media+marketing business trend links

• Planet Google Wants You - While the company says it will keep the YouTube name and Web address, the acquisition gives Google’s regular users — 41 percent of those who search the Internet, according to Nielsen/NetRatings — one more reason to feel they are living on Planet Google. - Alex Williams @ The New York Times
• Rove 2.0 On The Trail - Taking out an opposition leader is no small accomplishment. A safe seat, superb political skills and ready access to campaign cash are the usual perquisites of congressional leadership, making it tough to defeat such a leader in an election. But not impossible. Wadhams was rightly hailed in victory, and some suggested that the Republican Party had found a successor to revered GOP strategists like Karl Rove and Lee Atwater. Washington Monthly called the 50-year-old Wadhams "Rove 2.0 - the next Republican maestro of cutthroat campaigning." - John Farrel @ Denver Post
• Joining the Party, Eager to Make Friends- To big-name marketers, the teeming mosh pits of social networking sites look like dangerous places for their precious brands....But now these sites and dozens of smaller ones have something those marketers want: the attention of tens of millions of young people who increasingly avoid television commercials. So companies from Procter & Gamble to J. P. Morgan Chase, like so many lonely teenagers, are tricking out their online profiles and trying to make friends on the Web. - Saul Hansell @ The New York Times
• YouTube's Hipness Attracts Advertisers - One community particularly interested in YouTube has been the advertising and marketing world, where the site's mixture of usefulness and hipness have attracted small businesses on a budget and big companies looking for ways to make their commercials available to viewers anytime.- Teresa Lindeman @ Jackson Hole Star Tribune
• This Dot-Com Bubble Seems To Have More Staying Power - "A gigantic gush of consumer products advertising dollars is moving online," said Paul Kedrosky, a venture capitalist and author of the Infectious Greed blog. Consumer product companies represent 11 percent of the $145 billion global advertising market, but they spend only 1 percent of their ad budgets online, Kedrosky said. "That's absurdly low," he said, but it's changing, and "a gigantic sluice is opening up. And that's allowing all these bubbly, frothy things to happen." - Dan Frost @ The San Francisco Chronicle
• Yahoo’s Strategies Seen Late, A Bit Slow - But the problems at Yahoo go beyond advertising. From video programming to social networking — areas of interest to users and advertisers alike — the company is losing its initiative - Saul Hansell @ The New York Times
• China's Internet Mess - Click fraud is notoriously hard to prove, and Baidu denies the allegation. But the lawsuit underscores the murky nature of the Internet in China, where search-engine companies, in an effort to grab a slice of the Internet advertising pie, resort to tactics that would not be tolerated in the West. - Ben Robertson @ Newsweek
• Ad Buyers Beware - Google's billion-dollar deal for YouTube.com carries lots of risk, especially if it plans to incorporate ads into the video site. Such an abrupt change could prove annoying to users. - Eric Benderoff @ The Chicago Tribune

media+marketing business trend links

• How Safe Is Web 2.0? - Technology commentator Bill Thompson says the latest incarnation of the web, dubbed Web 2.0, is prone to the same flaws as its predecessor -BBC
• Why YouTube Is Not (Yet) The Future of TV - YouTube was fooling us; they do run at a profit - Robert Cringeley @ PBS
• YouTube Hype Isn't Like Last Time. Really - Google isn't buying YouTube for the revenue, but for the flatulence, er, we mean the community - Simon Beck @ Globe & Mail
• ComScore Vs. Hitwise - comScore says that Google and YouTube combined account for nearly 10% of the video-viewing market. Hitwise says that GoogTube accounts for nearly 60%. OK! Which methodology is more reliable? - Bambi Francisco
• Getting The Most From Online Advertising - "As a small business owner, how can I get better visibility for my business online when I don't have a lot of money to spend on advertising?" - Bruce Freeman @ Scripps News
• Content Owners Target Google - Time Warner chief says media company will play hardball in protecting its video copyrights. - Red Herring
• China Relaxes Block On Wikipedia - The Chinese government appears to have partially unblocked access to Wikipedia, according to a notice on the online encyclopedia's website.- VNU

media+marketing business trend links

• The YouTube Effect - The anxieties of YouTube fame. - Ben McGrath @ The New Yorker
• The Walmarting of the Blogosphere - MediaPost writes that Business Week this week called attention to the promotional stunt by Working Families for Wal-Mart (WFWM), which was launched by PR firm Edelman and is funded primarily by Wal-Mart. "While there is a Working Families banner on the website, nowhere does it mention that Wal-Mart has paid for the flight, the RV, the gas, and the blog entries," Business Week writes. - MediaBuyerPlanner
• Google for Educators - Google recognizes the central role that teachers play in breaking down the barriers between people and information, and they support educators who work each day to empower their students and expand the frontiers of human knowledge. This website is one of the ways they're working to bolster that support and explore how Google and educators can work together. - ZDNet
• Web Video Market: Who Will Win The Big Ad Money? - EMarketer estimates that $385 million will be spent on online video ads, equating to just over 2% of the total $15 billion or so in online advertising estimated this year....Web video is so hot that venture capitalists and angel investors are chasing the opportunity by pouring money into new ventures that hope to make money via advertising. - Bambi @ Marketwatch
• The Cult of the Superstar - Television and consequently money have redefined modern sport, making phenomenons such as Sharapova the norm. Not the exception - S. Ram Mahesh @ Sportstar Weekly
• Social Media and E-Commerce Converging: Report - The report, “s-commerce: beyond MySpace and YouTube,” finds consumer visits to social networking sites have increased 109 percent since January 2004, and page views per visitor have grown by 414 percent in the same time period. - ClickZ
• DVDs: They Will Survive - Doomsayers say DVDs are dinosaurs, but they're dead wrong. These discs will not only make it through the digital age - they'll thrive in it. - Chris Taylor @ Business 2.0
• Budgeting For A Robust Internet Marketing Strategy in 2007 - This article takes a closer look at some important aspects of Internet marketing in hospitality and what marketing activities and line items comprise the 2007 online marketing budget. - Hospitality eBusiness Strategies, Inc
• How Likely Is A Second Dotcom Crash? - Technology commentators are predicting the second coming of the dotcom crash, five years after the first one wrecked confidence in the internet business and sent countless paper millionaires on to the streets. - Paul Trotter @ PC Advisor
• Counting Web Users Often Sticky - "Ad measurement is the currency of this business; it's where the money trades hands," Stuart said. - Brian Deagon @ Investor's Business Daily
• Viral Marketers Under Siege - You can blame LonelyGirl15 who shot to one of the top viewed videos on YouTube. Just as advertising agencies, movie moguls and Fortune 500 companies began to feel their way into the foreign turf of viral videos, the Federal Trade Commission has decided to flex its regulatory muscle over stealth marketers. - Kyle Niederpruem @ Inside Indiana Business

media+marketing business trend links

• GoogTube: Huge Ad Platform for Small Businesses - Television continues to be the number one advertising medium. But small businesses (which Google and every other search engine keeps trying to reach) can't afford it. But they can afford video. It's already happening. - Frank Barnako@ Seeking Alpha
• Is There An Innovations Drought? - At eBags, an $80-million-a-year luggage e-tailer in suburban Denver, marketing Vice-President Peter Cobb says the pressure of weak financial markets has helped make the company hold back on everything from adding Web 2.0 features like video and social networking to spending $100,000 to translate its ebags.de site into German. - Timothy Mullaney@NewsFactor
• Loved and Hated Brands: Brands We Love, Brands We Hate - As brands fight for a much-coveted place in consumers' affections, a major survey has revealed which have ended up on the winning side and which on the losing. - Jane Simms @ Design Bulletin
• The 10 Biggest Mistakes Marketers Make - Marco would have had a much better shot at winning approval for his proposal if he had spoken the language of business. For example, he might have said: "Because our Web site is confusing to visitors, 15 percent of the people who come to the site depart without buying anything. That translates into between $100,000 and $300,000 dollars in lost sales every quarter." If he had spoken in terms of lost sales, he would have quickly gained his audience's attention. - Roy Young @ MarketingProfs
• Finding The Right Ad Model - YouTube is about to unleash software to help it comb through videos posted on the site and pinpoint those using copyrighted entertainment. Other sites are likely to follow. - Heidi Dawley @ Media Post
• How To Promote Your Small Business On the Internet - Dr. Wilson quotes a July 2004, Nielsen//NetRatings + MegaView Search factoid which found that 24.4% of searchers on major search engines conducted searches that were local in scope. - Web Marketing Today
• New Business Buzzword Dictionary - Pompous jargon pervades English these days, from corporate speak to silly legalisms. This lighthearted look at how English is being mangled reveals the underlying meaning, as well as the attitudes behind the meaning, of more than 1,000 buzzwords. - Brian Moore @ The New York Post
• The Land of the Video Geek (Korea) - All in all it was a typical night in South Korea, a country of almost 50 million people and home to the world's most advanced video game culture: Where more than 20,000 public PC gaming rooms, or 'bangs' attract more than a million people a day. Where competitive gaming is one of the top televised sports. - Seth Scheisel @ The New York Times
• In Scripts on YouTube, Politicians Reveal Their Unscripted Side - It's an increasingly used tactic in the 2006 campaign, the first election in the age of easily accessible Internet videos....they post their [competitors'] embarrassing snippets on the Web, where some of the clips can become instant sensations, spread by bloggers and political junkies - Amy Schatz @ The Wall Street Journal
• Google-YouTube Deal Expands Broadband Nation - The new-media paradigm of on-demand, downloaded, streamed and shared digital video is the powerful catalyst behind the Google-YouTube deal, which will become a growth driver for all content players smart enough to heed the call. - Diane Mermigas @ They Hollywood Reporter
• How To Best Spend Your Marketing Budget - So where should you spend your money? The obvious answer is to spend it where you get the most return. The harder part of that is to determine what will bring the best return for you - ISEdb

media business trend links

• Business 2.0's New Strategy: All Journalists Must Blog - Quittner is charging every journalist at the Time Inc. title with creating a blog. Such a move will offer "more ad revenue opportunities." - Rohit Barhava @ Influential Interactive Marketing
• Use Case: How Companies Can Use Photosharing Correctly - We gearheads at CrunchGear are fairly skeptical when it comes to hardware manufacturers trying to tap the excitement of social networking/sharing sites - TechCrunch
• Advanced Creation and Editing of Wikipedia Articles - Part two of our look at the online encyclopediadia anyone can edit shows how to create brand-new articles - What PC?
• Google Is Said to Set Sights on YouTube - Google is in discussions to acquire YouTube for $1.6 billion, people involved in the talks said yesterday. - Andrew Ross Sorkin and Peter Edmonston @ New York Times
• Are Sleeper Films Fading to Black? - "Movies do not come out of the blue. As studio marketers have become more aggressive, all the freshness has been appropriated by the campaign. So it's almost impossible to have a sleeper." - Stephen Farber @ The New York Times
• DM to the Long Tail - Online retailers like Netflix and Rhapsody generate nearly as much revenue from unconventional titles as from mega-hits. Having escaped the shelf-space constraints of bricks-and-mortar stores, retailers are finding unforeseen moneymakers among their vast inventories. - Ray Kingman @ DM News
• PayPerPost Funded to Launch Consumer Generated Advertising Revolution - PayPerPost, a marketplace for advertisers to reach bloggers, videographers, photographers, podcasters and social networks, today announced it has secured $3 million of venture capital. Florida-based Inflexion Partners led the Series A round, with Village Ventures and Draper Fisher Jurvetson (DFJ) participating. -TechJournal South
• Page views? Unique Visitors? Hits? How the Internet Methodically Measures Its Users - But people outside of the business often stumble over the meaning of Internet-specific measurement terms such as "hits," "page views" and "unique visitors," to name some of the most common ones. - BelleVille News Democrat
• Should Corporations Control Online Discussions? - The reason participatory citizen media have been so popular and successful is partly due to the fact that their platforms have been relatively independent of corporate control; therefore, they have allowed people to espouse independent points of view. - Steve Andersen @ Rabble
• Marketing Shifts In Changing E-Tail Landscape - This year, much of the focus will be on the fact that online searching often leads to offline buying. "Search is now an invaluable tool to holiday shoppers" - Keith Regan @ Ecommerce Times
• Analysis: New Media a Weapon in New World of Politics - Drudge is a news site, not a blog, according to blog empress Arianna Huffington - Washington Post

media business trend links

• Building eBay 2.0 - Clobbered by Wall Street. Fierce competition from Google. Meg Whitman's had a rough couple years. Fortune's Adam Lashinsky finds out how she's trying to turn eBay from ultra-hot to built-to-last. - Adam Lashinsky @ Fortune
• Dot-Com Bubble Part II: Why It's So Hard to Value Social Networking Sites - What makes this hard is that these companies seem to be so many years away from the kind of earnings that the valuation numbers are forecasting for them," says Andrew Metrick, finance professor at Wharton. The $15 billion MySpace figure "would imply that a lot more people will be on MySpace than are currently on it." - Knowledge@Wharton
• More than Half of MySpace Visitors are Now Age 35 or Older - "Last year half of the site’s visitors were at least 25 years old, while today more than two-thirds of MySpace visitors are age 25 or older.” - ComScore Research
• Forecasters On Lookout For Next Big Color - The environmental movement, for example, is fueling green's popularity. Forecasters noted the public's tolerance for the shade rose in the 1990s (post-avocado, people had had little patience for green) and the growing popularity of environmentalism has made green a symbolic, and more acceptable, color. - Nicole Tsong @ Seattle Post
• How Businesses Can Put Web Video To Use - New products from Cisco and others will help them make informal video like YouTube's relevant to their companies. - J. Nicholas Hoover and Larry Greenemeier @ Information Week
• Microsoft to "Socialize" Podcasts - "Microsoft (MSFT) is going to 'socialize' the idea of subscribing to content," Klau told the San Francisco Chronicle in an interview. "They're taking the idea of bookmarks, 'content you want to go to," and applying it to RSS and podcasts, 'content you want to come to you.'" - Frank Barnako @ Seeking Alpha
• Listening To Your Customers - Ecoute! You know there's a conversation about your brand happening out there online, but you don't know where to go to listen. Tom (Underscore's president) shows you the way. - Tom Hespos @ Underscore Marketing
• Marketers Turn to Ads on Social Media Sites: But, Consumers Still Wary - 20% of online advertisers surveyed by Jupiter Research say they plan to test viral marketing in vehicles such as blogs this year—but Jupiter also found that most consumers don’t trust product information they get on social media sites. - Internet Retailer
• In Web Marketing It's the Pitch, Not the Hits, That Counts - The yardstick of success isn't the number of hits per se, but rather the conversion rate. When you think about it, this is a fascinating divergence of two very different modes of web marketing: search mode vs. pitch mode. -Scott Brinker @ AdAge
• Sun Microsystems Wants to Blog News - CEO Jonathan Schwartz has sent a letter to Securities and Exchange Commission head Christopher Cox asking permission to disclose news about Sun Microsystems on his personal blog. Such a change would be a major shift in the way business news is distributed. - Red Herring
• Economies of Scale Don't Apply to Virtual Worlds? - Second Life's denizens are concerned that the entrance of big business into the world will drive them out. They're right to be concerned. Their businesses are as at risk as the local bookseller's business before Barnes & Noble comes to town. - Joystiq via BubbleGeneration
• The Rise and Fall (And Rise?) of AOL - AOL, which recently abandoned its 'pay to play' model, is now trying to succeed as a free service in a very crowded marketplace. Can it succeed? We look at AOL's past and possible future. - Jennifer Bosavage @ Tech Web
• Investor Shy Away from Web 2.0 Startups - "But we have trouble determining whether we can ever make money in this [Web 2.0] space, because there have not yet been these type of exits that generated venture capital type returns." - Tom Sanders @ VNUNet.com

media trend links

• NextFest's Long Tail Coverage - With a book cover styled like the Tipping Point (did anyone else notice that the paperback features a paper match, while the hardcover sports a wooden match? nice), The Long Tail has been beach reading for all those Crackberry dads spending "quality time" with their kids at the playground on Saturday mornings, and now a full-fledged bestseller. -Core77
• Don't Break Your Brand Promise - How many times have you clicked on a banner or email link only to be disappointed by landing on a generic page that has nothing to do with the reason you clicked? - Justin Talerico @ imediaconnection
• Google 'Universal' Widgets Released - Site publishers can now make it even easier for their visitors to get driving directions, view Picasa photo albums or play hang-man - Mashable
• Time For a New Model: Listening-Centered Marketing - Brands will have a very difficult time succeeding in this new environment unless they figure out how to dance in this zone of "tension" between marketer and consumer interest. - Pete Blackshaw @ ClickZ
• Marketing Pros Key to Entrepreneurs Growth - "A lot of businesses fail in the first 24 months because they have a great idea but they take it to the wrong market," says Michael Snyder, a principal at The Mek Group. - Caryln Duffy Marsan @ Indianapolis Star
• Do It Yourself E-Commerce - Rather than going door-to-door to drum up business or setting up a "mom and pop" store in the neighborhood, people are using the Web -- together with a mix of old and new communications, marketing and promotional strategies -- to build their own e-commerce businesses and entice customers to buy -- and then come back to buy again. - Andrew Burger @ Tech News World
• How Will The Clintons Harness the Political Force of the Blog? - While blogging has caught on everywhere, presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton still does not blog Â? or at least not much. - David Perlmutter @ USA Today
• Rebranding Ask.com - How do you engineer a major overhaul to your web site to increase traffic and user satisfaction? Ask.com's Senior User Experience Analyst describes the company's careful yet bold approach to its recent redesign in this wide-ranging interview. - Rae Hoffman @ Search Engine Watch
• Calculating the ROI of Corporate Blogging - You could apply the same benefit/risk analysis to any form of corporate communications. The difference is that blogging, which is just a kind of Web page, a container for content, applies the notion that markets are conversations, which is not build into the DNA of most corporations. - Charlene Li @ Forrester Research
• Getting Paid to Play: Landing a Job in the Video Game Industry - With sales over $7 billion annually and 42% of Americans purchasing, or planning to purchase a video game in 2006(1), video games are shifting from the edge of pop culture to mainstream entertainment. - Yahoo Finance
• Web 2.0: What's It Mean for Nokia? - Location-based services and Widgets on the way... - Jo Best @ Silicon.com

media trend links

• Web Ad Spend Boosted By Small Brands - Increased spending by smaller brands will propel the Internet to a greater share of advertising spending this year than the outdoor sector, according to ZenithOptimedia. - The Financial Times
• Managing IT for a 'Flat World' - In the age of the level global playing field, companies will need to rethink the way they compete, collaborate, and communicate. It will support completely new sources of information emanating from device-to-device communications (e.g., RFID tags) and digitization of previously analog content. The "Information Technology" industry will be redefined to include consumer electronics, content-producing industries, and communications, all largely based on digital input and output. - David Goulden @ BusinessWeek
• PR Newswire Acquires U.S. Newswire - By purchasing Washington, D.C.-based U.S. Newswire, PR Newswire will significantly expand its customer base in the government and public interest sectors and gain improved distribution channels to reach media and online audiences. -via Amy Solomon @ The Ruth Group
• SpotRunner Launches Affiliate Program - Spot Runner, the first web-based ad agency, that makes it fast, easy and affordable for local businesses to advertise on television launches the Spot Runner Affiliate Partner Program where users can earn money for every client you send their way. The Spot Runner Affiliate Program provides you with official Spot Runner links to put in your website or newsletter and lets you earn money for every new sale that you refer to Spot Runner. A “sale” occurs when someone you refer buys a TV airtime schedule at Spot Runner. - SpotRunner
• Web Classifieds 2.0: The Aggregators - A new breed of Web sites aims to simplify the classified process. The sites offer templates and step-by-step instructions for creating classified ads and then post the ads, sometimes free, on all the major listings services. Bob Tedeschi @ The New York Times
• Tories Unveil Their Secret Weapons: 'Webcameron' - David Cameron will today unveil radical plans to harness the power of the internet by reaching out to a blogging generation that is disaffected and disconnected from mainstream politics. - Will Woodward @ Guardian Unlimited
• The Trouble With YouTube - It attracts a lot of viewers, but can “user-generated” video make money? - the Economist
• It's the Digital Natives Vs. the Immigrants As Kids Go to Work- Traditionally, young people entering the workplace were the newbies - who had to be shown the ropes by their elders and betters. In some respects, that will still be the case. But as the internet becomes more and more central to the work of organisations, the newcomers will feel more at home in this environment than their employers. -John Naughton @ The Observer
• Building A Targeted Email List - Thanks to a high annual churn rate — 21%, according to a JupiterResearch study — building and maintaining an e-mail file can be like inflating a leaky life raft: You have to keep pumping air in to stay afloat. - Tim Parry @ Multichannel Merchant
• User-generated Content Touted as Web's Next Big Money-maker - Revenues from user-generated content on the Internet are expected to hit close to $1 billion by 2010, U.S. research firm In-Stat said in a report. - Roberto Rocha, CanWest News Service; Montreal Gazette
• Virtual World, Virtual Money - More than just a virtual world, a new Montreal-based online community venture is the virtual world. Launched Tuesday, co-founder Rocky Mirza’s “Weblo” is a virtual epicenter for commerce, centered on a digital recreation of the everyday world. - Red Herring
• AOL Reinvents Itself - Picture this: an online community with tens of millions of members connecting with each other across the globe in their own insular yet addictively accessible world. Techies scoff, but Web newcomers flock to the service. -Paul Bonanos @ Law.com
• Financial Times Goes Digital - Those reporting for work at the pink ‘un today are coming to terms with the launch of the UK’s first completely integrated newsroom. From now on all the material that appears on ft.com, email news alerts, blogs, podcasts and all other platforms is being produced by the same people who turn out the main paper. - Steven Vass @ Sunday Herald
• Will Social Networking Sites Transform Politics? - Candidates take chance on MySpace, YouTube in quest for votes - Karen Brooks @ The Dallas Morning News
• Selling to Avatars - The newcomers [marketers to Second Life] may see themselves as pros, Lancaster observes, but “what a lot of real-life companies don’t realize is that they’re going to have to compete against a completely different marketplace, which is basically the residents of Second Life.” - Rob Walker @ The New York Times

media trend links

• Generating Cash From User-Generated Media - Executives from Blinkx, MTV Networks, Revver, and Yahoo talk about how to make money from user-crafted content. - Red Herring
• The New World of e-Lections - "If you think of the Internet as a city, those social networking sites are virtual town squares where people spend time, where they share ideas, show their opinion, share information," said Keith Dailey, press secretary for Strickland's campaign. - Adam Sichko @ Post Dispatch
• Researching the Ebb & Flow of Brands - But in a world of spreading social influence due to the internet, brands are sets of values and ideas whose importance ebbs and flows among communities. - Marketing Web
• Do-It-Yourselfers Coming Out of the Woodwork - the 2.0 of real estate: The DIY - do-it-yourself - category is picking up some of the slack in the renovation market left by lower home sales, say national home improvement retailers and suppliers. New materials and products are making it easier for even shop class dropouts to achieve passable results. -Joanne Cleaver @ Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
• Don't Get Bogged Down By Employee Blogging - Some employers are finding blogs are useful, too. For example, General Motors Corp. has a Web site called fyi.gmblogs.com, which includes employee blogs, complete with posts from visitors. One recent post by Brian Akre, director of the Executive Communications & Global Corporate News Department at GM, tries to debunk a persistent story about the Chevrolet Nova, a compact car that supposedly sold poorly in Spanish-speaking countries in the 1970s because "no va" means "no go" in Spanish.-Wanda L. Ellert and Judson L. Hand @ New York Law Journal
• YouTube to Redefine TV Ad Industry? - YouTube will eventually be "sued into oblivion" due to copyright violations, predicts dot-com veteran Mark Cuban. - Forbes
• Online Marketing: What Works? - Amsterdam's Picnic '06 conference offered insights into advertising's future, from creating Internet buzz to social networking for customers - BusinessWeek
• YouTube's Video Poker - In an interview this week, Mr. Hurley, not surprisingly, portrayed himself as mainly trying to improve the site for its users while working to find arrangements that will satisfy Hollywood. - Saul Hansel @ New York Times
• ‘Long Tail' Author Shakes Up Retailing at NextFest - Wired's reporters and editors handpicked the exhibitors for their innovations in areas like design, environmentally friendly living, and social games. - Phil Wahba @ New York Sun

media trend links

• The Rebranding of the British Conservatives - David Cameron has the best chance in a decade to put the party of Margaret Thatcher back in government, thank to his reasoning that by shifting Britain's Conservative Party to the center of the political spectrum, he will pick up swing voters who previously supported the Labour Party. - Aaron Patrick @ The Wall Street Journal
• Google Office - Google will try to capitalize on collaboration options that Microsoft Office is lacking. But Microsoft has its own plans to shore up the vulnerability. - Aaron Ricadela @ Information Week
• Burnishing A Broken Board's Image - Fixing the Hewlett-Packard board in the wake of the current scandal will require a leader who can bring together a cohesive team—to start - By Jena McGregor @ BusinessWeek
• Web 2.0 Business Models Affecting Enterprise Systems Design - "Web 2.0 is really the acceleration of transformation," he said. "It's not that users got smarter or more social. It's that technologists figured out what consumers wanted." -Wyatt Kash @ GCN
• Bad Things Happen To Brands When Companies Run Out of Ideas - "Almost every category of consumer goods is in the process of forming into pools at both ends of the market," writes author Michael J. Silverstein in his new book, Treasure Hunt: Inside the Mind of the New Consumer. "In category after category, premium entries are growing, bargain brands are stealing share, and the middle is shrinking. " -Tom Asacker @ MarketingProfs
• How to Talk With Your Customers - A recent In Focus iMediaconnection did about what brands were doing with MySpace struck a chord (or nerve, as the case may be) with some of our readers-- to some, MySpace didn't count as true conversational marketing. -Nanette Marcus
• Mixed Outlook for US Online Spending - The US online advertising market continued its rapid growth in the first half of this year, although some changes in buying patterns, together with Yahoo’s recent warning about an advertising slowdown, could point to a more mixed picture ahead, according to analysts. - Richard Waters @ The Financial Times
• Advertisers Seek Safe Haven on User Sites - To overcome reluctance, MySpace has created several content channels, on topics from sports to books to movies, which assures brands they will not appear adjacent to racy MySpace profiles. It also sells placements on entry pages, where users tinker with their profiles. - Brian Morrissey @ AdWeek

media trend links

• The Image Problem - Back in the 1990s Cornell regularly ranked in the top ten, but after U.S. News changed their system, we fell substantially. Cornell is heavily penalized for its large classes, relatively high admittance rates and the low test scores of our matriculants. Mitch Fagan @ The Cornell Daily Sun
• Big Advertisers Chase Small Video Bloggers - Two prominent video bloggers -- former Rocketboom host Amanda Congdon and digital and performance artist Ze Frank -- have scored separate sponsorship deals with Ford Motor Company and GoDaddy.com, respectively, a clear suggestion that marketers are targeting new forms of online media in search of eyeballs. -Ryan Naraine @ ClickZ
• Google: Chaos By Design - The inside story of disorder, disarray, and uncertainty at Google. And why it's all part of the plan. (They hope.) - Adam Lashinsky @ Fortune
• Social Networking Sites Beginning to Drive Shopping Visits - Need shoppers? Hire a search engine or a social networking site? Hitwise recently announced that Google was the top U.S. search engine responsible for 14.93 percent of U.S. upstream visits to the Shopping and Classifieds category for the week ending August 26, 2006, while Yahoo! Search was the second most popular, accounting for 4.69 percent of upstream visits for that week. Meanwhile, Social networking site MySpace.com accounted for 2.53 percent of all U.S. upstream visits to Shopping and Classifieds category for the week ending August 26, 2006, up from 1.28 percent six months ago.- The Center for Media Research
• Podcast Customer Acquisition Strategies - From the ad:tech Chicago session "Customer Acquisition Strategies Revealed" with panelists from Sony Electronics, AllState and University of Phoenix. - imediaConnection
• Blog Ads Must Get Buzz To Work - Social networks are especially critical of bad ads, since reviews of poor or out-of-touch creative can be shared virally, said panelist Brian Clark, president of ad agency GMD Studios. "Social networking is far more punishing of bad creative," he said. - Shankar Gupta @ MediaPost
• How to Get Attention In a New Media World - Featuring blogger, Steve Rubel, the WSJ covers how to use New Media in the attention economy - Gwendlyn Bounds @ Wall Street Journal
• Can Blackberry Hook Japan's Market? - It's a great idea for RIM to reach out to Japan (as a stepping stone for U.S. corporate workers on their way to China), but the question is, are the tech savvy Japanese going to like the Blackberry? - Amy Chozick @ The Wall Street Journal
• Democratic Party - Social networking and homegrown content have generated a flood of creativity online, leaving Hollywood looking for ways to monetize the self-expression trend. - Diane Mermigas @ Hollywood Reporter
• Click Fraud: The Dark Side of Advertising - Randall S. Hansen, a professor of marketing at Stetson University in Deland, Fla., said: "We are just beginning to see more and more mainstream advertisers make the Internet a bigger part of their ad budget, and move dollars from print and TV," says Hansen, who has held marketing jobs at The New Yorker and People magazines. "But if we can't fix this click-fraud problem, then it is going to scare away the further development of the Internet as an advertising medium. If there is an undercurrent of fraud, then why should a large advertiser be losing $1 million, or maybe not know how much it is losing?" -Brian Grow and Ben Elgin, with Moira Herbst @ BusinessWeek

media trend links

• Young Internet Producers Bankrolled, Seeking Act II - Silicon Valley is awash in serial entrepreneurs, those who start a company, run it for a while, and then after success, failure or something in between, move on and start again - Miguel Helft @ New York Times
• Is This The Future of Advertising? - An attractive woman comes up to you and asks if you'd be kind enough to take her photo in front of the Golden Gate Bridge. Naturally, you agree. As you're lining up a good shot, you can't help but notice the camera's sleek, lightweight design. Sucker. - Drake Bennett @ The Boston Globe
• Click Fraud Is Growing On The Web - Pay-per-click advertising fraud is becoming more pervasive as spurious clicks can be generated through automated programs. - Karen Bannan @ The New York Times
• Wikipedia Founder Looks to Add Accountability, End Anarchy - Larry Sanger, who has had limited involvement in Wikipedia for the past few years, is working on a parallel project that would take a copy of Wikipedia's more than 1 million English-language articles and put them under the control of editors who post their names and credentials. - San Diego Union Tribune
• Organic SEO Or Pay-Per-Click Advertising - Which Should You Choose? - In an ideal world, you would use both strategically to maximize your site's profile. However, budgetary constraints often make this impossible, and trying to do both on a limited budget or with minimal resources can result in neither campaign producing ideal results. In this case, it's usually better to focus on one or the other. But which is best for you? - Scott Buresh @ The American Chronicle
• Where All the Beautiful People Are Ho-Hum - In an era when anyone can have a celebrity following (at least a small one), his popularity raises questions about the meaning of fame: If someone is celebrated for not being a celebrity, does celebrity itself still have any value? -New York Times
• Virtual Fashion - in the fast-growing virtual world of Second Life, many players are too enmeshed in the game's online fashion community to dissect what Vera Wang or Baby Phat sent down the catwalk in New York. - Andrew Lavallee @ Wall Street Journal
• Future Internet to Create 'Virtual Addicts'? - If people find social sites like MySpace and online role-playing games engrossing now, just wait. By 2020, people will spend more time online in connected, virtual worlds that will boost productivity but may lead to addiction problems. - Mark Walsh @ MediaPost
• Boomers: A Web Marketing Bonanza - only a few smart Internet sites have figured out how to appeal to a large constituency with time to spend and money to burn - Olga Khariff @ BusinessWeek
• Social Networking Sites Keep Local Flavor While Going Global - While companies like MySpace and Facebook have dominated the American social networking scene, several homegrown sites in Asia have been independently experiencing the same kind of success. Now, East and West are trading places. - James Shih @ International Herald Tribune

media trend links

• The Impact of Social Networking On Society - via New Scientist article: "I Saw The Best Minds of My Generation Destroyed by Google" - Slashdot
• Meet Google's Credibility Cop - Google's reputation and profits rest on the belief that its search results are relevant--untainted by hucksters, spammers and other charlatans.Standing guard at the company's gates of credibility is a former Defense Department intern who learned his craft blocking unwanted porn from showing up in Google's search results - John McCormick and David Greising @ Chicago Tribune
• Critiquing the Long Tail - This week Chris Anderson was interviewed by Jack Trout about the Lee Gomes critique of the Long Tail. What was most interesting was the discussion about the "old school" business heads, and traditional companies who are staring at the pages of the Long tail, wondering why it's a best seller and asking "what the heck do I do with this stuff." As producer of the program, I was a fly on the wall. Though I've read the book, followed the discussions online and read a few of the research papers; I found several good "Ah HA's" in the interview - Errol Smith @ Trout & Partners
• What Ever Happened to 'Small' Business? - The term "small business" doesn't mean what it used to. Small businesspeople today have to deal with the same issues big businesses do—global markets, complex supply chains, and fluctuating currencies—and they have to do it without an army of MBAs to support them - Keith McFarland @ BusinessWeek
• Marketing On Google: Not Just Text Anymore - Just as Madison Avenue once helped convince consumers that orange juice is “not just for breakfast anymore,” Google is turning to Madison Avenue to help convince marketers that Google is not just for text advertisements in tiny type that appear adjacent to the results of searches on google.com. - Stuart Elliot @ The New York Times
• Wikipedia Takes Fork In Road - With real-name logins and credential checks, Citizendium will place value on expertise - Jack Schofield @ Guardian Unlimited
• New Approach To Ads Let You Do The Work - Companies have seen how powerful it can be when consumers tell each other about a product they love by sending e-mails or posting endorsements. But let a marketer try to sneak in its own message that way and the backlash can be stinging. The Internet is just as effective in distributing the bad comments as the good. - Teresa F. Lindeman @ Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
• Interview With Donny Deutsch - A maverick advertising executive turned into a talk show host, Donny Deutsch gained a reputation for taking creative risks when he started out in the ad game. He transformed his father's small company into a multibillion-dollar, full-service agency with bold commercials that caught the imagination of the general public and political strategists alike. He built his roster of clients to include IKEA, Chevrolet, Revlon, Snapple, MCI, Coors, Bank of America, Tylenol, and the 1992 Clinton/Gore election campaign. - Ask Men
• WebStore By Amazon Launched - Amazon's new small business service allows businesses to create their own branded e-commerce stores, selling Amazon.com inventory alongside their own products (for a 7 percent commission). -Shankar Gupta @ MediaPost
• Some Hot Recorders for Some Cool Podcasts - Broadcasters, musicians and serious audiophiles have long been consumers of high-end portable audio gear, but podcasting has created an expanded market for this equipment. - Larry Magid @ New York Times
• Role of Professional Blogging Consultants - via Digital Inspiration

media trend links

• Andy Sernovitz: Word of Mouth Marketing - “As I read through Word of Mouth Marketing I felt, more than anything else, relieved. Relieved that we finally have a marketing author who understands the simplicity (and complexity) of this business. This one's worth your time.”— Jonah Bloom, Executive Editor, Advertising Age
• HP Said to Have Studied Infiltrating Newsrooms - It sounds like a best-selling crime story in the making; the New York Times reports that Hewlett-Packard conducted feasibility studies on planting spies in news bureaus for two major publications as part of its investigation of news leaks. - Damon Darlin & Kurt Eichenwald @ The New York Times
• Ad Sales Fall Short At Yahoo - Online ad sales falling short at Yahoo and driving its stock price down doesn't necessarily mean that online ad buying is decreasing. It could simply point to the fact that online media buyers are finding many new Web 2.0 venues within which to integrate their ad dollars - rjh
• Helping Brands Grab the Long Tail - A new service unveiled today aims to solve the riddles of the Web: If it is made up of infinite niches, why do the top sites account for most of the ad revenue? - Brian Morrissey @ AdWeek
• Social Networking Can Work For Businesses - But are social networks all bad? Nah. It turns out that companies ranging from Microsoft to Starbucks to Deloitte to Intuit are finding good uses for them — both inside and outside their corporate firewalls. - Ann All @ IT Business Edge
• The Ten C's of Branding - The benefits of having a strong brand are tremendous. Strong brands charge premium pricing; they thrive during economic downturns; they attract valuable employees, business partners, and customers; and they can extend into new business areas with ease. Every company, product, city, or even person can reap these benefits if they focus on building and maintaining their brands. - William Aruda @ MarketingProfs.com
• What Does the "Architecture of Attention" Look Like? - From "attention economy" to "attention architecture"...to make the concept of attention compelling and to prove to the consumers that their attention information is important, we need to build applications that provide useful services. And to build these applications we need a platform for the attention players to plug into. In short, we need attention ecosystem, where application providers can interplay and deliver definitive value to the end users. - Alex Iskold @ SOA Web Services Journal
• Murdoch Unveils MySpace Ambitions - News Corp. chief says company plans to launch social networking site in places like China, aims to overtake YouTube. - Paul La Monica @ CNN Money
• AOL Gains More Customers After Going Free - Time Warner Inc. on Tuesday said a strategy to offer most of online unit AOL's services for free was making faster-than-expected progress in attracting new Internet users and cutting costs. - Reuters

today's wows!

• YouTube auteurs will soon be able to use Warner Music selections in their videos-and share in a portion of the resulting online advertising revenue. - AdWeek
• More importantly, YouTube users will be able to use Warner material in their own clips - that’s a big step, since users will now be allowed to remix videos, no doubt creating more buzz for Warner’s artists - Mashable

media trend links

• Companies Wake Up to Blogs Barking - Mostly, the contents of such sites are anecdotal. But they can become a significant rallying point for a company's critics - Andrew Clark @ Guardian Unlimited
• In-Game Advertising - Advertisers earn extra lives for their clients inside video games, but keeping score remains elusive. - Lora Kolodny @ Hollywood Reporter
• Viral Ads: It's An Epidemic - Hit videos reach millions. But, can this ever be a real business? - Devin Leonard @ Fortune
• The E-Commerce Pendulum - Historically, online commerce experiences were modeled after physical shopping. Now there is evi-dence the pendulum is swinging the other way, and consumers are expecting online features and innovations in physical stores - BrandWeek
• Brands Participate in Virtual MTV Shows - MTV is planning to introduce Virtual Laguna Beach, an online service that promotes the show through three-dimensional characters fans can play, The New York Times reported. - Roger Park @ imedia connection
• Better Price & WOM Prompt Brand Jumping - College students are also multi-media multi-taskers. Nearly two-thirds of respondents say they use a computer while watching television, and 60.2 percent say they typically use a computer when listening to the radio. - MediaBuyerPlanner
• Time To Get On Your Soapbox - MSN is jumping on the user-generated video bandwagon with the beta-launch of Soapbox on MSN Video, a new Web platform designed for users to upload personal video clips - Mike Shields @ MediaWeek
• Will Video Save the Agency Star? - But far from the too-easy conclusion that ad agencies will soon ride into the sunset (aided by the inevitable collapse of the :30 commercial), I predict they're about to experience a reincarnation, renewal, and renaissance. Online video, I submit, is the catalyst and redeemer. - Pete Blackshaw @ ClickZ
• The Social Bookmarking Faceoff - The current social web era started with del.icio.us and the advent of social bookmarking. The simple concept of a tag has turned our interactions with the web upside down. The idea of being able to store your bookmarks online, share them with everyone and see what others have bookmarked - triggered the sequence of events that resulted in today's rich and social web ecosystem. - Alex Iskold @ Read/Write Web
• Top 10 Tips For Designing A Small Business Logo - For small businesses, creating a logo is one of the most important stages of a company’s infancy. A professional image can take you a long way, distinguishing your company from the competition. - Russel Arsenault @ Logo Bee
• Crisis Containment Could Empower Brands - The "Secure the Trust of Your Brand: How Security and IT Integrity Influence Corporate Brands" report released by the CMO Council looks at how marketers address security issues and prepare for crisis containment. - Enid Burns @ ClickZ