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Content and Marketing Lessons Learned from The Dark Knight

by on Jul 30, 2008 (Comments Off) Comments

For the four of you who aren’t aware, The Dark Knight is a pretty big deal for a multitude of reasons:

  • It was the first movie to film large chunks of the film with IMAX cameras.
  • It debuted on the largest number of screens in cinematic history (4,366).
  • It also debuted on the largest number of IMAX screens (94) and broke IMAX debut records ($6.2 million).
  • It beat the record of most money made from Friday midnight shows ($18.5 million).
  • It holds the record for the best opening day/single day ($66.4 million).
  • It made a record-shattering $155.3 million its opening weekend.
  • It has a 94% Rotten Tomatoes ranking.
  • Fandango reported that 64% of the people who have seen The Dark Knight plan on seeing it again in the theater (I’ve seen it twice).
  • And, of course, the film marked what could be Heath Ledger’s final performance, which is so engrossing that there is buzz that he could be the seventh person in history to receive a posthumous Oscar acting nomination (and if he were to win, he’d be the second person to win after death).

Whew! That’s a lot of stats I just threw at you. Sorry about that. I just wanted to convey the magnitude of this film’s success. You can argue that plenty of other films have made lots of money, but many of these movies are specifically targeted (e.g., big budget action flicks that skew overwhelmingly male), overly stylized/injected with CG, or just not very good (making money but disappointing movie critics). But how many times do you see a film that’s critically acclaimed make serious bank at the box office, have strong holding power, appeals to various demographics and both genders, and generate substantial awards buzz?

Not very often, which is why when you do have the fortune of catching lightning in a bottle, you better figure out the reason behind its success. I think The Dark Knight had a lot of things going for it, and these positives are all things that can be translated over to your site’s content and marketing strategies.

Yahoo, HP, Intel Give Ivory Towers a Stairway to the Cloud

by on Jul 30, 2008 (Comments Off) Comments


Yahoo, HP and Intel are collaborating on an ambitious research endeavor called “Cloud Computing Test Bed” — designed to support cloud computing research and education at universities. Users will be able to develop and test software, data center management, and hardware associated with cloud computing on this large-scale grid. The three companies are partnering with the Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany on the project.

Five Steps To Successful Site Architecture For B2B SEO

by on Jul 30, 2008 (Comments Off) Comments

Strictly Business - A Column From Search Engine Land A couple months ago, I noted that one of the 6 mistakes B2B marketers continue to make with organic search was inadequate site architecture-the fact that many B2B sites don’t have sufficient content to respond to desired search terms. The solution, however, isn’t simply adding more content. Proper site architecture is also critical. Here are five steps to success.

The Virtuous Competition in Cloud Computing Research

by on Jul 29, 2008 (Comments Off) Comments

Yahoo, Hewlett-Packard and Intel announced a research venture on Tuesday that spans the United States, Germany and Singapore. The goal is to advance Internet-scale computing — the proverbial “cloud,” in which more computing chores are delivered to personal computers and cellphones as services, with the heavy computational lifting done remotely in large data centers.

Google and IBM announced a big cloud research initiative last fall, pledging to build two large data centers that would be at the disposal of six universities initially: Carnegie Mellon, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford University, the University of Washington, the University of Maryland and the University of California at Berkeley.

Comparing Search Engine Performance: How does Cuil Stack Up to Google, Yahoo!, Live & Ask

by on Jul 29, 2008 (Comments Off) Comments

Posted by randfish

This week marked the arrival of Cuil on the search engine scene. Being a huge fan of search technology and how search engines work in general, I’ve been spending some time playing around with the new service and thought it would be valuable to expose my data on how the classic market leaders – Google, Yahoo!, Live & Ask compare to the newcomer.

When judging the value and performance of a major web search engine, there’s a number of items I consider critical to the judging process. In order, these are — relevancy, coverage, freshness, diversity and user experience. First, let’s take a quick look at the overall performance of the 5 engines, then dive deeper into the methodology used and the specific criteria.

Overall Performance

Google AdWords

by on Jul 29, 2008 (0) Comments

A business can only meet success when its products or services on sale meet their necessary marketing or advertisement. Now, when someone talks about advertising their product/service online, nothing can be more appropriate than AdWords.

AdWords was launched by Google in the year 2000 and by 2007 it was their main source of revenue. Initially an advertiser had to pay a monthly amount for advertising their product/service, but later in order to make room for small businesses and advertisers who wanted to manage their own promotion; Google launched the AdWords self-service portal. Google’s AdWords aim has been to provide the most efficient advertising to businesses irrespective of their size.

Over the years AdWords offering to its advertisers has changed for the better. Google has come up with formats like Pay-Per-Click and Site Targeted Advertisement.
Under Pay-Per-Click an advertiser pays on account of the clicks received. The advertisers has the option to bid from a range of 1 cent USD to 100US$ per click. By 2003 Google AdWords brought in the concept of Site Targeted Advertisements.

With Site Targeted Advertisements an advertiser can enter keywords by making use of AdWords control panel to draw attention of users and Google in turn puts the ads on relevant sites. The best thing about Site targeted advertisements is that the advertisers can bid on a Cost Per impression basis placement of their ads.

Leaving apart Pay-Per-Click and Site Targeted Advertisements, AdWords offer advertising facilities like:

  • Ad scheduling: This is like creating a time table for running one’s ads on web according to his wish.
  • One or numerous advertisements can be targeted with one or more keywords.
  • AdWords also generate a 24/7 performance report of your advertisement to your online account.

By 2005, a campaign management service called Jumpstart was launched by Google to help advertisers in setting their own campaigns. Jumpstart was followed by Google Advertising Professional Program or GAP. The whole purpose behind GAP was to train people on AdWords and award them with a certificate on having passed the examination. This was a significant move by Google to help advertisers’ who had problem dealing with the complexities of AdWords and the amount of money being put at stake. Such advertisers now have an option to hire professionals to manage their campaigns.

AdWords Account Management is another impeccable offering from Google.  Its aim is to assist its clients who find it difficult to deal with the complications of building and running AdWords accounts search engine marketing. Trained consultants are there to help individuals on account management. The biggest advantage of AdWords Account management is that any organization without proper knowledge on advertising can reach out to a global online audience.

Such facilities from AdWords have eventually made an issue as grave as proper marketing or advertising on the web a Cake Walk for almost everyone.

SearchCloud Weights Keywords To Improve Search Relevance

by on Jul 28, 2008 (Comments Off) Comments

SearchCloud, a new search engine that launched on July 17, has a new take on search refinement that it hopes will make it a useful alternative to the likes of Yahoo and Google. Instead of simply entering multiple keywords, users can rank how important each term is to the search. Each term is placed in a “search cloud”, where its weight is indicated by the size of the font.

For example, you could enter the words “TechCrunch” and “Apple” with TechCrunch more strongly weighted to (hopefully) get articles about Apple on our site. To further refine the search, you could enter terms like “iphone” and “app store” with a lesser weighting, which would help stories on those topics rise to the top, without excluding stories that don’t mention them.