Browsing archives for August, 2007
links for 2007-08-10
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hmmm
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Worth a browse…BDW operates entirely virtually with Skype, Mbox, Google Docs, Gmail, and web based admin for all the reporting and billing etc. I
Beetle mania
Dave’s got a thing for BMWs, which got me thinking about VW’s. I’m not really a car guy, but I have developed a *brand association* with VW.
My first car was a ’57 oval window beetle which gave me great service for a few years, original gear box and all. It’s crowning glory was charging up the mountain road at Turoa (fully loaded down) and overtaking the fluro suit wearing clowns in the Jaguar XJS :)
More recently we had this new beetle which was just sex on wheels…cream leather interior and awesome Rivieria Green paint, hmm.
I’m gutted that VW canned the new Combi project…that would have been way cool.
links for 2007-08-09
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sure would be nice to have a link from this pr8 page
The intersection of brands and search
A very interesting post over at Bubblegeneration discussing the challenge of the burgeoning ‘edgeconomies’ and the impact on brand marketing. I guess a simpler way to discribe this is to think about the fragmentation of pretty much any market your care to talk about…the flattening of the world, the near limitless choice for just about everything, and personal portability are all creating a thousand niches, or edge economies.
Marketers are at the cusp of strategic reinvention.
That means they can either rise to the challenges of – and seize the opportunities of – the edgeconomy. Or they can get commoditized by those challenges.
Here’s a mini case study of how to actively get commoditized: M&C Saatchi’s One Word Equity. The big idea is to reduce a brand to a single word – to “own” a word, globally, permanently, always and everywhere.
There are a few drivers of this. The first is globalization, and the opportunity to market globally, reaping enormous efficiency gains. The second, and more important, is search. Single words, to put it bluntly, are tailor made for search-focused marketing.
[read the rest at Bubblegeneration Strategy Lab]
For me the interesting part is how this all intersects with search. I’ve mentioned before that search is not really about brand, and this is another way of thinking about the same idea…
More simply: as consumer hyperfragment, and market power continues to shift to them, guess who already “owns” words – which are really just shared representations of value?
You guessed it – markets, networks, and communities, and the prosumers that make them.
For example, it doesn’t matter how much the RIAA pays to own the words “fair use” – because markets, networks, and communities are too busy living – and redefining – it.
Exactly! When it comes to search the really important thing is to be plugged into what and how your customers think and talk about your products and the way they use them. Trying to ‘own’ a single word for your brand, however relevant or popular it might be, is a really narrow way to think about the way your product is positioned in the mind of consumers, and in the search engine results pages.
Why naming your business after a domain name you don’t have is a less than brilliant idea
As seen in Invercargill. Can you just imagine the conversations that lead to this?
“I hear those internets are the future, let’s call our new furniture shop furniture.com…that will sound all cyber and stuff.”
A couple of months later…
“What do you mean we can’t have that website location?…It’s already registered to someone else! But that’s our business name…”
LOL
(via TH·E CON·CEP’TU·AL·IST)
The Vayniac
This is cool…WinelibraryTV is one of the best video blogs out there and the host Gary Vaynerchuk recently appeared on Late Night with Conan O’Brien taking his unique style to the masses.
And, to make it even cooler, one of the wines they tasted was a local Sauvignon Blanc from Allan Scott…back in the day we sold a metric shed load of Allan Scott Savvy at the Dockside (they probably still do).
YouTube – Conan – Wine Expert.
Thanks RWW for the heads up.
links for 2007-08-04
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neat effect, although it could get annoying
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this is intriguing
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Best cover of a Trent Reznor song eva
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They are introducing the ability to sync an audio track with your presentation which is pretty cool
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looks sweet
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bookmarked for later viewing. Toni Schneider is the CEO of Automattic
Jobs of the future
Top dog, Ted Rheingold, emailed the other day pointing out a new position, Community Manager, they have going over at Dogster. Then today Seth Godin posted this thought about jobs of the future: Online Community Organizer, and it seemed to be a sign that I should help Ted out…so if you are in the market, or know someone who would rock a job like this then check it out.
While we’re thinking about online community why not revisit Ted’s seminal presentation, The State, Future and Business of Passion-Centric Online Communities.
Gaming Netscape
Normally I just flag all the spam comments that Akismet doesn’t automatically delete and dump them, but this one caught my attention recently because it wasn’t linking to some viagra site, but rather to Netscape.com…
It turns out that this user on Netscape, ‘eiradys‘, is posting links to articles covering a bunch of topics like How to Buy Wholesale Jewelery, Hotels in New York, California Real Estate, Chili Recipes and How to get a bad credit loan…and all these stories include an open link to the article as you can see here:
Of course this isn’t in itself a bad thing, I mean even if they are spammy articles who am I to pass editorial judgement. However, what makes it 100% clear that these are not articles posted for the benefit of anyone but the Googlebot is the way the spammer then completes the loop by spamming blogs with comments linking back to their user pages on Netscape, and in this way aims to boost the indexation and juice of those Netscape pages…and in turn his (or her) own article pages. Sneaky.
They also seem to have taken care to avoid detection by sprinkling their account with legit posts to articles on CNN and others, as well as building up what appears to be a fairly legit network of ‘friends’. There’s a low level of cross posting on all those ‘spammy’ articles so I would guess that these accounts are all controlled by the one person.
I wonder what Jason Calacanis would make of this?
