Yahoo has announced and it’s reported by Marketing Vox that Yahoo is going to produce its own answer to social media and the market place by creating what has been deemed Yahoo’s "Brand Universes".  Marketing Vox reports:

Criticized for missing the social media explosion, Yahoo plans to leverage its social properties, such as Flickr and Del.icio.us, on behalf of advertisers in the hopes of partnering with "passion brands" to generate more ad revenue.

In the coming months, Yahoo will begin rolling out the first set of what it calls "brand universes" – dedicated areas on Yahoo for fans of a movie or product to congregate, share and connect with each other, reports Adweek. Unlike the brand areas on MySpace and YouTube, Yahoo is not asking marketers for ad dollars to build the sites. Instead, it itself has identified a batch of 100 "passion brands" to build dedicated areas for.

This seems like a logical step given the number of niche blogging networks popping up all over the blogosphere.  I have predicted before that a new advertising medium with blogs will be leveraging categories of blogs for specific advertisers.  Be it a category or in their term "universes" with the likes of blogging parents, health bloggers, and in their launch, gaming bloggers, it’s time for targeted advertising in Yahoo’s plans.

Tags: Yahoo, Branding Universes, Marketing Vox, blog networks

As I indicated in a comment in a post  I read today over at Kian’s blog,  I had to make my own sound in the echosphere. Yeah, I called an "echosphere" for a reason because Kian is experiencing something I have also experienced and continue to deal with like the feeling of having my eyes pried open with toothpicks and forced to watch I Love Lucy 24/7. I can only read Scoble’s take on a topic, or Winer’s thoughts about this and that, and what Doc told me today, so many times before I start to think about jumping out my office window.  In this case only 3 feet off the ground but nonetheless, totally whacked.

**Please note that I am completely  hypocritical in that statement 1. because I am envious of their traffic readership, and 2. the reason they are so easy to link to is because all I have to do is Google there last names, or in Doc’s case the word "Doc" and I get a first page search response.  This is a result of the echo chamber I complain of and using blogs to my preached point about SEO.**

With that said, let me explain the blogging echo chamber dilemma.  Blogs are real time.  As fast as something can be typed and the publish button pushed, words can be transmitted to readers all over the world.  When you have people that are gurus as I have mentioned above, everyone is excited to report what exciting thing they read today over at this popular blog.  If they are excited to report it, and you are also excited, and both of you blog it and make me click to go read it, you can see where you get caught up in that echo chamber or the "blogging fissure" (my phrase).

In keeping up with the blogging fissure or echo chamber continue reading this article at Bloggers For Hire.

On my own blog, I’ve written several times lately on how blogs can be effective tools for viral marketing campaigns. One can look no further than the One Red Paperclip promotion for an example of how these kinds of viral campaigns using blogs can work.

A recent viral campaign using a blog that is under way now is My Super Proposal. This is about a guy, “JP” that is trying to catch the attention of a major advertiser to foot the bill for a commercial where he’ll propose to his girlfriend during the Super Bowl. Doritos and the NFL.com are currently running such contests. He’s staying somewhat anonymous so as not to tip off his girlfriend.

A blogger and search marketing friend of mine, Joe Morin has connected with JP to help him promote the site and get media coverage. More about how that all started here.

The blog started out asking for donations big and small in order to raise $2+ million for a Super Bowl commercial, but those ads are now all sold out. He did manage to raise $74k though, which if not spent on a commercial, will be donated to a children’s hospital.

This Super Bowl Proposal blog has been covered by the likes of AdRants & AdJab already and there’s even an interview with “JP� over at the Nashville City Paper. NPR and USA Today should be running stories soon along with some buzz within the blog and search marketing communities such as this post on the Search Engine Watch blog.

Should JP pull this off, or even get close, it promises to be one of the more creative ways to use a blog for viral marketing and hopefully make a young lady very happy.

Remember the brouhaha over Marqui’s Pay Bloggers program back in 2004? People were so incensed that a company would dare pay bloggers to blog about them. Oh how idealistic they were! Those were the good ol’ days, before PayPerPost and Pay Per Digg. Now with ReviewMe having just launched, I see this system, of paying off bloggers, gaining more and more legitimacy. Programs such as these infuriate many ‘blogging purists,’ but the fact of the matter is, it’s simply capitalism at work. Like it or not, it’s here to stay.

Offering bloggers cold, hard cash is quite different from sending them free swag. Personally I think free swag offers distinct benefits over the payola route. As a blogger, I feel cheapened by the offer of cash. But the idea of free swag sounds kinda fun. Especially if it’s cool stuff. And as long as there are no strings attached. Several months ago Dave Taylor discussed whether free swag will get you a positive review by the blogger you send it to. The answer is of course, “not always,” but you should be willing to take that chance. Even if it’s not a good review, any link juice that comes out of it is good for your search engine rankings. My preference would be to make up “care packages” for your targeted bloggers that include free product samples and a nice, since, handwritten letter/card. Now’s a perfect time of year to send out such packages, with the holidays coming up. You can send them under the guise of a Christmas/holiday gift. Of course not all products are suitable for bundling into a care package. National Business Furniture would have a much tougher time picking out goodies to send than Steve Spangler Science or Discovery Channel Store.

As a blogger, I’d love to receive some instant snow or a DNA extractor kit, not so much a gun cabinet or sewing table. 😉

Then you don’t always need to invoke bribery either, to gain a link and mention. For example, a week ago I received a request from the folks at the wonderful association of online retailers Shop.org (of which my company Netconcepts is a member), asking for some coverage for their new shopping portal. It’s for a good cause, as all of Shop.org’s proceeds go to their Ray M. Greenly Scholarship Fund, for college students interested in e-commerce careers. So, here you go, Shop.org — Do your holiday shopping online and do some good at the same time. (Hope it helps guys, and good luck!)

In a case such as this, where it’s for a good cause, I’d say free swag could actually get in the way, and negate the emotional tug on the heartstrings with a rationalized economic analysis.

All of the above notwithstanding, the approach I endorse the most to ‘infiltrating the blogosphere’ is to build relationships with bloggers over time by commenting on their blogs (I’m talking about interesting/insightful/provocative comments, not empty throwaway statements like “Really useful post. Thanks!!”). Over time I bet you’ll start to capture their attention and interest. If you aren’t convinced of the value of commenting, you might want read this, this and this.

First a disclaimer. I’m a loyal fan of Woot.com. Not only do they offer unbeatable deals of some really cool gadgets, but they are also damned funny! It’s such a hoot reading their product of the day descriptions. Today’s was no exception:

For generations, American parents have trusted Barbie to prepare our daughters for adulthood, when they’ll be judged by completely unrealistic standards of beauty. Now, along comes everybody’s favorite plastic blonde with another reality check for the little she-tots. There’s no better way to say “Merry Christmas, and get ready for a lifetime of household drudgery� than the Barbie Real Vacuum by Bissell.
Ah, but we shouldn’t be so cynical. It doesn’t befit the season. Besides, the Barbie Real Vacuum is more than just a toy-slash-propaganda-piece; it’s an honest-to-Gaea cordless, rechargeable sweeper. A rotating brush, an easy-empty dust cup, and a washable filter make it easy for the wee lass in your life to make herself useful. Just one push of a button converts the Barbie Real Vacuum to a hand vac, and the whole thing weighs a mere 3.25 lbs, well within the capacities of all but the scrawniest kids.
It’s wonderful how those innocent, wide-eyed bambinas love to help out around the house. Take advantage while you can with the Barbie Real Vacuum by Bissell. After all, in just a few short years your little girl will be stealing your cigarettes and sneaking out of the house every night. There’s nothing the Barbie Real Vacuum can do about that, but at least you’ll have gotten some housework out of her in the meantime.

Feminist or chauvinist, you can’t help but appreciate such witticism!

Now to the point… Woot.com, having such clever, sharp-tongued writers on staff, surely could produce an exemplary blog, right? Certainly as a fan of theirs, I expect their blog to be absolutely killer! Unfortunately, it’s anything but. For the most part, it’s merely a copy-and-paste of their product-of-the-day descriptions. Attention retailers: Product description copy does not make for acceptible blog posts.

Because this is such an important point, let me restate it for emphasis… PRODUCT DESCRIPTIONS DOES NOT A BLOG MAKE!

I think somebody must have let Magazines.com in on this, because a year ago they abandoned their uninspired blog which was full of nothing but product descriptions.</RANT>

Automattic and KnowNow have partnered to launch a new blog platform that targets big business using the WordPress open source software. The new platform will be called KnowNow WordPress Enterprise Edition.

It appears that the new product will be aimed at the same audience that might be considering Six Apart’s Movable Type software. According to the slightly-over-the-top press release, “this partnership is critical to our Fortune 1000 enterprise customer base.”

Found through the Monkey Bites blog.

According to a tally by blog vendor Socialtext, just 40 of the country’s largest 500 companies have blogs. For many businesses, blogs remain a mysterious medium dominated by teenagers and technology geeks, says Information Week.

Most execs “do not read them, they do not understand why people write them,” says Charlene Li of Forrester. that will have to change  if they want to stay current with customers. “It’s a different mind-set that they have to understand,” says Li in the Information Week article

This last week Bulldog Reporter’s PR University held their annual new media and advanced PR technology in practice seminars in New York City and San Francisco. There has been a big shift in the knowledge and attitude of the attendees.  Last year they did indeed find blogs to be a mysterious medium.  This year they are much more up to speed on blogs and why a business would or should blog, but it’s the social media aspect that has them flummoxed.

GM is one blog that gets it. They use consumer-generated content from YouTube and Flickr on their FYI Blog, and  encourage people to lable images in Flickr with the tag GMFYI.

“Social media is a unique thing that’s going on on the Web right now, and it’s important for us to take part in it,” says Bill Betts, manager of Web services for GM communications.

This social aspect tagging and bookmarking content is the next thing companies need to get their heads around. Markets are indeed conversations and people are sharing content with each other and with the rest of the world.  With all the new social media tools available anyone can do it, and they can do it in the blink of an eye.

A political pundit interviewed recently on TV about the John Kerry Iraq statement commented that in today’s world of lightning-fast communications, someone in the audience with a video camera on their cell phone can take a clip of a speech, or a corporate meeting, and it will be on YouTube before the meeting is over.  

How can businesses benefit from all this?  Make your content relevant, authentic and interesting.  Then syndicate it. Make it easy to subscribe to the content and include social media elements that make it easy to share it.

 

One of the core questions that people ask me when they decide to start using a weblog as the foundation of their business marketing and branding efforts is: where should I host my blog? My usual answer is that it doesn’t really matter and that you can get started a lot faster by using a hosted service like WordPress or Typepad, but I’m going to have to change that now.

Why? Because the team at WordPress.com has come up with new regulations about what is and isn’t acceptable on blog postings, and if you cross the line, they’ll not only shut your site down with less than twelve hours warning, but they’ll also ban you from ever signing up again.

It starts with banning blog entries that have (sponsored) links from PayPerPost, but that’s a sticky slope and it’s easy to have that move into other prohibited areas, including perhaps exactly what your business blog is about. Then what?

So, come clean, are you hosted on WordPress.com? And if so, what’s your opinion on this clarification of their Terms of Service and its implementation within the community?

Note: this is an excerpt of a longer article I’ve written on this subject: Is WordPress now the Blog Police.

An interesting post over at Search Engine Roundtable discusses a thread on whether it’s detrimental to cloak your e-commerce site for religious holidays.

The situation is that some orthodox Jews shut down their web site on the Sabbath. So if you go to a site such as B&H from sundown Friday to darkness of Saturday night, you should get a sign that says they are closed.

The problem is that search engine spiders don’t observe the Sabbath, or Rosh Hashanah, or Christmas, or Patriot’s Day (Maine & Massachusetts.)

Whether it’s your Web site or your business blog, should you be able to shutter it during religious holidays without losing your search engine rank?

Shimon Sandler first raised the issue, and now you can follow the thread Cloaking for Religoius Reasons at the SE Roundtable’s forums.

An excellent article in E-consultancy about online PR and why businesses are not blogging.

His comments about PR agencies applies as much to the US and it does to the UK

“Ask them to explain how Google works. Ask them about RSS. Ask them about anchor text. Ask them to give you some tips on online copywriting. Ask them why blogging would be a bad move, with all the above in mind  The fact is that most PR agencies are not even vaguely qualified to advise you on blogging, or even about online PR.”

If you are in PR or marketing and you can’t answer these questions,  you should have been at the Advanced PR tech worlshop in New York on Friday. Debbie Weil did a stellar job in the session on blogging. They also got podcasting, video, online news, search and social media. 

There is another one on Friday 10th in San Francisco.  No Debbie this time though – I will be speaking on blogs and social media.

 

Google “chopstick instructions” and the flyte blog comes up third. Until a few days ago, we were number one, and still are if you include the quote marks.

What does this mean for you? It shows how you can drive traffic to your blog (or Web site). And, if you were a Chinese restaurant or sold Asian cooking implements, the power of driving qualified traffic to your blog.

It was a few Friday afternoons ago and I was a little fried. I read the miserable translation of the chopstick instructions on the chopstick wrapper (“Chinese glonous history?”) and found it funny. So I scanned in the wrapper and blogged about it.

I purposefully wrote a post title–which would become my page title–that should capture the interest of anyone wanting to learn how to use chopsticks, “Chopstick Instructions: How to Use Chopsticks.”

Within about two days I was number one for “chopstick instructions” and I find that I get a few people every day who come to my blog looking for chopstick instructions.

Now of course, I can’t take advantage of this audience. If any of them are interested in Web design and Internet marketing it would be a random occurance; certainly not worth the time of scanning in the wrapper and blogging about it.

However, it shows that there are people out there looking for help in certain areas of their life or business. What instruction manual or how-to can you post to your own blog to drive qualified traffic?
You need to get inside the head of your best customer or prospect, determine what she wants, and help her achieve it.

And, unlike your Web site that may have a certain structure, you can easily throw in how-to articles on your blog on anything you like, just to test the reaction. You can also write articles that might take advantage of current events, such as “How to Vote Twice on Election Day” or “How to Eat Your Kids’ Halloween Candy Without Them Discovering It.”

What are your best prospects looking to achieve? Now you have your writing assignment.

One thing I learned during Blog Business Summit is that for most people RSS is over their heads, like Goodyear blimp over their heads.  This isn’t their fault, it’s ours.  We, as the blogi masters, just haven’t done enough to help people get it (or “grok” it as I like to say).

Anita Campbell has an article in Inc Technology that brings it all down to this: “The simple reality is:  RSS still has far too much geek factor.”

The question is, then, what can we do about it?  I think it comes down to two things, education and application.

First we have to educate people what it is, how it really works, how to look for it on sites, and how to subscribe.  Then we need, we absolutely need to show people why it is so important.  Why it can save them time and help them in their day-to-day jobs.

Read on at Bloggers For Hire.

Tags: RSS, collaborative intelligence