Category Archives: Internet

I Tube… You Tube… We all Tube

I’ve been reading so much about the Goo-Tube craze and direction of video advertising that I thought I would try my hand at a little piece. I think what turned the tipping point was Paul Allen’s online video marketing blog. I went to You Tube and thought of a little piece… I tried to develop it along the lines of the other pieces I saw that had the most views… (Certainly not the highest rating).

I’m a long ways from my own internet news beat… but it was a fun little exercise. It will be interesting to try a series of little videos and learn more about how to successfully use them for exposure and conversion.

Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcaniconiosis is a disease one gets from inhaling microscopic pieces of silicate or quartz… Pretty interesting ‘eh?

Don’t ask me where I got the actor… Not bad for his first try though :)

Any ideas would be welcome.

Makin’ it happen…

So we thought about it today and we decided we would follow Seth Godin’s advice and Make it happen!

It was a pretty simple idea. Will Donate for Clicks–We identified a non-profit partner we’ve been working with and pledged $.10 for unique click on a simple landing page. Here’s the copy:

This just takes a few seconds!

Just click the link below to get to the donate button. Tell your friends and family and this can add up fast into valuable funds.

Pass this along to any of your friends, families or associates and this is an easy way to raise money for Peru!

HURRY, THIS PROGRAM ENDS OCTOBER 24th AT MIDNIGHT!

Thank you and Happy Clicking

http://www.worldbookdrive.org/page.php?id=5

The idea was simple. Our partners have mailing lists and regular readers. Those readers each have family and friends who want to help the organization. Our company is complimentary to their industry, so let’s work together to help our partners and get a little exposure for ourselves.

Maybe we should have thought about it a little longer. Maybe we should developed more guidelines and padding. But maybe was just too long for a company as at the tipping point as Worldwide Book Drive. We had to act. We did an initial assessment. We made it happen.

We’ll keep you posted on the benefit…

Are You Engage(d)?

We’ve all been to blog sites, forums or other community sites. More often than not, we havet to fish though mountains of unrelated issues to find what we’re really looking for.

Of course of lot large businesses have seen the benefit that could come from having a forum that actually helped to nuture the thought process to identitify and solve real queries.

I was introduced to Engage Thoughtware(tm) by Dan Mabey, Former Director Of International Economic Development for the State of Utah. This powerful business communication tool.

After a review of their patented program I’m extremely impressed by the benefits they offer. As best summarized by their own site, the benefits are as follows:

* Less costly than face-to-face meetings
* More secure than Blogs
* Produces better results than e-mail.

On another level, Engage:

* Drives the innovation/implementation cycle
* Removes political and geographical barriers
* Aligns team level efforts with the organization
* Reduces costs and streamlines processes
* Recognizes and provides for the reward of actual contributors.

Engage is already pretty well developed for corporate licensing. I believe the benefits and opportunities this technology would have in the free market would encourage incredible innovation and idea development. I also see huge economic benefit from IP development and advertising revenues. Kind of like the MySpace of organized and real information. :)

A focus group will be held in about a week to further explore its free market capabilities. I’m excited to see the development of this product.

Webdevelopment Outsourcing

In my opinion, development costs are some of the scariest expenses of a business that integrates the web. Generally speaking, front end isn’t too bad, but a back-end that allows dyanmic interface and webmastery, not to mention shoppingcart and customer accounts can add up fast…

I was first introduced to offshore outsourcing by John Jonas, who was researching its possibilities in his various ventures. I was really impressed with Danny Sullivan and the model he had developed for web outsourcing in the Philippines. The prices seemed reasonable enough but I was concerned about reliability and consistency and language barriers etc.

At first it was a little frustrating… We hired on a trainee. A great price, but really not quite as fast as we were hoping or expecting. We stuck with it, and after a while our trainee began to deliver much more on our requests. Better yet, he even began suggesting some of his own ideas and accomplishable creativity.

It is absolutely different than working with qualified american programmers. The pros and cons really depend on where your company is its development.

I would highly recommend it for any company that has more work to do than it can handle alone. In fact I have often thought that like re-selling webhosting, there might be some money in reselling webdevelopers :) Really.

I also think it would be relatively easy to start a development company and pick up work from anywhere in the world. It would be a simple model, with a fixed overhead of labor and enough qualified programmers to grow as fast or as slow as you would want.

I will not at all be surprised if this model begins to be replicated and re-sold, a lot like webhosting… We’ll see :)

 

Little Search Engine’s In Big China?

So I’m in Atlanta, Georgia right now with RigidFlex Plastics International at a trade conference regarding recycled plastics and the developments in the plastic trading industry.

Although completely off the topic of plastics, (I’ll write more about this conference later), it’s been fun lately to learn about the developments of Google and the other search engines in China.

It seems that Chinese Search Engines are showing some gain in their capture of the growing Chinese Market. It’s a tragedy to see that they sell out the top search results to the highest bidders rather than legitimate relevancy, but then, that’s very indicitave of Chinese media culture.

Google is having to adapt to Chinese media culture as well. Censoring their search results is pretty telling in that case. China’s market is growing quickly and google’s competitors (both foreign and native Chinese) are fighting for a piece of the fruit, it will be interesting to see what happens.

What ever happened with Alibaba anyways and their sellout and priorvow to take down google in China?

Losing Page Rank: Just Another Statistic

So after Google’s last big indexing round-up, a number of different sites that I manage in one of my small businesses lost its ranking. I understand that google has reset their algorhythms to try to clean out duplicate content and people who use scraper software, but a lot of legitimate sites seemed to have gotten slapped as well.

There’s a great article about it here for any one that might have suffered a similar fate.

If any one has any ideas of how to avoid showing duplicate content for site terms and policies, please let me know, I’m all ears. Online businesses, entrepreneurs or even basic bloggers will benefit from cleaning up how the bots read their pages.

First Prove Your Model

We recently had a publicity strategy meeting for Somethinglocal.com. We sat down and tried to identify as many things as we could that would increase traffic, build brand equity, increase down loads and more, (what else do you usually talk about at an internet marketing meeting). We identified some great things we could do that would be news worthy, along with a number of different strategies to synergize our upcoming podcast with our upcoming quick-time commercials, Big Aland other promotional efforts we have coming up.

Of all of the things we talked about, the one that rang the most true was this: Prove your model, and it will do most of the promotion itself. Of course this is not the case with everything, but if it’s a model that really provides goods or services that people need, you can bet they’ll tell their friends about it. MyspaceAmazonGoogle Adsense,Commission JunctionEbay and more, provide a service that benefits their customers and brings them back for more. I might be wrong, but I bet the budget for the time and money to market these services is relatively small. I know I mentioned only big models, but I’m pretty sure the same applies to little things as well. Wasn’t Craig’s list just a small start-up?

Somethinglocal.com satisfies a need. Local bands need to connect with their fan base in such a way to be exposed, promoted and make profit for further development. It promotes bands and sells their music. Bands get 69% of all of the proceeds from their downloads. The rest of the money is used to promote the bands through the different modules of the website. It hasn’t been a smooth transition for somethinglocal.com, but we’ve finally got the backend working as of last week and we’ve already got over 10 bands with a balance in their accounts. As we really help bands sell their music, it will help lead and orchestrate the other marketing aspects of Somethinglocal. It’s still too early to tell just how successful our model is in practice, but it looks like we’re on the right track. Either way, it seems our marketing and promotional strategy has a clear top priority: First, prove the model.