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Patent Problems Pending Over Web Apps?
The runaway success of OfficeMax's "Elf yourself" upload-your-face-on-an-animated-character campaign attracted lots of attention, but not just from the millions of consumers who sent elves to their family and friends. In late 2007, an obscure New York company called PixFusion filed a lawsuit against OfficeMax and its agency, Toy, for violating patents titled "method and apparatus for producing an electronic image" that covers the process of uploading and cropping a picture online.
The parties quietly settled a month later for a six-figure licensing fee, according to sources. Nearly two years later, the ad industry is worried about the precedent. The 4A's is mounting a lobbying effort for a patent-reform bill under consideration on Capitol Hill, and agencies are warning that contracts with clients need to be changed to avoid potentially catastrophic liability from specious patent claims for common technology. "It's not a new phenomenon, it's just manifesting itself in the marketing world as more campaigns are using software," said Rick Kurnit, a lawyer at Frankfurt Kurnit Klein & Selz who represents several agencies. The marketing industry, in fact, appears destined to face some of the same nettlesome problems that have plagued the tech world. One of the thorniest is the vast number of patents for what appear to be very simple mechanisms and processes, like uploading and cropping a photo. Those on the receiving end of these claims call the holders "patent trolls" for holding large numbers of patents and filing lawsuit after lawsuit. To date, agencies have drawn intermittent attention from patent owners. Typically the lawsuits lead to quiet settlements with a licensing agreement.
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New Online Ad Models/Placements That Will Make Money
This is the final slice of the Calacanis keynote, where he concludes by showing off some of his ideas for online content sites to start effectively monetizing their audience’s attention. For example, he shows off a movie trailer that could run before users are allowed to start their Facebook session. He asks how many people in the audience would stop using Facebook or Twitter if they had to put up with ads before they used them. Although few people raised their hands in such a public setting, I tend to think that a lot of people would start to desert these services if they start to cram advertising down the audience’s throats. Also - not sure if advertising is all that viable a business model to base your hopes on - with the economy in such shambles, businesses have cut back on advertising in ways that would have seemed impossible only a few years ago. At the end, he returns to his attention-grabbing theme of “Just take the money! We can destroy traditional media once and for all!”
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What Social Media Means for Search
Advertising Age - Homepage 351 days ago | Comment
The separation between search and social media is melting away, and a new paradigm is taking hold. Finding the right content is as much about whom it comes from as where you find it. By building a network of credible sources via social media, we're able narrow our "searches" to a select group of people whom we trust. -
Noovo Press Coverage Today
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Marketing Chiefs: Think Like a Start-up Brand - CMO Strategy
Panicky markets. Dazed consumers. Shifting distribution. Eroding margins. Disappearing budgets. An atomized media environment. Established brands used to pulling predictable business levers are likely to be in for a rude awakening in 2009, unless they substantially reinvent their marketing approaches. To survive in this new-world disorder, brands will have to dig deeper, move faster and execute perfectly the first time, every time. Just like a start-up. Start-ups are unique. They tackle their challenges with every imaginable limitation, and because of those limitations, the stakes couldn't be higher. Every move a start-up makes, no matter how well it is funded, is approached as if it were a "bet-the-company" initiative -- because more often than not, it is. As we enter 2009, with companies such as GM and Citigroup on the brink, with venerable 250-year-old brands such as Waterford Wedgwood filing for bankruptcy and 73,000 retail doors projected to be shuttered by the end of the second quarter, some of the answers ironically seem to lie in strategies of the most risky ventures, not in the tried-and-true.
That said, here are some smart start-up strategies to consider:
1. Tell consumers why your product is important.
Start-ups can't afford to be cute or oblique. High-impact and relevant benefit/feature and feature/benefit marketing is critical. Effective advertising is going to require a different kind of creativity for the foreseeable future. Consumers aren't in the mood to be amused; they want to be reassured. Empathy is preferable to edgy when you're talking to consumers who have no idea whether their last paycheck is the one they just cashed. Which is why Hyundai's current "Assurance" campaign seems so on-target. When you're asking for their money, make the case and make consumers care. Just like a start-up does when it launches an amazing product no one has ever heard of and doesn't think he or she needs.2. Sweat the small stuff to maximize the customer experience.
Like a start-up, there is no tolerance for executional inconsistency in a down market. That's because every purchase decision, large and small, is highly scrutinized with consumers looking for any excuse to walk away. In this environment, seemingly basic activities such as in-store merchandising, package design, website navigation, customer service and support, and return policies can be sharpened to become key differentiators and real revenue drivers. Delivering consistently excellent execution across the entire brand experience doesn't necessarily cost more. It requires laser focus, just like you see in every Apple Store and Costco. There's no faster, more efficient way to stimulate repeat purchases, create brand loyalty and perhaps even gain category leadership than stepping up the quality of your execution.3. Create leverage with every move.
Even in a viral marketing environment where gaining awareness couldn't be more cost-efficient, few start-ups have the resources to directly advertise and market to their consumers at an effective ROI. Which is why every marketing dollar a start-up spends is done so with an eye to the leverage it creates in the sales channel, on the retail floor and among vendors and influencers such as trade and general media. Complicated breakthrough products such as DirecTV and Toyota Prius would have fallen flat without extensive channel marketing and enthusiastic retailer adoption. Think about who really drives sales of your products. Is it really the consumer or are there other audiences that are even more influential?In a resource-constrained environment, every audience is critical and must be marketed to as valued customers, especially employees. Employees, like everyone else, are freaked-out consumers and need even more communication and contact with your brand than other constituencies. That's because it is impossible to market with confidence when your people are not confident.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR David Ellis is president-CEO of VEO Group, a brand development consultancy based in Studio City, Calif.
4. Be bold. Be fearless.
Every company has lists of innovations, upgrades and new products that are in the "when we get around to it" pipeline. Now is the time to make those things happen. Some of the most innovative companies and products have emerged out of the ashes of economic disaster. Hewlett-Packard, Disney and Microsoft were formed during times of economic instability and weakness. Apple conceived and launched iTunes during the dot-com crash while the rest of Silicon Valley was wringing its hands wondering what happened to their stock options. Right now, MyShape, an online fashion start-up that sells women's apparel by body shape, not size, has strong momentum and growing sales, despite the overwhelming challenges to the retail sector.It's also an opportune time to grab leadership and market share. If you have the resources, now is a good time to use them. During the Depression, Procter & Gamble, Kellogg's and Chevrolet took advantage of their respective competitors' timidity by cutting against the grain and outspending them. As a result, P&G conquered the household. Kellogg's knocked Post off the breakfast table and Chevrolet put a big dent in Ford and became America's Car.
5. Embrace the inevitable.
Unlike the 2000 dot-com bust, which was primarily contained to one sector, the coming Depression 2.0 will cut broadly across every business. Rest assured, the company you marketed last year will have little relationship to the company it will become once we emerge out the other side. The sooner you face the reality that you're going to need to innovate your way out of this mess, the faster you will capitalize on the opportunities that lie ahead. -
The Four Viral App Objectives (a.k.a., “Social network application virality 101″)
Matej 1 year ago
| Comment (1)
A lot of folks have asked for more details on the way we measured and optimized viral app growth in the Stanford class I co-taught recently. So here’s a bit more info on methodology for measuring virality and what it means for an app to “go viral.”
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The Top 10 Thing people have done on the web
Miki 1 year ago
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Findings: Why You Don’t Need to Tweet to Get Traffic from Twitter
I used to promote my blog posts on Twitter, then when I left Twitter, noticed a significant loss in traffic. Yesterday, I did a blog post encouraging others to tweet then retweet my blog post, as you know, being on a Twitter hiatus gives a unique opportunity to try out some experiments.
By the numbers:
Here’s the stats from the experiment: In the last 24 hours, 199 folks tweeted these words “How Bloggers Should Inspire Retweets” within 24 hours.Although not all of them used the snipurl I created, there were 2,000 clicks and unique clicks 1,280. This means that the average tweet that linked to the post generated 10 clicks, and about 6.4 unique clicks per person.
There were 145 new followers to my twitter account, the daily average is new daily followers 88. This is a lift in follower increase of 60% beyond the daily average.
Google Web Analytics showed that to be the top viewed page in last 24 hours, with 954 views, the graph below indicates that traffic returned to patterns before I took my Twitter hiatus.
Above Graph: Last 30 days visitors according to Google Analytics to my blog, notice the dip when I started the hiatus on Jan 20th, also coupled by the holidays. On Jan 5th the twitter experiment started and brought visitors back up to normal levels.
Above Graph: Twitter was the top referrer of traffic over the last 24 hours.This means that:
- My experiment on ‘energizing’ (word of mouth) was successful from blog to twitter, learn about my goals.
- You don’t need to be on Twitter.com as an active user to gain traffic to your site.
- Since my twitter account wasn’t involved, the number of Twitter followers doesn’t matter as much as we once thought.
- If you have compelling content, and make it easy for people to share, they will, and then it will rapidly spread through the twitter WOM network.
- While I do have a good sized blog readership, a marketer with advertising budget could easily generate eyeballs to a blog with less subscribers, and potentially get similar results.
- If you read the comments, there were several vendors that are going to offer a tweet icon at the bottom of your blog post, or wordpress plugin, so expect to see more of these.
This experiment isn’t completely scientifically done, if this were for an official Forrester report, that I’d have several control groups, sample with a variety of different websites, blogs, and twitter accounts to find a pattern. The one conclusion is that I don’t need to tweet to get twitter traffic.
Helpful? Copy, Paste, then Tweet it!
Findings: Why You Don’t Need to Tweet to Get Traffic from Twitter http://snipurl.com/9k5xy
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Vote for Noovo at OpenWebAwards!
Nebojsa 1 year ago
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I have just voted, c'mon ppl lets help this baby on the road to world domination :)
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Twitter Copycat Yammer Already Earning Cold Hard Cash
Miki 1 year ago
| Comment (1)
Twitter may have amassed a sizable following, but six weeks after its launch, microblogging service Yammer--or Twitter with a business model as its being called--is already bringing in revenue, albeit small. The service, based in West Hollywood, California, is aimed at the corporate crowd and and as CEO David Sacks told the NYtimes.com, tries to help workers be more productive. Instead of asking, “What are you doing?” as Twitter does, it asks, “What are you working on?” The idea is apparently to stop all those emails that can be quickly answered from blocking up email boxes. So how does it earn money? Anyone with a work email can sign up for free. But if a company wants to join officially--which gives it more control over security and how workers use it--they must pay $1 a month for each employee signed on. The startup currently has 10,000 companies with 60,000 users signed up. Of those, 200 companies with 4,000 users are paying for the service. Some of the companies, too, are quite impressive. Telefonica (NYSE: TEF), the Spanish global operator, uses it in its 350 member R&D unit, while the UK’s BBC has some 500 employees trying it out. Twitter, meanwhile, is still casting about for a business model.
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Socialization & Monetization Social networking is quickly gaining popularity on the mobile platform
... popularity on the mobile platform, the study said. One quarter (25%) of mobile users are accessing social networking sites from their mobile devices with one in seven respondents between 25-34 doing so for more than two hours/week. Some 64% percent of those surveyed reported that they would share content via their mobile phone with their contacts from social networking sites if it were easier to do so. azuki-systems-time-spent-social-networking-2008.jpg In terms of mobile advertising, almost 70% of mobile users said they would watch mobile ads in exchange for free access to mobile content. Additionally, if their mobile phones had location tracking capabilities that would present them with promotions for local businesses, more than 65% would take advantage of this opportunity. About the survey: The survey was conducted with more than 275 US mobile consumers of varying demographic backgrounds.
more at : http://www.marketingcharts.com/interacti...
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Geode Firefox Add-on Will Tell Browser Where You Are
Mozilla is planning to release a new add-on for Firefox called Geode. The add-on, which will be made available to beta testers Tuesday, will make the browser more location-aware, adding greater relevancy to local search and other location-based web services.
Wired.com
