Marketers Studio - David Berkowitz's Marketing Blog

Anonymous AIM Wimzi Widget

I'm trying this out in a blog post rather than the sidebar; feel free to send an IM through this widget if you care to chat sometime. Via wimzi.aim.com:

Kid Tested, Blogger Approved

Thanks, CK.

Search In The Digital Media Ecosystem

I had the rare pleasure last week of spending one day learning from 150 people whose insights always explicitly or implicitly inform this column each week: my clients, colleagues, and partners. What follows are a number of takeaways from my company's summit, "Search in the Digital Media Ecosystem."

The insights included here are from a number of speakers and sessions, so if the originators will pardon me, I'll spare the attributions and offer a collective thanks to all who've shared both the ideas below and those omitted solely because the space allotted could not do justice to them.

Amazon's Ill-Timed Ad

Someone's slacking in turning their ads off. See below from Google. A wrestler murdered his family and committed suicide, and this is the one ad that appears for a related search. Whoops.

The news:
Authorities reveal how WWE's Benoit died

The Ad:
Wwe Benoit at Amazon.com
Discover Amazon's new Toy Store
Qualified orders over $25 ship free
Amazon.com/toys

Screenshot below.

PSP: Ominous iPhone Harbinger?

There's a great Mobile Insider article by Steve Smith today you should read in MediaPost. For those who follow what Al Ries, Christina Kerley, and others have cautioned about convergence, this is especially salient, and it'll be of interest to anyone following new trends in technology. Steve writes:

Even when you bring a startlingly good new toy into the market and succeed in grabbing the early adopters, the question becomes “then what?” Sony seems to have been learning a hard lesson that some analysts predict Apple may experience later this year. Selling the first few million units may be the easiest part.

Catch the whole thing - well worth a few minutes.

Nail in the Coffin for Bloggers Giving Quotes to Ads

I can't do this justice as I catch up today, but if you haven't caught it, there's a MAJOR dust-up in the blogosphere, one that will impact how social media campaigns are planned going forward.

The VERY short version:

1)       Microsoft solicited notable bloggers like Om Malik (GigaOm) and Mike Arrington (TechCrunch) to talk about the importance of people at their businesses. The bloggers were part of the Federated Media blog ad network, which planned the campaign.

2)       These bloggers were not compensated directly, but rather were paid by Microsoft running ads on their sites.

3)       Nick Denton, Valleywag publisher, lashed out at these bloggers for taking money and not disclosing it.

4)       Bloggers reacted like crazy. Om Malik recanted. FM chief John Battelle said his bloggers should have disclosed it. Mike Arrington says Battelle threw him under the bus. This is bigger than the Iron Man-Spidey dustup in the Marvel Civil War series.

My take: the campaign itself wasn't that innovative. What, like it's going out on a limb to brand your business as people-focused? Why would bloggers take part in that? Seemed like a cool idea at the time, perhaps.

Yet more importantly, for this point, this will effectively kill the concept of bloggers participating in an ad campaign that runs on their site.

Still, Federated Media has been a pioneer with innovative approaches to blog advertising. For most marketers, blog advertising is simply running the same display ads you run on Yahoo and iVillage and extending them to blogs. That turns blog ads into a bland extension of a media campaign, even if it makes marketers feel better that an ad of theirs is running on a certified, bona fide blog (and, yes, marketers love hearing that kind of thing). Running a customized campaign involving reaching out to bloggers to inform the creative of the ad shows a great deal of care in developing a real blog media campaign, even if the execution fell short in this example.

Additionally, looking at the technical framework behind what FM is doing here, there should be a lot of great uses for blog ads to be populated with content from RSS feeds, such as user-generated content (that's screened, of course). We're going to see a lot of cool examples of this kind of thing in the very near future.

For some even better insights into all of this, read some great commentary: CK writing about the importance of trust (with great discussion in the comments), Jeff Jarvis chronicling the whole play by play and includes his own code of ethics that anyone would do well to follow and adapt, and MarketingPilgrim covering the brouhaha with lots of links.

Anyone But Google

This is clearly the year of ABG - "Anyone But Google." It's inevitable, but why are search engine pundits leading the charge?

The first pundit of note as a decent excuse - Charles Knight has made a name for himself raising awareness of hundreds of alternative search engines. He's done a phenomenal job building that list and gaining a following on his altsearchengines blog, part of the Read/Write Web group where his columns first appeared. He comes off as this Don Quixote figure, even if on occasion he comes off as a bit like a cult leader, as he once wrote a number of people, myself included, seeking someone with "a passion for the cause of the alternative search engines." I'm all for the education, but for causes, I'll stick to City Harvest and the like. Still, I applaud the work he's doing, as he's single-handedly raised visibility for dozens of search engines that deserve to find an audience (and hundreds more that don't).

Not only have I declined to enter into the "true believer" camp of Mr. Knight, but I've been routinely quoted as the defender of the status quo, sort of like Aaron Eckhart's character in Thank You for Smoking. It all started by a brief comment responding to an altsearchengine post on a "Day without Google," where readers were encouraged to break their Google crack habit and try another search engine drug of choice. My comment signaled how crucial the major engines are for allowing me to function:

"I might as well take it as a vacation day. The top 5 are the top 5 for a reason."

A quick Google search (yes, I'm evil) relating to that quote showed 10 mentions, or 97 if you show the omitted and potentially duplicate results, including a mention in the UK's Register. Word travels fast.

I found the quote come up once again in a post on Search Engine Land by none other than the Sultan of Search Engine Marketing himself, Danny Sullivan (maybe Kevin Ryan can be the Shah). He's inspired by Mr. Knight and is publicizing Google-Free Fridays. Yet rather than trying to use this to promote usage of truly alternative engines, he wants his readers to try Yahoo, Windows Live, Ask, and AOL.

I'm not sure my response to Mr. Sullivan's post will get as much play (it's not as pithy), but it's worth sharing here:

This blog caters [Search Engine Land] to search engine marketers, right? Whether one is client-side, at a search engine marketing agency, or even from another search engine, it's in everyone's best interest to check out other search engines from time to time. If you only use one engine, no matter what that engine is, you're not doing your job. Why we need a schedule for this is beyond me.

Full disclosure: I have the Google toolbar and use it religiously. In the Firefox search bar, however, I routinely have one of the other engines as the default so an alternative is easily accessible, and I often take deep dives on the others to see if anyone's offering improvements over the Google standard (see the recent column on Ask.com as an example). I also routinely check out vertical and specialized search engines relating to shopping, health, and other categories.

No matter which of the major engines you use, odds are it's good enough. comScore's rankings of search engine market share don't even include an "other" category. It's great to dive into that "other" category, but if you're already working with search engines in any significant way, you better be using more than one already or you're doing a disservice to your clients.

Wiffiti - A Live Test

Just read about Wiffiti from TechCrunch... considering trying a live demo during the 360i Summit, though cellphone access isn't great here. If you want to try it, write 25622 and start your message with "@summit".

Buzz from Digital Hollywood (Search Insider)

HOLLYWOOD'S TALKING A LOT ABOUT Google. What else is on everybody's mind?

To check the barometer, I sat on a panel at Digital Hollywood in Santa Monica last week with five other speakers to cover the most ground I've ever seen any panel attempt to navigate: "Broadband Advertising: The Power Surge -- Video, PODs, Social Networks, Links & Banners -- Entertainment, Digital Publishing, Communities and Search Engines Emergence." We could have talked about immigration rights and Iraqi politics and it still would have been on-topic.

I was inspired by Aaron Goldman who, at the Search Insider Summits, has kept a running checklist of the biggest buzzwords from the event and then shared them during his panel. I thought it would be fun to do that while on my panel, though it was a bit more challenging to take notes and participate in the panel at the same time.

I tried keeping tabs of 35 buzzwords, themes, and topics, and I had no way of noting who said what. While I can't credit each of them with their takeaways, I'll acknowledge en masse the wise coterie who I had the pleasure of learning from: Disney Online's Brad Davis, Fuel Industries' Brady Gilchrist, McCann WorldGroup's Marc Ruxin, Advertising.com's Ben Trenda, Maven Networks' Nicholas Troiano, and moderator Warren Lee of Canaan Partners.

On to the hottest buzz:

Join Me at WidgetCon

Here's great branding: a widget conference promoting itself virally through widgets. It's the so-simple-it's-brilliant approach. Kudos to Mike May for his help pulling this one off, as his involvement helps guarantee a great program. I've been advocating widget best practices for awhile now, and I'll be sure to share some highlights on the blog.