Blogging
Social Media: FTC Blogger Rules Foster Double Standard
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Written By Noah Mallin | October 6, 2009 | Share This
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I’m a freak for car magazines. I read the British monthly Car (at 10 bucks a pop no less), Automobile, even Motor Trend - a title that never fails to raise a giggle from my wife for it’s retro specificity. They all feature monthly road tests of cars, all of which are provided for testing gratis by the manufacturers.
In fact, Car used to have a wonderful columnist named George Bishop (who is sadly now in the great beyond) who would fill his column with the intimate behind the scenes details of the lavish car launch junkets manufacturers would throw for journalists - often involving trips to exotic locales, free lodging and meals, and copious behind the wheel boozing. All the other journalists were taking part in the fun too, it’s just that Bishop saw fit to weave the freebies into his articles.
While these events have been toned-down considerably for the auto industry some version of these launch junkets still exist in other industries and free samples or products are a matter of course for any company seeking to see their product in print.
It’s interesting then that the FTC has decided to clamp down on bloggers who review products for money in a way that seems to be more onerous than the standard that journalists are held to.
Make no mistake, the meat of the ruling codifies the best practices I tell our clients about every day: transparency and authenticity. Paying bloggers for coverage should always merit disclosure.
Social Media and Publishing: Revolutions Online and Offline
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Written By Noah Mallin | June 15, 2009 | Share This
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When Iran had their most recent popular revolution in 1979, people around the world had no 24 hour news source to convey what was happening. CNN would be launched the following year by Ted Turner so coverage was limited to shows like ABC’s Nightline (which was created in response to the hostage crisis which grew out of the uprising) and the regularly scheduled network new programs, as well as the daily newspapers like The New York Times and newsweeklies like Time magazine. The Internet? A gleam in Al Gore’s eye.
Blogging: CNN and Larry King Caught Stealing Blog Content - UPDATE
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Written By Noah Mallin | May 11, 2009 | Share This
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Accusing Larry King and CNN of content theft on Larry King’s blog may seem pretty brazen but it has and continues to happen. It’s interesting that the AP and several major media organizations including Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal have been huffing and puffing lately over news aggregators who link to their content. At least when that happens, the aggregators (like Google News and Huffington Post) give attribution and send visitors who want more info to the main story.
Search 3.0: Direct Response Marketing in an Indirect World
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Written By Noah Mallin | April 23, 2009 | Share This
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The bread and butter of the paid search world (and of many forms of advertising and marketing) is good ‘ol direct response. Though not as “sexy” as some other forms of marketing when done right it is swift and to the point. Click here to buy my stuff.
On a search engine reply page a good direct response ad can be gold, indicating clearly and relevantly to the user that you got, to paraphrase James Brown, what they need.
In Search 3.0 however, those intangible qualities that are associated with brand marketing come tromping onto the reply page like a high school marching band playing “Louie Louie”, whether marketers want them to or not.
Search 3.0: Susan Boyle Links Her Way to Stardom
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Written By Noah Mallin | April 20, 2009 | Share This
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Yep, I got Susan Boyle’s name in the headline of the post – and now the first paragraph. I’ve now joined hundreds of thousands of bloggers who have done the same, illustrating one of the most interesting new principles to emerge from Search 3.0.
In Search 2.0, optimizing for search engines was achieved in part by link building and sharing with other websites. While this is still a valid part of strategy in Search 3.0, the new wrinkle is that the platform size and strength has moved up a level from individual websites to social media sites, interlinked and connected loosely with each other and directly through well-optimized profiles.
Social Media: Facebook, Tumblr Switch Channels
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Written By Noah Mallin | February 18, 2009 | Share This
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Facebook learned a lesson in both how to and how not to engage with their community over the last few days. By changing their Terms of Service (TOS) quietly in a way that highlights the permanent nature of sharing information and posting items online, they riled up their users and the blogosphere. They have since reverted back to the old TOS and opened up a forum for users suggestions and comments about how their content should be used.
Reprise Media Managing Partner Joshua Stylman shared his take on this in a post for Advertising Age’s Digital Next column. He makes a number of important points there but I want to highlight one line in particular that should be taken to heart by anyone engaging in search and social media marketing (and indeed any online marketing):
“Regardless of your individual perspective, the one certainty is that there has never been a lower barrier to produce and distribute content for others to see. With that emerges a new responsibility for people (and companies as well) to think about their own digital footprint.”
When I spoke to Josh about this he elaborated in a way I found striking – saying (and I’m paraphrasing here) that we operate online as our own media channels now – from a corporate level right on down to the individual.
Link Sharing: Digg Finds it Harder to Win Friends, Influence People in Social Media
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Written By Noah Mallin | January 22, 2009 | Share This
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The idea behind Digg is simplicity itself – read an article or post online, like it, let other people know so they can vote on it and watch everyone’s page views skyrocket. The reality has turned out to be a test case in how a social media platform can turn sour. For marketers and others who want to promote content, it may already be time to pack it up and move on to a new platform.
We did some Digg promotion in the past for SearchViews but the number of people required to get anything to really go viral never equaled the effort we had to put in. Recently a colleague asked me why I don’t do more Digg promotion of posts again and I simply said, “Why bother.”
The Year in Search: Your Favorite SearchViews Posts from 2008 on Search and Social Media
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Written By Noah Mallin | January 5, 2009 | Share This
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After the rich meal that was 2008 it’s only appropriate that we take a moment to pause and savor the taste that some of the favorite posts from the last year have when belched up. Accordingly we’ve compiled your favorites for each month of 2008 based on traffic and user response and placed them in reverse order Benjamin Button style. Did we miss your favorite? Let us know in the comments or send me a message on Twitter at @nmallin.
The Year in Search and Social: How Did We Do? Rating Last Year’s Predictions
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Written By Noah Mallin | December 22, 2008 | Share This
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This is the time of year when we at SearchViews like to gather our best minds together to prognosticate on what the next year will bring us in the world of search engines and social media. Before we whip out the Ouija Board to contact Dionne Warwick, celebrity psychic Sylvia Browne, Ms. Cleo, and TV’s Patricia Arquette from Medium, we wanted to look back and see how accurate our last round of predictions were. Or, “Were our predicts totally redic?”, as the kids might say.
So here are our top 3 bullseyes and top 3 fails from last year:
Social Media: PR Folks and Bloggers – Why Can’t We All Just Get Along?
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Written By Noah Mallin | December 18, 2008 | Share This
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While the most recent presidential election seems to have gone some way towards healing the red state/blue state divide, there is another even more yawning chasm that yearns to be bridged in America today. Of course I mean the gulf that exists between public relations professionals and bloggers.
How bad is it out there? Let’s take this story from yesterday which is the flipside of my post last week about how Scott Monty and Ford are rocking social media outreach. Ford’s cross-town car making rival Chrysler stuck their foot in it big time during the traditional auto industry preview show and tell with industry journalists. This is the time period before the Detroit auto show when the car companies reveal future product plans for the next few years in exchange for honoring an embargo agreement. While GM and Ford were sure to include bloggers Chrysler made it clear that they were not welcome. Stupid move.