Great article by Cameron over at Pronet on the obstacles that social media optimization face before it becomes mainstream. I think that one of the biggest challenges that SMO faces is the two-way communication between companies/brands and their customers.
Madison Avenue was built upon the idea of a carefully crafted message. Advertising is all about creating an impression. Just look at any collection of TV ads to see that what is being sold is not the actual product, it is the illusion of something. For example, look at the car commercials. Drivers on closed roads driving a car in a manner that would get the average person arrested if they tried that on any road in the U.S. The SUV commercials talk about how roomy the car is, but they never mention how horrible the gas mileage is.
Wikipedia is one of the stars of the social media web as thousands of volunteers have made Wikipedia the largest reference website on the Internet. Search engines (especially Google) love the content and a recent study by Micropersuasion showed that 11 of the top 20 advertised brands in the US had a Wikipedia page showing on Page 1 of the Google SERP for it’s brand.
The problem that brand managers are facing is that many of those Wikipedia articles included neutral or unsavory information about the brand. For example the McDonald’s Wikipedia entry is an online version of the critical movie Super Size Me.
Interesting post on Threadwatch today about a video that showed up on YouTube last week for the new Samsung Ultra Mobile cell phone. Unfortunately for Samsung, the video which is entitled “Samsung handset, easy to break at one try!” shows a smiling young woman snapping Samsung’s 6.9-milimeter-thick mobile phone in two.
The reason that the video is causing controversy is that the copyright for the video belongs to Samsung competitor Motorola. Motorola’s isn’t saying much other than they didn’t intend for the video to circulate.
The video I believe is the first case of a company using social media to target a competitor. Full story is available here from The Korea Times
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I was really surprised that nobody picked up the huge decision that went against Target last week where a federal district court judge ruled that a retailer may be sued if its website is inaccessible to the blind. See PR on Yahoo
Part of the NFB’s charge was that target.com failed to include alt-text beneath graphic images so that screen readers could detect and vocalize a description of the image to a blind computer user.
The past week was an important one in that we might have seen the beginning of the end for the two social network sites Digg and Facebook.
Now it is not a well kept secret that a very small percentage (100?) of Digg (www.digg.com) Digg is updating their algorithm to create more diversity in Digg ranking results the wailing from the Digg community could be heard clear across the country. Digg is renowned for sending massive amounts of one time traffic to a web site. It is traffic that doesn’t click on ads, buy products and rarely returns. If Kevin through this algorithmic update can improve the quality of Digg traffic and posts then everyone will applaud this move. If it doesn’t work, then I believe that the Digg will be surpassed by other user driven content portals like Netscape.
One of the best things about the Internet, is that anyone can be famous and develop a following. The bad news is that through site like The Internet Archive, your online antics can follow you around for ever.
Browsing Andy Beals blog tonight and I came across his write up off a free guide written by Tom Drugan of Naymz.com, aimed at students who want to repair the damage they have caused to their reputation at social sites like MySpace, Facebook etc.
It’s a very handy guide and I applaud Tom for putting it together.
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Zachary Rodgers over at eVenturing has a very insightful article called “What MySpace Means for Marketers” (which I heard about on Top Rank).
Zachary has some interesting insight and quotes about targeting some specific markets on Myspace. Naturally one of market segments that he highlights is music. I love this comment and quote:
Record producers have discovered setting up a profile for even their best-known artists draws more youth traffic than an official band Web site. “Nobody’s going to the Warner Bros. main page for their band,” said Eric Valk Peterson, Agency.com’s vice president of media services.
Earlier I wrote about the challenges that old media were having developing a strategy to attract a younger, more social audience. John Battelle today highlighted a recent article by Tom Mohr in Editor & Publisher. Part of Tom’s comments were that:
It is instructive that after twelve years of the consumer web, not a single example of breakthrough online innovation has emerged out of a newspaper company. Not in recruitment. Not in auto. Not in classifieds. Not in shopping, directory, new ad models, or content aggregation.
The social media optimization naysayers frequently comment that the social media sites like Myspace are places where kids hang out and you cannot effectively target them with advertising. Then late last week Hitwise published some data that showed how MySpace sent more traffic to retail web sites in the previous week than MSN.
The Hitwise report puts Yahoo! as the source of 4.69 percent of traffic to online retail sites, MySpace as 2.53 percent and MSN search at 2.33 percent for the week ending August 26th. Google leads the pack at 14.93 percent.
I read two articles today that I thought perfectly illustrated the challenges that traditional media and advertising companies are facing. Their future audiences/clients are online, avoiding a lot of the brand names and old media has no idea what to do about it.
