With the rise of a huge number of copycat services that try to capitalize on the success of one venture without providing much in the way of differentiation or innovation, it is incredibly important to learn from the masters of innovation so that you can avoid falling in a similar trap.
Archive for July, 2007
4 Things That Are Horribly Wrong With Your Ad
After reading that Curtis (50 Cent) is going to sue an advertising company for $1 million – for illegally using his image in advertisements that encourage viewers to “shoot the rapper” to win a ring tone, an xbox 360, or another item, and inspecting it for a few minutes – I realized that the illegal use of the image was the least of the problems with the ad.
John Chow Speaks Out on Google, Technorati and More
John Chow has been very successful at making money online, but with this success he has also made some big enemies along the way. Google has dropped John from the top position for his own name to the bottom 50, and Technorati doesn’t show him on the list of top 100 blogs even though in his profile it shows he is ranked 48th.
SMX Social Media
Looking to learn more about social media? On October 16th and 17th in New York, [Danny Sullivan](http://www.searchengineland.com) and I will be co-chairing [SMX Social Media](http://searchmarketingexpo.com/smx_social07/). The show was designed to help you understand all of the social media sites out there as well as how you can leverage them.
The Power of Digg Top Users (One Year Later)
One year ago Rand Fishkin posted some quite interesting and at the same time incredibly damning statistics about how a small number of contributers were doing most of the work on Digg and were responsible for a majority of the content on the front page of the site. Here’s a look at new statistics, one year later.
Social Media Versus Traditional Media: Brand Impact Analysis
Social media marketing, if done right, can have a significant impact on brand awareness and popularity. However, many companies fail to utilize this cheap (and in many cases free) method of marketing. By looking at social media ranks for companies, and comparing it with mainstream media ranks for the same companies we can see which brands are taking advantage of this new medium and also draw conclusions about the effectiveness of social media.
Startups: Private Beta Invite Authenication Problems
While it is incredibly beneficial to use an invite-based system while your startup is in beta, the system is highly susceptible to spammers. Here are a few things to look out for.
ROMlet – Boast Your Content’s Popularity
Once you have written great content and have gotten the initial exposure, social proof is on your side. ROMlet is another way to use use social proof to your advantage and capitalize on your existing exposure to further propel your content.
4 Things We Can Learn From ‘The Google Story’
Steve Case, co-founder and at one point chief executive officer and chairman of America Online once remarked, “Ultimately the Google story is about product.” Here we discuss several things that you can learn from Google’s history and some that are readily apparent even by giving the search engine a superficial look.
How Google Will Save StumbleUpon
In March I wrote an article talking about how time-sensitive content doesn’t work on StumbleUpon and how it was a huge drawback of using the service. Today I learned that Google is creating a new META tag that will help similar problems.
