Internet Marketing Blog

Social Networking Statistics

Morgan Stanley's March Internet trends report shows that social networking sites are quickly becoming major hubs of online activity: Six of the top ten Web sites are social.

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Marketing To Millennials Presentation

This is a presentation for a seminar Pat Lilja, my colleague at Tunheim Partners, and I conducted on Wednesday for some public health people who are interested in how to reach the Millennial generation. We will have video of the session soon.

Citizen Journalist On The Scene At Bar Fire

When most people think about citizen journalism, the overcompressed, jerky cell phone video images come to mind. While it's certainly true that those type of images often represent citizen journalism, as we've seen with the Minneapolis bridge collapse, that is not always the case.

This is another remarkable example of not just citizen journalism, but the quality citizen journalism can reach. A popular Minneapolis bar I've hung out at on more than one occasion called Maxwell's caught fire and burned down yesterday morning.

Twin Cities blogger Ed Kohler at the scene, cameras in hand, shot still photos, some video, and posted the results to his blog, The Deets, as well as to his Flickr account. Here's the video he shot at the scene:

While the quality of these images are of traditional journalistic standards, what strikes me the most about citizen journalism is the You Are There quality it tends to convey and which seems to be missing from mainstream media coverage. Perhaps that's because of the packaging that comes along with MSM reporting.

It feels sorta like Edward R. Murrow reporting from the rooftops of London during the blitz (RAM).

Punch Pizza Flickr Photo Contest Campaign

Punch Pizza was in the process of getting their web site built when they came across a blog post by local pizza blogger Aaron Landry that was mildly critical of Punch for prohibiting him from taking a photograph of their pizza oven, as was wren at Flickr.

Landry's post led them to Flickr and they realized that many people were posting they'd taken at Punch Pizza locations and the quality of those photos were striking. On Facebook, they found a Punch Pizza fan club.

If your product or service is great, then your customers are likely to fans as well. Punch has great food and as the Flickr photos and Facebook fan club illustrate, they have fans.

This social media activity inspired Punch to create the Punch Neapolitan Pizza "Capture Our Fire" Flickr photo contest. Though they had legitimate business reasons to keep people from taking pictures of their ovens, Punch Pizza eliminated the no-photos policy. As Landry's blog post and the photos of Punch at Flickr made clear, their customers were also fans. If they wanted to take photos, the potential of someone stealing trade secrets was outweighed by making their customers happy.

They are giving away $3000 worth of Punch Pizza dining cards to the winners and they'll use the contest entries for their new web site when it launches. That will certainly make customers very happy.

We helped punch Punch navigate the social media waters by building the infrastructure through which they could learn a new way of communicating with their customers.

Punch Pizza co-owner John Puckett wanted to let Aaron Landry know that they'd changed their photo policy and were launching the contest, so he emailed Aaron and invited him to take part in the contest.

With that, the contest was launched.

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.

Flickr Has Stats

I got my wish. Or I've got part of my wish, anyway.

In September, I asked why I couldn't get usage statistics with my social networking accounts like Facebook and MySpace.

Flickr added basic statistics to the Pro version of their photo sharing service last week. Now that gives me tremendous incentive to pay the $24.95 annual fee for a Pro account.

A Pro account will show you page views, which sites are linking to your Flickr photo pages, how people are finding your photos within Flickr, and what search terms people are using to find your photos using the search engines. Search Engine Land has a detailed breakdown on how the stats work.

This is the first time we've had readily available usage statistics for photo sharing sites, which help a great deal in understanding how people use such sites.

TypePad's Updated Handheld Publishing Application

It's been a while since I've posted anything from my handheld using TypePad's mobile app because the last time I tried, everything was messed up, so I just didn't bother.

But I just downloaded and installed the latest version, so it's time to try it out again.

I'm posting from my T-Mobile MDA, otherwise known as the HTC Wizard--really, why couldn't someone come up with a decent name for this thing?!?

The phone is running Windows Mobile Pocket PC and I've got that slide-out thumbboard, so it's pretty easy to type.

The TypePad app gives you just enough functionality to do a quick and dirty post without any frills.

You cannot, for example, assign multiple categories to your post. There is no rich text editor, so there is no quick formatting but I suppose you could wrap such HTML tags as bold and italic around yor text I can't because my keyboard has no angle bracket characters

There is also no option for applying a meta description or keywords or Technorati tags to a post.

One really nice feature, though, is the ability to browse the photos on your phone and include one in your post. This is an exciting photo of my desk at work.

That makes it a perfect app for mobile photo blogging.

Even so, though, I like to keep my photos in my Flickr accout, so it'd be nice to have some integration there.

If this post works, I just may start moblogging more!

UPDATED 11/17/07: Because I'm particular about these kinds of things, I prettyfied this post with the links and keywords TypePad Mobile doesn't allow me to include.

Introduction To Flickr Video

This is a video introduction and demonstration conducted by my friend Ann Treacy of Yahoo!'s photo sharing site, Flickr:

Yahoo Upgrades Search Engine, Blends Search Results

Yahoo! has just unveiled upgrades to their search results after Microsoft had done the same late last month for their search engine, Live.com.

One of the primary upgrades is Yahoo!'s Search Assist function that tries to anticipate what you want as you type your search query by offering related alternative search phrases in a similar but more comprehensive way than Google's preceding service, Google Suggest.

Here's a screencast of Yahoo!'s Search Assist in action:

Search Dominance With Blended Results

Search Engine Land provides a good rundown of Yahoo!'s new search features but for our purposes, the one I'm most interested in is that they've added blended search results. That means they are including within the search results page links to  audio, video and photos as well as web pages. For video, they are actually including an in-line player, so you can watch the video directly on the search results page.

Google, of course, has been doing just that for some time. The following screenshot shows Google's in-line video player for the search results for "joe mauer batting tips." (Click on the graphic for more detail):

That same search, "joe mauer batting tips," is going to help me demonstrate the importance of not just search engine optimizing your own web sites, but also uploading and optimizing your own content to other online centers of gravity where large audiences congregate and share such as YouTube and Flickr.

We uploaded and optimized a 14 minute training video that comes with the Mauer's Quickswing batting training product at many of the popular video sharing sites such as YouTube, Google Video and iFILM. We also opened a Flickr account and uploaded and optimized photos of the Mauer's Quickswing. We did this long before Google rolled out their blended search results feature.

But when they did, the result of that work was that the preponderance of the links on the first page of results for "joe mauer batting tips" lead to content that we provided, either through optimized web sites or optimized content on other sites.

Now that the other two major search engines offer blended search, the same dominance of the search results holds true for both Microsoft's Live.com for "joe mauer batting tips":

...as well as at Yahoo! for "joe mauer batting tips":

The happy end result was that the vast majority of the links went to either the client's site directly, or to essentially product placements, with either photographic or video demonstrations of the Quickswing product.

That's search saturation.

NFL.com Redesign - Web 1.5

I was a bit critical in my last post about the NFL.com website redesign, and the failure to account for existing incoming links to the site from pro football bloggers and elsewhere.

Pat Coyle, the Digital Business Director for the Indianapolis Colts, points out at his Sports Marketing 2.0 blog, "how hard it is to relaunch a site for one nfl team. I can only imagine how hard it was to get this league site back up off the ground!!"

It's a point very well taken and something I should have mentioned previously. The depth of content that the NFL has to deal with for their site is simply astounding. NFL.com is not just a site for news stories of all things National Football League, it is a trove of data on individual games, teams, players--and now historical data on all of the above--as well as video and photographs. The list goes on.

The programming and logistics of bringing all of that together into a coherent and usable whole is pretty staggering when you think about it.

So, yes, I second Pat's sentiments, however belatedly.

But I do write about Internet marketing and after further review of the site, I've found something else lacking from an Internet marketing point of view.

NFL.com's New Features

The graphic design and layout of the new NFL.com is great. You can see at a glance where to find the different types of information, and that's no easy feat for a site as rich in content as this one is:

I won't go into great detail about NFL.com's new features (for that see BizOfFootball.com and Rotanation.com via Pat Coyle and DigiSpo). I will, however, share a few of my favorites.

• NFL Video: The site has a ton of video, including player highlights, game previews and recaps, and NFL Network programming.
• NFL Photos: Complete photo galleries for each game and more.
• NFL Statistics: In addition to all statistics you'd expect from a professional sports site, the new site offers splits, and, best of all, historical data that is even game-specific. As an Old Skooler, I can look at how Vikings Hall of Fame quarterback Fran Tarkenton performed for each game of the 1974 season right up to Super Bowl IX, when the Vikings lost to the Steelers.

It's all very cool and there is a lot of content to make football fans happy.

Content Is King...And Embeddable

If you want to market online, content is definitely king these days. As I've said before, content needs to be embeddable because, as Steve Rubel points out, traffic happens elsewhere.

This is especially true for professional sports. I'd be willing to bet that there is a far higher proportion of sports and political bloggers than there is for any other content category. Both love to talk about their passion online. And people like to read them.

I love to blog about sports and I'd love to be able to cut and paste some video highlights of the last Vikings game, for example, to highlight my points without requiring my readers to go offsite. But doing an iffy proposition because clips of NFL games on YouTube are constantly being taken down, so, instead of broken links, I'd have broken videos on my site.

Professional sports teams are notorious for clamping down on their content and there used to be good reasons for that. But now I think their just swimming upstream and failing to exploit an opportunity at the same time.

The new NFL.com site goes right up to the door of the sharing Web but refuses to cross the threshold.

The site is completely RSS-enabled; I can subscribe to a feed of just Vikings news or videos, so I am alerted when there's new content. I can email and link to but not embed Vikings game highlights. I can only email photos, and even then not to specific ones but to photo sets.

All of the "sharing" features are designed to drive traffic to the site rather than marketing to people where they are at.

It would be simple to include a pre-roll ad in the embedded videos. You could allow people to only embed small photos and require a link back to the high quality, large photos at NFL.com.

Sports bloggers wouldn't mind that. In fact they'd love it, reasoning that it's the price they pay for the content. Bloggers are trying to build an audience, too, by creating their own quality content, so they're not inclined to send their readers elsewhere when they don't have to.

But they're perfectly happy to share their audience, on site, and even host advertising without charging for it, as long as they can embed the content they want to embed.

Embedable content is, indeed, a win-win situation for both the content provider and those who are embedding their content. But sadly for both parties, pro sports seem loath to fully embrace the spirit of Web 2.0.

Barry Bonds & The Flickr Effect - The End Of Iconography

As I was reading the coverage of Barry Bonds surpassing Hank Aaron as Major League Baseball's Home Run King, it became to me that there was not one single defining photograph of him that captured his historic achievement. From our two local papers here in the Twin Cities, the Star Tribune and the Pioneer Press, to Major League Baseball, ESPN, Fox Sports, Sports Illustrated, and The Sporting News, they all used a variety of photos of Bonds to illustrate the story. Check out the Newseum's Today's Papers section and you'll find the same.

When I think of Hank Aaron surpassing Babe Ruth as the career home runs leader with his 715th bomb, I think of one image and one image only:

Since the invention of photography, every era in our history has had certain iconic images associated with it that helped define, in a glance, that era. The same holds true for many of our most significant historic events or moments.

The slide show below features iconic photographs from our nation's history

Flickr Slide Show Of Iconic Photography

(See below for links to full-sized photos)

As I was scrolling through Barry Bonds Flickr photos today, it occurred to me that Flickr has pounded the last nail in iconography's coffin. The Flickr Effect obliterates mass appeal through the volume and the dissolution of attention its RSS distribution system enables.

From here on out, I think it will be rare that a single image will become iconic by defining an event or era.

The environment for icons was much more friendly when we had three television networks, a couple of national newspapers, and a handful of weekly news magazines.

The death of iconic images has been coming for some time. It started with the expansion of news media outlets by the introduction of cable television and it continued when the avenues through which people consumed news expanded dramatically with the popularity of the Web. But it exploded with the rise of blogs, low cost digital cameras, citizen journalism, and the distribution platforms of Flickr and other photo sharing sites.

Mass media is dead. Because we get our news through such a vast array of sources, it is virtually impossible for one news organization to capture a large enough percentage of public for an iconic image to emerge.

It is certainly possible for an image to gain enough popular appeal to become an icon; it's just not likely.

Take 9/11. Surely the burning of the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center was an iconic image. Everyone can close their eyes and see that image in their mind's eye. But there is not one single photograph that is the icon. There was so much coverage from so many different sources that the photographic library of the attack was too voluminous, photos of the buildings were taken from so many different angles, that no single image ever had a chance to emerge as an icon.

The death of the icon is due to too much. Too much volume and too many sources.

Links to the Full-Size Photos Featured in the Slide Show:

The first photo is, of course, Abraham Lincoln, the iconic figure of the Civil War era. The Jesse James Gang and other outlaw photographs are emblematic of the post Civil War Wild West era. Wilbur and Orville Wright's first flight represent the 1900s.  The Roaring Twenties and Jazz Age are captured by the famous photo of jazz singer Josephine Baker. The photo of a migrant mother captures the Great Depression of the 1930s in all its anguish, desperation, and poverty. The Hindenburg disaster marked one of the most indelible word wide media events of the modern age. A photo of a lynching captures a national sin. The St. Valentines Day Massacre dramatically illustrates the gangsterism of the prohibition era. In the 1940s, we fought and won World War II and we re-elected a president, though some were not quite sure.  The 1950s are captured by Marilyn Monroe holding down her skirt in The Seven Year Itch. The turbulence of the sixties included the assassination of a president, controversy, sorrow, a new president, the struggle for civil rights, cultural change, the conquering of space, and a long and unpopular war. The student pro-democracy protesters in China's Tiananmen Square marked a turning point in world history. The famine in Sudan was dramatically illustrated by a vulture hovering over a dying child.

See also:

• Barry B*nds Supplants Hank Aaron As Home Run King
• Barry Bonds Breaks Hank Aaron's Career Home Run Record
• Barry Bonds Passes Babe Ruth