Viral Marketing : Salon.com, reached over 1 million

"Salon.com could have attracted a lot more links by publishing the release on their own site and syndicating it from there but all in all it is a great example of how a case study about your viral marketing can actually be as effective as the campaign itself"

"Yahoo Buzz sent Salon.com over a million unique visitors after the story was promoted to the Yahoo homepage."

Read more at Leveraging your success Salon.com style

Salon.com Reaches Over 1 Million Unique Users in 1 Day

You know Top Online Marketing Tactics ?

by Lee Odden

Here are the top ten tactics rankings so far out of 35 listed and the percentage of votes for each.

With the vote count at over 150, I’ve updated the top ten as of 02/13/08:

* Blogging (27%)
* Email marketing (16%)
* Search engine optimization (14%)
* Pay per click (9%)
* Social networks (Facebook, LinkedIn) (5%)
* Blogger relations (4%)
* Online public relations (3%)
* Viral marketing (3%)
* Free content (white papers) (3%)
* Corporate web site (3%)

The original top ten are here from 02/05/08:

* Blogging (25%)
* Search engine optimization (14%)
* Email marketing (12%)
* Pay per click (8%)
* Blogger relations (6%)
* Online public relations (5%)
* Viral marketing (5%)
* Corporate web site (4%)
* Social networks (Facebook, LinkedIn) (4%)
* Webinars/Teleconference (3%)

Blogging really does make sense because it can serve as a platform for so many other tactics including SEO, email (archiving newsletters), blogger relations, PR, viral marketing, a compliment to the corporate site, a touchpoint for social networking and a place to promote webinars.

If you’re a company doing business and/or marketing online and aren’t using a blog in some way, you’re really at a disadvantage. The longer a company goes without a blog of some sort, the greater an advantage their blogging competition will have. Of course, not ALL companies need to have a blog, but the number of qualified reasons not to is getting smaller each day.

Source / Read More Top Ten Online Marketing Tactics

Top Five Internet Trends in 2007

Top 5 Internet trends as identified by Keynote in 2007 Top Internet Trends in 2007.

1. Impact of Social Networking and Community
Social networking and community sites on the Web are having a huge impact on business and society in general.

2. Web 2.0 Applications Becoming Mainstream
Web sites are moving away from traditional Web page technologies and towards an online experience that is more congruent with the desktop experience. Web 2.0 technologies are coming into the mainstream in a big way

3. New Technologies Putting a Strain on the Web
Many companies assume most consumers are accessing the Web with quality high-speed connections, but that is not necessarily reality.

4. Traditional Web Stalwarts Continue to Innovate
The companies that have helped to build and shape the Web as we know it, continue to innovate. Although relative new comers, such as YouTube or Digg, continue to usher in the latest applications and trends, the titans of the Internet are not resting on their laurels.

5. Online Segmentation
There is increased segmentation of online groups and audiences as the Internet grows and matures. A social networking sites make it easy for consumers to form groups and connections online based on interests and demographics, and Web leaders, such as Yahoo!, are targeting market segments through micro-sites such as OMG, which targets teenage girls.

Source / Read full story on : The Web in 2007 – Top Five Internet Trends

Facebook Applications Open Up for search engines

The canvas page of Facebook pages can now be made accessible to the public.

There are two main benefits to this:

(1) If your app runs exclusively on Facebook (aka – it’s not an extension of your existing site) you now have a page you can use to promote it that doesn’t require someone to login to Facebook.

(2) Search engines will now be able to index your apps. So, if someone types into Google “music apps for Facebook,” they might get a link to iLike or Pandora’s canvas page.

Source / Read more : Facebook Applications Open Up (for search engines)

The internet will become the World's third largest advertising

The internet will put back magazines as the world's third-largest medium of advertising in 2010, according to industry experts.

Spending on internet advertising increased by 25 per cent during the third quarter of 2007, according to the Internet Advertising Bureau, with returns of $5.2 billion (£2.5 billion).

By 2010, internet ad spend as a share of all media will break the 15% mark in 10 regional markets around the world, according to ZenithOptimedia.

Currently just four markets have reached this milestone - Denmark, Norway, Sweden and the UK.

In these four markets the internet is predicted to top 20% of all media spend by 2010.

Read more at Internet to become third biggest ad medium

YouTube Will Lead to the Internet’s Downfall

A study conducted by the Nemertes Research Group points to the conclusion that the constantly increasing use of video services such as YouTube could see the Internet reach breaking point in just three years’ time.

According to the PC Advisor’s Grant Gross, "the research firm says the flood of new video content could overwhelm the web by 2010 unless backbone providers invest up to $137bn in new capacity, more than double what service providers plan to invest, according to the study. In North America alone, backbone investments of $42bn to $55bn will be needed in the next three to five years to keep up with demand."

Why the gloomy perspective ? I’m not sure how much you know about exafloods and I’m not sure that the word can actually have a plural form because it’s something like Noah’s flood: one and definitive one, no chance for a second. The exaflood is caused by the explosion of video content available on the Internet and the amount of data created by the users: 161 exabytes of new data just this year. An exabyte is 1 quintillion bytes or, if you like, 1.1 billion gigabytes.

Bruce Mehlman, co-chairman of the Internet Innovation Alliance, an advocacy group particularly interested ion the matter, says that "The responsibility for keeping up with this growing demand lies with backbone providers and national policy makers. It takes a digital village. Certainly, infrastructure providers have plenty to do. You’ve seen billions in investment, and you’re seeing ongoing billions more."

Source : YouTube Will Lead to the Internet’s Downfall - This is not a prank!

Social Marketing: The New Facebook Conversational Marketing Proposition

Last week Facebook announcement of a new range of social marketing options has given a good injection of innovation to the online advertising world, stuck, for already too long, on the stale, interruptive and unperforming banner-ad metaphor.














Social, conversational advertising options, as Facebook has just introduced, open up a new horizon of marketing opportunities that may have an enormous impact on the future of online advertising.


Social Marketing: The New Facebook Conversational Marketing Proposition - Social Ads And Company Pages

The New Rules of Internet Marketing

Internet marketing is very different — and if you're not knowledgeable, you can allocate budget improperly or direct your efforts toward an area that won't provide ROI.

We all know that traditional marketing is a monologue—companies deliver messages to the market and push customers through the consideration process. The Internet changes the ways we can communicate with customers, adding new media like blogs and Web video.

When I analyze what's happening today, here's the mistake I see most companies making: They use new online marketing tools to pursue traditional marketing goals such as driving awareness, consideration, adoption, and purchase.

That's a mistake, because the rules of traditional marketing were shaped by what could be accomplished using one-way mass media. Frankly, it was the only tool we had available—up until even just a few years ago. Now that Internet media enables two-way communication, the whole idea of moving customers through a structured consideration process needs to be revised.

The central goal of online marketing isn't awareness, it's engagement. And the five key tools to produce engagement are affinity, personality, community, co-creation, and advocacy.

Engagement means getting the customer involved with your company, with your products, and—often—with your people. You want your customers to get to know your organization and its values and services. When customers like what they see and experience, the relationship deepens, leading to affinity.

Affinity refers to leveraging the depth and interactivity of the Web to create a memorable relationship with the customer. Some of the best techniques for building affinity include being useful when a customer's not buying, sharing passions, extending the product online, and creating cool experiences.

Personality refers to how your company interacts with the world, both emotionally and rationally. The company's personality must be both distinctive and genuine. Unlike a brand image, it can't be faked. Your company's culture constrains the personality you can build online.

Community as a marketing tool challenges almost every expectation of traditional marketing. Instead of controlling the marketing process, the company hosts a social interaction in which customers develop most of the content. But good communities don't generally grow on their own—the most effective ones are carefully cultivated and subtly supervised.

A company that takes the wrong steps can easily kill a community before it even gets started. Communities at their optimum foster sharing, involve influencers and fans, and lead to involved customers who may even want to be co-creators with your company.

Co-creation occurs when people enjoy your product or services so much that they want to build on top of something you've already done—or create something new that could be used with your product line.

A fan who decides to make shoe laces with a school name woven in to match the basketball shoes you've manufactured is one example. It's the process of engaging customers online to help design the product.

Advocacy refers to a new way to describe customers who used to be considered hobbyists. But these folks go far beyond what we've known. They're users of a product or service who like tinkering with it beyond what the normal user might do.

Working with "influencers" is a very hot topic in online marketing, but it assumes that there's a small group of people in the population who drive purchases of all products. The reality is much more complicated.

A company's goal should be identifying, caring for, and training advocates—customers who are willing to help market your products to others. That's very different from sending press releases to a few influential bloggers.

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Marketing done right is about much more than just communicating to customers—it's about shaping your company's offerings to match the needs of the marketplace. The Internet enables new business models, including one-to-many communication, that we could have only dreamed about previously. It provides us with tools we can use to guard against competitors, and lets us explore new possibilities.

There's tremendous opportunity here for CEOs. Internet marketing is a competitive weapon that can be used to underscore our leadership.
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Nilofer Merchant is the CEO of Rubicon Consulting (www.rubiconconsulting.com), a strategy and marketing consultancy based in Silicon Valley that solves complex business challenges for high-tech companies.