The Browser: MySpace purge draws sharp reactions - Mar. 31, 2006

The Browser: MySpace purge draws sharp reactions - Mar. 31, 2006

MySpace purges 200,000 profiles with 'objectionable content'... As the blurb notes - the biggest risk is that when Friendster did this everyone bolted... for MySpace. Will this help their competitors and wanna-bes?

AUDIENCE FOR ONLINE VIDEO GROWING RAPIDLY

AUDIENCE FOR ONLINE VIDEO GROWING RAPIDLY

Looks like the televison commercial is jumping on to the web. According to AdAge, 2/3rds of web viewers also watch the commmercials...

This may be because the ads are usually shorter (15 seconds or so) and all the material is short form on demand... news clips, etc.

Interestingly, the estimates for total expenditures in this medium vary wildly:

Media buyers note that until consumers are viewing video as often as they do other content, planners cannot be certain how much of their marketing budgets to set aside for video. The video arena is so volatile that estimates of video ad spending ranges dramatically from study to study, with one projecting spending of $657 million in 2009, and another study projecting $2.5 billion in 2010.

Social Networking -- interesting news stories

Last week a Keynote speech delivered by Shawn Gold, senior vice president of marketing and content for MySpace.com, at the OMMA Hollywood Conference & Expo in Los Angeles provided a peek into the phenomenal success of MySpace and other social networking sites.

The key highlight of the speech was the growing appeal of social networking sites as an attractive channel for brand advertising. Many A-List advertisers including Aquafina, BEST BUY, VERIZON, WENDY's have started placing banner ad on the unlimited inventory of ad spots available on MySpace. Another form of advertising that has been popular with advertisers is viral marketing. However advertisers are using innovative techniques to generate a buzz. One such technique is to create a branded profile on MySpace and then allow myspace users to add themselves as friends with this profile, share the profile with others and pass it along the network. Check out the following campaigns which have generated more than 95K friends on MySpace.com

www.myspace.com/wendysquare
www.myspace.com/aquafina
www.myspace.com/callingallbands

In other significant news:

joga.com - a SN site for football fans started by Google and Nike was recently rated as the top mover and shaker by alexa.com. Google has been building this SN sites by invitation only and hopes to open to public by this summer

Alloy Marketing (www.alloymarketing.com), a New York based media company recently acquired a high-school SN site Sconex. Watch out MySpace.com ...

blogs for small businesses

Reaction to today's class on blogs:

One of my doubts about using an open blog for a small company, let's say for a B2C service:

- if the blog is open, as the speaker said today, the discussion can go in any direction and kill the blog rapidly. Not even talking about the reputational issue, if anybody starts on super-models for example, it can really spin off very fast, and it's on your company's web site... We all know how spamers can get creative with keywords, so automated filtering is still risky. We are talking about the company's brand here.

- so you're the moderator (and censor): how much of your time is that going to take? Can a small team afford having their (often unique) professional and talented marketer spending time on reading, filtering and answering blogs all day?

- alternatively, you close the blog to become a newsletter only, but then so long for the customer interaction and feedbacks.

Any solution?

BTW, is that blog suitable for discussion like this one, Dear Moderator ?...

Silicon Alley is back!

THis article from the New York Times really captures some of the revival of web business in the city... The map is particularly great!

"Alive and Well in Silicon Alley"

Measurement and standards in internet video

After hearing from Brian Weiser, our speaker from MAGNA Global, it's clear that what this article discusses cannot last if advertisers are to adopt internet video as a channel. According to this article in Mediaweek, most if not all traffic and statistics in the space are self-reported (and thus not really believable or useful for advertisers.)

"Online Video Measures MIA"

Neither Neilsen nor ComScore is currently tracking the media. Based on his presentation, we'll need standards for ads as well as standard 3rd party metrics so that advertisers can compare to comparable channels when deploying their marketing budgets.