Mark Celsor Joins ShareThis as Interactive Lead Developer
March 28, 2008
Mark Celsor will be joining the team at ShareThis next week as Interactive Lead Developer. Mark is an Internet marketing technology expert and the famed author of official sounding, 3rd person, press releases about himself, LOL.
ShareThis is internet startup with offices in Cincinnati and San Francisco. Their flagship product is a widget that lets web site visitors easily send pages to their friends or post pages to web services like Facebook and del.icio.us. Each month their widget has over 100 million views and over 26 million unique users. There’ve also recently had a bunch of press on tech news sites like CNET, Wired, Mashable and GigaOM with news of their series B funding.
I’ll be working to help design and develop user interfaces for ShareThis. I’m really excited about working with these folks. It’s really great to see a company like this taking off here in Cincinnati. Did I mention that I’ll be able to bike/walk to work? Gotta love that!
Design Coding by Poetic Prophet (AKA The SEO Rapper)
March 28, 2008
Leon Atkinson sent me a link to the video for the song Design Coding by Poetic Prophet (AKA The SEO Rapper AKA Chuck from Pop Labs). It’s an awesome rap song explaining how to code your web pages to obey web standards and increase search engine optimization.
I loved the lyrics:
…Your Photoshop functions then slice that design
Do your layout with divs make sure that it’s aligned
Please don’t use tables even though they work fine
When it come to indexing they give searches a hard time…
Poetic Prophet has a bunch of other videos including Conversion Closing Rap, Paid Search 101 Rap, Social Media Addiction Rap and Link Building 101 Rap. It’s entertaining stuff with solid explanations of online media concepts.
YouTube Insight – New Video Analytics Feature
March 27, 2008
Yesterday YouTube announced that it is making its YouTube Insight Analytics tool available to the public. Users will now be able to now be able to see more detailed information about whose watching their videos with reports showing views over time and viewers geographic location broken out by country or by state inside the US.
You got Rick Rolled by the New York Times
March 25, 2008
You can always tell that a perfectly good internet meme has jumped the shark when it shows up in the New York Times’ Media and Advertising section. 
YouGotRickRolled.com was covered by Evelyn Nussenbaum yesterday in her article The ’80s Video That Pops Up, Online and Off.
Japanese Advertisers are Abandoning MURLs
March 25, 2008
Cabel Maxfield Sasser recently returned from a trip to Japan and wrote a blog post about the disappearance of printed URLs in Japanese advertising.
In the United States we always stick Marketing URLs (MURLs) in TV and print ads. The idea is that people will see addresses like http://www.widgetco.com/billboard-offer and http://www.widgetco-tv-offer.com on TV or on billboards, remember them, type them in when they get to the computer and advertisers will be able to serve up a custom landing page and track the effectiveness of the off-line advertising campaign. This is usually a waste of time, because most regular people who actually care about the offering are just going to Google whatever information they remember from the ads, bypassing whatever special tracking and landing page the advertisers have set up. It appears that advertisers in Japan are accepting this behavior and starting to put pictures of search boxes with suggested search terms in their ads in place of MURLs. Advertisers can still put technologies in place to serve up a custom landing page and tracking based on the search terms that got them there but it does require your page to have excellent search engine optimization. Otherwise you might be sending people from your off-line ads to a competitor’s web site. This lack of control might make American companies drag their feet on this shift away from MURLs, but I am starting to see it more and more. One of the most memorable examples was this 2006 Leo Burnett, Google “Pontiac” ad.
It’s probably safe to bet that General Motor’s spent a decent amount of money on Google Ad Words and pages about Lyle Lovett’s 1987 album weren’t seeing a lot of search traffic while that TV spot was running .
via BoingBoing
An Underdeveloped E-Commerce Strategy
March 25, 2008
David F. Gallagher of the New York Times Bits blog posted this photo snapped in San Francisco traffic.
Tux the Penguin Moonlights at a Florida Convenience Store
March 25, 2008
Ah, the glory of ambiguous logo licensing!
Austin Davis Richardson discovered that apparently Tux the Penguin – beloved icon of the Linux operating system – has taken a second job moonlighting as an ice-cold drink salesman at a Gainesville, Florida convenience store.
via BoingBoing
Wal-Mart Buyers Write Candid Product Blog
March 3, 2008
In a relatively bold move toward marketing transparency, Wal-Mart has launched a new web site called Check Out that allows their low-level product buyers to write honest (and occasionally unfavorable) reviews of the products in Wal-Mart stores. I really feel that this is a great strategy. It positions Wal-Mart as an honest source for product information online, allowing visitors to connect with Wal-Mart employees as real people instead of cogs in a giant impersonal entity.
Positive reviews of products will definitely have positive effects on in-store and online purchases, but I feel that the opposite effect isn’t as much of a risk. By giving the product buyers freedom to pan products in online reviews, Wal-Mart probably won’t see traumatic results for sales in the store where point-of-sale advertising is still going to dominate and be geared toward price conscience and impulse buyers. Now… if Wal-Mart suddenly starts posting negative reviews on pieces of paper right next to the products in the store, the strategy might not work so well, but I doubt we’ll be seeing that any time soon.
Read more in the New York Times article by Michael Barbaro titled “Wal-Mart Tastemakers Write Unfiltered Blog“.
An industry group called the International Anticounterfeiting Coalition (IIAC) is attracting a lot of negative attention for its recent sponsorship of a course at the Hunter College of the City University of New York. The IIAC fights the sale of knock-off consumer products and represents major companies in the fashion industry including Abercrombie & Fitch, Chanel, Coach, Harley-Davidson, Levi Strauss and Reebok. In the course students were told to create fictional blogs written from the perspective of college students who had traumatic experiences with knock-off products. In one example a fictitious student named Heidi Cee blogs about how her beloved Coach purse was stolen. After paying a $500 for its safe return, she releases that she has been duped with a fake and proceeds to break down into an hour long crying fit. Of course none of the student blogs mentioned that they were fake or had disclaimers about being part of a college credit course sponsored by the IIAC, so the entire situation raises huge ethics questions not only about covert guerrilla marketing practices but also the idea of corporate sponsorship of college courses in general. Read more in an article Scott Jaschik wrote for Inside Higher Ed called “This course brought to you by…” or follow in-depth analysis of the situation on Bob LeDrew’s blog FlackLife.
