From time to time I talk about sports and Internet marketing here at Marketing Pilgrim. I do it mainly because I am a fan but even more so as a marketer because sports sells. Now being in the US, soccer (or football to the rest of the world) is not as dominant in terms of shear numbers and impact as a spectator sport. It does, however, count millions of youngsters as players of the game and many others catching on during the start of the World Cup in South Africa today.
It looks like the US and the rest of the world are taking notice. Beet.tv reports
Akamai, the world’s largest operator of a network of computers, today is showing on its Web site that it is the busiest day for bandwidth demand for news sites. With some 11 million visitor requests per minute to its network, up 233 percent from the normal demand at this time.
The previous record for most video requests was the Inauguration of Barack Obama.
Below is a screenshot of the Akamai “live” counter showing the impact on several continents with increased traffic.
All very interesting indeed especially if you have products and services to market to the World Cup soccer fan. Considering that this is essentially soccer’s “Super Bowl”, it will be interesting to see just how the Internet, social media and the whole Internet ecosystem effects the impact of the event and the growth of the sport in places like the US moving forward.
Of course, what would help is that teams win and progress through the tournament. Sports fans can be a fickle lot especially with so many ‘fair weather’ fans jumping on board for this big event.
Here’s to success for your team. In fact, tell us who you will be pulling for so we can see just where some of readers’ allegiances are.
Google has taken what was once their enhanced listings for local businesses, renamed them Google Tags and is rolling the program out nationwide. With local search becoming more and more important in the Internet marketing landscape this is welcome news for many who are trying to figure out the best way to get the most mileage out of listings that appear in the 7-pack map listing.
Here is what the listing would look like
The Google Blog tells us a little more:
For a flat monthly fee of $25, businesses can enhance their listings that appear on Google.com and Google Maps with a yellow tag that emphasizes specific information such as a coupon, video, website, menu, reservations, photos, or a custom message. Tags do not affect the ranking of the listings, and we clearly indicate which parts of the search result are sponsored.
Tags are also being shown in the mobile results so this offering while being national in scope is also available throughout the entire range of Google search options.
Greg Stirling over at SearchEngineLand discusses ways that this offering could impact businesses and Google as well
With Tags Google is trying to create a dead simple way for local businesses that have claimed listings in Google Places to further stand out and for Google to get incremental revenue from these businesses. Local listing ads, a more complicated, but higher profile local ad category appears to have been retired.
Finally Google is adding Posts
Posts, a new kind of Tag that enables business owners to create a custom message, is also live. These messages can be changed as often as the business owner would like, making it easy to let the world know about a special discount or limited-time offer.
So local goes loco with changes and innovations for your weekend use. Have a great one!
Is it Friday yet?
After last week’s abbreviated work-week, this week seems to be dragging on some. How’s your week going? Really? See if these Pilgrim Pick’s can brighten your day.
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There’s one question that seems to be asked of Twitter all the time: what’s the ROI?
I tend to reply with some smart alec comment such as “That’s like asking: what’s the ROI from my telephone!” Yeah, that doesn’t go down too well, but it’s true. Twitter is a channel, a tool. Just like your telephone, it has no ROI unless you put in place a strategy that can be measured.
Well, that may be all well and good, but Twitter’s not taking any chances. It’s not prepared to sit back and hope its business users are smart enough to figure out the “ROI of Twitter,” so it’s made an important acquisition. It’s just acquired an analytics company.
When Smallthought launched Trendly, a tool that helps web sites distinguish signal from noise in their Google Analytics data, we were among the first to try it…Therefore, it is with great pleasure that we announce the acquisition of Smallthought Systems. They have joined our analytics team and will focus on integrating ideas from Trendly into our current tools and building innovative realtime products for our future commercial partners.
Trendly is now closed to new customers, but according to its site, the service offered some pretty cool analysis. Stuff you can actual use!
Google AdWords would like you to know that you’re a loser.
Well that sucks, doesn’t it!
Wipe away that tear–it doesn’t mean that your father-in-law was right about you all along. Nope! While Google AdWords wants to tell you that you’re not up to par, it’s doing so in a kind way–and it wants to help.
The just launched “Analyze Competition” feature will help you understand how your AdWords campaign matches-up with others bidding on the same type of keywords:
‘Analyze competition’ examines your account’s activity over the past two weeks and lists categories that represent the products or services you’re advertising. Categories are based on actual Google.com search terms and are matched up against your keywords, ad text, and landing page text. For each category associated with your account, you’ll see a bar graph, which shows your individual performance compared to the average performance of other advertisers in the same category.
Let’s say you wanted to see how your click-thru-rate (CTR) compares to other advertisers. AdWords would give you a report like this:
I’m not a big-time AdWords user, so maybe I’m not hardcore enough to see the benefit of these reports. After all, it’s one thing to know you suck, but it’s another thing to know how to reduce your “suckitude.”
What are your thoughts on the usefulness of these new reports?
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Are you going to PubCon Masters Group Training in Austin?
Not your thing? Too far? Haven’t decided yet?
Or perhaps you’d like to double up on your small group training for that week?
Well, be sure to take a serious look at BlueGlass LA–two days of search and social marketing training from some of the smartest guys in the industry. A follow-up to their highly-rated Search and Social Summit, Chris, Tony, Loren, Dave et al are “putting the band back together” for what will likely be another great conference.
What else do you need to know? Attendance will be limited. It’s being hosted in Los Angeles, CA. Everything is included for just $495.
So what are you waiting for? Head to LA, then catch PubCon Masters Group Training in Austin, TX. Three days that will likely be the best investment in training you’ll make this year!
Yesterday, I had the opportunity to watch AOL’s CEO Tim Armstrong be interviewed by Slate’s Jacob Weisberg at the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s Innovation Days event during Internet Week in New York City. It was interesting to listen to Armstrong because he is an engaging guy. He comes off as very passionate about AOL and its efforts to re-establish itself as a leading brand in the Internet space. He talks about all of the things that people want to hear when it comes to the Internet and content generation.
It just so happens that this talk comes on the heels of AOL’s announcement that it is hiring hundreds of journalists to add to its current 500 staffers on the content side plus the 40,000 free lancers that are out there creating content about who knows what and God knows what.
FastCompany wonders aloud what all this means for ‘journalism’
Words like these, from AOL’s president of global advertising Jeff Levick don’t help: “We have insights into our audience, and can produce content they want, which leads to engagement, which leads to what advertisers want.” Content that ultimately snares the consumer, by hook or by crook, for the benefit of the advertisers? Doesn’t sound like journalism to us.
As with all things on the Internet, this story / announcement is ultimately about revenue. You can talk all day about hiring journalists. Armstrong during his talk proclaimed that the average new hire has 8.8 years of experience as a journalist. He also spoke about how they are sending people into the field to cover stories like a, gulp, real news organization would. This all sounds great but ultimately is this just a way to generate what Armstrong deemed “super networks” of content that will look to corral consumers into a pen and so that advertisers can whack this ‘captive audience’ with marketing messages?
The question is who wins and loses in this. Pure journalists are crying foul because the quality of this content is being questioned regardless of what credentials are being thrown around in talks. Marketers probably don’t care so much about quality as long as the audience is there.
AdAge reported on the announcement yesterday that David Eun, recently appointed president of AOL’s media and studios division claimed
“Our mission at this company is to be the world’s largest producer of high-quality content, period,” he said. “The content driving our traffic is home-grown, and 80% of it is now produced by folks on the AOL payroll.”
All of this talk and gathering of ‘content weaponry’ by AOL and competitors like Yahoo with its purchase of Associated Content and the independent player Demand Media makes for some interesting decisions coming up for marketers and advertisers.
The push is clearly to generate content that will be used to fill the void left by failing newspapers and traditional media as a whole. Who will be the winners and losers? Depends on which camp you want to believe. For the mass content producers the winner is both the content starved consumer and the advertisers that want to reach them. There are plenty of people, however, who are bemoaning this movement away from traditional journalism as the beginning of the end of quality and integrity first for journalism as a whole.
If Mr. Armstrong has anything to say about it one big winner will be AOL who is looking to get into the “great big pile of cash that is moving online”. When you hear it like that you wonder what is first: journalism or just plain old capitalism.
What do you think?
See that? That is Google’s homepage today. For everyone…in the world!
When Google announced that it would let users upload images to its homepage, it was cute. It gave me the ammo to suggest that Google was copying Bing–which was the first big search engine to go with the background images.
That’s still a legitimate observation, but here’s another one that I’ve not seen mentioned.
Google wants you to add an image to its homepage because that is exactly what you do to the background of your desktop, right? You customize your desktop with an image that makes you happy, makes you smile….makes you want to see your desktop!
That’s right, this is not so much Google copying Bing, but Google trying to make its homepage your new desktop. Google’s not just taking on Bing, but Windows 7 and Mac OS X.
Think about it. Bing shows you some random image on its homepage–to give you something to look at. Google’s letting you upload your own image so you’ll come back…over and over again.
Google has to walk an interesting line at times. It needs to keep itself at arms length from government scrutiny and activity but at the same time needs to be close enough to call on governments (as in worldwide) for assistance.
That is certainly the case as Google looks to the US government and European government for help in addressing Internet censorship in China. Google’s woes in China have been well documented and it is one of the rare moments where Google appeared to walked away from a fight. What might have really happened is that they just stepped back to regroup as The Canadian Press reports:
Google Inc.’s top lawyer said Wednesday that the world’s leading search engine is asking the U.S. and European governments to press China to lift Internet censorship, describing it as an unfair barrier to free trade.
David Drummond told reporters that western states should defend the free trade in information with the same kind of rules that they use to complain of China’s below-cost sale of products.
He said government talks are “the only way that it’s going to change, that this tide of censorship or this rising censorship is going to be arrested.”
Interesting talk coming from Google but it makes sense to take this approach. Even a company like Google is probably ill equipped to handle taking on the Chinese government on such an issue. Better to let the diplomats take care of this so now Google can stay at arm’s length and not do anything that would set off an international issue.
Since being attacked by Chinese hackers that were seeking the Gmail accounts of human rights activists Google has been careful in its talk around China.
Since late March, Google has been redirecting search requests from mainland China to Hong Kong, which doesn’t have the same restrictions.
“The cyber attack was sort of the final straw because we felt that it was increasingly hard to do business there in accordance with our values,” Drummond said, describing the company as in danger of becoming “part of the same apparatus” of Chinese state censorship.
“Censorship, in addition to being a human rights problem, is a trade barrier,” he said. “If you look at what China does — the censorship, of course, is for political purposes but it is also used as a way of keeping multinational companies disadvantaged in the market.”
“It should be obvious that the Internet sector is very important to the west and so we should be working on seeing that that kind of trade is protected,” he said.
Apparently some support is being offered by the French, German and US governments already, but this is likely to be an ongoing issue for some time to come. If Rome wasn’t built in a day then censorship in China certainly won’t disappear quickly (if ever).
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