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the American phone subsidy model is a RAZR way of thinking in an iPhone world

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2010/02/23/editorial-the-american-phone-subsidy-model-is-a-razr-way-of-thi/

The concept is simple enough — pay more, get more. So it has gone (historically, anyway) with phone subsidies in this part of the world, a system that has served us admirably for well over a decade. It made sense, and although it was never spelled out at the customer service counter quite as clearly as any of us would’ve liked, it was fairly straightforward to understand: you bought a phone on a multi-dimensional sliding scale of attractiveness, functionality, and novelty. By and large, there was a pricing scale that matched up with it one-to-one. You understood that if you wanted a color external display, a megapixel camera, or MP3 playback, you’d pay a few more dollars, and you also understood that you could knock a couple hundred dollars off of that number by signing up to a two-year contract. In exchange for a guaranteed revenue stream, your carrier’s willing to throw you a few bucks off a handset — a square deal, all things considered. So why’s the FCC in a tizzy, and how can we make it better?

Continue reading Editorial: the American phone subsidy model is a RAZR way of thinking in an iPhone world

Editorial: the American phone subsidy model is a RAZR way of thinking in an iPhone world originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 23 Feb 2010 20:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Wednesday, February 24th, 2010 Uncategorized No Comments

Evidence for Increasing Online Use that is also Accelerating

If you sum up the total unique user sessions in Jan 2008, Jan 2009, and Jan 2010, you get

Jan 2008 – 285M

Jan 2009 – 337M

Jan 2010 – 413M

That is a year-over-year increase of 18% and 23% respectively. Assuming the population of the world does not change that much year to year, the change in total unique sessions leads to the conclusion that online usage continues to increase noticeably.

The Compete.com chart below shows nearly identical number if unique users monthly — Google at 148M uniques and Yahoo at 132M uniques. And Facebook alone achieved another 134M uniques. So while the unique visitors across these 3 sites are not mutually exclusive, there are 414M unique user sessions in the month of January 2010

facebook-yahoo-google-2-year

Well, this is strange. January 2010 numbers from Nielsen reveal Google has 66.3% of the search market, while Yahoo has 14.5% and Microsoft has 10.9% across its various properties. Google is 4x more than Yahoo and 6x more than Microsoft.

search-share-jan-2010


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Tuesday, February 23rd, 2010 Uncategorized No Comments

The numbers vary depending on who you ask or whose data you use

Bing search volume continues to drop despite tons of ads and cheating — redirecting traffic from live.com, msn.com, microsoft.com, and windows search (see also – http://bit.ly/7qDBEz) .

January 13, 2010

The Nielsen Company today reported December 2009 data for the top U.S. Search Providers.

MegaView Search data – including total searches, unique searchers, search share, and all other search figures – cannot be trended with search results prior to October 2009 due to recent methodology changes.

search-volumes-comparison

Searches represent the total number of queries conducted at the provider. Example:  An estimated 6.7 billion search queries were conducted at Google Search, representing 67.3 percent of all search queries conducted during the given time period.

versus Oct 2009 numbers from hitwise

experian-hitwise-percentage-us-searches-leading-search-engine-provider-september-2009

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Wednesday, January 13th, 2010 analytics, search No Comments

Even Major Sites are Not Yet Benefiting From the Full Power of Search

@glenngabe’s post on  FaceYahoogle – The Impact of Facebook, Yahoo, and Google on Website Traffic inspired me to also look at the search terms driving traffic.  Most sites, even major ones have their own brand terms driving traffic. This is OK, but it is taking significantly less advantage of the full power of search.A more ideal scenario for sites is that they have a large number of non-brand terms driving traffic — i.e. the keywords they want to be known for are driving traffic to them.  The premise is that if the user already knew the brand or brand name, it would be redundant for the advertiser to spend awareness ad dollars on them. The advertiser wants to get users to their site who do not already know their brand name.  This is especially true for pharma drug websites, as you will see in the following examples.

GENERAL SITES

These sites have such a diverse set of products, services, or topics, we don’t expect the top search terms driving traffic to be anything other than their brand terms.  But they should have a long tail of thousands of keywords driving traffic (and they are, in the following examples).

NYTimes.com

nytimes

LinkedIn.com

linkedin

Weather.com

weather

CATEGORY SPECIFIC SITES

These sites focus on specific product categories, so one would expect that they should have keywords around their product category driving traffic — e.g. clothing, chocolate, wine, etc.  But as you can see, most don’t and the total number of keywords driving traffic could be larger than it is now (implying more long tail keywords).

JCrew.com – clothing

jcrew

Apple.com – computers, consumer electronics, iPod, music

apple

Godiva.com – chocolate

godiva

AnnTaylor.com – clothing, women’s

anntaylor

SINGLE NICHE SITES

Such sites should be all over search terms that surround the topic areas that they want to be known for. But as you see from the analytics, most don’t. Instead, the top terms driving traffic are their own brand name. Again, if the user already knew the brand, additional advertising would be wasted on them. The sites need to make efforts to “own” additional keywords (or at least “show up at the party”) so people who don’t know the brand name might still have a chance finding them when they type in other keywords surrounding the specific niche.

Sutent (Pfizer) – cancer drug

sutent

Nucynta (J0hnson & Johnson) – pain drug

nucynta

Spiriva (Boehringer Ingelheim, Pfizer) – COPD drug

NOTE: This is the best of the bunch of drug sites.  COPD, the disease area they want to be known for, does actually show up in the first 5 search terms driving traffic, along with emphysema and their product name handihaler. Also, notice they have nearly 10 times the number of keywords driving traffic compared to the other 2 drugs cited (65 vs 7 or 8 )

spiriva

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Sunday, December 6th, 2009 Uncategorized 1 Comment

Net Promoter Score (NPS) – A Metrics “Sacred Cow” That Should be Slaughtered?

My main issues with the Net Promoter Score (NPS) is that it doesn’t tell me anything new, is based on flawed math, the number cannot stand alone, and is not actionable (does not tell marketers what to go do).

Read More about Net Promoter Score Challenges

Thanks for all the retweets!

ZebraBites@adamferrier Another one for the NPS collection; http://www.clickz.com/3635696 (via @jhenning and @acfou)

acfouIt’s an “it is what it is” metric (which isn’t actionable) – #netpromoterscore #netpromoter #NPS - http://bit.ly/6EYyc

spiralsThought provoking Net Promoter article http://www.clickz.com/3635696 -Good idea to use search as an indicator of customer satisfaction

VirtualMRRT @berniemalinoff: RT @JHenning @acfou: Net Promoter Score (NPS) is synonymous with “useless” http://tr.im/Fgv3

seangibRT @glenngabe: What’s Wrong With the Net Promoter Score http://bit.ly/84Jh2P via @acfou on ClickZ – some interesting comments as usual w …

glenngabeWhat’s Wrong With the Net Promoter Score http://bit.ly/84Jh2P via @acfou on ClickZ – some interesting comments as usual w/Dr. Fou. :)

MetriclyWhat’s Wrong With the Net Promoter Score - http://bit.ly/8U3VVD

christinet6dOh snap… RT @lizapost What’s the value of the Net Promoter score? According to @acfou, not much. ‘http://bit.ly/6EYyc

lizapostWhat’s the value of the Net Promoter score? According to @acfou, not much. ‘What’s Wrong With the Net Promoter Score’http://bit.ly/6EYyc

berniemalinoffRT @JHenning @acfou: Net Promoter Score (NPS) is synonymous with “useless” http://tr.im/Fgv3 || healthy debate pros/cons of #NPS

contactjrFrom @acfou: What’s wrong with the Net Promoter Score? http://bit.ly/17ahJC

Noakesi@holycow RT @jonnylongden: RT @rj_berg: Great article on some of the problems with Net Promoter Score (NPS) http://bit.ly/2h5jot#measure

acfouNet Promoter Score (NPS) like brand sentiment scores are oversimplified averages that are not actionable - http://bit.ly/6EYyc

ju2ltdRT @jonnylongden: RT @rj_berg: Great article on some of the problems with Net Promoter Score (NPS) http://bit.ly/2h5jot #measure

jonnylongdenRT @rj_berg: Great article on some of the problems with Net Promoter Score (NPS) http://bit.ly/2h5jot #measure #retail – why use this?

Adtraction_RAJ_What’s Wrong With the Net Promoter Score http://bit.ly/17ahJC (mmm)

KarmaMediaLabs#NetPromoterScore not all it’s cracked up to be? Decide for yourself: http://bit.ly/17ahJC

EricheadRT @rj_berg: Great article on some of the problems with Net Promoter Score (NPS) http://bit.ly/2h5jot #measure #retail – why use this?

PeteHealyNet Promoter Score = useless; replace w/ search volume. Augustine Fou @acfou http://www.clickz.com/3635696 Your thoughts? #in

helena_chariRT @mrnews: #NPS ‘tells you the obvious, isn’t predictive, doesn’t answer the “So what?” question.’ http://bit.ly/1DqmgD (via @DavidPenn

makingcjcAn it is what it is” metric…debate on the Net Promoter score. http://www.clickz.com/3635696

DannyGavinRT @EstherSteinfeld Interesting read: “What’s Wrong with the Net Promoter Score?” @acfou says, “So many things.”http://bit.ly/1ojkfk

ZaliciousRT @kevinertell: This is an excellent article on ClickZ: What’s Wrong With the Net Promoter Score http://www.clickz.com/3635696

hellosmalldogArticle about NPS is interesting – thanks to @mjayliebs for CCing us! We’re reading it now. (via @acfou, @wimrampen)http://tr.im/Fgv3

bigmacherRT @kevinertell: This is an excellent article on ClickZ: What’s Wrong With the Net Promoter Score http://www.clickz.com/3635696

DavashRT @rj_berg: Gr8 article: problems w/Net Promoter Score (#NPS) (http://bit.ly/2h5jot ) #measure [A grad of stats 101 could see all of this]

BobbleHeadGuruRT @rj_berg: Gr8 article: problems w/Net Promoter Score (#NPS) (http://bit.ly/2h5jot ) #measure [A grad of stats 101 could see all of this]

EstherSteinfeldInteresting read: “What’s Wrong with the Net Promoter Score?” @acfou says, “So many things.” http://bit.ly/1ojkfk

kevinertellThis is an excellent article on ClickZ: What’s Wrong With the Net Promoter Score http://www.clickz.com/3635696

rj_bergGreat article on some of the problems with Net Promoter Score (NPS) http://bit.ly/2h5jot #measure #retail

mjayliebsRT @wimrampen: Net Promoter Score (NPS) is synonymous with “useless” http://tr.im/Fgv3 (cc @hellosmalldog)

jestodcWhat’s Wrong With the Net Promoter Score http://www.clickz.com/3635696

jonathanmendez“NPS is what I call an “it is what it is” metric — it tells you the obvious” http://bit.ly/6EYyc

mrnews#NPS ‘tells you the obvious, isn’t predictive, doesn’t answer the “So what?” question.’ http://bit.ly/1DqmgD (via @DavidPenn1@jhenning)

DavidPenn1RT @jhenning RT @acfou: Net Promoter Score (NPS) is synonymous with “useless” http://tr.im/Fgv3 Maybe we need to take it less literally?

wimrampenRT @JHenning: RT @acfou: Net Promoter Score (NPS) is synonymous with “useless” http://tr.im/Fgv3

NicoPeruzziPhDRT @JHenning: RT @acfou: Net Promoter Score (NPS) is synonymous with “useless” http://tr.im/Fgv3 – the emperor has no clothes…

JHenningRT @acfou: Net Promoter Score (NPS) is synonymous with “useless” http://tr.im/Fgv3 Builds on my criticisms with some of his own.

acfouNet Promoter Score (NPS) is synonymous with “useless” (is based on bad math, is not actionable) – what say you? http://bit.ly/6EYyc

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Friday, November 20th, 2009 Uncategorized No Comments

Facebook is going down – pageviews, average stay, pages per visit – why?

From the Compete charts below, it is clear that Facebook is seeing a decline in pageviews, average stay, and pages per visit.  But why?

I know that I have reduced the time I spend on Facebook and I have also reduced the number of messages and other social actions as well.  And I have deleted virtually all of my personal and family photos and will not upload any more. These may be the first signs of a waning of Facebook due to a number of factors.

I can’t get my stuff back out

For example, Facebook has stated that it will not participate in OpenSocial because they do not want people to be able to export their content, conversations, photos, etc, out of Facebook and use on another social network. I am concerned that I will not be able to retrieve or back up content which I believe is mine. I like to have control over my family photos, conversations with friends, etc. I am willing to accept as a “cost” of using the Facebook system the fact that they know who my friends are.  But I am less willing or unwilling to continue putting my content where I cannot get it back, in its entirety.  (Google Docs, for example, just launched a feature where you can back up everything back out of Google Docs into Microsoft Office formats).

Ads in the stream, erosion of trust

A second issue mentioned in a previous post is the increase in advertising on Facebook and also the more unscrupulous practice of injecting ads “into the stream” — ads masquerading as status updates. These are harmful to the overall trust built up in the community and I have un-friended quite a few people whose accounts were clearly used to promote events, products, etc.

Ad-effectiveness sucks

From a prior post – http://bit.ly/EhiW9 – Facebook advertising metric are absolutely abysmal. They keep trying to sell advertisers on the hundreds of billions of pageviews they throw off. But advertisers are getting smarter and more and more of them will buy ads on a cost-per-click basis (instead of CPM, cost per thousand impressions basis).  This means that the ad revenues that Facebook enjoyed from gross INefficiencies will be decimated.


facebook-pageviews

facebook-average-stay

facebook-pages-per-visit

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Friday, October 30th, 2009 Uncategorized No Comments

JetBlue All-You-Can-Jet Pass – how viral can be manufactured (easily)

http://bit.ly/13sF7E

Enjoy unlimited travel with our All-You-Can-Jet Pass! For just $599* you can take JetBlue anywhere you like, as often as you like, from September 8 to October 8, 2009. Use your All-You-Can-Jet Pass for business, for pleasure, to visit your favorite cities or to meet with a client. You might as well just do it all! With more than 50 cities to choose from, and for just $599, it’s a deal you can’t pass up.

About the Pass

  • $599 for a month of unlimited travel, any available seat
    • Domestic taxes and fees included
    • International and Puerto Rico taxes and fees not included
  • On sale through Friday, August 21, 2009, or while supplies last
  • Travel Dates: Tuesday, September 8, 2009 through Thursday, October 8, 2009
  • Each flight must be booked no later than 11:59 p.m. MDT three days prior to the flight’s scheduled departure.
  • Nonrefundable/nontransferable/no name changes permitted
  • Customers who already have a flight booked during the pass travel period can pay the difference to upgrade to the pass by calling 1-800-JETBLUE (538-2583), prompt 4.
  • Each All-You-Can-Jet Pass is eligible for 35 TrueBlue points. Flights booked on the pass are not available for additional TrueBlue points.

To purchase an All-You-Can-Jet Pass:

Call 1-800-JETBLUE (538-2583), option 4. You do not have to be a TrueBlue member at the time of purchase, but a TrueBlue number is required to book all flights.To join TrueBlue, click here; it’s free.

To book flights with your All-You-Can-Jet Pass:

  • Before calling to reserve your flight, please visit jetblue.com to check availability and select flight times.
  • Call 1-800-JETBLUE (538-2583), prompt 4.
  • Provide your pass number which is your original reservation number.
  • Provide your TrueBlue number.
  • You may only book one flight per city per day; if a violation of this policy is found, JetBlue will honor only the last booking made and cancel the customer’s other bookings from that city on that day.
  • Each flight must be booked no later than 11:59 p.m. MDT three days prior to the flight’s scheduled departure.
  • You can change/cancel flights for no fee with three (3) or more days notice; changes or cancellations to flight bookings made after 11:59 p.m. MDT three days prior to the flight’s scheduled departure will be charged standard JetBlue change/cancel fees.

To change or cancel All-You-Can-Jet Pass travel:

  • Greater than three (3) days before a flight: $0 change/cancellation fees
  • Less than three (3) days before a flight: JetBlue’s standard change/cancel fees apply

In the case of a no-show, the customer’s pass will be placed on hold, any reserved pass flights will be canceled, and no new flight segments wil be able to be booked until the customer pays a $100 no-show penalty.

*Other important restrictions apply. For complete details, please read the Full Terms and Conditions.

18,000+ clicks in 4 hours

jetblue-all-you-can-jet

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Wednesday, August 12th, 2009 Uncategorized 1 Comment

#whentwitterwasdown – Twitter crippled by massive #ddos (distributed denial of service) attack

As many of you may have noticed, Twitter was down for many hours starting Thursday morning August 6 and remained intermittent even when it was brought back up. The theory is that this was caused by a massive DDOS attack on their servers including the services that other web applications depended on — that means that outside services (twitter applications) were also taken down.

For an explanation of denial-of-service attack or distributed-denial-of-service, this is the wikipedia entry. It basically is an attacker using a large number of “zombie” computers to “hit” the victim’s site at the same time, thus overloading it, and causing it to not be able to respond to legitimate traffic.

ddos-diagram

Full Coverage of the Social Media DDoS (Source: Mashable)


Is Cyber Warfare to Blame for Twitter Meltdown?

Denial of Service Attacks Being Investigated by Google, Twitter, Facebook

Facebook Problems Also the Result of DDoS Attack

Twitter Outage Explained: What’s a Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDoS)?

Twitter Down Due to Denial of Service Attack (DDoS)

Facebook Down. Twitter Down. Social Media Meltdown.

Twitter Down: Twitter Doesn’t Know Why

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Friday, August 7th, 2009 Uncategorized No Comments

The JKWeddingDance video was real; the viral effect was MANUFACTURED – Post 1 of 2

originally investigated and reported on Friday July 31, 2009 by Augustine Fou, with Tugce Esener @tesener

Several friends and colleagues had the same reaction when they found out about this video — that it was at such a high view count already and we were late to the party of finding out.  Then we did some more digging — digital forensics  :-)  And this is a case where a viral hit was indeed successfully manufactured.  There’s something to be learned from all this – how to successfully manufacture a viral video sensation and make viral profits.

Related: How to manufacture a viral video sensation and make viral profits – Post 2 of 2

Chris Brown is successfully tapping into the viral halo of a funny video that coincidentally used his song.

ReadWriteWeb article on how rights owners (Sony, Chris Brown) can make viral profits on other people using their work instead of suing them - http://bit.ly/KA3HI

The video was real. But promotional activities (possibly/likely paid) created the initial viral effect (led to the tipping point of the viral effect) which then got carried a further by people thinking they were simply late to the party, including myself (e.g. 440k bit.ly clicks and 3k detectable retweets out of the 13M views). The numbers don’t jive.

The viral halo has added 1 million more views to the video from August 1 – August 2.  (13.1 M to 14.5 M)


Ten ELEVEN TWELVE THIRTEEN proof points to follow, each with screen shot to illustrate.

1a. anyone notice that the “Forever” soundtrack is remarkably consistent throughout the video as if it were dubbed or added in after the original footage was shot. The sound is too consistent in volume and loudness to have come from a built-in, on-camera microphone. At the very end of the video, once it cuts back to the couple at the altar the sound quality goes back to the echo-y, tinny sound of an on-camera mic.

1b. The “TheKHeinz” user on YouTube was registered on July 19, 2009, the day the video was posted. We usually look for clues like this to detect “plants” by PR agencies.  This is an issue of trust — a user “CmdrTaco” on Slashdot has been around the forums for years, made hundreds of posts, and was rated by the community very highly. PR agencies trying to seed stories have to create new user accounts during the PR campaign (recent registration date) and have made no other posts or uploads before (no history).

thekheinz-user-info-on-youtube

2. The social intensity detected in all of the top social venues like Technorai, Delicious, Reddit, Digg, etc. indicate there was not enough organic sharing to support a view count of 13 million views in 11 days (updated: 14.6 million today August 2, 2009).

a) Bit.ly shows only 447k clicks on the shortened URL

bitly-statistics-on-jkwedding-video

“At Fortune’s Brainstorm:Tech conference Ashton Kutcher effectively took credit for boosting the views from – in his words – 12,500 views before he tweeted the link – to some 1.2 million views 12 hours later…”

Well, unfortunately he used a bit.ly link which provides public analytics on how many people clicked. Most tweets result in immediate traffic, which then tails off immediately after the tweet falls off the first page. In his case, look at the following bit.ly stats URL and click “past month” to see the peak clicks on July 23. All he can actually claim is that his tweet drove a peak of about 100,000 clicks on that day not 1.2 million :-(

http://bit.ly/info/Z7vMw

too bad Ashton. next time you make a BMOC claim, be sure to use a non trackable method, so analytics won’t “out” you so easily.

august-21-bitly-intensity-update

after only 3.5 days of retweets the twitter intensity died off to next-to-nothing; if this were a truly viral video, carried forth by real people (and not by paid PR support and paid media) the retweet intensity would remain high. As of August 21, there are over 21M views on the video and the 505k retweets does not show actual organic support for that number.

ashton-kutcher-promote-viral-video


b) Twitturly shows only 3 thousand retweets on the YouTube URL itself

updated-twitturly-stats-for-video

c) Delicious shows only 447 bookmarks of the video itself

delicious-bookmarks-jkwedding

delicious-bookmarks-jkweddingdance

d) Reddit only shows 673 thumbs up for the video itself

reddit-results-for-jkweddingvideo

e) Technorati shows only 277 blog mentions of the video itself — this could be undercounting if blogs used URL shorteners. But if you look at the blog intensity results (below) sorted by blogs with most authority the blogs have very little authority (i.e. influence or size of audience).

technorati-blog-posts-on-jkwedding

– these are real indications of interest by real people. The social intensity of the passalong for this video does not substantiate the huge number of views in 11 days.

What we are seeing now is the additional viral halo, as the momentum is sustained by large media outlets reporting on the story — even Google Blog blogged about it (boasting about the success of YouTube advertising in driving revenues). Of course TechCrunch is right that viral videos can be monetized: http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/07/30/youtube-viral-wedding-videos-are-great-for-advertising/ )


3. Twitter shows nothing in the top “trending topics” related to this video – indicating few people are actually tweeting about it — if this video is SO viral (13M views in 11 days) then it has GOT to show up on a scan of social intensity. (see screen capture below)

July 31 (Friday)                 August 2 (Sunday)

twitter-trending-topics-455pm-july-31-2009August-2-trending-twitter-topics

4. The original video was posted July 19, 2009. The people from the video appeared on NBC’s Today Show and danced around Rockerfeller Center on July 25th (6 calendar days after posting). Today Show staff may be great at spotting news, but to get all the wedding party from the wedding to re-enact the dance on the Today Show in 6 calendar days — too good to be true?  Hmm…

today-show-appearance


5. Out of all the wedding videos on YouTube, how did Chris Brown detect this particular one that used his song. @glenngabe noted that there are song detection mechanisms  - ContentID - which detect the pattern of the copyrighted song and report that to the rights owners. We know there are hundreds, if not thousaands, or really funny wedding home videos — America’s Funniest Videos has been running for years and years on TV showing funny wedding blooper videos that people submitted to them.


6. ALL TEN of the top viral videos on AdAge’s Viral Video Chart took around 3 – 6 months to achieve full viral effect — not 6 days.  See all 10 videos’ stats, as reported by YouTube at the following link. This video has not shown up at all on the list of Adage viral videos.

AdAge Top Viral Videos all take 3 – 6 months to reach full viral effect



7. From @RedW0rm – YouTube Declares Wedding Video a Financial Success http://bit.ly/9ZUtu


8. also check the velocity of this http://twitter.com/#search?q=jkwedding or this http://twitter.com/#search?q=jkweddingdance notice the tweets are not seconds apart but hours apart. Something that achieved 13M views in the 11 days since posting would show far higher velocity or twitter intensity.

twitter-1-jkwedding

twitter-1-jkwedding

9.  For a top-trending topic on twitter, there is usually correspondingly high search volume that is detectable.  At first glance, terms related to this viral video like “jkwedding” or “jk wedding dance” all seem to spike.  But if you put it against even “Corazon Aquino” (one of the top trending topics NOW on Twitter) those JK wedding search volumes are dwarfed.  (see chart below).

corazon-aquino-search-volume

10.  Google only reports 366 links to the video and most of them are not even important websites (see Alexa blue bar)

google-in-links-for-jkwedding-video

11.  The video itself has no honors and no stats (yet); YouTube stats are conveniently turned off. Other videos have their stats graphs publicly available.

no-honors-for-jk-wedding-video

12. see the fine print in the YouTube description — For more information or to make a donation towards violence prevention please visit our website: http://www.jkweddingdance.com/ – why would a normal wedding video ask people to make a donation towards violence prevention? (see screen capture below), the WHOIS record shows the domain jkweddingdance.com was created 29-Jul-09 — today is 31-Jul-09

Updated: This was circumstantial evidence. A source confirmed that Jill is studying patterns of violence propagation for her PhD. Their choice of charity was their own choice. And the site was set up to help that cause.

violence-prevention-chris-brown

whois-jkweddingdance-part1

whois-jkweddingdance-part2

Conclusion?  The video itself is real, made by those nice people in the wedding. They may not even realize why or how their wedding video went viral (and the tens of thousands of other wedding videos on YouTube did not). On the Today Show, “The couple told Lauer they were surprised at the video’s popularity” (also see NY Daily News article – http://bit.ly/OA3iG )

Related articles:

ReadWriteWeb – Build Profit Not DMCA Suits

WSJ – YouTube Declares Wedding Video a Financial Success

PSFK – Co-opting Viral Hits to Sell More Music

TechCrunch – YouTube: Viral Wedding Videos Are Great For Advertising

Huffington Post – Viral Wedding on YouTube Drives Buyers to Chris Brown Music

ClickZ – http://blog.clickz.com/090805-160921.html

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Friday, July 31st, 2009 Uncategorized 37 Comments

Despite massive increases in advertising, the biggest beer brands see massive drops in sales

Beer is yet another commodity and category that is being decimated by better quality alternatives. The means of production and distribution are no longer controlled by a very small number of big companies. Consumers find attractive alternatives in micro-brew beers or local beers. They have the means to access them (online) and have the product shipped directly to their homes.  So no matter how much advertising the big companies do, if their product is just not that great, they will continue to lose customers to alternatives. The “lime” version of Bud Light was said to cannibalize sales of regular Bud Light. And rightly so, consumers are looking for a better product.

Source: http://adage.com/article?article_id=138141

Fourth of July Holiday: Bargain Brands Gain, but Big Spenders Bud, Miller Lite and Corona Tap Out

By Jeremy Mullman

Published: July 27, 2009

Despite a flurry of new and improved ad pushes for the country’s leading brews, the days leading up to Independence Day, usually the biggest-selling period of the year for the category, led to gruesome sales declines vs. the same period last year. Sales for Anheuser-Busch’s Bud Light and Budweiser plunged 7% and 14%, respectively, in grocery, convenience and drug stores during the two-week period ending July 5, according to scanner data from Information Resources Inc. Miller Lite suffered a 9% drop. The big importers were hurt badly too: Corona marketer Crown Imports watched sales decline 6% to 8%, while Heineken and Diageo each saw double-digit drops.

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Sunday, July 26th, 2009 Uncategorized No Comments