Archive for AjaxBlogging
Marketing and Branding Advice
Here is some advice i heard online about branding.
I think the best brands, the best sites have a large portion of their founders personality in them. Never be afraid to be yourself, after all there are 1/2 billion people on the www, not all of them have to agree with you. Concentrate on the ones that share your views, concentrate on making their experience the very best it can be, the rest forget them.
Or to put it another way, the best sites say – this is what we do, this is how we do it, if you don’t like it go somewhere else.
Nike Basketball Commercial – Viral Video Ad
Nikes new Viral video commercial. In the top charts on youtube.com
America’s Got Talent: Terry Fator – What a Wonderful World
He is good!
Lyrics:
I see trees of green
Red roses too
I see them bloom
For me and you
And I think to myself
What a Wonderful World
The colors of the rainbows
So pretty in the sky
Are also on the faces
Of people going by
I see friends shaking hands
Saying – How do you do?
They’re only saying
I love you
And I think to myself
What a Wonderful World
Ohhhhh, yesss…
America’s Got Talent: Terry Fator (ventriloquist, impersonator, singer, comedian) with Winston the Turtle impersonation of Kermit the Frog singing Louis Armstrong – What a Wonderful World. Semi-Finals Top 20.
Like Shopping? Social Networking? Try Social Shopping 2.0
FOR most small businesses, competing on the Web is hardly easier
than competing offline, where gigantic retailers with huge marketing
budgets dominate. But for Amenity Home, a start-up in Los Angeles with
three products, four employees and no marketing budget, getting noticed
was a simple matter of word-of-mouth advertising, albeit in an unusual
way.
Late last month, an online shopper posted a photo of one of Amenity Home’s $400 duvet covers on ThisNext.com,
one of a new breed of Web sites that promises to connect
independent-minded shoppers with hard-to-find products. Other shoppers
copied the photo to their own blog pages, bringing the company some
much-welcome attention, said Kristina de Corpo, an Amenity Home
founder.
“We’re a young business furiously trying to keep our
heads above water, so this is really exciting,” she said. “We’ve gotten
tons of hits from it.”
Sites like ThisNext and a handful of services like Kaboodle.com, Wists.com and StyleHive.com
are spearheading a new category of e-commerce called “social shopping,”
that tries to combine two favorite online activities: shopping and
social networking. These sites are hoping to ride the MySpace wave by
gathering people in one place to swap shopping ideas. And like MySpace,
the sites are designed for both browsing and blogging, with some
shopping-related technology twists included.
Social shopping is
just the latest solution to a chronic problem for online retailers and
shoppers: many shoppers aren’t sure what to buy, but they know they
won’t find it on the sites of mainstream retailers like Macy’s, Amazon or Wal-Mart.
Online
retailers often refer to this as the “product discovery” problem, but
it might better be referred to as online retailing’s Teflon piñata, so
many times have entrepreneurs tried to crack it.
“Online
shopping is more accurately described as purchasing, because it’s so
directed and goal-specific,” said Gordon Gould, ThisNext’s chief
executive. “You might be looking for a plasma
screen TV, but there’s not a lot of lateral thinking about what else
you might be interested in. We want to show people other products that
wouldn’t make sense for an e-tailer to batch together.”
•Users
who register with social shopping services typically create their own
pages to collect information on items they find. But instead of simply
describing what they have found on other sites and posting a Web
address, they can download a piece of software that allows them to grab
images of those products to post on their own shopping lists.
The
social shopping services can then post pictures of items that have been
viewed or circulated widely among visitors who have searched the site
for, say, home furnishing ideas.
The social shopping sites hope
to parlay that enthusiasm into advertising revenue, once they attract
enough visitors to go back to merchants with a better sales pitch. Some
sites, like ThisNext, also plan to form so-called affiliate
relationships with merchants, who often pay percent commissions on
sales that come as a result of their products being featured on other
sites.
ThisNext also gives users the ability to transfer pictures
or videos of their favorite products from the site to their personal
blog pages. Mr. Gould said the site could also eventually make money by
helping companies find influential customers that they might involve in
early-stage marketing plans or product testing, among other things.
“If you’re the go-to guy for buying Kona coffee, I want to find you, not a generalist,” he said.
Kaboodle, meanwhile, has created another revenue source by striking a deal late last month with eBay’s comparison shopping service, Shopping.com.
Under that agreement, whenever a Kaboodle user features a product that
also appears on the Shopping.com database, Kaboodle will post the
prices at which the product is sold online at various merchants. Should
a reader click through to the merchant’s site, Kaboodle will earn a
share of the fee the merchant pays Shopping.com for that click.
Kaboodle
has also worked with eBay to create pages for collectors of certain
items on Kaboodle, wherein they can receive feeds of eBay auctions that
are relevant to their collections.
The site, which has about
50,000 registered users, has so far raised $3.55 million from
well-known Silicon Valley investors, like Guy Kawasaki and Shea
Ventures, according to Manish Chandra, Kaboodle’s chief executive.
Last
week Kaboodle introduced a set of new features, including one that
allows users to run a slideshow of the products on their list, and then
transport that slideshow to their own blog pages. (That could account
for the late-summer popularity of a collection of string bikinis
featured on Kaboodle’s home page last week.)
According to Rob Goldman, who leads the American division of Shopping.com, Kaboodle and its cohort have potential.
“Who
knows? This may be the only way you shop for clothes in the future, by
seeing what your friends and other people are wearing,” he said. “But
in the scheme of the way commerce is conducted online right now, I’d
see these more as venture investments, and less as line extensions.”
Patti
Freeman Evans, an analyst with Jupiter Research, an online consultant,
agreed. The increasing popularity of customer reviews on retailer sites
and elsewhere, she said, “will help get customers a little more
engaged, and thinking about recommendations from other people, which is
what ThisNext and these other sites are based on.”
One hurdle,
Ms. Evans said, is getting users to go through the trouble of
downloading software so they can grab images of products they like,
assuming they are motivated enough to post favorite products to begin
with.
Ms. Evans said that social shopping sites would also have
to be vigilant against featuring stale products — a particularly vexing
issue for fashion merchandise — because retailers typically carry such
products for about 12 weeks.
But instant popularity for such
sites is not assured. “I think this will have a nice developing
trajectory, rather than something that’ll explode tomorrow,” Ms. Evans
said. “Customers are so used to going to the store to discover new
products that it’ll take a long time to get them out of that.”
- Crowdstorm
- Kaboodle
- Etsy
- Zebo
- ThisNext
- Wists
- ShopWiki
- Wisheus
- Wishpot
- Buzzilions
- Stylehive
- Glimpse
- StyleFeeder
- Reesycakes
- Osoyou
Good-bye, Google Bomb, Hello Google Bomb 2.0
Good-bye, Google Bomb
By Garance Franke-Ruta
Bloggers, take note: the old-school Google bomb is no more.
That’s right, the online behemoth best known for its search engine
says that it has rejiggered its legendary and proprietary technology so
that online efforts by bloggers to manipulate its top-secret search
algorithm to create cheeky, offensive and decidedly off-message answers to searches will no longer work.
“It was fun” while it lasted, said Rick Klau, a member of the Google
strategic partner development content acquisition team, at a search
engine optimization training session for political bloggers in
Washington, D.C., this afternoon. But, he said, “Google bombs don’t
work anymore.”
Indeed, the changes to eliminate Google bombs were instituted more than a year-and-a-half ago.
But that hasn’t stopped political bloggers of the left and right, who
have announced (or worried over) fresh efforts to manipulate search
engine rankings as recently as this May (see here) and June (see here, and here).
Here’s
how the old Google bombs worked: Say a group of people wanted to
associate a certain Washington politician — let’s call him Mr. Smith
– with a particular insult — like sleazeball — and have articles
about Mr. Smith come up high in Google search results when people
search for the keyword, sleazeball. They would all link to Mr. Smith’s
Web page, wrapping the link’s HTML code around the word sleazeball.
Presto-chango: Via the links, the algorithm made a connection between the name and the subject matter, and adjusted accordingly.
That doesn’t work anymore, said Klau, because the company today can
spot these swarms and neutralize their effect. “We are far more
perceptive when it comes to these link swarms that show up in a matter
of hours or days,” said Klau.
So why haven’t bloggers stopped trying to game the system? Work-arounds
may be one reason. So might the increasingly sophisticated nature of
today’s Google bombs — what Open Left’s Chris Bowers calls a “2.0 version of the Googlebomb”
– where the goal is to influence the search rank of a slew of negative
news articles about a politician rather than tie his name to a keyword.
Klau said that he’s “not aware of any [successful] Google bombs or
equivalents over the past year” — but the new efforts aren’t Google
bombs, per se.
As Bowers explained it, “What I’m doing isn’t a Google bomb.” It’s a
much harder to detect effort “to alternately optimize John McCain” in
the Google search engine rankings, by linking his name to nine
mainstream new organizations’s stories that raise questions about the
GOP presidential contender.
So good-bye Google bomb; hello, Google bomb 2.0.
