Sep 5th, 2007 | WebProNews | No Comments
Does anybody out there use Yahoo Messenger’s chat rooms? If your answer is “not anymore” you’d be in the majority. If your answer is “yes,” then you’re probably a viral marketing robot.
This post on theYahoo Messenger blog a little while ago inspired 872 comments. The post was supposed to be about some technical problems that Yahoo is having, but the common thread in all the comments is that all the accessible chat rooms are full of bots making automatic sales pitches. These bots need eyeballs to justify their existence, and they’ve driven those eyeballs away en masse. Yahoo’s chat rooms have instead become echoing chambers where bots hawk products to each other. This isn’t viral marketing anymore. It’s become an epidemic.
The first online viral marketing success story that I remember was with the independent movie The Blair Witch Project. The filmmakers cleverly promoted it as a true story using a TV show, the press, and guerilla marketing to drive traffic to the film’s Website. Although I can find no proof of this, if memory serves, the filmmakers also hired people to go into chat rooms and promote the film, also as being “real.”
The film may not have been real, but the buzz it generated certainly was. The public consciousness elevated it to epic proportions, to the point where I suffered through an hour and a half of motion sickness just to be a part of this event. Their viral marketing campaign worked like a charm because it was original, fresh, and, most importantly, people believed it.
Good luck pulling that off nowadays. People can smell a robot in a chat room from a mile away. Viral email chains, you know, those annoying emails you sometimes get from your friends that say “if you forward this to ten friends, we’ll give you half off,” have more or less gone by the wayside. And user-generated product reviews have been completely polluted by the epidemic. Web users are well aware that positive book reviews on Amazon might be written by the writer, the editor, or the publisher posing as an anonymous reader. At the same time, a negative review might be written by a jealous rival with an axe to grind.
Word to viral marketers out there, don’t insult your audience by sending out robots to pose as people, posting anonymous user feedback, or creating incentives for people to annoy their friends. The audience knows that you’re not one of them, that you are in fact a businessman with an agenda. The only way to gain the audience’s trust, and the key to viral marketing in the age of the tech-savvy consumer, is reaching influencers. And as the Internet becomes increasingly social, you’ll be able to find ways to reach influencers.
The most likely candidates for online influencers are power users. They’re the people who modify their Facebook profiles every day, and communicate constantly with other users. Online communities are getting closer and closer to being able to track these power users and discern their likes and dislikes.
Suppose that one power user is connected to two hundred people on Facebook. Those two hundred people might get a message from Facebook saying that their friend (the power user) has just watched the trailer for a certain movie, or just bought a handbag from a certain designer, or a certain brand of jeans. Maybe one of those two hundred people is also a power user, who then goes out and buys the same product that the original power user bought. Now the second power user’s two hundred friends get the same message, and so on.
If online communities can offer a package similar to what I’ve described to advertisers (and rumor has it that they’re getting closer and closer) that will be the new word of mouth. Because if you think about it, face to face meetings with friends are gradually being replaced by phone meetings, chat sessions, and social networking Websites.
On the other hand, chat room robots, viral emails, and user generated feedback have done the one thing that a successful virus never does--they’ve killed their hosts.
Tag: viral marketing
Sep 5th, 2007 | WebProNews | No Comments
Users of Facebook will have their profiles indexed by the likes of Google and Yahoo unless they opt to keep their listings from appearing in search engines.
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| Facebook Opening You To Google |
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Profiles in social networking sites like Facebook have caused trouble for people whose prospective employers searched for them on those services. Such searches for people on Facebook will get a lot easier in the coming weeks.
Facebook will begin permitting external search sites to index its public search listings. Upon logging in starting today, Facebook members will be alerted to this change, and given the opportunity to opt out of this.
A public search listing in Facebook shows a person's name and thumbnail picture. "We think this will help more people connect and find value from Facebook without exposing any actual profile information or data," Philip Fung said on the Facebook blog.
"The public search listing contains less information than someone could find right after signing up anyway, so we're not exposing any new information, and you have complete control over your public search listing," he said.
Previous Facebook changes have generated controversy, particularly when they added feeds that revealed changes one made to a profile to all of their friends. Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg had to offer an apology over that fiasco, which one person called a "stalkeriffic" change to the site.
Facebook, Privacy, Search Engines
Sep 4th, 2007 | WebProNews | No Comments
If you were specifically looking for the population of the United States, you'd notice the big red numbers in the upper right corner of the US Census Bureau homepage right? Not so fast. A recent eye-tracking study suggests you've been trained to ignore things like that.
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| If It Looks Like An Ad They Ignore It |
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Editor's Note: Studies are great and all, but sometimes real-world examples are more powerful. Have you recently redesigned your site and seen drastic results? Let us know how you did that in the comments section.
Usability expert Jakob Nielsen, who's been studying how people interact with webpages since there were webpages to interact with, follows up on previous explorations to show once again that people not only ignore content that looks like advertising, but need things plainly spelled out for them.
The task was simple enough: find the country's current population. Nielsen even gave them the website to use. But 86 percent of users failed to find the answer even though it was displayed in large red letters in plain sight.
"Users tend to ignore heavily formatted areas because they look like advertisements. Thus, about 1/3 of users never even saw the Population Clock. However, most people did fixate on this area because it's not as overly formatted as most promotional features. So, most users saw the Population Clock; they just didn't use it, even though it contained the exact information they were looking for."
Okay, so a third doesn't exactly make up 86 percent. Why did the others fail when, in my grandmother's language, if it was a snake it woulda bit them? There are many reasons, but a large chunk of it, says Nielsen, lies in the language.
Most users scanned the big red number U.S. 302, 781, 150, as of today, but only made it to 302 before skipping off to the search box labeled "Population Finder" or some other area. (Or in one case, a man after my own heart, frustrated with poor site search, said "forget it, I'm going to Google.")
The big red number was labeled "Population Clocks," which isn't exactly an intuitive label. It sounds more related to time than it does to number of people. It's a classic case of leveraging core competencies rather than using your strengths. As users didn't automatically grasp what a population clock was, they skipped it.
The suggestion here then is that a simpler label of "Current US Population" would have worked much better, giving the user what the user expects, which is the end goal.
Andy Beal, editor and Internet marketing consultant for MarketingPilgrim.com has another take on it, which might make sense to you. Users may have taught themselves not just the look and feel of advertising, but also the location of advertising.
"The study demonstrates that it's not just paid ads users are filtering from web sites, but areas that might contain ads. Web users are conditioned to focus on the main area of a web site, when looking for meaningful information.
"They've been taught that the areas to the left or right are typically reserved for navigation or advertisements. As Neilsen suggests, it's important to make sure important information is located in the area of the web page users expect to find it."
Advertising Usability Jakob Nielsen Andy Beal Website design Marketing Eye tracking
Sep 4th, 2007 | WebProNews | No Comments
A four publisher deal brings content from major news organizations to Google News and its hosting services.
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| Deals Bring Publishers To Google News |
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Google News readers will be familiar with the search results they see when a news story by AP gets picked up by a variety of newspaper websites. The story appears over and over again for that topic, with each newspaper destination individually linked, all for the same content.
There is a new destination for those Associated Press, Agence France-Presse, UK Press Association and the Canadian Press stories. Those organizations will have their content hosted by Google, the company announced on the Google News blog.
Google said that since the quartet does not have consumer sites to host their articles, they haven't benefited from Google's ability to drive traffic to news websites. That traffic for articles has traveled to newspaper sites that are members of the given syndicate.
Another feature update by Google News should make more views on a topic available, beyond the multiple duplications of the same wire story on all those newspaper sites:
By removing duplicate articles from our results, we’ll be able to surface even more stories and viewpoints from journalists and publishers from around the world. This change will provide more room on Google News for publishers' most highly valued content: original content. Previously, some of this content could be harder to find on Google News, and as a result of this change, you'll have easier access to more of this content, and publishers will likely receive more traffic to their original content.
This update should be a welcome one for smaller publishers whose stories may be overlooked, as Google noted. Newspaper websites may not be as excited over the new hosting arrangements, which could deprive them of traffic to AP or other stories where they would have usually drawn visitors.
Google News, Duplicate Content, AP, AFP
Aug 31st, 2007 | WebProNews | No Comments
There's no need to get Tipper Gore involved or anything. No need to relive that old Twisted Sister mess. But neither MySpace, Fox, nor the band in question has returned requests for comment, and usually, if somebody doesn't want to talk about it, then it probably should be talked about.
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| MySpace, Say Anything But That |
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So, my future stepson's fourteen. Big YouTube fan. Likes his music irreverent, edgy, antiestablishment. I think that's healthy and normal. His mother's taught him right. He calls me over to the computer and says, "Have you heard of 'Say Anything?'"
And I'm like, "Duh!" John Cusack with that stupid boombox over his head. And he's like, "What's a boombox?"
He says, "No, old dude," (I'm 30), and he brings up a YouTube video that I'm not going to link to because I'm sure it will be DMCA'd as soon as I do. It's a tribute video, not the studio production of the band Say Anything's song "Little Girls," with the lyrics appearing in sync with the audio, a Web 2.0 version of the old red bouncing ball, of which he probably also knows nothing.
The lyrics go:
I kill, kill, kill little girls.
I kill, kill, kill little girls.
It's such a thrill, thrill, thrill to the world
when I kill, kill, kill little girls.
The video cycles through pictures of little girls at birthday parties and such.
As my stomach turns, he's laughing his head off and looking at me like I should be laughing with him. If the teenagers in the comments section beneath the video were standing in the room with us, they'd all be lmaoing and wondering why I wasn't too.
I'm not laughing because I'm at once disgusted and conflicted. I think of Columbine and Virginia Tech, of child predators, of all the sickos out there that these teenagers probably haven't thought much about between Biology and English. They're not having the visceral, sad, sickening feelings I am when I think of it – it's just a bunch of nonsense to them. They don't watch the news.
But I'm also a defender of the arts, of free speech, and I remember how unjust and crazy and un-American I thought it was that Dee Snider was yanked in front of Congress to talk about some stupid song lyrics that the kids seem to get but the adults were outraged by.
And here I am, with only a few white hairs parked amid my dark chocolate waves, just one foot into full-on adulthood and still breaking in a 401(k), thinking the world is about to end because of a rock band. I could stomach Ozzie, Marilyn Manson and Mudvayne, but not this?
To be fair, judging from other lyrics it does seem to be some sort of shock rock attack on prettiness – you know, all the glossy lipstick DUI insanity inflicted on us from the Lindsay Lohan absurdities out there.
Other Say Anything titles include "It's a Metaphor, Fool" (okay, fine, you don't really want to put sixteen bullets in my head) and "I Will Never Write An Obligatory Song About Being On The Road And Missing Someone" which is just hysterical.
With over 238,000 friends, the band is quite popular on MySpace, which is why I bring it up here. That, and by sheer coincidence, the day after I first heard their song about killing little girls, MySpace announced their first concert tour.
Guess who was headlining.
Weird, huh?
I tried to contact the band to ask them to explain the lyrics to me, but they have not responded.
I wanted to ask MySpace how promoting a band that sings songs about killing little girls fits into their aggressive campaign against child predation on their website, but neither MySpace nor Fox Interactive Media returned requests for comment.
MySpace Say Anything Rock music Media Teens Violence Child predators Parenting Lyrics Concerts
Aug 31st, 2007 | WebProNews | No Comments
This new product may never make it out of research and development, but word has it that Yahoo is working on a social network called Kickstart. If successful, Kickstart would effectively bridge the gap between Facebook and LinkedIn.
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| Yahoo Tests A Facebook/LinkedIn Contender |
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Of course, Facebook and LinkedIn are also trying to bridge that gap, and so are a dozen other companies; hence the “never make it out of R&D” bit. Still, when CNET’s Harrison Hoffman got a sneak peek at Kickstart, he came away impressed.
“I personally think that Kickstart is a really solid concept and that it’s a possible game changer in the professional networking space,” wrote Hoffman. “Hopefully we’ll see Yahoo kickstarting some careers in the near future.”
And that’s what Kickstart is designed to do. By connecting college students to alumni within certain companies, the social network would attempt to give users a leg up in the job hunt process. I’m not sure that it wouldn’t just result in some annoyed alumni - getting asked to vouch for strangers could grow tiresome - but it’s an interesting idea.
There’s no telling how much time and money Yahoo has put into Kickstart so far. There’s also no word on when Kickstart will either graduate to the next stage of development or kick, instead of a person’s career, the bucket.
Tags: Yahoo, Kickstart, Facebook, LinkedIn
Aug 30th, 2007 | WebProNews | 1 Comment
It didn't take long for user-generated content to translate to user-generated profit. But as the giants have their weird litigious and incestuous thing going on both in the courtroom and in the boardroom, YouTube users aren't just getting the shaft, they're getting mud kicked in their faces.
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| Here's Your 15 Minutes And Your DMCA Notice |
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Have a seat. This could take a minute.
A YouTube user submits his video to YouTube and it becomes popular to the tune of millions of views. And the user gets, well, his 15 minutes.
According to YouTube's terms of use, YouTube gets the rights to sell that video to whomever they like. The user hasn't forfeited rights to the video, just rights to profit from the upload. YouTube and the user both hold rights to the video as long as the video is on the website.
However, it's unlikely that the user has a connection to media powerhouses like, say, Viacom, which slapped YouTube's parent company Google with a billion-dollar copyright infringement lawsuit as soon as the ink was dry on the acquisition papers.
Admittedly, nearly a year later, you can still find virtually any music video you want on YouTube (Viacom owns MTV and VH1) – in fact, YouTube's pretty much the MTV of the Internet. So Viacom's concern about their intellectual property is understandable.
What many have taken issue with so far though, is the company's overzealous pressing of its rights. Viacom sends out DMCA takedown notices like AOL used to send out free CDs. YouTube has blindly complied with the notices, removing content whether or not it was actual infringement in efforts to protect itself.
This led to the MoveOn.org laying some Fair Use bait for Viacom, and a subsequent lawsuit by the Electronic Frontier Foundation that forced an admission from the media giant that there is, indeed, such a thing as Fair Use. In fact, much of Viacom programming, like Comedy Central's "The Daily Show" and "The Colbert Report" rely on it.
As does another show: "Web Junk."
"Web Junk" is a show that runs on VH1 featuring the week's most popular viral video from the Internet. Much, nearly all, of the content on the show comes from you-know-where.
Now, the irony would be much too sublime if Viacom was violating YouTube's terms of use that prohibit transmitting YouTube videos in a non-streaming format for commercial use without YouTube's permission. No, we'll assume Viacom licensed the videos through YouTube like they were supposed to.
Which means, again, YouTube and Google, who are being sued by Viacom, are also making money from Viacom, who is also making money from YouTube content while the uploader gets his 15 minutes.
But wait it gets worse.
Christopher Knight has a word for one of Viacom's latest actions: "chutzpa." It's a Yiddish word, if you didn't know, for "unbelievable gall or audacity." Knight's video was viewed a few hundred thousand times on YouTube before being featured on "Web Junk."
He didn't complain, according his blog post about it, and thought Aries Spears' commentary was funny. He posted a clip from the episode featuring the commentary on his YouTube video back on YouTube.
You can guess what happened next.
Knight writes, "So Viacom took a video that I had made for non-profit purposes and without trying to acquire my permission, used it in a for-profit broadcast. And then when I made a YouTube clip of what they did with my material, they charged me with copyright infringement and had YouTube pull the clip.
"Folks, this is, as we say down here in the south, "bass-ackwards".
Well, that's one way to put it. Another way might be to suggest that Web 3.0 comes with some user content rights.
YouTube Viacom Fair Use copyright DMCA EFF MoveOn.org Web 2.0 user-generated content VH1 Web Junk Christopher Knight
Aug 30th, 2007 | WebProNews | No Comments
One executive moves out, another gains a little more power, and a new division comes into being, as co-founder and CEO Jerry Yang's reorganization efforts reshuffle Yahoo.
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| Yahoo Pulls On The Reorg Boots |
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Rumors of a Yahoo shakeup proved true, and much broader than just company president Sue Decker's pal, Hilary Schneider, gaining at the expense of another executive's job again. Greg Coleman had been the executive in charge of global sales, which included the search and display ad business.
Coleman was also the guy who gave Wenda Harris Millard a not-so-fond farewell in June 2007. "The industry has shifted and requires a different set of skills to take the business forward," Coleman said of Millard at the time.
Now it's Coleman who's being shoved out the door, as more changes take place at Yahoo. Rafat Ali at PaidContent managed to score a copy of the internal Yahoo email about the shuffling of Yahoo's sales deck.
Yahoo has created a new division called Global Partner Solutions (GPS). Schneider has been minted the new head of this group, which will develop international business while overseeing all of Yahoo's US sales, marketing, and business development when it comes to advertising.
"Therefore, with the decision to create this new Global Partner Solutions unit under Hilary’s leadership, we mutually agreed that Greg would leave Yahoo! to pursue other opportunities," Decker said in the memo.
That includes the performance of Yahoo's search advertising product, which has yet to make a big impact on Yahoo's financial statements. Executives who are depending on Panama to deliver profits now have the added pressure of being under the dual Schneider and Decker microscope.
They see what happened to Coleman, who was in the way. Reorgs aren't much fun for anyone, but the corner office dwellers will really sweat profusely when the third quarter earnings announcement takes place in the fall.
Yahoo, Greg Coleman, Sue Decker, Hilary Schneider, Reorganization
Aug 29th, 2007 | WebProNews | No Comments
Using the wrong ad format could be the culprit as members of Google's AdSense content network have experienced problems in getting referral 2.0 ads to appear.
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| Google AdSense Referrals Hiding From Publishers |
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The referrals product made available by Google offers webmasters another revenue stream beyond the conventional ad placements. Referrals to AdWords, Checkout, or other specific Google (or non-Google) products pay the publisher for referring a converting visitor.
Since the rewards for referrals can be generous, the referral code has been in demand. However, a few webmasters have encountered issues with deploying the latest version on their sites.
Google's Rajiv Sud posted some reasons on the AdSense blog why this may be happening. As with some other things in life, size matters:
(M)ost horizontal referral ad units smaller than 180x60, square referral ad units smaller than 125x125, and text links are only available at this time for Google products such as AdSense or AdWords. This means that if you generate code for referral ads in an unsupported size, you won't see any referrals shown on your webpages.
A number of other reasons could affect the placement of referrals on one's AdSense units. Google only permits three referral units per page, for example. Exceeding that number would keep those lucrative referrals from appearing.
Sites that display content Google deems mature or sensitive won't spur the generation of a referral ad. Such sites would have to stick with conventional AdSense units.
Google, AdSense, Referrals
Aug 29th, 2007 | WebProNews | No Comments
The latest edition of the Google phone, or gPhone or GPhone, chatter contends the search advertising company has a mobile operating system ready to launch.
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| Google Phone Rings Up Mobile OS Rumors |
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Google's purchase of Android in 2005 kicked off speculation about the company's interest in mobile services. Android's work within Google has been completely silent; the Internet has done the talking for Google's mobile desires.
Engadget offered a post that cited "a number of very trustworthy sources" about Google's mobile phone work. Soon, Google should make its mobile OS available, and jump into competition with Nokia and Microsoft on that playing field.
"We can't help wondering what El Jobso thinks about all this. Apple has been so buddy-buddy with Google lately, especially on the iPhone," Engadget's Ryan Block wrote. A Google phone OS really doesn't compete with Apple, though.
Apple's hardware really competes with itself, within Apple's fervent userbase. Google isn't going to cannibalize iPhone sales because their business model, advertising, needs to reach as many people as possible. That means less-expensive handsets.
These latest rumors about the Google phone have been popping up faster ever since the announcement about Google providing Sprint's future WiMAX customers with a portal of services. We're going to guess that a GPhone will emerge close to Sprint's opening of that high-speed service.
After all, rich media advertising from Google AdWords will come through a lot better over a fast connection.
Google, Mobile, Phone
