Cam Balzer's Web-Cite

An appeal to the adjectival naming body for holiday weekdays

Black Friday. Now CyberMonday (or CyberMondays if you will). Don't the other holiday days deserve techno adjectives too? I propose:

• Hyper Tuesday
• WWWWednesday
• Information Superhighway Thursday
   
• TCP/IP Friday (for all those poor Fridays after Black Friday)

C2C banner buys?

Fun new alpha from Yahoo: Me2U, which is basically person to person marketing, for fun. You create a nice flash ad unit, the squarish size that shows up all over the place on content pages on Yahoo, too frequently with inhuman, badly drawn dancing automaton's trying to sell you a refi. Then you enter your target's emails and they see a personalized ad among the other ads they are (probably) tuning out...

Send personalized messages to your friends and family as banner ads on the Yahoo! network.

Very cool: ads become "hackable" and useful for the little guy. Aside from classifieds, which Craig and his list have done in, who would have previously perceived a need for this kind of functionality. Nice idea Y!.

Open question: you've got so much great web 2 stuff under your umbrella, can you just make another big play here, blow through some of the internal barriers you seem to face in product dev / management and tie all Y! things social into a big awesome bundle.

Beacon and Typepad

I like this. TypePad is letting bloggers who are Facebook members to automagically notify the Facebook newsfeed when they post stories.

Offering Facebook Beacon on TypePad means that you can now choose to share your new blog posts with your friends on Facebook. (Everything TypePad: Features)

Smart of TypePad to make this an opt-in feature. For each blog, you choose whether to be prompted to send the stories to FB in the blog's configuration.

Can't the other sites using beacon do the same? why wouldn't zappos or overstock market this as an opt-in feature to their users?

One thing I don't get about the negative response: don't you have to click OK to these dialogues before the item is added to your feed? I mean, that could be a bit clearer from a usability POV, but all the prompts I've seen make it pretty clear that you can delete any story or that you can say OK.

No surprise that a Murdoch company has bigger ambitions!

MySpace looks to be trying to follow Google's lead by taking their purpose built ad platform to a broader distribution network. Known as "FIM Serve" (FIM = Fox Interactive Media), it is being proffered to other Fox/News Corp properties and...

Ultimately we'll take the company off network and become an ad network for assets outside of the News Corporation empire. (News Corp builds online ad network)

Peter Levinsohn is quoted as saying this could happen as early as mid 2008.

I would expect this platform to provide performance marketers with both CPC and CPA opportunities.

Even Orwell fans not creeped out by profile targeting

I absolutely LOVE this test that David Berkowitz ran with Facebook's profile-targeted ads. Those ads allow marketers (or any individual with a credit card and a hankering for clicks... David is apparently both!) to target ads at FB member's interests. David targeted users whose profiles included "1984" as an interest with an ad asking if they thought this targeting was creepy. Results aren't scientific, but they show that even potentially paranoid lovers of Orwell aren't really that creeped out. David's account and comments from real ad clickers here: Facebook Ad Targeting: From 2007 To 1984.

Quick, someone test this on the even more paranoid readers of Pynchon or DeLillo!

But seriously... a potentially knottier question is whether those fans and their friends will be more creeped-out by seeing Social Ads that says

Cam became a fan of "The Crying of Lot 49"
Save now on other books you didn't really read in college. Bookstore.com

Marketers will need to handle this power deftly: too brazen and it will turn off both fans and their friends. Given the free access they give to the ad platform and the likelihood for unsophisticated marketers to act deftly, Facebook will need to be, well, authoritarian in policing! Hmmm...

(image from Shepherd Fairey's NineteenEightyFouria exhibition, strangely apropos...)

Whrrl - mobile + social + search

I don't think I've seen this particular straight in buzz-word rummy yet: mobile + social + search...

Overview from USATODAY: Give it a Whrrl: Service blends Net, friends' advice.

Will Google be "the next Google"?

Nice narrative overview from Forbes of the competing visions for the future of social networks and advertising, as promulgated by Facebook and Google over the last 10 days for so: Facebook, Google go to war over the future of advertising.

It does feel like the airy-fairy "untold opportunity" in social advertising has suddenly started to gel. The question now, reflecting back on the evolution of paid search: who is the next  Overture in this model and who will be the next Google? Who will get really close and set the stage for the next player to get it really really right?

Ad--or add?--value

Interesting synchronicity between Chris Anderson's thoughts on the unconsidered "negative externalities" of PR spam and Max Kalehoff's observation of the costs to consumers and advertisers of bombarding consumers with messages:

the cost of advertising for the consumer is rarely factored into marketing strategy or advertising planning. This is important because that cost translates to brand experience, affinity and equity. Fundamentally, how often have you ever heard a marketer ask: “Does our advertising — ultimately, our message — cause our customers to love or hate us?” The closest advertisers come to addressing this question — and this was especially true at Ad:tech — is in discussion of thresholds of tolerance. Thresholds of tolerance? That sounds like a framework more suited for discussions of pain or torture. (The Cost Of Advertising For Consumers)

One of the beauties of search marketing has always been that when the engines manage relevancy well, the advertising is a benefit, not a cost. As performance models begin to emerge in the social network space, the sliding scale between unnoticed skyscrapers and interruptive vs valuable ads will make all the difference. Introduce ANY real consumer cost (in creepiness or by tolling their social interactions) and they will flee to the next cool social platform in droves. Find a way to ad [sic] value and you've got the next Adwords.

Remember, you're being watched

In London on Remembrance Day (at least, that's what we Canadians call it). Striking to see bemedaled Veteran's in uniform around the city. Also saw a very timely exhibition at StolenSpace Gallery in Brick Lane: Shephard Fairey's NINETEENEIGHTYFOURIA. Very large scale works to smaller prints staring back at big brother. With it's palette of poppy reds and its subtext of the costs and trade-offs for freedom. Struck me as strangely appropriate to photograph people viewing and photographing the work.

The space is spectacular too, above the Old Truman Brewery Sunday Market. Additional work from Fairey's Obey series "deface" the area around the gallery. Brilliant work and entirely sold out, including the massive canvases. Maybe I can go back and steam one of the posters off the wall outside!

My photos on Flickr. More info at stolenspace.com and a great review from the London Times: Poster boy with a difference.

Chumby - what the?

As if i'm not online enough already, now there's a friendly little hunk of chumby to make that always-on(line) experience cuter, personal and more animated.