Category Archives: Surplus

How Ad Based Digital Content Allows Us to Reach Engaged Customers

Brand Marketing, Fun, Web 2.0, , , ,

Though we’ve witnessed the demise of Napster, dozens of other file sharing networks have risen in their place creating a network of 9.4M simultaneous peer-to-peer users legally, and illegally, trading music, movies, and other content. What does that have to do with Marketing you ask?

Intent MediaWorks, endorsed by various record labels, has begun seeding P2P networks with songs embedded with unobtrusive pop-up advertisements. By December, they expect over 10 million downloads of their songs which, at a $5.80 CPM for ads on songs, allow advertisers to reach this attractive audience.

Consumers claim to welcome this form of advertising as their desire is not to download/share illegally yet, the ease of use and speed of download outweighs their penchant to obey the law. One has to wonder, while they welcome the occasional pop-up on music or videos that have been downloaded, how will they feel when their catalog of thousands of songs has been replaced with ad based music? How would you feel seeing a pop-up each time a song plays?

Those concerns aside, this strikes me as a wonderful opportunity not just to engage with this audience but to remarket your brand which may already associated with a song or video. Consider advertising with TV shows in which your product is featured or alongside the music that plays during your TV commercial (I confess, I still can’t get The Pussycat Dolls “Don’t Cha” out of my head since the Heineken Light commercial aired).

In a unanimous decision by the the U.S. Supreme Court, Justices stated that most music piracy occurs within file-trading networks and that a new business model is required to support the marketplace and demand for digital sharing. In that finding, the Court cited Intent MediaWorks as the only company capable of offering a viable option. This raises the question of how the RIAA will be able to pursue illegal file sharing when an viable alternative exists. Could users not claim to use the network with the assumption that they are downloading these legal, ad supported files? Since the ads are pop-ups, how is one to know if they file they’ve downloaded is supported by an ad they simply haven’t seen yet?

Clearly, Intent MediaWorks is worth your attention if you have interest in this engaged, entertainment minded consumer. I for one need to stop singing, “Don’t you wish your girlfriend was hot like me” in front of my wife.

France’s Missed Opportunity

Fun, Paid Search, Search

Without question, traditional and offline marketing activities influence behavior in search. A new TV commercial prompts the audience to search based on what they saw, recognized, or remember from the commercial; the same is true of press releases which raise questions in your audience, questions that are best answered by a search engine.

With the buzz or interest created by marketing and PR, why miss an opportunity to draw in a qualified customer who has already expressed interest in your brand, product, or service by nature of the fact that they searched for it? The country of France today missed a significant marketing alignment opportunity when they failed to support a PR event through Paid Search.

France opens secret UFO files covering 50 years

“It is a world first,” said Jacques Patenet, the aeronautical engineer who heads the office for the study of “non-identified aerospatial phenomena,” citing France as the first to release its documenation of more than 1,600 sightings to the public domain.

Of the 1,600 cases registered since 1954, nearly 25 percent are classified as “type D”, meaning that “despite good or very good data and credible witnesses, we are confronted with something we can’t explain,” Patenet said.

With such reliable data and “credible witnesses,” the public is no doubt scrambling to review these documents to satiate their unending demand for the confirmation of extra-terrestrials. Since the July 1947 UFO incident near Roswell, New Mexico, non-identified aerospatial phenomena have become a part of American pop culture yet, surprisingly, with concrete evidence available, such as the 1998 documentary The X-Files Fight the Future which recorded the heroic efforts of United States FBI agent’s Fox Mulder and Dana Scully to stop extra-terrestrial colonization of Earth, most still crave confirmation, proof.

France may very well have released that proof today but, save for the prominence of the release (I’m sure you’ve already heard the news as it is being broadcast on all major networks and websites), neither the gouvernement, Parliament, ministres délégués, nor Prime Minister had the foresight to acquire keywords to respond to the demand and interest generated.
Where can these documents be found? Search for ‘alien,’ ‘UFO,’ or even ‘terrestre supplémentaire‘ on any of the major engines and we’re presented with movie promotions, conspiracy websites, and the ever present wikipedia listing. Without consideration of Search, the French govenment missed on opportunity to capitalize on the strength of their brand, the reach and popularity of the press release, and goodwill that could be nurtured with UFO enthusiasts searching for answers.

Don’t make the same mistake! Remember that offline activities, events, marketing, and press are successful in generating awareness, interest, and demand. Increasingly, customers turn to search for answers.

Happy fun Friday 😉

My You’re Looking Dapper

Surplus

In somewhat of a variation on Yahoo! Pipes (though they’ll probably hate me for saying so), the new Dapper allows you to easily build website APIs by mashing together different sources of content.

With Dapper (Data Mapper) you can use any web content to create an RSS feed, a Yahoo Widget, or a Google Gadget for a site. Consider using your site’s content on an Ajax based map, receiving an email alert when your store’s Alexa ranking reaches your goal, or create a mashup of your favorite team’s game dates and a hotel reservation website to organize your roadtrip.

Dapper takes you through an intuitive process after which you will have at your disposal an API with which you can interface to get the content in a format of your choice (XML, HTML, RSS, Google Map, etc.); one might say, a little more dapper.

Here’s an application from Guy Kawasaki which automatically tracks the Technorati rank of SEO’Brien as well as the number of links and the number of sites linking to the blog.

hmmm… not moving much… I’ll have to work on that

Unlike Pipes, Dapper is a little more complicated so I’m still working with it before I can share with you my own examples. If you create something of your own, let me know and I’ll post it here.

Get Paid to Search

Fun, Search, , , , , ,

Let’s keep Friday interesting shall we?

Anyone remember AllAdvantage? I admit I tried it, earning mere cents for the hours that I spent surfing the internet (granted, I still do that without earning anything). The concept was simple enough, getting paid for doing something online: reading email, surfing, visiting specific sites, or signing up for newsletters. Sound questionable? It isn’t really; the paying company would install a small program on your computer through which ads were displayed (and often, behavior tracked). Advertisers’ ads were then shown while you did your thing and since the software usually tracked websites that you visited, the company was able to sell targeting to their advertisers. Sure you may not want your privacy invaded but in the end, the idea was legit as you opted in to earn a share of the advertising to which you were subjected; like cable TV.

AllAdvantage launched in March 1999 and grew to 13 million members in little over a year with a multi-level marketing system. And therein is where the model fails; users were paid for surfing the internet and got an increment of the time spent surfing by others who they recommended to the scheme, a pyramid scheme.

So why do I bring up a defunct scheme to make money off the internet by doing nothing more than you usually do? Because it is back and this time it will really work, I’m sure of it!! Glumble, using Yahoo search results, will apparently pay you a random amount for searching. Earn $.01-$1000 per search (Hey, this is their story, I have no experience with it). I hear they too will support the referral model allowing you to refer your friends to earn from their searches.

I’m not going to let hearsay get the better of me here. I’ve only heard of this though the folks at Digitpedia; as you can tell from Glumble’s own site, and wonderfully insightful blog, well… you can’t tell anything from their blog or site.

Rest assured, I’ll stay on top of this exciting news so you don’t miss out on the opportunity to get paid to search. Who knows, maybe they’re on to something, you can still get paid to Digg.

Produce Your Next Commercial for Free

Brand Marketing, Fun, Vendors / Agencies, Web 2.0

Limited marketing budgets? Annoyed with that agency you feel charges too much? Perhaps you feel you could do a better job creating a commercial for your company yourself thinking? Zooppa is for you!

Yes, Zooppa, a new startup generating hype for their attempt at creating a platform for paid, user generated video, has released a unique opportunity for budding directors to win cash prizes for commercials.

In truth, Zooppa is not terribly unique; while the Googley Beast YouTube has yet to present a paid video opportunity, Revver targets a broader audience with the same opportunity: paid, user generated video. Zooppa’s approach is unique, soliciting advertisers to submit campaign briefs with target audiences, brand considerations, and marketing messages from which users post their creations for review and opinion.

As an advertiser, check out both Revver and Zooppa and you may find commercial development costs are not as great as they seem.

Housekeeping update for my RSS Readers

Change Log

I want to take a moment to share with my RSS readers, significant improvements I’ve made to the blog to improve the user experience on site. I’ve spent so much time focused on content and reaching out to an audience that I neglected proper scripting and clean design.
Everything appears to be fixed.

  • Homepage archiving was broken with dozens of articles and pages of content appearing as the page loaded. This caused a significant load time and ridiculously long page. It is now limited to the 10 most recent topics.
  • Category links have been moved from a site-search results method to a more friendly page segmentation that allows you to easily access sections of topics.
  • You may have noticed my test of Miva InLine links; previously, a bug caused those to appear everywhere on the site. They’ve been limited to the articles.
  • Removed a del.icio.us module with which the formatting corrupted the page layout
  • Reformatted my search module to better fit in the design. I encourage you to bookmark and use even just the search engine I’ve created as it not only searches seobrien.com but all online marketing content. As a customized search engine your experience should be enhanced in that results are only those from relevant sites (no spam from SEO vendors when you search Search Engine Optimization).

I hope these design enhancements are well met and welcome many of you to visit seobrien.com

buzzvote for anything – Create your own poll

Fun, Web 2.0

attap, an innovative company with potential to be a favorite of mine, has launched a fun enhancement to their buzzvote service that allows anyone to easily create and host visually appealing polls for product recommendations. Gone are the boring polls or product specific ratings with difficult comparison functionality; with BuzzVote you can display a poll for multiple products and allow users to give an easy thumbs up or thumbs down while displaying the results alongside one another for clear comparison.




(I considered a poll comparing Matt Cutts, Jeremy Zawodny, and myself but didn’t want to bruise any ego’s)

Unfortunately, the system is flawed in that the poll you create is only as good as the votes collected through your poll. attap has another time wasting (yet worthy) site at riffs.com that allows you to vote the same way on just about anything, creating a massive database of your likes and dislikes against which they then offer suggestions customized to your preferences. Through riffs, you can vote on people, music, books, technology, news, places, or even websites. Clearly, attap has collected previous votes for products which should be made available to the pollster; giving us an option to include those votes in a poll could add to the quality and depth of the poll results.

Both services are fun, innovative, and aestetically appealing but I hear you, how can I say this company has the potential to be one of my favorites with mere recommendation engines??
“Potential” is the keyword as forever languishing in closed development is lifeio, a product selected as the Top Connected Innovator of 2006 by TechCrunch. Perhaps this is a better link explaining lifeio for, as you can see from their website, they don’t even explain what it is. As I write this, I have no confirmation that lifeio will ever even see the light of day but I hope it does. All Things To All People (attap) is exactly what lifeio hopes to become by combining calendars, address books, to do lists, and more with riffs’ recommendation engine.

  • Have a meeting coming up in San Francisco around lunch time? Knowing that lifeio could display restaurant recommendations based on your previous preferences
  • View the calendars of friends and peers the same way you might be able to do with your corporate calendar system to easily book meetings, parties, and happy hour
  • Heck, conceivably, it could merge the movie votes from you and your wife to recommend something you’ll both enjoy when it knows you have a date planned
BuzzVote polls have some potential I wanted to share with you but stay tuned and cross your fingers for lifeio.