I came across a MediaPost Insider article this afternoon called "Holiday Shopping Season 2007: All About the Blogs", by Tessa Rudd. The article talks about how online shoppers, and advertisers and marketers trying to reach them see blogs as helping out with "guided shopping".

Rudd writes, "The blogosphere offers unbiased, third-party voice for consumers, while simultaneously empowering advertisers with the valuable opportunity to capitolize on the trust that has developed between bloggers and consumers. Numerous reports from the Internet advertising industry and market researchers suggest that advertising is working on blogs. This is creating a dynamic environment where branding meets direct marketing."

The article then goes on talking about "online e-fluencers": "The success of advertising in the blogosophere is manifested through the relationship between the consumer and online e-fluencers. E-fluencers are often bloggers who have become experts, through research and knowledge, in a specific area of interest, such as MP3 players or GPS systems. E-fluencers become an influential and guiding player in the traditional concept of consumer-to-consumer marketing."

In reading this article, I quickly came to realize that at least 2 items on my Christmas list this year came from specific items that were recommended on blogs. One item is a handbag a friend had recommended on her blog around fashion. If I hadn't asked for it for christmas, I would have purchased it right from her blog - as she often posts pictures of items, linking to the product's website to purchase.

If its wasn't for these e-fluencers, my christmas list may have been much more barren this year (and maybe would have even saved Santa Claus some money!)

Labels: blogs, e-fluencers, holiday shopping season, online shopping

On Tuesday, Merriam-Webster announced their word of the year for 2007. And the winner was… w00t! Of course. I use this word ALL the time. For those of you out there who, like me, don’t find this word entering their daily vocabulary, let me give you a little background on the word. Webster’s online Open Dictionary defines it like this:

1. w00t (interjection)

Expressing joy (it could be after a triumph, or for no reason at all); similar in use to the word “yay.”

w00t! I won the contest!

And while there is plenty of disagreement as to the origins of the word, one popular theory as defined by Urban Dictionary is that the term was derived from online gamers as an acronym for “we own the other team.” In other words, it was a victory cry of sorts. And now… well, now it seems to have worked its way into mainstream language, or at least into “leetspeak,” or l33t.

As a “word of the year,” w00t joins the ranks of other “word of the year winners” such as ruthiness, integrity, blog, and democracy. These are all words that are chosen by Webster’s based on their wide usage, and are then voted on by the internet public. So, the question is, will w00t become as wide-spread as “blog.” Will we all be crying “w00t!” as we ring in the New Year? Ten years from now, will we all look back and laugh that I’m blogging about the term “w00t” - a term that has become as mainstream as “internet,” “telephone,” or “HDTV?” I’m obviously just a n00bi3 at all this l33t stuff, and at this point I’ve resigned myself to the fact that I may just never be k3wl.

Labels: l33t, leetspeak, Merriam-Webster, w00t, word of the year

According to Google’s software engineer, Matt Cutts – Google plans to shortly roll out a new filter that will treat sub-folders and sub-domains of a site equally. According to SE Roundtable (http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/015621.html), at a recent PubCon conference in Las Vegas, Matt stated that very soon things will change and a domain will be limited to 2 total URL’s within any set of search results.

So what does this mean for webmasters? Since sub-domains up until this point have been treated as individual domains, site owners had the ability to easily game the system and index an endless amount of sub-domains in Google to dominate a bunch of rankings. Google’s latest effort to put an end to this, will most likely have a significant impact on websites using these tactics. In addition though, some legit sites are likely to hurt from this change, as certain sites who let’s say had 3-4 of their own listings within top 10 search results will now be limited to just 2, therefore losing some of the traffic.

Whether or not this new algorithm will cause relevancy issues is under question, but the filter should surely put an end to black hat SEO’s taking advantage of the current situation, especially those in the more competitive areas of the business.

Labels: google, search engine optimization, SEO, sub-domains

In a meeting with our Google team this week, one of our contacts introduced us to iGoogle. Although I was aware of it, I never really went as far as to try it out. However, out of curiosity today, I went to check it out quickly, and before I knew it 15 minutes went by with me playing around with my page, as well as some of the 'gadgets' I can add to it.

iGoogle allows you to personalize your Google homepage, spicing it up from just the plain white background. It allows you to customize your page with news, local weather, YouTube clips, and lets you 'add stuff'; gadgets that you may want to interact with when visiting the page. Our rep let us know one of his favorite gadgets was Pacman - and much to my surprise, you can play Frogger and Duck Hunt too!

Much to my surprise, some of these gadgets are being used as ad units - which Google is currently calling 'gadget ads'. These gadgets are being described as 'websites within websites'; users can post and share gadgets anywhere, engaging users around your brand. Gadget ads are comprised of 'applications incorporating data feeds, maps, images, audio, video, flash, HTML, or JavaScript in a single creative'.

Now that I've actually seen these gadgets and interacted with some of them myself, I'm curious to see how they work in an ad campaign!

Labels: gadget ads, google, igoogle, search engine marketing

Yesterday, the popular social content site, Digg, made some pretty drastic changes to its taxonomy. This change certainly softened the corners of the traditionally tech driven social site, providing a greater diversity of content options. There is a new Lifestyle category and greater prominence for Sports and Entertainment categories. Additionally, Offbeat, which has historically served as the catch all for stories that didn't fit elsewhere, has been broken out into its own category with a variety of subcats.

It will be interesting to see how the fork-tongued Digg hard corps react to this invitation to art and puppy lovers to join their ranks. My guess is that it could go one of two ways:

1) They leave and find the next best thing. This is a tech savvy crowd that knows it and prides themselves on being hip to the coolest new thing out there. It is possible that this process was already underway.

2) They go the way of Phish fans following the break up of the Greatful Dead in the mid 90's. Before I go on, while I enjoy the music of both bands, I am by no means a die-hard fan of either. which I think gave me a more neutral take on the situation. When the The Dead broke up and all these people flooded over to start going to Phish concerts, it seemed that Phish fans felt the needed to super-charge their fan-dom and fight the yuppie-posers (ie Me) who were encroaching on their thing. While hateful comments are already the norm, it's possible that veteran Diggers may lash out and bury posts in the new categories.

I guess a third option is that veterans actually like the new categories because the new outlets will stop people from posting stories in categories that aren't a good fit.

I any case, Digg's reasoning has to be in-part motivated by the need to grow their audience, most likely to make the site more appealing for advertisers or potential buyers. Only time will tell if their approach will achieve that goal or if it will drive away the people that made the site what it is.

Labels: digg, smo, social media optimization

As the paid search industry has evolved from the days of goto.com to Overture to Yahoo and the rise of Google Adwords all sorts of search engine marketing strategies have been suggested and debated. Bid management, writing effective ad copy and day parting are just a few worthy of mention. Yet among all of these tactics the one most fundamental of concepts is time and again overlooked, conversion tracking. Let this then be just a friendly reminder to track your campaign's target conversions and more specifically, all conversions.

A great example of the importance of tracking all available actions (and not just the most desired) is in one of Rock Coast Media's present campaigns. After a substantial period of time working through numerous technical challenges we were finally able to track call center sales in addition to just search driven online sales. All along we had some theories about the value of these calls but we were never sure...the result, over 40% of our sales were still over the phone. Clearly these numbers have substantially impacted the campaign's bottom line and our overall strategy.

Yes, the holidays are coming soon, 2008 planning is in crunch time and things in general are crazy. Hence, just this friendly reminder to review all of the available actions in your campaign and make sure they are properly tracked.

Labels: paid listings, paid search, PPC, rock coast media, search engine marketing, tracking online advertising