>>Special Thanks to Brennan White for this answer: Brennan is Founder of Pandemic Labs and writes the Pandemic Blog which brings knowledge of social media marketing, experience with social networks and experience with professional media creation together for clients.

Scott Clark asked Me The Following Question:

“Malcolm Gladwell, Elihu Katz, Paul Lazarsfeld, Ed Keller and Jon Berry subscribe to versions of the theory that each marketing message flows through two stages - to influencers first, and then to the masses. Followers in the marketing industry therefore spend lots of money targeting those influencers. Duncan Watts has stimulated a lot of discussion and debate by publishing research[pdf] and arguing (well) that such starts with a random set of people, and then spreads in a more organic way - so we should spread messages to the masses (at least the receptive ones) in order to improve viral penetration. Which theory do you subscribe to? What modes of Internet Marketing (multiple or single) would best fit these theories? Is there a hybrid theory that makes more sense? “

As is usually the case in my experience, the answer to this question lies somewhere in the middle. That is to say in this instance that both extremes are effective to some degree, but the most effective strategy involves aspects of each theory. In this particular case, the hybrid argument is made stronger by the fact that accomplishing one “extreme” effectively will actually “double dip” and accomplish the other extreme as well thereby erasing the distinction between the extremes almost entirely.

To start, it is inarguably worthwhile to have the attention of traditional influencers. One mention from Oprah can “put you on the map” and change your business. A mention will almost definitely create additional blog discussion and a longer “shelf life” of the buzz surrounding your product. In my experience, these are all good things.

The difference that a lot of “old-school” marketing and PR folks seem to be missing is that Oprah, the Wall Street Journal and your local paper, are no longer the key influencers that everyone needs to target to build effective buzz for their business. A mention of your new technology offering by Engadget can drive as many views as a mention from the traditional media and those views come from micro-targeted individuals. For example, an Engadget mention will drive people interested in technology to your site, rather than people just interested in overall business in general as would a WSJ mention. It is clear that, while the WSJ provides some targeting of buzz, internet sites generally are more specific and more tightly targeted. Additionally, due to prevalence of blogs, wikis and the like, the number of influencers has become more numerous and your job of contacting them has gotten much easier. (more…)

AT&T Announced today that over 12 Million AT&T and Starbucks customers will get free Wifi at over 7000 locations across the USA.

Beginning this spring, Starbucks Card holders can enjoy up to two hours of free Wi-Fi service per day at Starbucks locations offering Wi-Fi access, while more than 12 million qualifying AT&T broadband and AT&T U-verse^SM Internet customers will have unlimited free access to the Wi-Fi service. In addition, more than 5 million of AT&T’s remote access services business customers will be able to access Wi-Fi service at Starbucks locations. AT&T will soon extend the benefits of Wi-Fi at Starbucks to its wireless customers. (more…)

I am always leveraging a company’s PPC brand (and yes, 1+1=3 when it comes to having organic and PPC presence for brand-related searches) there are roadblocks brought on by PPC networks. In the past few months we’ve been dealing with an interloper who has used broad-match on Google Adwords to get around their trademark blocking policy… Note, none of these links are to the interloper in question, I’m just linking to informative posts related to it)
According to Google’s documentation, Google Adwords will not allow competitors to actually use the trademarked keyword phrases in the text of its ads – but does not prohibit purchasing the keyword itself and presenting an ad. This seems to work most of the time, as illustrated by Shoemoney (where it kinda worked.)

For example, I do marketing for a national franchise, let’s call it “Cheeseworks” (fictional) - and I have a high quality score placement on PPC and organic rank. But competitors are able to bid AND DISPLAY “Cheesework Pizza” on Google Adwords (singular, no ’s’.)

Cheeseworks Pizza
Open a Franchise in Your Town
Excellent Opportunity - Low Cost
http://www.fabuliospizza.com

And then somebody else runs this one:

Cheesework Pizza
Are You Ready to Be Your
Own Boss? Learn More!
http://www.franchise-pizza-leads.com

(this company sells leads to franchises - again this is a fictional representation of a real case)

Yes, we filed trademark complaint about them using the singular version of this mark, but since they do character-by-character checks (apparently) - and rejected the complaint. If someone does broad-match triggering on “Cheeseworks Pizza” the ad with the singular version will show. This is wrong. Trademark/Brands are protected from confusingly similar derivatives. I don’t expect Google to become an arbiter of trademarks - they need a scalable system that does much of this - but this case (it is a real case, just as absurd) they should consider the spirit of trademark law considering “use in commerce” and how their match types work.

The interloper had private domain registration and doesn’t answer emails - we couldn’t prove it but there was evidence they were selling leads to others. We had to spend a lot of effort with attorneys to send a C&D and a real substantial threat. The ad is off now, but it required huge work. We’d not expect them to get involved in the McDowell’s vs. McDonald’s case that was in the Coming to America movie. But this was simply a singular versus plural issue that anyone could see was illegal.

Upon removal of the ad (via our legal work) our brand-specific click through rate jumped 4%. This, over the course of several months, adds up to over $6000 in traffic not to mention possible loss of business to a competitor. There is real talk about suing the other advertiser for the harm done. I know Google wants things to be handled “outside” but this is one case where it shouldn’t be.

At the very least Google needs to block by match type when infringement occurs. They should have disallowed broad match at least.

Note: I’m not an attorney - none of this is legal advice. If someone would like to chime in and clarify these issues I will be happy to hear it.

postscript:  I received an email from Google who has approved the singular version of the trademark block.  It took me three tries, and lots of damage done to my client, but at least it’s gone now.  I want to be grateful but still I’m just mad.  

Image from “Coming to America” a terrific Paramount Pictures film. Highly recommended.

I must admit, Donato’s franchise has great pizza. But when it comes to trusting their online ordering environment, they leave some things to be desired. Below find the email that came to my house after ordering online. We knew it was “real” because it came shortly after the order was placed. But Donato’s made two errors. Make sure you aren’t making them in your business.

• Donatos doesn’t use their own domain name for the feedback link, prompting Vista mail to flag the message with a phishing warning. In a world where trust is a critical part of branding, this is just foolish. My family is very advanced when it comes to the web, but many customers would just delete the message without reading it.
• Donatos sends our usernames and password in plain text in the message. You just don’t do this, especially with all of the other personal information in the same message. My family uses different passwords for our sensitive accounts such as online banking, but I am absolutely sure this isn’t the case for many customers. This means the Donato’s password may have been used for more lucrative purposes, such as paypal, etc. We all know that keylogger exploits can do worse damage, but at least they require an infection and many have basic protection.

There is plenty of buzz out there about how the economy is slowing. Companies will begin pulling back on expenses and unfortunately cut on staff, too, if it gets worse. But smart companies know that there is no better time to surge forward and leave competition wondering what happened.

Social marketing, with authentic messages, is the most important recession-time marketing tool any company can have. But waiting until a real recession to try it is a huge mistake. Now’s the time to get involved. But involved in the right way.

The trouble is, many companies jump into blogging, digging, and you-tubing blind and clueless, hoping that the magic beans will carry them into the clouds. An old-marketing approach to spreading the word will not work in today’s social sphere, but you’ll still see it - blogs that read like press releases and TV commercials posted to youtube without tags of any type.

Successful Social Marketing can give protection against economic downturns. But it’s not easy - and it requires a change in the way you think about customers, communications, and the very core of your business model. With a constant application of authentic, easy-to-spread messages, you encourage distribution of the message.

You already know if you build it, they won’t come. So, how are you going to get people to join in your social media effort? What is the best way to identify key blogosphere influencers that might already have access to your market(s)? In which communities/listservs will you place ‘moles’? Once you identify them, how will you engage them to make your destination attractive to them? How will you increase the ’shareability’ of your blog/podcast? - Lena Wes

For one thing, authentic messages go further down the customer’s consideration cycle than average marketing messages. Especially if they have an anchor - such as a specific example close to home or a highly visual image that sticks. This makes it easier to re-tell the story to others, without worrying that you’re inadvertently feeding bullshit. If your customers join the conversation, they can spread the message for you - the most economical and effective marketing method available.

Those applying social marketing methods need to know about the people whose behavior to change as well as their relevant beliefs, behaviors and attitudes in context of social and cultural factors influencing behaviors. By knowing this first, the marketing message can be designed to spread naturally, and inexpensively, between marketing mavens.

People distrust old-school marketing messages - and they’re trusting them less all the time. So while you may feel as if you’re “putting the word out there” - people may not be buying it. If you can’t afford to put the word out there in an authentic way, you can’t afford to do business today. You’re wasting your marketing dollars pushing messages that do not work.

Lastly, those who take the time to integrate social media with market segmentation techniques can have a multiplier effect on the post-click element of this process the same way raising another mast of sails does to a ship.

photo: Pedro Simões

In my mailbox today

Re: [url]

To whom it may concern:
We’d appreciate your forwarding this to the appropriate contact at [url]

….. we have noticed that you have blocked the Ask.com agent from crawling your site in the robots.txt file.

We definitely understand that granting our crawler access to your site is an act of trust, which we will use with utmost integrity. So we are asking you to reconsider allowing our crawler access to your site. If there is some reason you are blocking us, please share that with us and allow us to address it. Or if there is no reason, then we ask you to go ahead and remove the line in your robots.txt file that is blocking us. Our goal is to have the same access you have granted other search engines.

The line in question is:

User-agent: Jeeves
Disallow: /

Nice!

BUT…. long ago, Jeeves was used by Leon Brocard to create a web mirroring bot.

Therefore “Jeeves” used to be listed as

robot-id: jeeves
robot-name: Jeeves
robot-cover-url: http://www-students.doc.ic.ac.uk/~lglb/Jeeves/
robot-details-url:
robot-owner-name: Leon Brocard
robot-owner-url: http://www-students.doc.ic.ac.uk/~lglb/
robot-owner-email: lglb@doc.ic.ac.uk
robot-status: development
robot-purpose: indexing maintenance statistics
robot-type: standalone
robot-platform: UNIX
robot-availability: none
robot-exclusion: no
robot-exclusion-useragent: jeeves
robot-noindex: no
robot-host: *.doc.ic.ac.uk
robot-from: yes
robot-useragent: Jeeves v0.05alpha (PERL, LWP, lglb@doc.ic.ac.uk)
robot-language: perl5
robot-description: Jeeves is basically a web-mirroring robot built as a
final-year degree project. It will have many nice features and is
already web-friendly. Still in development.
robot-history: Still short (0.05alpha)
robot-environment: research

modified-by: Leon Brocard

I don’t know why the bot was on the “evil list” but it explains why this old site had it blocked.

I had always had my eye open for

Ask Jeeves
Ask Jeeves/Teoma
DirectHit

…but never just “Jeeves” - but it is definitely an alias.

I thought it was awesome for Ask.com to take the time to crawl these files and send out notes.

AT CES, Samsung showed off their new web-connected TV which lets you display subscribed RSS feeds (only USA Today for now) on the screen. Equipped with an Ethernet connection, they can pull RSS feeds, allowing you to customize your news, weather, sports, and more. Other providers are also working on improving this integration, but I like Samsung’s approach.

Information dashboards are all the rage. I’ve seen executives with 5 plasmas on their wall, each displaying a few data points (and helping to heat their office) My parents would never use this, but for upwardly bound news junkies, having feeds show over Bloomberg, CNN or other incoming information sources might be the perfect office jewelry. It reminds me of what was cool about Pointcast, but using the latest tech.

RSS can of course carry rich media (it’s really just a list of pointers in a package) so there is no limit to the types of textual, audio, video, and interactive information that can flow this way.

“USA TODAY is excited about this innovative and groundbreaking partnership with Samsung,” said Jeff Webber, senior vice president of advertising for USA TODAY and publisher of USATODAY.com. “The ability to deliver up-to-date news content to Samsung’s customers is just one more way USA TODAY is working to expand how people get news and information.”

USA TODAY is a multimedia brand with print, digital, video and mobile platforms that reach millions of readers each month. USA TODAY will provide national and world news as well as keep viewers in touch with the latest in money, sports, life, weather and politics news for the InfoLink™ RSS service. The Weather section will allow viewers to personalize current temperatures and seven-day forecasts by zip code and will also feature weather alerts. Markets data will offer market summaries and individual stock quotes.

Consumers need only to press the special RSS button on the Samsung HDTV remote control to bring up a semi-transparent menu overlay featuring selectable newsfeeds covering a variety of customizable topics. Consumers can then either browse through headlines to catch a quick glimpse, or select a specific story to view full story. Content already playing on the HDTV will remain on-screen, ensuring that moments from a favorite show or a fantastic play during the big game will never be missed, all the while having the most up-to-date news, weather and more just a click away.

Video Here

The big question for me is what happens when you click.

What About the Search and Social Media Players?

(more…)

Let the top 10/20/30 lists begin! Here’s my top stories round-up, using information I collected as I write my latest article for Business Lexington. I’m almost certain to come back and adjust links, so bookmark me, and add your own - cause I know I’m missing some!

iPhone Stirred the Mobile Internet marketplace. While the iPhone earned raves for its interface and sleek styling, it still was designed to operate only on the AT&T/Cingular wireless network, lacked a keyboard and did not operate on 3G broadband networks. Buyers still swooped in after the device, buying one million iPhones in 74 days. The iPhone platform readily integrates a number of Internet technologies that will benefit greatly from the planned 3G version in 2008. Still, it’s worth keeping in mind that the iPhone is still only around 1% of the marketshare. Later it was announced that a 3G iPhone will be available soon.

Merger and Aquisition Madness in the Search Advertising Google acquired Internet Advertising Company Doubleclick for $3.1B, Microsoft bought Ad Agency aQuantive (including Avenue A/Razorfish) for $6B, and Yahoo! bought Right Media creating a potential for conflict of interest in the web search advertising giants that some see as an unfair monopoly.

Google’s Street-Level View Google’s “Street View” solutions for Google maps allows a “virtual drive” of certain cities via 360-degree images captured by specially equipped cars. Privacy advocates quickly found people in compromising positions on some images and Google offered a “blur-out request form” on their website. Microsoft’s version garnered some attention as well, showing scenes through the windows of a race car.

(more…)

I was swindled last week.

I poured my heart out about a post (this is the “copy”) I found at creativebits.org being one of the best I’d seen in 2007. And today, I realize it was a knock-off. Others tried to express their concerns, as well, in the contents area of the post, but it appears they were ignored.

The original post, 10 Absolute “Nos!” for Freelancers, written about 60 days ago by Samuel over at the “Sleeping Late: Freelancing, Online Income, and Sleeping Late” blog, is A BRILLIANT list of guidelines that would serve any consultant well. Print and memorize it if you’re in web development (or related ventures) and you will find more success with less heartache. Nice work and Great Blog. 2800 Diggs and counting and it deserves the attention.

Fooled …I shake my head, but earlier I even went over and gave the copy a vote at Mixx.com. I wonder if CameronLow or the other 56+ voters knew it was a copy? I’m betting that Joshua, James, and Thomas didn’t know. The tiny little attribution links or mentions at the bottom doesn’t cut it. In my mind, creativebits had written, sorry, pasted the article on their fully-monetized blog with the intent of enhancing the blog’s reputation and ringing the cash register.

(ps: It appears in several other autoblog sites and and in another, obscure blog that somehow reminds me of those pictures you see of Chinese knock offs that say “Sone Playstaten” - this one even disabled the links. Ug.)

Lastly …

I’m not used to this in the blogosphere I circulate in. A blog is mean to be authentic, transparent, and to help us learn about the very essence of the organization or person writing it. It builds trust that is returned through through comments, links, and attribution. To copy posts from those who spend the time and energy to create great stuff is to break trust, and people are getting called out about it. This stuff wouldn’t be tolerated in print, so why would it be online?

It’s not that they had a RSS feed, forum posts, or blog excerpts, which can be done in a respectful way that in my non-attorney opinion invokes “fair use.” They copied the whole damn thing.

I’ve been told the readership of creativebits is a “small group” - but I ask, what is a “small group” on the public Internet, and does that matter? The post shows up in Google, in Technorati, and other search engines. So, please find a better excuse.

So, have I missed something about the blogosphere, fair use, and what has transpired? Do you agree with my point of view?

As I had review creativebits.org, I find great content, some very interesting posts, and a lot to like. But until they start giving authors their due, they’ll have to do without this Kentuckian’s participation and link equity.

If this is happening to you, there are some great resources on the issue you should check out. But most importantly, keep your cool and enjoy life.

In a shortly to be released study by B2B, web marketers, web developers, videographers and supporting technologists may want to consider preparing for a busy 2008. Some hilights:

60.1% of all marketers plan to increase their 2008 budgets.
79.1% plan to increase their online budgets (last year was 75.6%)
Web Site Development will be increased says 74.0% of marketers.
Email Marketing will increase says 70.1%
Search Engine Marketing (SEO) will be increased by 64.3%
Other increases include video (39.5%), web casting (39.1%) and social media (26.2%)

source

I also think that 2008 will be a huge year for analytics, and for those who know how to utilize them. Skilled, science-based marketing seems to me like the smartest and lowest risk type of investment for people still bedazzled by Web 2.0 orgies. I’m hoping that 2008 will turn focus back to the business, in particular the small business, which was relatively neglected in terms of innovation for 2007.