Publishing
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.”
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.
Publishing: Christian Science Monitor Saves Trees, Moves to Online Revenue Model
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Written By Noah Mallin | October 28, 2008 | Share This
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It’s amazing how a little economic crisis can clarify people’s thinking and give all kinds of already prevailing trends a hard nudge forward. Take the newspaper industry, which has been grappling for years with how to deal with declining readership offline and online revenues that stubbornly resist moving towards a level that will float their expensive newsroom operations. While many traditional newspaper publishers are responding with layoffs the venerable Christian Science Monitor is throwing in the daily newspaper towel entirely.
Social Media: Publishers Are Using Social Media to Entice Readers to Stick Around, Drive up Ad Revenue
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Written By Noah Mallin | October 13, 2008 | Share This
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I think it’s good form to begin a post by referencing the great Staten Island philosophers the Wu-Tang Clan. They once titled a song “C.R.E.A.M” which meant: Cash Rules Everything Around Me. Never was that more true than in our current economy in which GM looks at hooking up with Ford, 401k’s melt like ice sculptures in the Sahara and dogs and cats are living together – mass hysteria! To which the publishing industry might say “Welcome to the world we’ve been living in for the past few years.”
Traditional publishers are desperately looking to the Internet to make up for declining revenues for their offline product but as of yet most have not hit on a strategy that can balance what they are losing offline with more revenue online.
Enter social media.
Online Reputation Management: United Misses the Flight on SEO and Paid Search
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Written By Noah Mallin | September 11, 2008 | Share This
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Yesterday I blogged about some of the big themes around the recent United Airlines stock selloff and the old bankruptcy news article that sparked it, all while working in a charming Western-themed metaphor. Today, I want to touch on just the reputation management aspect of the story through paid search and SEO which I think remains unexplored – until now.
Just to recap briefly, early in the week the Florida Sun Sentinel’s website belched a 2002 story about United Airlines declaring bankruptcy onto its most viewed page when some sort of lonely bankruptcy buff clicked on it at a low-traffic time. The Googlebot scraped the story and in part because of the Sun Sentinel’s bad SEO sent it along to Google News as fresh where it proceeded to wend its way to Wall Street via Bloomberg where it tanked United’s stock 75% before trading was halted.
Search News: United Airlines Story Shows That the Internet Wild West is Now Settled Territory
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Written By Noah Mallin | September 10, 2008 | Share This
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For a good chunk of the 90s and even the 00s people have referred to the wide-open constantly evolving online world as akin to the “Wild West” – lawless and wild with plenty of things happening away from the prying eyes of strangers. Well that’s been dead for quite some time now and yet companies and individuals persist in acting as if it’s still true.
The recent unpleasantness caused by an archived article on the Florida Sun Sentinel’s website is a good example. It seems that over the weekend a story from 2002 about United Airlines entering bankruptcy appeared on the Most Popular page of the Florida Sun Sentinel’s website. Along came the Googlebot which could only find the date that the story went hot, thus making it look like news rather than archival. The erroneous story then traveled a path that led it to Bloomberg News where investor’s saw it, panicked, and began dumping United stock. This was magnified by electronic trading which kicked in to dump even more shares once the selloff began.
Social Media: Technorati Expands its Search Niche, Becoming Mini-Google
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Written By Noah Mallin | August 26, 2008 | Share This
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Technorati has always been a strange beast – neither fish nor fowl. Often mentioned in the same breath as Digg and Delicious it’s used by many passively as an aggregator of blog postings. Here’s how Technorati describes their mission:
Technorati is the recognized authority on what’s happening on the World LiveWeb, right now. The Live Web is the dynamic and always-updating portion of the Web. We search, surface, and organize blogs and the other forms of independent, user-generated content (photos, videos, voting, etc.) increasingly referred to as “citizen media.”
Online Advertising: Grasping an Ad Network’s Reach
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Written By Noah Mallin | August 14, 2008 | Share This
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One of the great things about search advertising is that there is a wealth of hard data out there that can tell you how many people are searching for a particular keyword before you bid on it. When you serve advertising on a search engine results page you reach people who are searching in order to take an action either now or later.
On the other hand, advertising on publishing sites more closely resembles other forms of traditional print and television and share with those mediums a degree of uncertainty over whether the people seeing your ad are actually intereste din your message. The uncertainty grows when dealing with ad networks which can claim, as one former ad network employee tells me, to “reach 90 percent of the Internet” — an astounding and meaningless figure.
SEM: Using Google Insights to Explore Old Media’s Geographic Reach
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Written By Noah Mallin | August 12, 2008 | Share This
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Newspapers by their nature tend to be local. Their location is even part of their name in most cases. Even so, certain newspapers are so influential that their reach extends beyond their location to other parts of the country and even the world. I thought it would be interesting to see how this might be reflected in Google’s dandy new toy, Insights for Search.
I picked four of the best know daily papers in the United States, The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post and the Miami Herald. As a ringer I added USA Today to see if a paper that bills itself as a national one really has national scope online. The timeframe was calendar year 2007.
Weekly Search Roundup: This Week’s Search News Fully Vetted for Counter Governmental Rhetoric – Now Go Watch The Olympics
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Written By Noah Mallin | August 8, 2008 | Share This
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The glorious Olympics games are here! Everybody enjoy the sweet-smelling fog that has enveloped Beijing – it is all natural and not in any way related to industrial activity. Kindly remove the insulting facemask and enjoy the following news. Or else.
Girls Gone Wild Yahoo Style
Forrest Gump once mused that “Life is like a box of chocolates – you never know what you’re gonna get…” Less nauseating but still chocolate boxey, automated tagging within articles can produce a similar “Surprise! You just bit into coconut!” effect. Automated tagging is when you drag your mouse over a word in an article online and it opens a box (not of chocolates) that directs you to more information on that topic – often sponsored. This is all well and good until the phrase is “underage girls.”