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Obama and the Internet

Akshay Sura — Tue, 30 Mar 2010 12:52:35 +0000

Although much of the media attention Barack Obama is receiving now is focused on his governance and Health Care, it’s important for other politicians and businesses alike to keep in mind the paradigm shift of the Obama election.

Obama transformed campaigning and politics through his use of the Internet as a campaign tool.

He did not stop with a simple website, as many candidates have posted in the past, or a simple money raising campaign as Howard Dean and Ron Paul effectively ran.

Obama created a complete internet package for his political campaign that took full advantage of the new medium in ways that had not been fully imagined before.

Remember his videos – which he compared to Roosevelt’s “fireside chats” — on YouTube? Those were viewed millions of times — for a total of 14.5 million hours. How much would Obama have had to pay for 14.5 million hours of television advertising time? According to the New York Times, $47 million.

And with the YouTube videos and internet messages, Obama was able to get his own message out, the way he wanted it told and as long as he wanted it to be. He wasn’t constrained by 30 or 60 second advertising spots, and he wasn’t filtered and quoted by journalists.

His message was framed, produced and presented entirely according to his own standards and what he wanted to accomplish. Best of all in a political campaign, the cost was negligible to reach those hundreds of thousands of potential supporters.

For politicians, this internet opportunity is the merging of all the best possible factors for campaigning: unfiltered messages going directly to supporters, low cost, wide accessibility, and good credibility as a source of information – great messages for individuals and businesses to keep in mind as well.

Search Ads Come To YouTube

By Miguel Helft — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 23:32:22 +0000

Quiz: What’s the No. 2 search site?

Answer: If you guessed “Yahoo,” you’re wrong. Internet users now conduct more searches on YouTube (2.5 billion in August) than they do on Yahoo (2.4 billion), according to comScore’s expanded search query report.

So it is not surprising that YouTube’s parent, Google, is thinking of turning those searches into dollars. The company has begun testing video ads that are targeted to specific YouTube searches. The system works a lot like the hugely profitable AdWords system for search ads on Google. Type “Tina Fey” into YouTube’s search box and, along with the search results, you may find a somewhat relevant ad for the movie “W” as well as a significantly less relevant ad for the University of Phoenix. (This is a test, after all.) The “W” ad links to a trailer on YouTube for the Oliver Stone movie and the University of Phoenix ad links to that school’s YouTube channel.

“We are constantly testing a wide range of options to find the right advertising format, for the right content, for the right video experience on YouTube — whether you’re watching short videos or long videos, uploading videos, or even searching for videos on our site,” said Aaron Zamost, a YouTube spokesman. “We do not believe there is one advertising solution for YouTube, but lots of valuable ways for advertisers to engage with our audience.”

For now, only a small number of advertisers is testing the new format, the latest of many that YouTube has experimented with in the past several months. YouTube, which has struggled to monetize the hugely popular site, is still working out its targeting technology and other aspects of the YouTube search ads system.

While this system works like the multibillion-dollar AdWords program, don’t expect YouTube’s video search ads to match AdWords in size. As AdAge, which first reported on the YouTube search ads, noted, YouTube and Google are different animals: “People are often looking to be entertained when they do a video search, which is a contrast to the more varied — and often commercial — nature of searches on Google.com.”

Generating Leads in a Web 2.0 World

Louis Columbus — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 11:00:00 +0000

Marketing is going through a revolution online, thanks to the continual adoption of the Web 2.0 concepts originally defined by Tim O’Reilly and Dale Dougherty.

If you want to see some excellent graphics and analysis explaining Web 2.0, subscribe to Ross Dawson’s blog, Trends in the Living Networks.

A New Conversation

Social networking has removed many of the obstacles that got in the way of better understanding prospects and customers, and serving them. Here are a few insights from trying to stay up with how Web 2.0 is changing how companies interact with prospects and customers:

Overbalance the scales with offers of knowledge, not sales hype. Instead of blasting out PDFs that tell prospects how great your company is, think about setting up weekly webinars where you invite in an industry expert that freely shares their knowledge of what’s working in the area your products, services or software deliver value. Before you dismiss this as just for the Fortune 1,000 realize that industry experts need PR coverage too and often you can get them do these in exchange for promoting their practice.
Define a Web 2.0 strategy now for your company and start executing on it fast. The two best bloggers in this area are Josh Bernoff and Charlene Li of Forrester who write Groundswell. These two authors, through their analysis of social networking and the Web 2.0 landscape, continually show how transparent and more connected previously isolated social networks, both in private and commercial areas, have become. What also emerges from their analysis is that when Web 2.0 technologies are used for connecting with customers, sales hype is dead. Informative, knowledgeable content that solves a complex question or problem for a customer is all that matters. Blogging to deliver solutions to customers in the form of knowledge generates real leads. It takes some companies a year or so to see any sales from this, yet it is hardly time wasted. These companies have changed how relevant they are to customers by delivering significant value without first asking for an order. Sales follow knowledge.
Consider your own YouTube University. Getting a channel on YouTube to upload videos that can be inexpensively produced is another approach to gaining a reputation as a company willing to share knowledge with potential and present customers. The development of your own YouTube University also needs to have periodic updates, fueling new traffic in the process. It’s a fairly large resource commitment to make, yet getting your best product experts onto your own YouTube channel can increase your company’s credibility across the industry and with prospects.
Work with any channel, technology or services providers to offer them participation in your trade shows and events, and vice versa. This works well as many partnerships have overlapping customer bases, yet have their own unique market segments as well. Developing this type of partnership significantly reduces the costs of trade shows and increases face-time with prospects, a critical part of lead generation.
Understand that Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) AdWords is only as effective as your landing pages, lead management process and continual managing of keywords. Google has delivered some exceptional tools in this area during 2008, including the ability to optimize a landing page design by testing it iteratively before its launched. This is the largest lead generation strategy for many technology companies, and their continually improving of landing pages and key words generates significant results.

Knowledge Is Power

I’ve not spent years studying lead generation, yet what I have seen is that many companies are still doing very well with leads despite news about the economy this year.I’m convinced it’s because they have worked very hard using the strategies discussed here to get and stay relevant to prospects and customers. They’re delivering more knowledge, value, insight and intelligence than anyone else.

As a result, they’re trusted more and sales happen. Lead generation cannot be reduced to a series of causal factors; it all begins with trust in your company. In a Web 2.0 World, earning and retaining that trust is much more about offering insight and knowledge first.

A New Way to Search: Use Your Mouse

Don Reisinger — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 21:19:48 +0000

Here at TechCrunch 50, there are a slew of interesting companies worth writing about on-stage. But I came across one in the Demo Pit that’s just as noteworthy.

Called KallOut, the service allows you to search the Web from a Word doc or email without minimizing the screen and going to the Web. It replaces that with a couple clicks of a mouse. According to the company, its research shows that users can search the Web up to ten times faster by using KallOut. I’m not sure it’ll be that fast, but it’ll definitely improve efficiency.

After installing KallOut, you can click on a small KallOut box over every supported term (there are 100 million of them) contained in documents, email, or websites. (The boxes are small, and not too distracting). By clicking that box, a pop-up is displayed and shows the best search terms for YouTube, Wikipedia, Google, IMDb, and more. If you want to view one of those links, KallOut displays a small window bringing you to the site, while still letting you work in the document or online. It’s not too useful when you’re in your browser, but KallOut’s pop-up box could be extremely useful when you’re working in a Word document and you don’t want to keep switching between windows to input a search term into Google.

KallOut can search a slew of sites, including Twitter, The New York Times, and those mentioned above, and should offer more support for other services soon.

Overlay.TV Helps You Customize, Monetize Streaming Video

Jason Kincaid — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 13:00:47 +0000

Overlay.TV, a startup that lets users augment streaming videos with customized text, audio, images, and links, has launched to the public. The service overlays videos from a number of video sharing sites with a new layer containing this customized content, which can be used for entertainment purposes or as an easy (and potentially effective) means of monetizing video.

To use Overlay.TV, you first give the site the source URL of the video you’d like to modify. Overlay then streams this video from the original host (the site doesn’t host any video content, so it shouldn’t have to worry about the copyright violations that plague sites like YouTube). After loading the video, users are free to add their own content as part of a new layer with options that include text, links, custom images, and clip art. The site includes some basic timeline functionality, so you can set specific times for each item to fade in or out, but it can be hard to finetune the position and timing of each element.

Okay, so what the heck is Web 3.0?

John Brandon — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 10:55:30 +0000

The lurching, heaving behemoth of the Web will become a self-feeding entity someday, symmetrical and aligned with itself, ubiquitous and pervasive, not constrained by the browser or even a PC. That’s the vision for the world wide Web after Web 2.0 – a concept where apps are islands, users interact only through portals that let them interact, programming languages don’t understand each other, and we’re limited by what the OS, the network, the browser, and the computer will permit.

I see Web 3.0 as a break from the computer altogether, something that exists outside of a keyboard and a mouse. As crazy as it sounds, there’s a small wireless clock radio called Chumby that you might call a good example of Web 3.0. It’s essentially a streaming media device that can play YouTube videos and show RSS feeds.

The Democrats Lose: Comparing the Convention Web Sites

Akshay Sura — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 21:33:57 +0000

I've been fighting this sinking feeling that we're headed for another four years (or eight) of a Republican President. Not that I have anything against John McCain except that I'll never vote for him. But I'm a pretty staunch Democrat, and it'd be nice to blame my own party for the world's problems for a change.

In the last presidential election, I formulated a theory that the most social media-savvy party would win. John Kerry and the DNC pretty much screwed the pooch every chance they got. Bush, on the other hand, had some remarkably media-savvy folks doing everything from real-time blogging and spin of debates to carrying their Swift Boat campaign to YouTube.

Kerry, of course, went on to lose by 3 million popular votes and a lot more states.

Could John Kerry have reached another 3 million people online? Dunno. But surely a few smart moves online could've helped when his image started to crumble.

Fast forward. It's 2008. The Democratic National Convention is going on now, and the Republicans start theirs in a week or so. So I decided to compare their respective convention sites based on simple stuff.

I may just have to change my party affiliation.

Broken Links: Democrats Lose

I checked the Republican National Convention site using Integrity. 1000 pages, no broken links. A few timeouts, but that was it.

I checked the Democratic Convention site. 2000 pages, 200+ broken links. Ouch.

Democrats lose.

Social Media Hooks

Then I checked each site for social media 'hooks': Ways to easily follow each party on Digg, Twitter, etc.

The Republicans seem to have their act together:

The Democrats don't. They opted for 'gavel to gavel' hidef video. Which is neato, but not quite as helpful. Plus they made a totally unexplainable technology choice. But I'll get there in a second.

Brand

The Democrats have billed their convention as open to all. Their home page, though, looks more like a Nike commercial:

It's pretty. It's also utterly devoid of any updates, any text, or any call to action for me, a long-suffering Democrat. Oh, yeah, and given how many e-mails and phone calls I've gotten from the party asking for unity, don't you think the home page should, I dunno, ask for unity?!

Oh, yeah, and the DNC home page still shows 'one hour to go' as one of the blog headlines, 24 hours later. Way to stay up to date, guys.

The Republicans' home page, on the other hand, is kind of folksy, like you're going to a county fair:

Not my style, but I'm not their audience. And their page has several calls to action: Form a local 'watch party' (which somehow makes me think of the McCarthy era, but no one's perfect) or sign up for e-mail updates. The DNC site has the e-mail signup too. But I could actually find it on the Republican site.

Video: PHAIL

I'm old, so I'm not sure I used 'Phail' right. But the Democratic National Convention site uses Silverlight for all video:

Huh?

Why on earth wouldn't you use YouTube, or another video streaming service, or at least use Flash on your own server?

So, playing video on the DNC site required that I download not one, but two plugins. Not a major hardship for me. But kind of dumb if you're trying to spread the word to as many people as possible.

Oh, did I mention the dire warning message I got when I tried to install the plugins:

In 2012, when you're running to unseat John McCain, try using Flash, which has a ridiculously large user base. Or at least get up-to-date certificates for your plugins.

I know, Microsoft probably wrote them a big honking check to use Silverlight. But isn't "we're for sale" kind of the wrong message to send when you're trying to elect a President? Even if it's true?

To Be Fair

The Republican National Convention site has its problems, too: Two conflicting e-mail signup forms, a writing style that makes me cringe and a candidate that can't remember how many houses he owns.

It's About the Effort, Stupid

It cost about $15 million to prepare the Pepsi Center for the Democratic National Convention. Plus a whole lotta money for security.

I'd cheerfully have built their web site for, oh I dunno, $250,000. My therapy bills would probably top that by the time we were done.

For this tiny slice of the pie:

I would have cheerfully made the effort run a link checker on the damned site. I would've thrown in a few social media links for good measure, made sure their plugins worked properly, and hit them with furniture when they mentioned using Silverlight as their video platform.

I hope I'm wrong. At least a President from my party will take my money and give it to the poor, instead of taking it and giving it to Iraq. But if not, you guys know where to find me in 2012.

Whither DART Search?

Andrew Goodman — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 18:04:00 +0000

SES San Jose 2008 is now in the books and another Google Dance -- that annual bash that provides us all with so much safe, clean YouTube fodder -- has come and gone. Among the various features and benefits -- upscale backyard barbecue fare, free beer, modified karaoke, dancing, and light shows -- is the most fascinating spectacle of all: Googlers meeting other Googlers. (Oftentimes, I ran across Googlers just sticking with their own little clique and talking among themselves, but what do you expect... it's a "campus".)

Google is such an enormous entity by now that it carries a real risk of the right hand not knowing what the left hand is doing. Overall, though, the company does a pretty good job of keeping its initiatives in sync.

But if Googlers are always needing to meet other Googlers for the first time, imagine the effort of digesting a large company in the digital ad space whose founding predated Google's by two years, and which brings to the table a variety of legacy technologies and platforms along with its own corporate culture. Googlers, meet DoubleClickers!

Click to continue reading...

Google Tries Milking Mobile YouTube for Ad Money

Jeff Meisner — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 18:52:31 +0000

Search engine giant Google has begun testing video ads on its mobile version of YouTube in the U.S. and Japan. The move is an attempt by the Mountain View, Calif.-based search engine to monetize YouTube’s video ad potential. Google bought YouTube for $1.65 billion in October 2006. The move is typical for Google, reflecting its penchant for experimentation, said Laura Martin, an analyst with Soleil Media Metrics. “They’re being aggressive because they’re looking for the killer app for video ads. They’re just trying a lot of different things.”

A YouTube Experiment

The announcement came from Christine Tsai, a YouTube product marketing manager, via an official blog, one of the many ways Google releases company news to the public.

“You may have noticed that we started running a test of display ads on select pages of the YouTube mobile site in the U.S. and Japan,” Tsai wrote. “This is our first step in testing mobile advertising for YouTube — it will give you a new way to interact with content on the go, while allowing us to learn how video viewers engage with mobile advertising. Our test advertisers will also have an additional branding tool at their disposal and the opportunity to reach the millions of people who visit YouTube every day on their phones.”

Make Your Content Work for You: Creating and Promoting Viral Content

Kyle Robbins — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 07:05:56 +0000

Viral Content: The only kind of virus people actively seek. Google’s paying millions for it, making a huge purchase of the king of viral content, YouTube over the past few years. And if Google sees viral content as the wave of the future, who am I to disagree. If you haven’t heard the term “Viral Content” you have at least been exposed to the idea… Creating content that spreads rapidly around the internet through word of… mouse.

With the cost of quality traffic rising and reaching and maintaining top search engine position becoming more and more difficult as EVERYONE is moving to the net, viral content blows up one of the most spouted off cliche of all time… “NOTHING IS FREE”. The exposure and added traffic that an amazing piece of content can generate is free. That’s the beauty… with a truly viral piece of content, everyone else does your promotion for you, letting you sit back and enjoy the ride.

While some viral content has much more “exposure power” than others, every type of site in nearly every niche can produce some type of viral content. Different sites offer different ceilings, with humor, video, entertainment, and gaming sites offering huge platforms for amazing amounts of viralness. But even if you own something more, umm, boring, you can still reap the benifits of everyone else promoting your site.

Here’s a few tips for creating viral content and an example of each:

1. Give your visitors tools to download or use that relates to your content. If you own a financial blog you might use a microsoft access spreadsheet that you keep your budget with. It would make sense to brand that spreadsheet with your logo, create a link or two on the sheet, clean it up really nice, and release it with your post on balancing your budget. If your visitors download and use that, they’ll see your logo and have many opportunities to continue visiting your site.

2. Consider what tools you use daily in your niche and/or are asked for by your visitors and offer them to your visitors. Say you have a baseball blog and everyday write articles using tons of numbers and stats… from OPS to OBP to ERA to WHIP. Why not create a feature that shows what those numbers are, how to figure them out, and give a calculator that they can add to their site that will do the work.

3. Think like a chain letter! I’m sure you get them still. Those stupid letters that say “if you don’t pass it on, you will die or have bad luck or lose your hair… And if you do, you’ll find your love, millions of dollars, and happiness.” Now, everyone in the world knows these are fake and stupid… Yet people still pass them on because, well, maybe they aren’t fake. And it can’t hurt right? The power of suggestion is a VERY powerful thing indeed. Use it to your advantage!

4. Use Guides, Lists, and Humor! People love top 10 lists, they love bullets, and they ADORE humor!