Prediction for 2008....More Anti-Social Networking...

You gotta love the "no holds barred" nature of the Internet. There really is something for everyone out there, regardless of your attitude. So, when the first social networking sites started spawning parody websites back in 1996, no one could really be surprised.

The latest send ups allow you to turn your Facebook account into an ANTI-social network. These Facebook apps: Snubster and Enemybook allow users to "Keep your friends close…and your enemies closer" and put those you don't like "on notice". Yes, it’s all very tongue in cheek, but there are real emotions behind these applications – primarily cynicism.


I predict this kind of backlash will continue and grow into the mainstream. Consumers do care about privacy and the trend for social networking sites to leverage your profile information for advertising purposes will have an even more negative impact on trust and usage.

ON Digital has a great list of the Top 10 Viral Videos of 2007

The very bright Joanna Pena Bickley has published a list of the Top 10 Viral Videos of 2007 on her ON: Digital+Marketing blog.

On the list are the brilliant Nike video of soccer star Ronaldinho hitting the crossbar four times without the ball touching the ground! This performance is brilliant and reminiscent of how Tiger Woods bounced a golf ball on his golf club before batting it baseball style. The second video features a man wrestling a bear and also on the list is the second of the brilliant Dove Real Beauty videos.

There is one incredible video that made a huge impression on me that didn't make the list. It comes from the brilliant internet video producer Micahel Wesch and it is called 'A Vision of Students Today'. Once again Wesch has used the medium of online video to perfection telling an impassioned story with unique and engaging video style.

Some Familiar Names in TechCrunch 'Dead Pool'

Popular blog and eNewsletter TechCrunch has a rather crass 'Dead Pool'. They relish in declaring the demise of a start-up.

Sadly, there are some well-known names in their year-end round up of failed companies and projects called The Year-End Dead Pool 2007 including:

- AOL To Discontinuing Netscape Browser Development
- CompUSA Going Into The DeadPool
- Yahoo Shutting Down Auctions and Yahoo Photos In Favor Of Flickr
- Google dropped shopping search brand name Froogle in favor of the more descriptive and powerfully branded 'Google Product Search'

PROMO’s 2007 Interactive Marketing Awards Winners

PROMO Magazine consistently gives its audience a “what works and why” coverage on marketing trends and news. Their annual Interactive Marketing Awards recognizes the best and most effective interactive tactics used in motivating consumer response. Check out the 8 first-prize winners of the 2007 Interactive Marketing Awards, their brand campaign results, how they achieved them, and how you can use their ideas.

As overall winner, Sony Picture Entertainment won in the “Best Campaign, Promotional Web Site” category with their Google campaign for “The Da Vinci Code” movie. To attract a younger audience to this film about cracking codes and mysteries, the campaign offered over 12,000 separate puzzles based on the movie characters and plotlines. The first 10,000 players to work their way through all the puzzles won a replica from the film and went on to the final mystery. Players used Google Maps and book-search functions to find clues. The interactive promotion was enormously successful in generating awareness about the film and keeping audiences engaged. Over 1 million unique users tried to crack the codes while playing 9 million puzzles, individually and in teams.

In the “Viral Promotion” category, OfficeMax achieved an incredible level of viral publicity with ElfYourself.com, a holiday web site where visitors added their faces and voices to elves, then emailed the results to friends. This humorous soft sell tactic generated an average of 41,000 elves per hour, drew 36 million visitors in the five weeks it was up, and boosted traffic to OfficeMax.com by 20%.

The other 2007 Interactive Marketing Awards winners were:

• “SMS/MMS Mobile Marketing” Category: Verizon Wireless
• “Loyalty Marketing” Category: Coca-Cola Co.
• “E-Mail Marketing” Category: McDonald’s
• “Search Engine Marketing” Category: Harley-Davidson
• “New Media” Category: Indianapolis Motor Speedway
• “Trial Recruitment” Category: MasterCard Worldwide

Top 10 US Search Providers

Neilson Online put out a press release yesterday outlining the Top 10 US Search Providers, based on November 2007 searches and ranked by total searches.

Neilson Online shows that the Top 3 search engines are still Google, Yahoo! Search and MSN/Windows Live Search, so internet marketers are starting the New Year, steady on course, still courting the same search engines that they were in 2007.

Does that mean that internet marketers should be resting on their laurels?

Of course not. While there probably won't be any upsets in the top 3 search engines in 2008, certain areas of internet marketing, such as personalized search, Web 2.0/social networking, video search, and mobile marketing, will continue to challenge internet marketers to up their game.

Internet Terms Highlighted In English Dictionaries

It was only a matter of time the internet had an impact on the way we speak English as a whole. The Collins English Dictionary will be adding “Facebook” as both a noun and verb in their 2008 edition. Now you can say, “I can Facebook you,” and be grammatically correct! Two other words that are related to Facebook, “pimp” and “poke” also will have added meanings in the next edition, in which “pimp” refers to customizing your Facebook profile to make it look more attractive and “poke” which refers to getting someone’s attention.

In another dictionary, Merriam-Webster, a poll was created to search for the word of the year of 2007. The #1 word voted was “w00t” which is known to be an acronym for we owned the other team, but is widely seen on the internet. W00t is defined as expressing joy, similar to using the word “yay.”

If you want to be more in tune with internet lingo and acronyms, there is an interesting website that you can refer to called NetLingo.com.

2008 Prediction: Media Networks Will Try Online-Only Venues

More Hollywood and cable production networks will create films and series to be viewed only online. There will be many failures as they try to develop the right models and audiences. The more successful attempts will rely heavily on Web 2.0 and social networking as part of their marketing and distribution strategy, using consumers to influence each other. Marketing strategies will integrate the new technologies, including mobile web, text and video messaging, blogs, podcasts, viral promotion, and virtual worlds. The most effective experiments will provide not just the film product, but a rich online experience for audiences. This complete experience must extend to marketing strategies that utilize interactive promotions, games, and loyalty rewards to engage the audience. Results will show that many audiences are not just driven by consumerism but seek experiences, entertainment and exploration, and they continue to have shorter attention and satisfaction spans.

10 Golden Rules Internet Marketing Podcast # 16 Features Google's Matt Cutts, Todd Malicoat and Chris Tolles

Our 10 Golden Rules Internet Marketing Podcast #16 has several interesting interviews and features including:

- INterviews from WebmasterWorld's Pubcon Google's Matt Cutts, Todd Malicoat and Chris Tolles
- Ten Golden Rules of Personal Branding by Jay Berkowitz, Special to Rohit Bhargava’s Influential Internet Marketing Blog
- The Ultimate Marketing BookStore
- Schneider PR’s Top Ten Product Launches of 2007
- Tips for creating Squidoo lenses
- How you know if you’re a web old timer
- The Beijing Olympics
- Facebook Integration
- Podcast-of-the-week Librivox.org
- New Product Press from 1800PetMeds
- Song-of-the-week PJ Develin Tears don’t last 4 eva

If you have a comment or question please call in questions and comments to our K7 call-in line

Social Networks That Have Popular Potential

I’ve been using Social Networks even before I even realized it was called social networking. Today, there are many different social networks to choose from, and each one has different purposes and different uses. For example, Friendster and MySpace are focused on meeting new friends and reconnecting with people you’ve lost touch with. Then there’s LinkedIn, which is more of a professional social network. As more social network websites are appearing on the internet, I wonder which ones will stay around and which will fall off. I know that when I first joined Facebook, I wasn’t sure if it was going to last, but now it’s just as popular as MySpace.

As I notice more social networks becoming visible, I wonder if it will be the next best social network. Here are some social networks that I think have possible potential in becoming the next best thing.

43Things – 43Things is a social networking site that focuses on people who are goal oriented. Every member lists their goals and can see who else has listed that goal as theirs. I think it is a fun and different way to meet others in a way that you can discuss your similar goals with each other.

Pownce – Since social networking and microblogging, such as Twitter have become big this year, I think a site that brings the two together could definitely become successful. You can integrate your Twitter feed and customize the look of your profile, as well as add your friends to network amongst each other. I think Pownce has potential because many Twitter users share links using a shortened link service, such as tinyurl.com or urltea.com, but in Pownce not only can you share links in its full form, but files and events too.

Utterz – Utterz is so new that it doesn’t even have a Wikipedia entry yet! I mentioned Utterz in a previous post, and I believe that this site has a lot of potential to being a very popular microblogging site in a voice, video and photo format since there isn’t anything out there like it.

Mobile Marketing: Hot Internet Marketing Trend for 2008

To stay on top of your game, you need to stay on top of the hot trends in internet marketing, because this medium moves at nothing less than light speed. With new mobile technologies and new ways of reaching the consumer through cellular phones, mobile marketing is going to be a hot internet marketing trend in 2008.

With the advent of the Apple iPhone, mobile marketing is becoming that much easier. Touch screens, user friendly interfaces, mobile widgets, new email solutions and better web experiences are making mobile search easier to use. As the mobile internet becomes more user friendly, consumers are going to use it more, which means big opportunities for internet marketers.

Just check out some of the factors that are going to make mobile marketing explode in 2008:

• Early 2008 Apple will open its iPhone deck to third party developers launching an explosion of innovative mobile solutions.
• With iTunes pushing video to iPods and iPhones, mobile video is becoming more accessible to consumers.
• WiMax...that’s right, high speed isn’t just going to be available to phone and cable companies. This new form of broadband technology will be creating hot spots that will span over hundreds of square miles.

The Bridge for Understanding – Online Privacy

"People don't truly care about privacy" – Seth Godin

". . . I would say that privacy matters most to me in my email, and less so in my profiles on social networks." – Rohit Bhargava (Influential Marketing Blog)

These two comments appeared on their respective blogs in mid-December, primarily in response to the controversy created by Facebook's "Beacon".

After reading the various blog posts, news stories, and also seeing "Block Beacon" plug-ins for Firefox and various other methods to protect privacy, I stumbled upon this video.

Now, I've always agreed that if a picture says a thousand words, a video says a million – but THIS video says it all. With a "Hal-like" voiceover (yes, that's a "2001: A Space Odyssey" reference), the complex issue of personal privacy and online identity is explored, explained and made simple.

I think this video should be required viewing for all online marketers – or any (company) considering online marketing. Not only does it illuminate what can be gained as a marketer – but it also explains, in a totally non-sensational way, what there is to be lost as a consumer.

If the two were ever at odds over this issue (and you know we are), this video builds a bridge for understanding. Watch it now.

Top Viral Videos of 2007

It's that time of year when every website, book, magazine, TV show, etc puts out their "Best___ Of 2007" The fine folks over at Nerve.com put out their top 20 viral videos of 2007 and for the most part the list is pretty accurate. In the top 15-20 there are some obvious standouts such as Obama Girl (#18 and should have been higher), the 2 yr old singing My Humps (#12 should have been higher), Miss Carolina (#11, which I thought should have been higher, but did not really have any staying power), Soulja Boy Tell em (#10, should be higher, some argue the how-to video made his song the hit that it was), Dramatic Chipmunk (#9, should be #2).

The Top 5 are Thriller Prison Dance, Vagina Power (barely should be in Top 10) 2girls 1 cup (not actual video which is NSFW and I think the reaction videos are better anyway), Leave Britney Alone and the Landlord.



The top video was watched over 50 million times and a vast majority of those were not on Youtube, but instead FunnyorDie.com which was launched by the brilliant individuals at Gary Sanchez Productions. I had seen 16 of the Top 20, how many had you seen? Which videos are missing from the list?

RSS/Atom Feeds Removed from Google's Search Results

This week Bogdan Stănescu, Google Software Engineer, announced on their Webmaster Central Blog that Google has removed RSS/Atom feeds from their search results. This decision was prompted by a concern that these feeds were duplicating the content on their HTML pages.

There is one exception to the rule, podcasts. For now, Google is still listing podcast feeds in the search results. The reason is that a significant number of podcasts are standalone documents. If you're running a podcast and creating HTML pages to compliment them, you might want to consider excluding your podcast feeds from Google to avoid duplicate content issues. To do so, add the following code in brackets:

meta xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" name="robots" content="noindex"

For more information on Google's decision to remove RSS/Atom feeds from their search results, visit Google's blog.

Google to Compete with Wikipedia

According to the official Google blog, they are going to begin to "encourage people to contribute knowledge." They have been asking people to contribute to a tool they are calling the "Knol." This tool is set to compete with Wikipedia and could help them own the number one spot.

Apparently, one major difference between Knol and all competing services is that authors will have the ability to place Google ads on their pages could receive revenue from those ads.

"A knol on a particular topic is meant to be the first thing someone who searches for this topic for the first time will want to read. The goal is for knols to cover all topics, from scientific concepts, to medical information, from geographical and historical, to entertainment, from product information, to how-to-fix-it instructions," said Udi Manber, VP Engineering at Google.

Everyone will be able to post questions, comments, make edits, and add additional content. Users will also be able to rate a knol or review them without Google making any edits. Each author will own the content which will help with credibility and helping to promote the self proclaimed experts.

Be ‘Herd’ With Utterz!

If you already use Twitter and enjoy tweeting daily, you might like another blogging community called Utterz. Known as a mobile blogging community, Utterz allows you to do a combination of different types of posts to place on your website. This includes creating posts by voice, video, pictures and text. To record your voice as an “Utter” you call their telephone number, and to send video, pictures and text you send an email to a specific email address. Every time you Utter, it will automatically update to your profile page and you can also set it to immediately update to your Blogger, Facebook, LiveJournal, Myspace, Twitter and more. There are also channels where you can participate with other users about a certain topic and voice your opinion. Right now Utterz is available to users in the US and Canada, but going worldwide in the coming months. Utterz is just as fun as Twitter in my opinion, and is starting to gain popularity. Also, it’s free, so why not give it a try and “be herd!”

Jackass 2.5 Online – Kicking and Bucking Hollywood Marketing Tradition

Industries continue to modify their marketing and distribution strategies to use the full potential of the Internet. The latest proof of this is the new “Jackass 2.5” movie and Hollywood’s innovative shift from conventional movie business practices. Viacom, Paramount Pictures Digital Entertainment and MTV New Media will completely bypass the traditional theatrical release of their film “Jackass 2.5” in favor of an online launch and distribution.

“Jackass 2.5” will be the first studio-backed film to be offered online for free streaming over a two-week span beginning December 19, exclusively on Blockbuster’s web site. After January 1, 2008, Blockbuster will get exclusive online VOD rental rights via MovieLink, and the DVD will be available for sale at major retailers and sell-through platforms including Amazon’s Unbox and iTunes. In February, the movie will move onto its new web site JackassWorld.com. The international release next year will use the same strategy with different distribution partners.

Tom Lesinski, president of Paramount Pictures Digital Entertainment, told The Wall Street Journal that the movie was a natural for this bold move because “there are hundreds of millions of people online watching video every day.” To The Hollywood Reporter he explained why they considered this deviation in tactics for a full 64-minute movie, bucking the conventional wisdom that shorter is better: “We’re trying to shake up the model. We’re trying to prove that some form of longform [full-length film] distribution can be successful on the Internet.”

Their marketing strategy is being remodeled along with the new distribution plan. Instead of traditional yearlong promotion through 30-second television spots and print ads, the movie will utilize short-term intense viral marketing and video messaging featuring the film’s star Johnny Knoxville. The short-term campaigning is aimed at young males and is timed to reach them at home during the holidays.

It will be interesting to see if this ballsy experiment helps transition Hollywood into a mainstream digital media player.

A College Student Laments Facebook Changes

As a teenager, social networking has been a part of my life for about four years now. You can imagine my excitement when I was invited to join FaceBook as a high school senior. Until then, Facebook had been the college-only social networking site, but they had just started allowing high school students to join on an invitation basis. I was completely addicted to Facebook after that and this obsession continued until this past summer.

About 6 months ago, Facebook began to allow anyone with an email address to join; and despite all of the petition groups to turn Facebook back to college only, it continues to allow anyone with an email address to join. While this attempt to turn Facebook into a MySpace style social networking site annoyed me, I was still satisfied with their services and FaceBook was the only way that I was connected to many of my friends.

My excitement ended when I was introduced to the new ‘applications’ that you can add to your page. Some of them were fun, you could add iLike to share the bands and music you like, but some of them were annoying, and you had to read about how Joey “Bit another victim” with his vampire. On top of this, they had deleted the courses application, possibly the only useful original application in terms of college classes. When you added a class to your schedule, you added it to FaceBook under courses and you could see who was in your class. This was useful because you could find that really cool person who sat next to you in Calculus class, and if you ever missed a class, you could message them and find out what you missed.

So now I find myself checking FaceBook maybe once a week, and when I do check it, I have to scroll through a string of zombie and vampire applications. I think that FaceBook realized they were the next big thing in social-networking and increased their user numbers and page amounts to boost their profits, in exchange for many of their earlier users’ satisfaction.

Google Earth Plays YouTube Videos!

Google announced today that it has finalized the "YouTube" layer for Google Earth. Now, you can zoom into a region of the world and then with a click, watch videos tied to that location.

Of course, this requires appropriate geo-tagging by the person uploading the video (which you can't always count on), but what a great feature! When you're tooling around Google Earth, researching your next destination, you can also stop and enjoy some videos related to that area. This is similar to the "Book Layer" feature, except it shows you locations referenced in videos, rather than mentioned in books. By the way, I found it under the "Gallery" Layers, which is not where the blog post notes it will be. Kind of hard to find – but worth it.

Google rightly warns, if you turn on this layer in Google Earth, you might not get any work done today. I suspect that's true – I certainly got sucked into it!

Internet Advertising and Website Promotion Expert Speaks at SIPA

Internet advertising and Website promotion expert, Jay Berkowitz will be speaking at the Specialized Information Publishers Association (SIPA) Annual Marketing Conference on Internet adverting trends and Email marketing through client newsletters this week at the Lowe's Hotel in Miami.

Topics include:

• How to produce Websites that come up in Google searches
• Effective Email marketing through client newsletter
• How to generate positive return-on-investment with Internet advertising trends
• What online business models are working, and not working, today
• How to build ongoing relationships with the customers who visit your Website
• How to capitalize on the Ten leading Internet adverting and website promotion trends
• Top search engine marketing services
• How to select an ethical Internet marketing company

Awesome list of Office 2.0 Applications

A huge hat tip to Robert Scoble on the Scobleizer Blog, who referred to this amazing list of Office 2.0 Applications published by Ismael Ghalimi. These aren't Microsoft Office Apps, this is a comprehensive list of tools to make your online and work life easier and more productive.

Scoble also gives us a tip that Microsoft is announcing a new product on Monday...

Gmail and AIM United

Today, Google announced their integration with AIM in the Gmail Chat interface. So, now those who use Gmail chat can also chat with their AIM "buddies" without leaving Gmail. Even the advanced features of Gmail chat, like chat history and automatic sorting of your buddies based on how much you chat with them, works across both systems.

We may find the metric for the amount of time visitors spend on your site increasing for Google with this integration. This post was provided by the official Google blog.

How You Should Create A Squidoo Lens

Squidoo is a community where you can publish information that you know all about and share with others. Lenses (a Squidoo page) can be pretty much about any topic and can point to other websites on the web. Squidoo can increase traffic to a website by linking to your website from you lens, as well as increasing your chances in appearing in search engine results since the site is popular.

Modules are the building blocks of what makes a Squidoo lens. They can contain text, photos, YouTube videos, user polls, link lists and featured products from Amazon. Squidoo lenses can also make you some royalty money or you can donate your earnings to a charity by having an Amazon, CafePress or eBay module.

Squidoo lenses are pretty easy to create, but the best lenses are updated often and filled with interaction.

My suggestions when creating a Squidoo lens would be:

• Make sure you have an introduction to your lens
• Have at least 2 or 3 text modules
• Have at least 3 or 4 modules of media
• Include keyword targeted phrases
• Keep content easy to read using short paragraphs or bullet points

For an idea of what a Squidoo lens looks like when complete, you can check out Ten Golden Rules’ Official Squidoo lens.

How Pistachio Twittered me 18 New Friends

Last night I was at the Pubcon2007 conference and I was Twittering (small messages sent to my 'friends' on Twitter.com/JayBerkowitz) during the amazing Guy Kawasaki Search Engine Panel presentation.

One of my Twitter friends Laura Fitton aka Twitter.com/Pistachio was running a bit late for the presentation. She followed my 'tweets' about the event and sent a note to her followers that I was covering the event with live twitter messages. When I opened my email I was honored to find out that 18 of Laura's friends chose to follow me on Twitter.

Social media is an amazing, fun, blossoming world of virtual friendships. Will you be my Twitter friend? Twitter.com/JayBerkowitz

Are Videos Part of Your SEM Campaign?

Search engine marketing isn't just about optimizing the text, getting links to your site and running a pay per click campaign. Universal search is in full swing and video search is a powerful medium in which to reach out to potential customers.

According to ComScore Video Metrix Report for September 2007, Americans view more than 9 billion videos online, showing that the average online viewer watches slightly more than three hours of online video during the month. Just like standard web search, Google's Network (specifically YouTube.com) is proving to be the one to court when it comes to video search.Google Sites own 28.3% of the video share, and YouTube.com makes up 27.6% of that share (equaling to approximately 2.5 billion videos viewed). Fox Interactive Media, the #2 Video Content Site, only has 4.1% of the video share, which doesn't even come close to Google's powerful numbers.

So if you're not already implementing videos into your search engine marketing campaign, it's time to get started. And make sure to put those videos on YouTube.com. Because not only is it the most popular video content site on the Internet, but Google and Yahoo Video Search both crawl YouTube.com looking for new videos.

(P.S. - right now these search engines don't crawl the Internet looking for videos so it's the best place to submit this type of content.)

Amazing panel at Pubcon 2007 Moderated by Silicon Entrepreneuer Guy Kawasaki

A fantastic Day 1 at Pubcon 2007 - WebmasterWorld in Las Vegas was wraped up with an amazing panel Moderated by Silicon Entrepreneuer Guy Kawasaki from Truemors, Matt Cutts from Google, Tim Mayer from Yahoo!, Rahul Lahiri from Ask and Eytan Seidman from MSN

Here are some random notes I took and and Twitters I sent from the panel:

Tim Mayer "At Yahoo, our Goal is to get customers from To-Do to Done in 1 search"

What do you think of Mahalo? Matt Cutts from Google "Initially it was marketed as a Search Engine? Now it is more of a Search Service, more like a search directory, it can provide value e.g.: search for cheap travel provides good results'

How would you do search if you were starting from scratch?
Matt Cutts:
1. Make a compelling service. Have something interesting to say a dot-com called Vallywag started with rumors about 2 people dating at Google = major conciousness. Do investiative reporting, really good scoops.
Get contenet about companies people are interested in Google Apple.
2. Start a blog -the easiest way to build a site and to get links. Word Press is pretty well SEO'd. WordPress Version 2.3 content has all unifed single place.
3. I would do SEO make sure things are crawl-able

Matt Cutts and Tim Mayer confirm it is beneficial to have keywords in your URL, Mayer points to Amazon as a good example

Matt Cutts if your URL's have numbers in them, create a 301 redirect and send them to a page with keywords in the URL

Matt Cutts "The easiest way to double your money is to double your conversions."

Matt Cutts "Pay Attention to Local. If you search for plumber and get an ad for plumber that's OK. Find a plumber down the street that's way more relevant.

Rahul Lahiri ASK.com Pay attention to ROI at every step. If you get a lead on your site and they sign up for you eNewsletter and you get a sale later, know the ROI at each step.

Matt Cutts We do try really hard to find niche expert sites (for top results). We're constantly looking at ways to change that. And we have some changes in the pipe to improve the diversity of results so you won't see the same site in 8 different results.

Matt Cutts "People say I need a link to get ranked. Put it the other way around...develop great reasons for people to link to you, spend your time developing that."

Web 2.0 Bubble Song and Video

Any video that includes the lyrics "won't you blog about this song" is trying to hard for linkbait, but in this case it worked, but only because it changes the lyrics to "We Didn't Start the Fire" by Billie Joel. The Richter Scales did the song and video, check out their site for more info on the group.

The Top New Product Launches for 2007

Amanda Mooney, Amanda Gravel and the team at Schneider PR and the Launch PR blog have developed a great list of the top new product launches from 2007. So far the top picks include iPhone, Twitter, Windows Vista, Apple's Leopard, Halo3 and Joost.

Watch for the final list on their blog in the next few days...