Archive for January, 2007
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Google’s Q4 Profits Nearly TripleJan 31 2007 | Google |
And they just keep getting hotter and hotter….
Google Inc.’s fourth-quarter profit nearly tripled amid another burst of breathtaking growth that enabled the online search leader to sprint past analyst expectations — a habit that has helped propel its stock price above $500.
And people thought online marketing was slowing down?
No Comments » - Posted in Google by Chris Winfield
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Is Corporate Blogging Worth the Effort?Jan 31 2007 | Blogging |
The benefit of blogging has been consistently questioned by people I encounter everyday. Within my social circle, new blogs emerge that are more personal in nature, and often resemble online diaries. The question often arises if there’s any value to blogs beyond personal ramblings and thoughts.
In a word, yes. Blogging is worth it for businesses.
A study from Forrester was recently released that discussed whether there really is ROI from blogging. Charlene Li discusses these findings with its application to a very well corporate blog. She writes:
…the most common benefits are; increased brand visibility, savings from customer insights, reduced impact from negative user-generated content, and increased sales efficiency.
Further, the report as summarized by Charlene goes on to say that the blog’s success involved community involvement (”about 100 people commenting on the blog each month”) as well as media exposure (”the number of press mentions it received”) as it relates to bringing new users to the attention of the blog.
4 Comments » - Posted in Blogging by Tamar Weinberg
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Yahoo Goes Viral with a Link Badge WidgetJan 30 2007 | Yahoo! |
So they predict that 2007 is the year of the Widget. MyBlogLog has been a big hit so far. Now Yahoo, after acquiring the primary widget preferred by thousands of bloggers, has gone the next step to create a nifty little widget that allows users to see how many incoming links their website has from Yahoo’s Site Explorer.
The Badge, which Yahoo calls it, is Javascript code that appears to dynamically update itself with the number of incoming links to a particular page or site from Yahoo’s search engine. With just the installation of the code, individuals can see how many inbound links point to a particular website or web page instead of having to perform the research by hand. How cool would it be if there were widgets for every link statistic publicly available to help publishers easily determine the location of their weak points — from just a quick glance?
4 Comments » - Posted in Yahoo! by Tamar Weinberg
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Google Top Ten: 4 out of 10 results for the same thingJan 30 2007 | SEO |
I was doing some research earlier and did a search on Google for translation services and was quite dissapointed to see Babel Fish as not 1, not 2 but 4 of the top 10 results returned.
Yes - Babel Fish is an extremely popular service for quick, free translations. Does it deserve to be in the top ten? Sure. Does it deserve to be in the top ten - four different times? No shot.
All of these results (despite having different URLs) all lead to the same exact tool. How does this enrich the searcher’s experience?
Interestingly enough, Yahoo! owned AltaVista’s BabelFish doesn’t show up once in Yahoo’s top 10 results for the same term.
4 Comments » - Posted in SEO by Chris Winfield
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Upgrade Complete! Do you notice anything?Jan 29 2007 | Announcements |
We upgraded to Wordpress 2.1 last week (and moved this site to a new server) and are now ironing out the kinks that remain with the transition. Have you encountered anything that we should know about? If so, please let us know.
3 Comments » - Posted in Announcements by Tamar Weinberg
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Money for Your Videos - YouTube to Share Revenues with UsersJan 27 2007 | Video |
Google owned YouTube is going to start sharing revenues with users. They said they were originally against it because they wanted video lovers not money lovers. Now they realize that the money lovers can probably create some killer video. Co-founder Chad Hurley made the announcement today:
We are getting an audience large enough where we have an opportunity to support creativity, to foster creativity through sharing revenue with our users,” Hurley said. “So in the coming months we are going to be opening that up.
One major YouTube competitor Revver already has a revenue share plan in place that shares ad revenues with users and this has been a major selling point of their service. From their About page:
Sharers earn money too! Help spread Revver videos and earn 20% of the ad revenue. The remaining money is split 50/50 between the creator of the video and Revver.
3 Comments » - Posted in Video by Chris Winfield
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The Power of Digg Beyond TrafficJan 26 2007 | Social Networks |
There has been lots of debate this week about whether social media traffic is good or bad. I lean pretty heavily towards the GOOD side. But let’s look beyond that for a minute and look at another example of the power of social media with two very different companies: Sprint and Linden Lab.
Last week, The Consumerist ran a story titled Sprint Refuses To Cancel Dead Brother’s Cellphone, which told the story of Sprint refusing to cancel the cellphone service of a reader’s dead brother. The most they were willing to “bend” for the reader was to “put the account on vacation,” at $5.95 a month. This story was then subsequently submitted to Digg and quickly went on to get over 5000 Diggs and lots of angry comments. Well, Sprint obviously caught wind of this perhaps due to the emails Diggers were encouraged to send and posts on other blogs such as Billing the Dead. Today The Consumerist updated their website saying that the reader was contacted by a Sprint PR person who bumped his issue way up the ladder and he got the following email:
3 Comments » - Posted in Social Networks by Chris Winfield
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The Other Impact of Social Networks: Discussion and CriticismJan 26 2007 | Social Networks |
The New York Times and similar newspaper websites have the “Share” button on their site for a reason: to promote stories and to encourage commentary. Once your content has been recognized in the social sphere, a byproduct of this promotion is discussion.
The discussion, as we know, is not necessarily positive. In fact, in some networks, it is often heavily biased. (On sites like Digg, saying “great site” really doesn’t bode well.)
Remember that a big challenge about designing a website or product is about not necessarily knowing what the end user wants. Your own agenda may not necessarily produce conversions that benefit you. You could ask your peers for feedback but they may not necessarily be as critical of your product offerings as you want them to be. An outside user oblivious to you and your offerings may be exactly what you need.
No Comments » - Posted in Social Networks by Tamar Weinberg
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Social Search and Why We Should Care: A Chris Sherman WebcastJan 25 2007 | Coverage, Social Networks |
I’ve really taken a liking to these SearchMarketingNow webcasts. In today’s webcast, I have had the pleasure to listen to Chris Sherman who tackled the topic of Social Search: New Marketing Opportunities. With a lot of social networks out there, where can you leverage your traffic and what problems can you foresee? Chris discusses these areas and offers his insights.
Well, first, Chris introduces social search. What the heck is social search? There is no good industry definition at the present.
- The simple definition: On the Internet, is a way of finding tools that are informed by human judgment. People are thinking about it, or describing websites, and so on.
- Informed can mean many things, including egregiously uninformed. People are writing things or tagging things that makes it harder for people to find content.
Truthfully, we’ve always had social search.
10 Comments » - Posted in Coverage, Social Networks by Tamar Weinberg
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The Digging Debate: Is Social Media Worthless?Jan 24 2007 | Social Networks |
There’s a big debate in the blogosphere about long term effects (if any) related to being Dugg. Kim Krause Berg, who recently posted a ton of useful links relating to web design, had her post hit the Digg main page. 
From the exposure, her blog got 28,000 new hits. Her reaction? Not very positive. Kim has gone on to write that the Digg effect is a “quick marketing sugar high,” because the traffic appears to be short-term. She references Matt Bailey’s review of social media where he writes that “social media site links consistently yielded the lowest rates of engagement and no conversions.”
I am reminded about a post made not so long ago by Darren Rowse of Problogger who addressed this concern as well. After evaluating the traffic before and after the Digg effect, he speculated that the Digg effect does have long-term benefits, though nothing that can consistently match the spike from being featured on the main page of such sites. Benefits include:
