Its, been a while since my last post. I keep thinking that I will find more time to keep this site active but alas, more content…
Enquiro is looking ot hire an experienced online marketer. If you have ever found yourself wanting to be surrounded by a group of people as passionate and obsessed about all things online as you are, then I encourage you to apply.
On May 27, 2009 Google released a demo of their latest platform during the Google I/O keynote. Their product, Google Wave is a basically an online version of Microsoft Outlook (on steroids). Check out the keynote below to see what is all involved… more to follow…
Here is something interesting that I found today while looking through Google Labs. Google has developed (currently in beta) a way to search for text inside videos.
Google Labs has developed an audio indexing technology that will change the way that audio/video hosting sites will get indexed. This is what Google says about the technology:
“Google Audio Indexing is a new technology from Google that allows users to better search and watch videos from various YouTube channels. It uses speech technology to find spoken words inside videos and lets the user jump to the right portion of the video where these words are spoken.”
In the example below when you search for the word ‘economy, t’he video player will place a yellow dot in the video time line to indicate where each time ‘economy’ is spoken.
Under the video there are audio snippets of every reference to the phrase that was searched for.
Currently the search engine is focusing on election/speech material because it provides a perfect environment for audio indexing (no background noise/music). It won’t take long for them to develop this technology and expand into other channels.
This will have an effect how SEOs optimize their videos. Audio indexing will leave no room for artificially manipulating the video rankings with keyword rich title tags and description paragraphs. I can also see this technology opening the door for an entire new set of video optimization rules (i.e. If you want your video to get a cleaner indexing then don’t have music in the background).
How do you see this technology being used in the future?
If you scroll down to the bottom of this post you will see the latest addition to jordankettner.com.
Facebook & Twitter connect will allow commenters to login in to your page using their Twitter or Facebook profile information. The provider of this service, Disqus, is a free service that uses the commenter’s login information to automatically pull their name and profile picture and place it beside their comment. The users will also be given the option to post the comment as a tweet or as a comment in their Facebook news feed.
It literally took me less than five minutes to install the plugin into Wordpress and sign up for a Facebook & Twitter API.
Add a comment to the bottom of this post to give it a try!
I’m sure that almost everyone has heard the saying “it takes a village to raise a child”, but now the same thing goes for companies. It is no longer possible for a company to gain success without the help from its surrounding community.
Gone are the days where large publishers could buy a printing press, hire a team of authors, and literally print money as they distribute news around the community and around the world. On April 21, 2009 The New York Times, one of the most prestigious news companies in the world announced that they were operating with a loss of $61.6 million compared to their $77.7 million profit in the first quarter of 2008.
When you look at the other end of the spectrum at companies like Facebook and Twitter you can see that the management that run these websites only had to do one thing: Give the content to the people. Once they built the infrastructure for the websites it was up to the general public to produce the content and make the websites valuable. Much of the success of Twitter doesn’t even come from the website itself, but from all of the 3rd party websites who have developed on the Twitter API.
Twitter co-founder Evan Williams recently spoke at a TED conference and said: “When you give people easier ways to share information, good things happen”
The same thing goes when you are trying to promote your company. Involve people around you: If you are a toy company, invite kids to give feedback on your toys, if you are a photographer let others critique your work, if you are a software developer let your product be open source.
Social media is so valuable, not just from a product development standpoint, but it also allows the general public to easily open up a conversation with you and give you feedback. I have had many experiences with companies online via Twitter and Facebook that have enriched my experience with their product and made me tell others that they were a company worth dealing with.
Three days ago Enquiro purchased a license for Wordtracker to help make our keyword research more efficient. After an hour or so of working with the product I posted a tweet on Twitter saying how I was impressed with the interface and it was making the job easier. Within two minutes I had a reply from someone at the Wordtracker camp saying that they were happy to hear that I was enjoying the product. This opened up a bit of a dialogue with the company and I found out that there were going to be introducing a couple new features over the coming months and now I can’t wait for the next update for their product.
It sounds like a pretty simple thing, but it elevated me from feeling like a user, to feeling like a valued customer of the company. Not only do I tell friends/colleagues about my good experience with the company, but it makes me want to go out of my way to tell people that they are a great company to work with.
This is the future of internet marketing: Energizing customers with great customer experience so they promote your brand for you.
Have you had any experiences with social media that have made you want to promote a product/service?
Twitter co-founder Evan Williams gave a keynote at TED in spring 2009. In his keynote Evan reveals that many of the ideas that made Twitter so successful came directly from the Twitter users. It’s yet another great example about how powerful social media really is. Enjoy…
YouTube has just released some of its latest stats: Every minute there is an average of 20 hours of fresh content uploaded to YouTube’s servers. This is up from its previous record of 15 hours posted in January 2009.
Now, 20 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute, and it is a testament to the fact that you’ve made YouTube your online video home. YouTube Blog
In January of 2009 comScore has reported that Google sites alone had just over 6.3 billion videos viewed by 147 million unique viewers. The actual bandwidth for YouTube is actually much higher than this as these numbers only reflect usage within USA. A couple other notable findings from comScore include:
76.8 percent of the total U.S. Internet audience viewed online video.
The average online video viewer watched 356 minutes of video (approximately 6 hours), up 15 percent versus December.
100.9 million viewers watched 6.3 billion videos on YouTube.com (62.6 videos per viewer).
54.1 million viewers watched 473 million videos on MySpace.com (8.7 videos per viewer).
The duration of the average online video was 3.5 minutes, up from 3.2 minutes per video in December.
On YouTube’s blog product manager Ryan Jones said that their next goal is to achieve 24 hours of uploaded video every minute. That way they can have a full days worth of video uploaded every minute.
Online social media has grown rapidly over the last 5-6 years. Since the advent of social profile websites like MySpace social media has grown from a promotion method for indie bands to a ‘must have’ for businesses. The problem is that entrepreneurs are often overwhelmed with the concept of social media, and don’t know where to start.
Finding a starting place for your social media campaign depends mostly on your skills and your target audience. To gain exposure online you should be able to contribute something useful or interesting to your target market. Here are some sample starting points for various skill sets.
Writer - Blogs & Twitter
Photographer - Flickr & Twitter
Thought Leader/Research - Digg, Blog, Wikipedia, Twitter
Musician - Myspace, Facebook, YouTube
Web Developer - Website, Myspace, Facebook
Sometimes the best approach is to start in a little corner of the social community. If you start small you can gain loyal followers and keep a close eye on trends, user behavior, and best practices before you expand your campaign into other channels. You can’t keep the same focus if you are trying to learn the ropes of many different channels at once.
Start small, produce great content and you will build a loyal audience.
Over the last couple of months we have seen many unique campaigns on Twitter, but this one in particular caught my eye.
Eminem (@eminem, aka Marshall Mathers) has been tweeting the locations of secret concert tickets hidden around each city as he continues his tour. In some locations he will hide multiple pairs, and in others he only has a single pair.
With some tweets he even includes a twitpic of an object that the tickets are hiding inside of.
In my opinion this is one of the better uses of celebrity Twitter profiles. There have also been other users like @britneyspears and @theellenshow who have run with similar campaigns and have also had great success.
Every Tuesday at Enquiro we have a tradition called “Ted Tuesdays”. Basically all of the staff that can make it will pile into the boardroom during lunch and watch a clip or two from the TED (Technology, Edcuation, Design) Conferences.
This week Andrew Spoeth brought in a video featuring Blaise Aguera. This clip moves very quickly through two different projects that he has been working on: Sea Dragon and Photosynth.
I’ll let the video do the rest of the talking for this post. Grab a coffee, sit back and enjoy…
YouTube has just released some of its latest stats: Every minute there is an average of 20 hours of fresh content uploaded to YouTube’s servers. This is up from its previous record of 15 hours posted in January 2009.
