cities, and languages. With our latest update, you can now see numbers on the graph download to a spreadsheet. (Note: Both these functions are available after you’ve signed in to your Google Account.)”

• MySpace Exec Talks Strategy By C.G. Lynch | PCWorld.com. “MySpace and Facebook have very different approaches to developing applications for social networks. After Facebook opened its platform to third-party developers in May 2007, an explosion of applications populated the Facebook directory. But there was a problem: many home pages became jammed with spam apps: applications with little usefulness that, in some cases, users didn’t even ask to install. Facebook also required developers to use snippets of their proprietary code to run the application.”

• Advertising is Not A Sufficient Revenue Model to Sustain Content Companies Jack Myers Think Tank. By Jack Myers | Jackmyers.com. “The digital media industry will under-perform ad-revenue expectations if it continues to embrace outdated values, metrics and marketing initiatives that are undifferentiated from those of traditional transaction-based mass media. There are two future paths for advertising-dependent content companies, which I describe later in this commentary.”

• Ten Big Questions Every CMO Must Ask By Pete Blackshaw | The ClickZ Network. “When I started writing this column more than three years ago, my official title was chief marketing and customer satisfaction officer. It wasn’t a coincidence that I added “customer satisfaction.” To me, it more accurately reflected my mission, role, and world view of marketing. It reflected a belief, solidified in so many of my columns, that you simply can’t decouple service and marketing in this new era of consumer control. Without satisfied customers, we simply can’t market. Without strong customer advocates, we simply can’t sell.”

• A Primer on Social Media Marketing Components and Tactics By By Harry Gold | The ClickZ Network. “When it comes to social media marketing, there’s one three-letter abbreviation that I can’t stand: SMO (social media optimization). Why don’t I like that term? SMO implies that leveraging social media in your marketing efforts is a cousin of SEO (define) or, even worse, an adjunct that is simply about getting more inbound links to build your search engine prominence.”

• This Ad Stinks: Let Readers Vote by Catherine Holahan | Businessweek.com. “Online marketers are finding that rating of their campaigns by social networks can yield big rewards—or humiliation”

• ‘Lifestreaming’ challenges social network hierachy By Chris Nuttall | FT.com. “A new generation of social networking sites is gaining support in Silicon Valley, challenging the established models of leaders MySpace and Facebook.”

• Some Facebook Applications Thrive, Others Flop By Riva Richmond | The Wall Street Journal. “n May 2007, Facebook Inc. invited software developers to create free software programs that members of the social-networking site could use to entertain and inform each other.”

Posted in Behavioral Targeting, Creatives, Monitization, Search Marketing, Social Networking | No Comments »

Today In Online Marketing Tuesday June 10, 2008

• Spoof ads run in Philly.com, Inquirer, Daily News By The Inquirer | Philly.com. “The Inquirer, the Philadelphia Daily News and Philly.com ran a series of spoof airline advertisements yesterday that a spokesman said were meant to gauge their collective power “in generating awareness and traffic for, in this case, a brand that doesn’t even exist.”

• Rummaging through the internet By The Economist. “Computing: New techniques to navigate and gather information online promise to revolutionise web browsing”

• The Ads Network Business: Not Doing So Bad After All? By Michael Learmonth | The Silicon Alley Insider. “Remember that news about a slump in online ad networks? Bogus, says Frank Addante, CEO of The Rubicon Project. He says ad rates are up 20% in the last two months among the biggest players.”

• YouTube: Your Created the Content, Now Sell the Ads By Abbey Klaassen | AdvertisingAge. “Google, Looking to Monetize Video Site, Is Letting Content Producers Sell Advertising on Their Branded Channels”

• Amazon Just Lost $1.8 Million in an Hour By Abbey Klaassen | AdvertisingAge. “E-commerce Site Was Down for 90 Minutes”

• Adapting Websites to Users By Erica Naone | MIT Technology Review. “Websites that change to fit the cognitive style of the user could be more effective at selling products online.”

Posted in Ad Networks, Behavioral Targeting, Creatives, Mergers And Acquisitions, Monitization, Recession Marketing, Social Networking, Video Advertising | No Comments »

Today In Online Marketing News – Monday, June 9 2008

Today In Online Marketing News – Monday, June 9 2008

• Our New Social Media Deals Report: Charting VC and M&A Deals Over the Last Year By Amanda Natividad | PaidContent.com. “Nearly two years ago we had our first Social Media Deals Report in which we recounted the social media VC and M&A deals in various categories of the social media sector. Because we’ve had numerous requests for another edition since then, we’re pleased to present to you a new edition of our report, offering not just a list of stories concerning this sector, but also charts and graphs of the biggest investors, most active acquirers, busiest categories, and much more.”

*Image from PaidContent.org

• Slide Now Working More For Quality Than Quantity On Facebook By Paul Glazowski | Mashable. “Slide has already done plenty of horizontal on Facebook. Now it’s going more the way of vertical. Or at least more so than it has over the past few years.”

• How Meetup Tore Up the Rule Book By Heather Green | BusinessWeek. “The popular Web site company’s radical experiment is putting employees in charge.”

• Marchex Creates AdHere: National-Local PPC Ad Network By Greg Sterling | SearchEngineLand.com. “Marchex, which has been investing heavily in the local search market, has now brought together its broad range of assets into a single PPC ad platform and network that it’s calling “AdHere.” AdHere is intended both for brands and national entities trying to reach local consumers online, as well as small businesses seeking exposure in their respective markets and service areas.”

• Quantcast Rolls-Out ‘Media Planner’ Site Measurement Tool By Fred Aun | The ClickZ Network. “Quantcast today officially launched Media Planner, a free online audience measurement tool that the company says is the only one on the market offering direct, “census level” data about Web site traffic and audiences.”

• Meebo’s Marketing Platform: Easy for Advertisers By Kristen Nicole | Mashable.com. “Meebo and market research. The two go hand in hand, and I’ve been saying as much for quite a while. Meebo found a new way in which to monetize its instant messaging client by offering branding opportunities for its Meebo Rooms and custom Sponsor Rooms, which allow for easy media-sharing in an environment that can be created by a particular marketer around specific content. A new song release, for example, can be promoted through a Meebo Room, where users can hear the song, talk to other users about it, and subsequently spread the word.”

Posted in Ad Networks, Creatives, Legal, Mergers And Acquisitions, Monitization, Rankings, Search Marketing, Social Networking, UK Marketing | No Comments »

Today In Online Marketing News – Sunday June 8, 2008

Today In Online Marketing News – Sunday June 8, 2008

• Google Search Ads Rile Its Big Customers By Emily Steel | The Wall Street Journal. “As Google Inc. pushes to sell ads crucial to its revenue growth, some of its largest advertisers are growing angry with the way the company oversees its sponsored searches.”

• Who Will Rule The New Internet? By Josh Quittner | Time Magazine. “An anonymous wit scratched those lines on the side of a junked car door and lugged it to a trail near my home in Northern California. The middle of a pristine, ancient redwood grove is the wrong place to find a rusted-out car door, but the words magically transformed the thing from an aggravating piece of junk into art. I Googled the quote as soon as I got home, of course, but found nothing. (Thanks to Google, we live in a world where “I don’t know” has become an unacceptable response. So my inability to identify the author there is driving me crazy.)”

• Slide-ing into the Big Apple By Kara Swisher | All Things Digital. “In its ongoing bid to prove there is a robust and sustainable advertising business in the social-networking space, widget-maker Slide opened a New York City office and hired a big-deal online ad exec.”

• How to Build a Better Content Model for Your Site: Understanding News Consumption Patterns Dosh Dosh. ” Among the key findings was the fact that the subjects were experiencing news fatigue, meaning they were overloaded with facts and updates and had trouble connecting to more in-depth stories. Participants yearned for quality and in-depth reporting, but had difficulty immediately accessing such content. This experience was common across participants’ race, gender and geographic location. Additionally, the anthropologists noted that the news habits of the young consumers were dramatically different from those of previous generations.”

• Social media’s uphill advertising climb by Stefanie Olsen | C|Net.com. “MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.–Reality check: half of the social media start-ups at Tuesday’s Under the Radar Conference won’t exist next year. That was the dour prediction of an advertising executive after a day of start-up presentations from a tongue-twisting list of tech companies–including Verismo, Mytopia, Loud3R, Jacked, Sometrics and PutPlace.”

• YouTube’s Head of Monetization Quits, Joins Cooliris By Om Malik |Gigacom.com. “Google’s senior executive exodus continues. YouTube’s head of monetization, Shashi Seth, has now left the company to become the chief revenue officer of Menlo Park, Calif.-based startup Cooliris. In his new job at the startup, which has raised some $3 million in Series A funding from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Seth is going to help develop a new business and advertising model.”

Posted in Creatives, Mergers And Acquisitions, Monitization, Online Marketing, Search Marketing, Social Networking, Video Advertising | No Comments »

Today In Online Marketing News – Tuesday June 3, 2008

• The Fork in the Road for Social Media By Bernard Lunn | ReadWriteWeb.com. “Social networking is at a major fork in the road. Down one road is adding more features to a walled garden and opening up just enough, so that users seldom need to leave. Most sites are going down this yellow brick road and the prize is clearly a big one. But they may end up back in Kansas. Down the other road, lies a future of being the primary repository for your connections (aka the social graph), but with this data available via open APIs to anybody who needs it. That is a utility type model, and as with any utility, it can be hugely valuable at scale.”

• Caught in the Middle: Why Developing and Retaining Middle Managers Can Be So Challenging By Knowledge@Wharton. “Almost every company has them. They may number six or 6,000 and they all share the same job category — middle managers. They are often referred to as the “glue” that holds companies together, bridging the gap between the top management team and lower level workers. They implement strategy and organizational changes, keeping workers engaged during both good and bad economic cycles.”

• A Letter to Facebook’s Founder By Steven M. Davidoff | The New York Times. “read with great interest your recent interview with Kara Swisher at the D6 Conference. I was particularly struck by your answer to Ms. Swisher’s question about whether Facebook, the popular social networking site you created, can be sold by your venture capital co-owners without your approval. Your response: “I don’t think so.””

Posted in Behavioral Targeting, Legal, Mergers And Acquisitions, Monitization, Social Networking | No Comments »

Wii Fit Girl And the Power Of Viral Marketing

I had a few people ping me yesterday about the “Wii Fit Girl” which now has over 9300 DIGGs. More on the video can be found through The Los Angeles Times and Shoemoney.com.

The video has been seen some 725,000+ times in the last day.

Posted in Creatives, Online Marketing | No Comments »