A whiteboard explanation of the financial crisis
It’s been a long time since my economics studies, and the way this is explained is easily understandable.
(Found at presentation zen)
1 trillion unique webpages and information overload
Just a quick note: While read/writeweb writes about information overload and how it has caused a productivity loss of $650 billion, Google boasts about having indexed 1 trillion (1,000,000,000,000) Websites. Add Email, twitter, SMS and possibly even paper producst like books and newspapers, the amount of information available – or battling for our attention – is enormous these days.
Tools for searching (or: finding), aggregation, filtering and blocking will become ever more important.
Participation will no longer be optional.
I missed the blogpost „social media will be like air“ by Charlene Li in March. But before not mentioning it at all, I’ll rather blog about it late. The article is about the fact that social media, especially the communities/social networks that make up these media plattforms, will be be ubiquitous in a few years. The son of my boss once asked, how people managed to access the internet before computers were invented. A rather smart question, once you think about it.
In a few years kids will ask us, why we used so many different platforms to socially engage with one another online. (And why we used platforms in the first place). Similar to why they will ask us, why we needed stationary big machines with huge screens to access the internet.
So the article of Charlene Li is worth reading in any case, but there was one point that I particularly noticed:
4) A business model where social influence defines marketing value. Today’s advertising models don’t work on social networking sites – that’s because simply targeting better on profile or social graph details is still the same old media model of CPM and CPC pricing. What’s missing is marketing value based on how valuable I am in the context of my influence. For example, Steve Rubel is a highly influential person because he is an authority on social media, the people in his social graph tend to interested in his views, and they in turn have a great deal of authority as well. (Several people came up to me after the speech and said that this is similar to a „PageRank of people“, a very easy way to crystallize the idea.)
There are discussions about the future of your „typical target group“ already going on. The idea of establishing a „PageRank of people“ seems to be a viable solution. Discriminating it may be, but it provides a good indication of who to target – or should we rather call it: speak to?
In summary, Participation is no longer optional writes Steve Rubel, referencing Charlene Li’s post. And he ads:
The end result is that marketers will need to shift the way they approach communities. Static advertising is no longer viable. The solution is collaboration. Marketers will need to tap these emerging social operating systems to build meaningful connections through their sites and others before competitors do.
Engaging in „social networking“ with your brand/product advocates will be is a crucial part of the media mix. I just wonder, when this insight will have found its way into marketing plans of most companies?
Vote for marketing memes on the web
I should have known. The chances of having an idea first are really slim. So someone, Alister, to be precise, came up with the idea to block the URL for Marketing Meme first. A URL that could be the meme-tracker of the marketing world, just as techmeme is the meme-tracker of the technology world.
Not sure when he came up with this, of course, it doesn’t say on the site. All it says is: your vote and support is needed here. And the post behind that link was written in December of last year (so I am probably only 5 months too late – which is a decade in internet terms). Now he is asking us from the marketing community to help him to get the guys from techmeme to setup a special service for the marketing industry:
I’d be happy to see some nice ongoing volume of inbound links from SEM Search, but honestly, I’d really like to see Gabe Rivera over at techmeme.com create a “marketingmeme.com“, that removes SEM/SEO/SMO/PR/etc stuff out of techmeme and puts it under its own “engineâ€, building off, say, Lee Odden’s list, with some fuzzy logic around that, finding other on-topic blogs as well.
So if you’re interested in having such a service (I am, for sure!), go over to this site and put your vote in the comments!
Joost focuses on the US.
Just a quick one: Joost shuts down its global operations and focuses on the US only. Shame, I liked the idea of Joost. But in the end, it was brought down by two main factors that even a technologically smart way of streaming videos can’t solve: first: trying to buy global rights for content that studios could probably sell much more profitable on a country-by-country basis. second: having exclusive, compelling content that users won’t find anywhere else (nevermind that they’re overloaded with too much online video anyway.
And for me: I always felt like the joost interface just wasn’t right somehow. I don’t watch fullscreen video on my PC. Still, I was always hoping for it to evolve (globally), so that one day I could enjoy watching videos via joost. But not any more, I guess.
Average user clickfarms
There is a standard joke around online advertising managers about the fear of those „chinese villages“ taking over one of your ad campaigns so that you receive the clicks you paid for, only all of them come from one and the same family (in China or India, or Eastern Europe or Antigua, etc. it doesn’t really matter).
But you don’t need to go very far away. Your next door neighbor might be part of a „click farm“. Even though he most likely never realised what he got himself into.
Just the other day I took a look at a site called OnlineTVRecorder.com (don’t want to give them any link credit). On that site you can record TV programms of any German TV Channel – most of which I wouldn’t even be able to access in this area of the country. You first record them, and then download and decode them. But you can only decode those that you „recorded“ in advance. This makes it similar to any VCR/DVD recorder and hence (I guess) a legal way of recording shows via the web.
So far so good. However, the system only works for you, when you pay per download with so called „good will points“. If you haven’t got enough points, you can’t download or decode any files.
And how do you get these points? There are two ways. Either you donate money, or you click on some of their ads. Yes, that’s right: you can click on the ads to receive good will points! You get points for clicks that advertisers pay a lot of money for (on aggregate).
I guess most users on this site aren’t fully aware of the fact that each of their clicks contributes to ripping of advertisers. Note: I am not saying „poor advertisers“ here! I am just saying that advertisers don’t get what they pay for when they signed the contract with these mediasites: intentional attention.
Clickworking is an interesting and positive trend, since it uses the minimal individual productivity of large crowds to achieve a large complex goal.
Clickfarming seems to be a dark side equivalent. Utilize the small contributions of a large crowd’s individuals who might not even (want to) realize that their few clicks are contributing to a large system of fraud.
I wonder how many other sites of this kind are out there? How much dubious content is paid for in this way? How many advertising campaigns bought on a pay-per-click basis have been corrupted by clickfarms like these?
If I was an advertiser and I saw one of my banners on one of those sites, I would ask my media agency or the publisher for my money back. And may be sue them.
Wo ich sonst so bin...