Internet Marketing Blog

New Word Of Mouth Networks - Teens Talk Online

I haven't fully digested the new Pew Internet & American Life Teens & Social Media report, but the summary makes clear that teens' online behavior is creating new networks that will require online word of mouth marketing to be an increasingly crucial tactic within overall Internet marketing strategies.

The Pew study shows that they are prolific online content creators:

• Of the 93% that are online, 64% of them have created content online.
• 39% of online teens share their creations online.
• 33% create or work on others' blogs or web sites, be it for friends, groups they belong to, or classroom assignments.
• 28% have created their own blog.
• 27% have a personal web site.
• 26% create mashups.
• 55% have created a social networking profile at sites like Facebook and MySpace.
• 47% have uploaded photos.
• 14% have posted video online.

Teens share their online content and that sharing builds the foundation of their word of mouth networks because that content is a virtual conversation starter. The Pew study found:

• 89% of teens who upload photos say that people post comments about those photos at least sometimes.
• 72% of video posters say those videos elicit comments at least sometimes.
• 76% of teens who use social networks say they leave comments on other people's blog posts.

It seems clear that teen marketing for the short term, and, as these kids grow up, overall Internet marketing for the long term, will depend upon tapping into these online word of mouth networks.

Crowdsourcing Disease Symptoms

I heard a fascinating piece on MPR this morning about a woman who noticed that whenever her severely autistic child had a high fever, the symptoms of his autism fell away to the point where he could communicate with them normally.

When the fever fell, his severe autism returned.

The phenomenon is called the "fever effect" and researchers have apparently known about it for years.

The report got me to thinking that such phenomenon might be more quickly unearthed and, as a result, the aspects of diseases might be better and more fully understood, productive avenues of research might be more quickly and efficiently identified, and medical science for specific diseases might be more quickly and completely advanced if there were a way to crowdsource disease symptoms.

I don't know if anyone's thought of it, but wouldn't it be enormously beneficial if there were some central location where anyone could contribute in a qualitative and quantitative manner their own anecdotal evidence of disease symptoms and phenomena like the "fever effect"?

I could see parents, family members, loved ones, disease sufferers and physicians all contributing to and researchers consulting with such a resource.

I haven't really thought about what the technology for such a system might look like but I imagine that it could be some type of modified wiki format that would allow for open ended comment but would also be able to quantify the number of people who had observed a specific symptom, for example.

Give me a comment below if you know of anyone who might be doing something like this or have any ideas about the topic, what such a system might look like and work, etc.

Meta Me: My Lifestream Through Google Analytics

Now that Google is increasingly owning everything online, they ought to start thinking about integrating their Google Analytics service into everything else they own not called AdWords.

In addition to analytics, the Google accounts and services I use include Webmaster Tools, Local Business Center, iGoogle, Alerts, Gmail, Talk, Docs, Notebook, Calendar, Maps, Maps for Mobile, Earth, Picasa, Groups, Page Creator, Reader, Bookmarks, Shared Stuff, Blogger, FeedBurner, AdWords, AdSense, Checkout, Jaiku, Dodgeball, Orkut, Video, YouTube, Desktop, Mobile Search, GOOG-411, Google SMS, Web History, Trends, Suggest, Sets, and Toolbar.

I'd like to get statistics for all of these products and services to analyze how and how often I use them. I admit, it would be a huge step for a lot of people to surrender and personally identify all that data about themselves and entrust it to a megacorporation.

Services such as Tumblr and the most recent Google acquisition, Jaiku, allow account holders to plug in the RSS feeds from all of their various online accounts, from your blog to YouTube to digg to Flickr and Twitter and display the content you create in one "lifestream" to which friends (or strangers) can subscribe. The emergence of the notion of, and services catering to, lifestreaming suggest that the idea of sharing your entire electronic life is gaining a foothold in the popular consciousness.

Certainly, user statistics for all these services are being collected by the service itself, though that data is not necessarily personally identifiable. Why not allow people or organizations access to their own data?

The payoff could be huge for both the user and the organization. Say Google runs with my request and integrates Analytics into all of their products and opens up the user data to their users. The analytics of how you behave online could prove invaluable to those users in terms of finding ways to use their time or services more efficiently or in hundreds of other ways we have yet to fathom.

The payoff for Google is massive and obvious in that they would accrue a gold mine of user behavior data, the knowledge from which they could then apply to their existing and future products.

Further, with Google's foray into the productivity software business, the resultant integrated system could form the foundation for a largely automated time recording system to calculate time sheets in the background, saving businesses a lot of lost time and productivity.

And that could the mother of all cash cows.

Google Buys Jaiku - Is Jaiku Now A Twitter Killer?

Mashable reported yesterday that Google had acquired the microblog service Jaiku and asked the obvious: Why not Twitter? (Robert Scoble says Google's going to couple Jaiku with their social networking service, Orkut).

Microblogging services such as Jaiku, Twitter, and Pownce combine the publishing technology of blogs  with the ability to update your microblog via a standard web interface, through your Instant Messaging client, or from your phone using text messaging. Each post is limited to 140 characters--the size limit of text messages; thus the term microblogging.

Mashable said: "This is somewhat surprising news considering the perceived dominance of Twitter in the so-called “lifestreaming” space. Additionally, Twitter is co-founded by Evan Williams, who was the creator of Blogger, which was previously acquired by Google. In a world where price is no object for Google, it’s interesting that they would opt for Jaiku and not Twitter."

One reason may simply be feature sets: Pownce allows you to share files and events through your Pownce blog while Jaiku lets your plug in your own RSS feeds so you can automatically update your Jaiku blog with other online content and the service allows you to create communities of interest. Twitter offers none of these features.

I wonder, though, if Google's preference for Jaiku over Twitter points to something fundamentally fatal about Twitter itself.

I love Twitter and I use it all the time but the service has had some well-documented scaling problems. Anyone who has used Twitter for a moderate amount of time has run into the cat or bird error notice when trying to perform some routine function.

I myself am a victim of Twitter's technical snafus. I haven't been able to post to my Twitter account for about three months and my pleas to Twitter about it have been either ignored or unheard.

You'd think that scaling issues wouldn't be obstacle to overcome, considering the resources Google could bring to bear to fix any technical problems. But then when you look back at how long Twitter has been having these problems, you gotta wonder if their technical problems are so deep that Google trying to fix them wasn't worth the effort.

Regardless, with the resources that Google will no doubt invest in Jaiku, Twitter has got to be worried.