Being Peter Kim has assembled an excellent compendium of predictions for 2009.
Also worth a look, the Junta 42 bloggers have made a list.
Category: Uncategorized
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Protect your company from online identity theft
photo courtesy of Giant Ginkgo
Last week was pretty good for Illuminati Karate, a web
developer in Raleigh, North Carolina. The company snapped up an expired web domain
for $10 and resold it for a profit of $34,990.The
domain? GeorgeWBushLibrary.com. The library’s online vendor, Yuma Solutions,
carelessly let the domain expire. And Yuma should have known better. It
initially bought the domain for $3,000 – from yet another squatter.Welcome
to the wild world of online identity, where seemingly anyone can appropriate a brand’s
name. Don’t think it can happen to your company? Consider the threats:• Cybersquatting, which occurs when
someone purchases a domain that points to your brand, such as the example above.
While there are laws against cybersquatting, it can be expensive and time
consuming to win. And the so-called squatter may have a legitimate right to the
name. In the early days of the Internet, a jazz club in New York called The
Blue Note was outraged to discover that someone had already purchased the
domain thebluenote.com. The owner, a music club in Columbia, Missouri, felt it
had a legitimate right to the name. It, too, was The Blue Note. The New York
club had to take legal action in Missouri, where it lost.• Typosquatting, in which
competitors purchase domains that are similar to a legitimate one in order to
redirect traffic. For example, you could purchase goggle.com and receive a fair
number of visits from sloppy typists who meant to do a Google search.• Phishing, in which a malicious
web site poses as a well-established brand and solicits personal information. Phishing
schemes typically target companies with online ecommerce, such as banks and
credit card companies.• Brandjacking, in which someone
poses as your company in any online exchange. This can include popular social
networking sites like Facebook or MySpace. Not long ago, a woman calling
herself Janet set up the account ExxonMobilCorp on the Twitter microblogging
site. She answered questions and shared expertise about her company, including
the observation that the Exxon Valdez was not one of the worst 10 oil spills.
The problem? Janet was not an ExxonMobil employee. While her account has been
shut down, to this day no one knows who she was. -
Just for fun – holiday virals to share
You know Christmas is coming when your friends start sending you the latest Elf Yourself electronic greetings. According to a post at Odeo.com, this viral has been seen by 193 million visitors. Brilliant, lean in branding for Office Max, and for the cost of one TV commercial. Nice podcast about the campaign, too. Here are some more fun virals:Naughty or Nice? Courtesy of the Greteman Group, a branding agency in Wichita, Kansas.Simon Sez Santa does your bidding from keyboard commands.Celebrity Gingerbread, Law and Order edition, from last season, at chow.com. Instructions for making ginger cookie versions of some of Hollywood’s fallen heroes (Phil Spector pictured, without gun). Delicious!Sephora’s Mistletoe Makeover. Upload a photo of yourself and play with cosmetics. What favors you most? Is it “Smoky Sugar Plum,” “Merry Berry,” “Santa’s Little Temptress,” or “O, Tannen-Babe?”Added on 12/17:Ace your Face, from Ace Hardware.Holiday Party Excuse Generator, from Enlighten, an ad agency in Ann Arbor, Michigan.Don’t tell the kids! For a modest fee, Capture the Magic will photoshop Santa into your living room for evidence of his visit. Ho, ho, ho!Added on 12/22:BannerBlog has archived 123 agency e-greetings from 2008. No trees were killed, just lots of hours of Flash development.If you’ve found a good holiday viral, let me know. And happy holidays! -
Links for 12-8-2008: all-Twitter edition
I’ve posted a great deal about Twitter on this blog lately, but I do have a good reason: my students are doing a research study on how companies use Twitter to communicate with their customers. These links are to help them find their way through the front part of their paper assignment. So here’s another batch:
Niall Cook writes about good Twitter practice for corporations at The Customer Collective.A very useful study on Twitter from H-P Labs, Social networks that matter: Twitter under the Microscope, with useful annotations from Jeremiah Owyang at Web Strategy by Jeremiah.Ogilvy PR 360 slide deck on Twitter, from SlideShare.follow me @DavidKamerer -
Links for 12-3-2008: all-Twitter edition
- Guy Kawasaki, from his blog, How to use Twitter as a twool
- Mossberg Solution, written by Katherine Boehret in Wall Street Journal, Birds of a feather Twitter together, good introduction to Twitter.
- Kathleen Parker, Rise of the Twitterati, from the Washington Post.
Follow me @DavidKamerer -
You never forget your first time, and yet more Twitter links
Remember when you were young and full of innocence? You know, about a thousand tweets ago?If you’d like to recapture that special first time, check out MyTweet16, which will show the first 16 tweets of any person you care to stalk investigate learn about. You know, how they tweeted “back in the day.” Sometime in September or October, most likely (Twitter has grown that fast).The open API that Twitter runs on is sparking lots of innovation and reinvention, always a good thing with new media. Everyone can get their hands on a piece of the Twitter experience. Here are some more Twitter tweaks:TweetTrak – service that tracks keywords on Twitter, sending you a direct message when your term appears.
FriendorFollow – Who are you following? Who is following you? This service helps you manage the reciprocity of your Twitter follows/followers from three easy-to-understand windows. Worth a look every so often to keep your Twitterverse in balance.Mr. Tweet – your Twitter valet service. Follow Mr. Tweet (for some reason I can’t stop thinking about Homer Simpson as “Mr. Plow”) and Mr. Tweet will suggest people who should be in your network.Twitbacks – free custom Twitter background themes. (or you could go old school and wrangle the pixels yourself; I suggest creating an image 2048 pixels wide by 1707 pixels high at 72 ppi; save out the finished art as a .jpg. And please, make it pretty).Also, very much worth a read: Why I love Twitter, by Tim O’Reilly (yes, THAT O’Reilly).Thanks to Kevin Dugan at Strategic Public Relations for some of these links. -
Social media campaigns
Here’s a nice list of social media campaigns, courtesy of Being Peter Kim. There’s a ton to learn here, so get clicking!
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How to get started on Twitter … and who are these people?
With much of social media, there’s the “getting started” problem. For example, suppose you’ve just activated an account at Twitter. What next? You’re following no one, and no one is following you. Not much fun, is it?
If you’ve been contemplating joining the Twitter community, here’s some excellent advice on getting started from David Meerman Scott, author of The New Rules of Marketing & PR. This book, by the way, is an excellent introduction to using social media.One way to get going is to generate a feed of Twitter users in your community. You can do this at twitterlocal, or by using the advanced search function at Twitter.Another approach? Figure out who the power Twitter users are, and follow them. Or, you could follow the top Tweeters at TwitterGrader, which purports to analyze the influence of Twitter users.But don’t look for me on the list. I’m taking Twitter pass/fail.Follow me @davidkamerer———-Thanks to Clemson University Professor Mihaela Vorvoreanu for the post upon which this entry is based. -
Go where the eyeballs are
Nicholas D. Kristof enjoys a prominent perch in American life; he’s a columnist for the New York Times, where he can reach millions of people every week. But he’s also on Facebook, where he has almost 20,000 fans. Why Facebook? The principle is simple: for maximum influence, go where the eyeballs are. According to Alexa.com, Facebook is the #5 most visited website in the U.S.; NYTimes.com is #21.
That’s the biggest limitation for a lot of bloggers. You can manage the technical hurdles and you can create the content. But in the end, there may not be a lot of eyeballs at David Kamerer’s Spoonful. Or at my public relations blog, PRNeededHere.com. I’m building traffic, but it’s not like perezhilton.com over here. Perez is on a superhighway; I’m a two-lane blacktop.
But I’m learning to go where the eyeballs are. In the past week I’ve cloned my blogs twice. LinkedIn’s new applications create new opportunities to host content on your LinkedIn page. I installed Six Apart’s Blog Link, and my blog instantly flowed on to my LinkedIn page. Blog Link also found my contacts’ blogs, which are also viewable from my page. Simple and brilliant.
I also participate in a public relations social media site, PR Open Mic. I cross-posted some blog entries there, and instantly got a lot of comments. The process is pretty simple; from my blog dashboard, copy the blog entry HTML, and then paste it into a window. Preview it, touch up the code, and publish.Every time I clone my blogs, I reach a new audience. It’s a few more breadcrumbs to make it easier for interested readers to find my work. I’m glad to have you as a reader, whether here or there. -
Netflix get its Mac act together
Rejoice! Macintosh users can finally instantly view Netflix movies on their computers. For the past year or so, this feature has only worked with Windows computers. The Mac viewer is in Beta, so there may be little hiccups here and there.Here’s how to get access to instant viewing with your Mac. First, you must be a Netflix customer. If you are on an “unlimited” plan, you can use this feature all you want. Other plans have monthly limits.You’ll need to download Microsoft Silverlight 2 software and install it. Then, follow this link to opt in to the beta test. Restart your browser. Then you should be able to view available Netflix titles instantly.For high quality viewing, you’ll need a fast Internet connection. Here’s how Netflix sees it:- High quality: 1.6 Mbps or faster
- Medium quality: 1 – 1.5 Mbps
- Low quality: less than 1 Mbps
Not sure if your Internet is fast enough? Test your connection speed here.Netflix is also in the process of rolling this service out to selected devices that are more at home connected to your television set. These include the XBox 360, newer Tivo boxes, the Netflix Roku player and combo players (which include a Blu-Ray drive) from LG Electronics and Samsung.You don’t have to be a futurist to know that the days of the shiny disk are numbered. This multi-platform approach, combined with Netflix’s vast catalog (more than 100,000 titles and growing) and excellent customer service, position Netflix to be a leader in the post-disk era.Crave more Netflix information? Visit Hacking Netflix, an unauthorized blog that covers the service in great detail.