OK Go ditches EMI to make a real go of viral video
Major music labels often depend on the album sales of their most popular artists to counter the production costs for other musicians they work with. But online, viral views do not always translate into album sales. That's one of the reasons that EMI and the band OK Go have decided to part ways this week.
The split opens up new possibilities for OK Go, but leaves open the question. What will labels do when their most popular artists decide to take the middle man out of the distribution equation?
Internet is indispensible when it comes to local shopping
If 97 percent qualifies as "everyone" (and it very nearly does), then everyone is using the web to enhance local shopping. Among consumers surveyed in a study conducted by BIA/Kelsey and ConStat, 90 percent of users use search engines; 48 percent use Internet Yellow Pages; 24 percent use vertical sites, and 42 percent use comparison shopping sites.
11 steps toward a content strategy
IBM recently published research showing that about 80 percent of those who begin a corporate blog never post more than five entries. And that's just blogging. The Internet is littered with near-tweetless Twitter accounts, expressionless Facebook pages, no-one-home YouTube channels. In the rush to adopt social media as a tactic, too many marketers leave strategy in the dust.
Increasingly, marketing isn't about buying media, the advertising model. Media is cheap -- or often even free. But rolling your own media brings with it a new set of challenges: coming up with enough content to fill all those blank pages, blog posts, profiles and such....and doing so on a regular basis, not just in a one-off burst of Week 1 enthusiam.
CNN's Jonathan Klein: TV Ratings don't matter. We're competing with social networks.
It's not unusual to hear someone from a television network that's not in first place to claim that ratings don't matter. And CNN's Jonathan Klein is no different.
Speaking at the 2010 Media Summit in New York, the president of CNN said that television ratings don't paint an accurate picture of his network's strengths. But his reasoning is interesting — it's not because FOX is beating them there, but due to competition from online sources that aren't being tracked by the Nielsen ratings.
10 heinous usability crimes committed by Playmobil
In the comments of a recent article by Matt Curry on e-commerce platforms and Javascript, Playmobil was mentioned as an example of particularly poor usability.
One of the problems that Matt found was the threat to lock users out of the site for 24 hours if questions were answered incorrectly, which is astonishing.
There are plenty more user experience crimes to be found on the site though, and if Playmobil wants to make the most of the online channel, then it should look into solving the following issues, if not redesigning the whole site...
Six things you can learn from Sex.com's failure
In 2006, the domain name Sex.com was purchased by a group of investors for a reported $14m.
The buyers of Sex.com, Escom LLC, had big plans for their $14m domain name. According to a press release announcing the sale, "The new Sex.com will transform into the market-leading adult entertainment destination by offering compelling, next-generation web interaction experiences to revolutionize the industry. The new Sex.com will leverage the millions of monthly unique visitors that are already coming to the site while it continues to roll-out a host of professionally produced products and services..."
Trends and challenges in Web Analytics in 2010
It was good to attend Econsultancy's Digital Cream event last week. It was my first due to diary clashes, although it’s now in its fourth year. I moderated a roundtable on web analytics, which is one of my main digital passions, so it was good to see analytics was one of the most popular topics.
This post summarises the main challenges and gives tips on approaches the managers present are using to overcome them. The Econsultancy peer summits operate according to “Chatham House rules”, so there is no attribution to companies.
UK's ASA looks to regulate social media marketing
Social networks are increasingly popular with marketers, and that means they're increasingly popular with the government bodies that regulate marketers.
In the United States, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has issued guidelines designed to set boundaries on what marketers can and can't do in the world of social media. So it's no surprise that a similar effort is now taking shape across the pond in the UK.
Foursquare opens up for businesses with new features
This week, both Twitter and Facebook have come out with big location news. Twitter is adding geolocation features and Facebook will soon let users share their location. Both of those announcements could strike fear in the heart of a mobile check-in service like Foursquare. But Foursquare is banking its success in the mobile check-in space on attention to detail. And the company also has some new features — that could be very useful for small businesses.
In the next few weeks, Foursquare is going to start sharing a free analytics tool that will help small businesses track — and communicate with — their customers.
Digital Cream Talk Notes Part 1: Social Media
Last week some of us from Econsultancy US had the pleasure of traveling to London for the Digital Cream event (the equivalent of September's Peer Summit in New York). In among the great roundtable discussions, Rebecca Lieb and I did a short talk made up of 5-minute bits on some hot topics from a US perspective. Naturally, social was the hottest of the hot.
Paperchase allegedly plagiarises independent artist and Twitter erupts
Q&A: Jennifer Day on the new Endsleigh website
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Graham Charlton
Strategy & Planning
