This fall several events have taken place that placed “Citizen Journalism” into the mainstream. It’s no surprise that Old media has been spoon feed news for sometime; just read the PR newswires then watch the news. Even old media news anchor Dan Rather has spoken out against the mass media establishment; albeit because he was pushed out of that system.
To help reestablish there news gathering abilities every major news outlet has adopted some method of using there listener/viewer as a news reporter. A great idea on paper, but it’s very easy for lazy news gathering organizations to not due their own due diligence on a news story.
There are two recent cases where MAJOR news organizations screwed up. The first was the CBS eyemobile.com Iphone application blunder. CBS built a great Iphone app that connected users with each other and CBS news. The only issue was it appears that no one at CBS was monitoring this. The result was many false news reports which boiled over when three ladies making out was sent to users. As the story and images were basically porn, the errors with the system were quickly realized
ChaCha is the greatest party novelty in a long time. As explained from the site:
ChaCha is conversational, fun, and easy to use. Simply ask your question like you are talking to a smart friend and ChaCha’s advanced technology instantly routes it to the most knowledgeable person on that topic in our Guide community. Your answer is then returned to your phone as a text message within a few minutes.
Amazingly enough it works pretty well and has given me the correct information 90% of the time. While I could simply perform a Google search on my palm to find the info there is some prestige in saying I’ll just ask ChaCha and continuing in a conversation. The only con right now is it sometime takes up to ten minutes to get an answer, which is unacceptable. Give it a try the next time you have a random question.
While stumbling around I came across an ad that leverages a great movie authority community directly in their creative:
If you have ever been to a movie and said, “Why did I spend $10 on that!?” then rottentomatoes.com is a great resource prior to spending a wad of cash. Their Tomatometer is a score that factors in a variety of sources (newspaper, online, magazines) and average them into a single score. It’s community driven with over 7 million readers and nearly one million reviews of movies (any recent film has certainly been reviewed).
Sidenote: I feel kind of bad for the real Sarah Marshall
This post has nothing to do with Online Marketing, but the excitement is building.
One Monday I will run the 112th Boston Marathon. This will be my third marathon (2nd official) so some of the first time nerves are long gone, but this is the Boston Marathon so I still have plenty. Boston in the endurance racing world is like the SuperBowl of Marathons: Elite Athletes, Large amount of runners, Newton hills, and the best supportive crowds. The course is gnarley as it can trick the runner to run faster than they should as till mile 17 it is mainly downhill. Living in Boston I’ve done the majority of my training directly on the course, so I know my strong spots and I know where I’m really going to need the Fans to give me a shot of endorphins.
The why I started running marathons is too long for this post, but it’s been an amazing experience to know your limits and then surpass them. Running Boston is a real treat, and doing it with the Dana-Farber Marathon challenge team has been fantastic. The team is extremely friendly and every team member is a real inspiration for better health and helping advance Cancer treatment research. My Flip video camera has been cleared out and is ready to get some great shots of Online initiatives in use during the Marathon.
A co-worker lead me to this story about the first foray of live video being used in banner ads:
“GE last month became the first advertiser to present live streaming video within banner ads, using a new feature developed by rich media company EyeWonder.
GE used the technology, called LiveWonder, to deliver a live webcast of Chairman-CEO Jeff Immelt presenting the company’s annual report to investors in a banner ad campaign that ran on about 10 Web sites.”- Kate Maddox, BtoBonline.com
Rich Media has made some huge leaps in the past year in regards to video, but to push live dynamic content through an ad network is incredible powerful. Sharing your annual report is spiffy, but imagine if this was used during “Black Friday”for an electronics boutique. You could have an HSN type setup and sell the latest GPS gear in Realtime. O wait that may be “pop under” annoying to the user. Maybe not great ideas but it certainly merits a bit more thought and maybe even a test. The LiveWonder does have limited functionality as why would you want to show live content? Only time-sensitive content (News) would seem like the best fit for this tool, as the rest could be created and then distributed with out using LiveWonder.
“With great power comes great responsibility”
EyeWonder thus far has been a real hero in the rich media world. With increased competition from Google’s no-fee rich media serving I wonder how EyeWonder will stay the dominate rich-media ad server. They may have tripled their market share in ‘07, but Google Video and Banner ads with $0 serving cost is sure cut that share in ‘08.
YouTube, the 6th most popular website is about to get into the Analytics game for the average joe. YouTube plans on offering later this month the following to start:
Geo-specific viewership data- What is the viewership of your video segmented by region.
Relative Video Popularity -A video’s popularity relative to other videos in that market over a given period of time.
The above features are already apart of the YouTube sponsored video platform, so we can assume that some of the other YouTube analytics may be coming soon to the masses. The most notable future feature would be if they added the average length a user is engaged to a video. For more information about the Insight tool or learning more about how you can advertise/ optimize with YouTube, check out the YouTube advertise’s channel.
In the past month at work I’ve been fighting with a co-worker: My work Laptop. From the time I hit the power button untill Vista loads would take 2+ hours. Now as a GTD wannabe I clearly was wasting a good sum of my day fighting with the very tool that allows me to make a living. As I’m no stranger to broken hardware I followed proper protocol and restarted my computer, reseated the battery, reseated the memory (of course with the battery out)… Until I hit the wall and started to look for a HP tech support hotline for my HP laptop.
While I have all the printed documentation stuffed in a desk drawer like most people I used a another computer and did a Google search for “HP Customer Service”. The resulting page had a paid text ad the caught my attention:
Curious I clicked. The resulting landing page took my frustration away in an instant:
HA,I was not alone. Clearly HP Customer Service had irked the wrong person. Amazingly now that it’s been a month since I first spotted this Adtext it is still in rotation. I was sure this would get pulled as they are using “HP” directly in the Adtext, which is slightly* taboo. Clearly someone is asleep at the helm at HP marketing, public relations, and customer support for this ad is still running. If HP took 10 minutes and placed a trademark violation report with the Google Adwords team they would not have this public relations issue.
What I would do If I was at HP:
Fill out a Google Adwords Trademark violation form
Contact the individual who put up this paid campaign. Get his/her feedback of what happen to them and learn from the honest feedback. The person had the gusto to put up a paid search campaign to bash HP, the likely know your service department better than you.
Start your own Customer Support paid search campaign. Bid on terms like HP Pavilion Dv6000 support, HP Laptop help, HP tech support… While electronics keywords are highly competitive if your campaign uses qualifying keywords that are then phrase and/or exact matched you will “likely” pay a lower CPC. See Apples customer support model for supporting evidence of this theory, they do a great job supporting the customer throughout the lifetime of an apple product using a paid search campaign.
Will I ever by an HP Laptop again? I wouldn’t rule it out,but I’m happy with a trusty (please don’t blow up) Dell at the moment.
Last week while at Search Engine Strategies (SES) NYC I met a recent online marketing viral star: Chuck “The SEO Rapper”(20K+ views on YouTube). For a few months I have enjoyed Chuck’s lyrical marketing productions on such topics as Link building, Social Media Addiction, and my favorite Paid Search 101. A few minutes long he sample’s classic rap beats while rapping the basics of Search Marketing. From the novice to the expert I’d strongly suggest watching any of his videos as they are not only hilarious they provide a great training overview.
Poor Yahoo! not only are you in internal turmoil, but you just got dumped. Opera, an up and coming Norwegian browser maker has gone back to it’s long term relationship with Google. Just a year ago Opera had left Google to go to the “content” driven Yahoo! for their mobile web browser. On Tuesday Opera made the return announcement , which specifically highlights that opera is now the default engine for Opera’s mobile Web browsers.
“Google and Opera have established a valuable relationship over the years and we look forward to continued collaboration on mobile products,” said Jon von Tetzchner, CEO, Opera.
The move by Opera must be driven by this autumn announcement of Google’s Android platform, which promises to evolve the mobile web by leap and bounds by advancing open standards for mobile devices.
On Thursday the Boston Interactive Media Association (BIMA) held their 3rd Annual Agency Shoot Out at the Hard Rock Cafe Boston. The event was billed as a “head-to-head” of some of Boston’s leading agencies. Six agency’s sat on the panel to discuss today’s “Hot Topics” that faces digital marketing, while being moderated by Ron Belanger, Vice President of Agency Development, Yahoo!. The panel consisted of (seated left to right in the below video’s):
-Brian Babineau, Vice President/Director, Media Digitas
-John Wolfarth, Senior Vice President, Group Creative Director, Mullen
Introduction:
As the evening was held at the Hard Rock Cafe Ron started the panel introduction with the question: “Who are you, and what’s your favorite band”.
-Brian Babineau- “Led Zeppelin”
-Whitney Berns- “The Samples”
-Adam Cahill- “Dave Matthews”
-Bill Haeck- “Van Halen”
-Stephanie Rogers- “STEPHANE POMPOUGNAC, House DJ at Hotel Costes, Paris, FR”
-John Wolfarth- “Vampire Weekend”
Question- What are your thoughts on online spending related to user consumption?
-Brian Babineau- “The big challenge is the bright shiny bubble factor…”
-Whitney Berns- “Comes down to metrics ultimately…”
-Adam Cahill- “Most of the money that’s being controlled is being directed by traditional lead agencies, and there’s always going to be a uncertainty to move away from that…”
-Bill Haeck- “We’ve grown up in a silo manner focusing on individual tactics…”
-Stephanie Rogers- “I think we are hitting that watershed moment were budgets will shift more towards to web…”
-John Wolfarth- “People Lie, percentage of spend to consumption can’t be compared…”
Question- What online media properties do you deem a first buy?
-Brian Babineau- “Just buying space understanding the breadth and demo of your audience, and telling us your CPM is just not a first by approach…”
-Whitney Berns-“A couple of key thing matter, its volume and its control…”
-Adam Cahill- “Partners that can be strategic, and help agencies be smarter…”
-Bill Haeck- “Folks we tend to like to work with are the folks we can engage in a partnership…”
-Stephanie Rogers- “we spend a lot of time on the upfront trying to understand who we are trying to reach…”
-John Wolfarth- no comment
