website
This Is Why that Amazing NASA Earth Image Looked So Familiar
After publishing the The Most Accurate, Highest Resolution Earth View to Date, it got extremely popular: The day after, countless newspapers and blogs worldwide reposted the story. NASA wrote to us, surprised. Why? Because everyone already knew about it:
Yes, the Blue Marble is the iPhone’s default screen, which have been seen by millions of iPhone owners and by everyone who has read about the iPhone since 2007. In fact, the image has been public since 2002:
From: *************** <***********@nasa.gov>
Mr. Diaz
Hello. I am the photo editor for the Public Affairs Office at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.
We were happy to see you featured our Blue Marble image on your website last week.
http://gizmodo.com/5478787/the-most-accurate-highest-resolution-earth-view-to-date#comments
We also featured it on our Flickr page but it has really taken off on the web. We had over 500,000 hits in the last two days alone.
Given that this is an image from 2002 I’m just curious what prompted you to post it on your site? Or did you pick it up from someplace other than our site? I see at the bottom it says “NASA via Twitter”
Really, I’m just curious because it’s gotten so much play over that few days.
Thank you for your interest in our work.
Take care,
Rebecca
The reason? Because it’s a beautiful image, that’s all. One that makes you marvel at the beauty of our planet, and how tiny and insignificant we are, but also how unique and rare. [Gizmodo—Thanks to John Hermann for telling me about the obvious]
Don’t forget to check NASA Goddard’s Flickr page. They keep posting really cool stuff.
Twenty-four telecom operators unite to form Wholesale Applications Community
Source: http://www.engadget.com/2010/02/15/twenty-four-telecom-operators-unite-to-form-wholesale-applicatio/
Big doings over in Barcelona today. Twenty-four telecom operators, with the support of the GSMA and three major hardware manufacturers, have formally announced they will come together to form the Wholesale Applications Community. Essentially, the goal of the alliance will be to create a viable, cohesive and open industry platform for mobile app developers. Members of the Community will include AT&T, China Mobile, China Unicom, Deutsche Telekom, NTT DoCoMo, Orange, TeliaSonera, Sprint, Verizon Wireless, and Vodafone among others, and they’ll be supported in their endeavors by LG, Samsung and Sony Ericsson. The total customers of the group is about 3 billion, giving WAC (our name) some considerable — albeit theoretical for the moment — power. The group plans to work on coming up with a standard for working across platforms over the next twelve months. WAC’s website just went live a bit ago — there’s a link to it below — and the full press release is after the break.
Continue reading Twenty-four telecom operators unite to form Wholesale Applications Community
Twenty-four telecom operators unite to form Wholesale Applications Community originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 15 Feb 2010 05:06:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Permalink | | ! Email th is | 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
LinkedIn.com
Weather.com
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
Apple.com – computers, consumer electronics, iPod, music
Godiva.com – chocolate
AnnTaylor.com – clothing, women’s
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
Nucynta (J0hnson & Johnson) – pain drug
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 )
Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~3/IMPiDaoQJ4M/wikipedias-brain-drain
The decay of time, bitter infighting, and the increasing scope and strength of regulations slowly strangle the life out of Wikipedia, with editors—its braintrust—fleeing in droves, even as traffic at the world’s fifth most-popular website keeps growing. [WSJ]
Behold, the power of a scary-sounding letter from a lawyer! Paul dropped his Kindle 2 and it broke. Amazon wanted $200 to replace it. Instead, they replaced it and gave him an additional $200. Damn, son!
Seriously, how badass is this letter he sent to Amazon?
Paul Gowder
[Address omitted]August 12, 2009
Amazon.com Inc.
Legal Department
1200 12th Avenue South
Suite 1200
Seattle, WA 98144-2734Dear Sir or Madam:
On June 21, 2009, I purchased an Kindle 2 e-book reader from the Amazon.com website. I purchased this device based, in substantial part, on the expectation that it would be reasonably durable. In particular, I expected that it would be approximately as durable as is ordinary in the consumer electronics market.
Amazon.com advertises the Kindle 2 on the basis of its durability. Notably, Amazon.com displays a “drop test” video on the web page for this product. That video displays the device being dropped twice from thirty inches onto what appears to be tile. That video displays a fall with sufficient force that the device visibly bounces, and deliberately creates the impression that the device will function after impacts similar to that sequence of drops.
Despite those representations, the Kindle 2 is far less durable. On July 26, 2009, I dropped a messenger bag containing the device onto the sidewalk, from approximately two feet above the ground. It was dropped only once, and the messenger bag absorbed enough of the shock that nothing else in the bag, including a Macbook laptop, suffered an! y damage whatsoever. (Unlike the drop displayed in Amazon.com’s video, for example, nothing actually bounced.) Moreover, there was no visible damage on the exterior of the Kindle 2. Nonetheless, the Kindle 2 became completely unusable, with over 50% of its screen no longer able to display any text.
I called Amazon.com support and was told that, because of the accidental drop, you would not be willing to supply a replacement device under warranty. You did, however, offer to sell a new device at a discount, for $200.00. I took advantage of that offer under protest, and explicitly reserved my rights to bring a claim against you based on the unreasonable fragility of the device and the misrepresentations in your advertising. It is that claim that forms the subject of this letter.
I am prepared to offer an immediate settlement of my claims against Amazon.com for a payment of $400.00. That sum represents the $200.00 replacement fee I paid plus $200.00 to compensate me for the diminution of utility and value of the device as well as of the e-books I have purchased for that device, in light of the fact that the replacement device, too, can be expected to be far more fragile than advertised and prone to destruction under the slightest stress. This offer expires thirty days from your receipt of this letter. If you do not accept this offer, I intend to bring suit either individually, or, if I decide it is warranted, as representative for a class of similarly situated plaintiffs. At that time, I will seek the amount noted above, plus punitive damages under the California Consumers Legal Remedies Act, Cal. Civil Code §1750 et. seq., costs, fees, and such other monetary damages as provided for by law, including without limitation Cal. Bus. & Prof. Code §17200 et. seq., the implied warranties of merchantability and fitness for a particular purpose, and other relevant law.
Also, you have demanded the return of the broken device as a condition to the unreasonable discounted replacement offer which I accept! ed under protest. Your agent has informed me that you will charge my credit card for the full price if the broken device is not returned to you. I am considering seeking a protective order placing that device in the custody of the Court pending litigation. However, should I instead return the device, you are hereby notified that it is evidence in the anticipated litigation to which this letter refers. Should you modify, destroy, or resell the broken device, I will ask the Court to treat that as deliberate spoliation of evidence and make adverse inferences as appropriate.
Very truly yours,
Paul Gowder
And here’s Amazon’s response:
Pretty awesome. Just goes to show that if you put your somewhat-unreasonable request in an official-looking form and also threaten to sue, big companies will be happy to toss a token amount of money your way to make you go away. [Consumerist]
How NOT to design a web page
a great technique to use to see if your website design is too cluttered or busy is to shrink it down to a thumbnail (like below). You will quickly see that your eye is trying to find something to focus on in each case. If you can’t find the thing to focus on, then you need to go back and simplify the design. Only in rare and specific circumstances should your site deliberately have multiple points of focus. Even then, there should be a sequential order to what the user is led to see.
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).
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
“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.
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.
b) Twitturly shows only 3 thousand retweets on the YouTube URL itself
c) Delicious shows only 447 bookmarks of the video itself
d) Reddit only shows 673 thumbs up for the video itself
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).
– 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)
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…
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.
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).
10. Google only reports 366 links to the video and most of them are not even important websites (see Alexa blue bar)
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.
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.
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
Digital Orchestration
digital orchestration means helping clients orchestrate and coordinate the activities of agencies that have particular specialties — search engine optimization (SEO), search engine marketing (SEM), website design and build, analytics, social marketing, etc. Too often, clients are not comfortable asking about digital or don’t know enough to tell if the agency specialists are recommending the correct strategy or tactic.
search consultants typically help individual clients find individual agencies that are good at a particular area — e.g. TV agency, digital agency, SEO agency, etc. Today, this is no longer as effective because the different disciplines and specialities need to work closely together and feed off of each other to work properly.
CCA – cost of customer acquisition
how do we judge the relative merit and effectiveness of different types of advertising? By finding a common parameter that can be used to compare “apples to apples.” We argue that cost of customer acquisition is a great candidate for such a parameter.
For example, if television advertising cost $50 million to produce and air, and 1,000 people came to the acquisition website, and 10 people applied for and received credit cards then the CCA — cost of customer acquisition would be $5 million ($50 million / 10 people who got the credit card). Of course television advertisers would claim that the “impressions” from TV would have “branded” millions more people and they would eventually get a credit card from the company. That’s possible. But for the purposes of this exercise, if there is no absolute end-to-end tracking, we don’t count it. Because, for example, many other possible scenarios can also occur, like the person saw this ad for a credit card but ended up getting a card from a different bank, they saw and remembered the ad but they already had several credit cards from the company, etc.
With “online” we can easily see lift in search activity around the time that brand/awareness advertising is in-flight. This is one of the best indicators of interest — the person saw the TV ad, and was inspired enough to go online to do more research to inform their own purchase decision. Modern consumers will typically search and then click through. In rare instances, they will type the URL, but it is usually the domain name, not the special URL — domain_name.com/special_url — just because of pure laziness or simply because they forgot the /special_url portion.
Now let’s look at a print example: a print ad cost $5 million to produce and traffic in targeted magazines. About 1,000 people came to the website and 10 people ended up purchasing the advertised product. So the CCA is $500,000 per customer acquired. There may be more people who saw the ad and eventually came in to buy a product. But again, there is a problem of attribution.
Now a final example from “online” marketing. Search ads were run using Google Adwords and a $1 CPC (cost per click) was paid. Of those people who clicked through 1 in 20 purchased a product. So it took 20 clicks at $1 each to achieve 1 sale – so the cost of customer acquisition is $20.
OK, so what about prodycts not sold online? We can use a proxy which has a known conversion to sales. For example, once a coupon is printed from the website, from historic data the advertiser knows that 30% end up using the coupon – i.e. redeeming with a purchase. So, again, if we used a $1 CPC and 1 in 20 ended up printing the coupon and 30% of those “converted” to an offline sale, the CCA would be $66.67 ($20/0.30).
So to recap
Television – $5 million CCA
Print – $500,000 CCA
Paid Search – $20 CCA
Paid Search + Offline Sale – $67 CCA
About Me
Tags
Recent Posts
- iPad on Sale today – only 24% will buy, 76% will wait and see
- Change or Die [Music]
- A Predictable Failure: Kimberly-Clark Offering Kleenex Hand Towels
- 1024-bit RSA encryption cracked by carefully starving CPU of electricity
- 975
- Apple vs Microsoft vs Sony [Graphs]
- This Is Why that Amazing NASA Earth Image Looked So Familiar
- 972
- Please Euthanize This Big Boy Already – How Lack of Innovation Killed Another Giant
- 969
Popular Posts
- HP Mini 311 Nvidia ION Netbook Hackintosh'ed
- Facebook advertising metrics and benchmarks
- What is Web 3.0? Characteristics of Web 3.0
- social media benchmarks
- Samsung 52 inch HDTV $9.99 at BestBuy - purchase receipt below (6:21a eastern time August 12, 2009)
- How to manufacture a viral video sensation and make viral profits - Post 2 of 2
- The JKWeddingDance video was real; the viral effect was MANUFACTURED - Post 1 of 2
- The Grand Unified Theory of Marketing(tm) - Digital String Theory
- Evian baby viral video has much higher ROI than Etrade baby superbowl ad
- Net Promoter Score (NPS) - A Metrics "Sacred Cow" That Should be Slaughtered?
Recent Articles by Dr. Augustine Fou
- The ROI for Social Media Is Zero - ClickZ
- What's Wrong With the Net Promoter Score - ClickZ
- The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing No Longer Apply, Part 2 ...
- How to Do Social Marketing in Heavily Regulated Industries ...
- The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing No Longer Apply - ClickZ
- 11 Most Popular Experts' Columns of 2009 on ClickZ - ClickZ ...
- December 27, 2009 - January 2, 2010 - ClickZ - News and ...
Pages
Archives
- March 2010 (10)
- February 2010 (21)
- January 2010 (12)
- December 2009 (4)
- November 2009 (2)
- October 2009 (14)
- September 2009 (6)
- August 2009 (19)
- July 2009 (34)
- June 2009 (11)
- May 2009 (4)
- April 2009 (6)
- March 2009 (13)
- February 2009 (32)
- January 2009 (25)
- December 2008 (1)
- October 2008 (1)
- November 2007 (1)
