Internet Marketing Blog

Why Mint.com is Web 2.0 Defined

October 11, 2008 – 5:06 pm

Growing up in New York City in the 1980s, my friends and I had terminology for something that we considered cool or fascinating - “that’s mint!” we would say. Well, bringing new meaning to the term, mint.com is simply one of the best website interfaces that I have seen, from all key fronts that define excellent websites - branding, design layout, functionality and usability. Mint.com reflects Web 2.0 at its best! Here is why. This is something that you just have to experience.  More websites should leave that impression - that the user had an experience rather than just another website visit.  Of course, it takes masterful information architecture, user interface expertise and web 2.0 programming skill to do so!

Mint, like all great software, makes a complicated process seem easy. Managing your money through software like Quicken, Microsoft Money or directly via your online banking website, hardly compares to the effortless and intuitive interface of Mint. It simply works in a way that gives the user flexibility. In terms of managing your finances, that is a whole separate reason why you should use Mint, which I talk about in blog post on 401kid.com/blog.

Mint is free…for now. I am sure that they will find ways to offer premium services and through the analysis of your spending habits, start offering discounts and special offers around those trends.

High Conversion Website

Simplicity and minimalism is the feeling that you get from Mint’s interface, which is a consistent theme from the home page through to your detailed financial statements.

Usability

When you log in to Mint, the Dashboard gives you extremely useful information, such as where you stand with your monthly budgets, what your current account balances are. Downloading accounts and information from my various banks, including a company expense account, took less than 5 minutes.

Some key Web 2.0 features worth noting:

1. The budget line moves each day, to show you not only what the dollar amounts currently are for whatever budget categories you setup, but to show whether you are on or ahead of pace. They did not have this feature last time I logged in - pleasant surprise!
2. I can see my monthly income statement, to see whether I’m up or down, cash flow wise, each month.
3. Now I can create my own categories, which was limited before. Another great new feature and a hallmark of good web 2.0 development - listening to customers and constantly improving the software.
4. Key charges and upcoming recurring expenses show in the dashboard.
5. Customizable mobile and/or email alerts, such as “Notify me when this account goes under $1,000″ or “when I exceed my Shopping budget for the month”.

Branding

The branding is light and ‘minty’ fresh. They utilize the term “mint” well as part of the brand message “refreshing money management”, and “All the news that fit to mint” in the Mint blog, which also includes tips on how to better utilize Mint, financial education advice (mint.edu: know and grow your money) and content from partners such as fool.com.

Web 2.0 Execution

When I look at Mint.com, I cannot say enough. It is clear to see that someone (likely some VCs and the Founders themselves) invested wisely and someone else (likely the Founders with a group of highly competent web 2.0 warriors) executed well. Much respect to Mint.com, for the company’s vision, domain knowledge, initial execution and continuous evolution. May the rest of us take good notes. I know it’s not the 80s and that I’m not in high school anymore, but I just can’t help saying “This is one MINT website!”

Posted by Arman Rousta
Posted in Web 2.0, Website Design | No Comments »
Tags: great web design, SAAS, web 2.0, web development

5 Critical Steps in the Search Engine Marketing Cycle

September 17, 2008 – 3:51 pm

We all know some of the tasks related to search engine marketing include keyword research, page optimization and link building. But one thing that is becoming vital to search marketers and agencies is the method in which they create, measure and execute their campaigns.

For search engine optimization, IBLs (inbound links) are a great method for boosting rankings. But what happens after you get the links is just as important as getting them in the first place. If you don’t follow up regularly, the links may somehow get moved to another page with a lower page rank or disappear altogether. So it’s the linking cycle or management that’s most important. This post will give an overview of the bigger picture of the search marketing life-cycle.

Step One starts off with a need. You may want more traffic for a promotion or more targeted traffic. Regardless of the need, a strategy must unfold that is measurable. To insure that you’re able to see and measure the results, you need a baseline report. So step one is to analyze and measure the situation for the particular need you’re addressing. Professional interactive marketers will bust out their copy of WebPosition or other SEO desktop app. Or maybe use Website grader or SEOmoz to set an online baseline report. So this step also includes setting up the various accounts that come in handy like Google Alerts and Google Webmaster Tools to name a couple.

Step Two means documenting the baseline metrics in a report. Maybe use a spreadsheet like a Google Doc that is easily shareable between your team and the client. Your creating historical references that will be used throughout the cycle. So Step Two involves documenting all the data in one place using the easiest to share and use tool you have. By creating this report and documenting the success metrics, you’ll be forced to clearly define the success metrics. Remember, this is a “cycle” and that means it gets repeated. So you’ll need good documentation.

Step Three involves planning and setting goals. This important step helps to further refine client expectations, your documentation and also serves as a sort of budget review. If you’ve already done a good job of working with your client and setting expectations in Step One, Step Three will mostly involved setting milestones, events in your calendar and daily tasks to perform. Not to sound too much like a Googler but Google calender is a really nice (and free) tool for sharing all your marketing tasks in one place for your team. Keep everything measurable.

Step Four nearly gets us to the end of this cycle. But before we hit Step Four, review your efforts in Step Three to make sure it is reverse engineered. Meaning, look carefully at your project end date. Are your efforts and plans sufficient enough to achieve the results you need? Can you really expect to be able to report all your metrics back to the client with the numbers they need? If you’re confident the answer is, “yes” you’re now ready for Step Four, which is to execute the plan. Executing the plan means starting the paid and organic programs, doing the daily and weekly tasks and performing your regular reviews to insure you’re moving towards your goals.

Step Five takes place when one of two things have happened. One, you have reached your target goals and the metrics have been communicated to an elated client. Or two, you have reached the point in your plan where time has run out in the first cycle. In either of these two cases, it’s time for Step Five which is to repeat the whole process over again. Before you do, you must have your documentation completed from all your first round, aka first cycle.

You can name the bigger picture tasks anything you want. Keep the whole process simple and measurable. Don’t get bogged down in the individual tasks. Stay mindful of the bigger picture and communicate the cycle to your client. An informed client will be more likely to support paying for a second cycle. An uninformed client may wonder if something went wrong. This can be avoided by setting the right expectations and sharing your progress along the way.

Posted by Arman Rousta
Posted in Marketing, Marketing Agencies, Online Advertising, Search Engine Optimization, Social Media Marketing, Website Analytics | No Comments »
Tags: engine, life-cycle, Marketing, search, SEM, SEO

Short Takes on Improving Interaction Design

September 16, 2008 – 12:16 pm

Interaction design is a living breathing asset that represents all the content on your site. It represents an opportunity to reach a helping hand out to your first time visitors and longtime customer. The first interaction anyone has with your site is grounded in design and opportunity. Colors, white space, focal points and navigation all lead towards a mutual goal of interaction between your company / brand and a human. The message below is general in scope and probably best consumed as a reminder.

Focus on the visitor. Visitors have specific needs. Depending on how they heard about and landed on your site, they have different perceptions of what might be of value to them. Visitors will tell you what they find valuable if you listen. Listening requires you to get to know your visitors even if all you have is log file or an analytics account. Log files reveal time on site, time on page, paths visitors take and exit pages. You can quickly learn which pages are popular and which pages rarely get visited. Your log files are the feedback when you have no feedback. Use Google Website Optimizer to further test your pages. Also read our earlier post on A/B testing for more insight.

Focus on the user. In this case, a “user” refers to a visitor that has already been to your site. They have found something useful and they want to use it a second time. A user may visit your site relatively often and may only use a specific feature or perform a specific task. Listen and you’ll find what a user finds most valuable. Try to ask your users how they would improve your site or application. Engaging users through comments and surveys can reveal opportunities you never knew existed.

So what does this really have to do with “interaction design?” Everything. Visitors and Users are the reason you make things interactive. Otherwise, you would be printing a book and you would have readers. Or, you would have a linear presentation or video, in which you case you would have viewers. Visitors that visit more than one page require a good interaction design to become users. Visitors require a solid interaction design to become regular “Users.”

Focusing on the people you are designing for is step one. When more than half your visitors leave before viewing a second page, you have a need.

Use graphical elements such as buttons, colors, tabs (also study modal vs. non-modal) and use text for navigation. Google generally likes to index pages with only one link to content but you can add the “no-follow” attribute to your graphical buttons while preserving your original intent to provide text for the Google-bot. This is important to interaction design because your homepage may not be the first interaction your visitors have with your information. Many website visits start with a major search engine which requires special attention to landing pages.

Improve your landing pages and your visitors may generate a more favorable first impression before they ever start to use your navigation. If they don’t find what they need on your site, they’ll probably just go back to the search engine. You may or may not get a second chance at creating an interaction with a visitor.

Keep in mind that users have special interaction design needs. They may be trying to accomplish a specific task. Shortening those steps for return visitors provides value. While making similar steps more obvious for first time users provides similar value.

Visitors might just be checking out your brand, learning what you have to offer and may only want to interact with your brand to learn your value proposition. They may not have any specific task in mind and providing them with options might be helpful. “Visitors,” especially first-timers give you the opportunity as an interaction designer to strut your skills while providing measured results.

Try and develop a metric that can be regularly and easily measured to help you see changes in visitor paths (called funnels in Analytics) and user habits when you make interaction design changes.

Employ several feedback mechanisms to make it easy for your visitors and users to give you insight about they way they want to interact with the site. Combine all feedback to create a listen, design, develop and release loop. Often it’s not a single amazing interaction design that wins. It’s most often a designer’s ability to listen and make small adjustments over time that is the single most important critical success factor in any interactive design.

Posted by Dali Singh
Posted in Interactive Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, Website Analytics | No Comments »
Tags: design, feedback, interaction, metrics, users, visitors

First Impressions - Google Chrome

September 4, 2008 – 10:49 am

An early leak about Google’s new browser has lead to an early release (by two days) of Chrome, short for Chromium. There’s a ton of stuff being written about the new browser so I’m just going to offer a quick first impression. To set the stage, you should know that I’m comfortable with my current browser. It offers many features like blogging, social media and a useful, web clipboard for moving clipboard items to my Flickr account and other sites.

Making a switch seems far away for me, right now. But let’s see.

Finding the download was easier than finding an election or campaign article. Installation, a breeze. The default installation setting to import my settings from Internet Explorer was refreshing. I do wish my browser, Flock was listed so I kinda missed out on the whole settings import thing. My settings were imported from Firefox which is my secondary browser.

On first load, two tabs were opened. The default tab showed some empty thumbnails with a description that read in part,

The “Most visited” area shows the websites that you use most often. After using Google Chrome for a while, you will see your most visited sites whenever you open a new tab. You can learn more about this and other features on the Getting Started page.

The second tab pointed to a welcome page with a 404 error message of sorts that read in part,

This webpage is not available.
The webpage at http://tools.google.com/chrome/intl/en-US/welcome.html might be temporarily down or it may have moved permanently to a new web address.

When I clicked the “More information” link, I got the details,

Error 104 (net::ERR_CONNECTION_FAILED): The attempt to connect to the server failed.

Server must be busy? Sure enough, clicking the refresh button loaded a page, a real welcome screen outlining some new features.

The user interface is clean and feels fresh and Googley, kinda exciting, like the first time I used Flock. There’s a distinct absence of browser chrome, also refreshing The windows are intentionally chromeless to give web apps more display room. How convenient.

I won’t go into the features here but you can and probably will anyway. Each of the features has it’s own YouTube video. Which, IMO, is the fastest way to learn or get someone to try your new, online anything. The videos were succinct and instructional. Browser release 2.0.

Still having a good experience overall. Watching a video from the development team on the thinking and features behind Google Chrome.

All the normal shortcuts I use regularly, work as expected. My sites looked great within the Chromeless windows and really clean. Short of a round browser window, I like to see new design approaches.

Webmasters can get the behind the scenes, Google Chrome scoops.

Default encoding is UTF-8. Mac and Linux versions are “coming soon.” Blacklists, sandboxing for tabs and incognito mode will surely steal some thunder from the IE 8 release.

Marketers and bloggers might like the right-click, “copy link address” function which actually copies and pastes correct urls, not a Google modified link. This alone coule be enough for some folks to make the switch. You may also like the search from toolbar ability. It’s still going smoothly.

I’m writing this post in Wordpress using Chrome and haven’t noticed any difference. But it feels good and “standards” seem to be in-tact. Although a quote at Wikipedia reveals,

The first release of Google Chrome Beta (Build 1583) does not pass the Acid3 test; it scores 77/100 and does not render the image correctly.

Look for the Open Source community to stay on top of this. 77/100 is very solid and currently only slightly behind by Opera.

So my first, quick impressions are really positive. Am I willing to switch browsers yet? No, I can’t afford the time right now. But I’ll keep trying it out for the rest of the day and if things go well, I could possibly make a full switch over with a couple months. Only sweet time will tell.

Additional Reading
Could Google’s Chome be death blow to Firefox?

Google Chrome on Wikipedia

Posted by Dali Singh
Posted in Online Advertising | 3 Comments »
Tags: acid3, browser, chrome, chromium, google

Considering Cognition in Your Interaction Designs

September 3, 2008 – 11:11 am

Last month Gamasutra went into detail about the importance of cognitive interaction design.

Last week Mary Brandel wrote in NetworkWorld, “Students from CMU’s HCI Institute are much in demand.”

Knowing how to measure the success of a great interaction design in terms of usability, cognitive facilitation, user adoption rates and ROI could all be considered success factors in a successful interaction design. Although there are many factors, cognition is worth a closer look even to the generalist when engaging and creating win win experience in your designs.

Usability is the ability of the user to do things like navigate to the content while cognitive skills actually dictate the user’s ability to process the data as they navigate and therefore during a chosen task.

LearningRx writes, “Key point: It’s not how much you know (the information that has been crammed into your head), but how effectively you process the information you have received. Cognitive skills are the processors of this incoming information.”

So it’s also important that you present the information in a timely fashion guiding your users or visitors in a way that helps facilitate or even improve their ability to process the incoming information.

This “incoming information” is coming from your website or other interactive presentation or video.

The next paragraph states,
“In other words, cognitive skills are the learning skills used to 1) attend to and retain information; 2) process, analyze, and store facts and feelings; and 3) create mental pictures, read words, and understand concepts.”

Creating that mental picture can help your users associate a positive experience with a brand, logo or lead someone towards a buying decision.

The Regional Educational Laboratory Midwest writes on their website, “Cognitive skills are any mental skills that are used in the process of acquiring knowledge; these skills include reasoning, perception, and intuition.”

We’ve all felt intuitive interfaces. It’s a great experience when the mouse seems to almost take you on a guided tour of an application.

Increasing a user’s cognitive ability also helps them become process the “value” you’re offering. Rising adoption rates can be a sign of potential rise in ROI and this sets the stage for an HCI pro to earn a great income connecting the dots between users and ROI for clients and employers.

Keep Reading…

Periodic Table of Visualization Methods (must see for Interaction Designers)
http://www.visual-literacy.org/periodic_table/periodic_table.html

and another table related to gaming:
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/3738/emotion_engineering_a_scientific_.php?page=3

NCREL Home
http://ies.ed.gov/ncee/edlabs/regions/midwest/index.asp

Cognitive Skills
http://www.ncrel.org/sdrs/areas/issues/content/cntareas/reading/li1lk23.htm

LearningRx
http://www.learningrx.com/cognitive-enhancement-faq.htm

IT schools to watch: Carnegie Mellon University
By Mary Brandel , Computerworld , 08/18/2008
http://www.networkworld.com/news/2008/081808-it-schools-to-watch-carnegie.html?page=1

Design Versus Cognition: the Interaction of Agent Cognition and Organizational Design on Organizational Performance
http://ideas.repec.org/a/jas/jasssj/1998-7-1.html

Interaction Design Papers and Resources
http://www.interaction-design.org/references/publishers/acm_press.html

Visualisation Periodic Table, 2nd Irish HCI Conference, HCI in 2020 & Science 2.0

Are you a Human Factors Engineer looking for a job?
Try this one:
http://jobs.nwsource.com/careers/jobsearch/detail/jobId/11414915/viewType/rss?rssref=stbiz

Posted by Arman Rousta
Posted in Interactive Marketing, Online Advertising | 1 Comment »
Tags: cognition, cognitive, design, interaction, usability, user

Digital Conservation for Your Web Design

August 25, 2008 – 11:26 am

As we all know, green design is no longer about light bulbs and electric cars. Windmills and solar panels play an important part in sustaining energy and our future, but what about conserving our digital economy?

From producers to buyers and everything in between, all of you are powering web 2.0. and everyone will have a role in determining the shape of the next generation Internet. As more people get directly involved in producing content on the web, we all have the option to implement best-practices in ‘digital conservation’.

We know about the greening of data centers. Instead of busting out a new tech meme for green coding practices, let’s reuse some older terms. Below are some familiar terms to get you started thinking green in your designs, work-flows and coding practices. This is not meant to be a definition of sustainable web design but it could lead you to more research.

Reduce

Power requirements in web servers are going down. Energy Star compliance for computers was the beginning but data centers are now driving cooling, energy and bandwidth requirements. Hosting control panels are reducing the amount of support required by giving more control to the site owner and site designers. Better designs which include mature, standards-based languages and coding practices help insure we get the most logic from the least amount of code.

Web standards like XHTML 1.0 and CSS 2.0 help reduce the amount of code on a page. Emerging standards like POSH and other Microformats help designers write semantically-correct code leveraging existing standards. Spending less time learning new standards shortens learning curves. Shorter learning curves free designers to focus more on user needs and sustainability.

Recycle

Design patterns help recycle code, imagery, and media based on past-project requirements. One example might be shopping cart code that is recycled from product sku to product sku. The same JavaScript is reused while the variables get updated for each product skew. The associated graphical elements, like “Buy Now” and “Add to Cart” buttons might be recycled from other navigational aids found in the site design. Rich Media such as product video introductions can be recycled from product to product using the similar titles, intro and credits.

One key to recycling code is the separation of code from presentation and style. Themes are a great example of site design recycling since a theme can be easily duplicated, and recycled through designer customizations.

Reuse

Hot-swappable hardware such as hard drives are refurbished and disk images are reused across entire server farms. Virtualization software and platforms help optimize the entire process. Even though we’re just in the beginning stages of green design, the techniques we’re employing in the technology sector are amazing. It seems to have started in the data centers.

Data centers themselves are now being located near renewable energy sources and some web hosts are entirely off-the-grid. Just as the data centers were driven to go green by cost-savings, green design is beginning to take hold as standards progress.

Another example of “reuse” is the popular one-click installations offered by many web hosts. Entire websites are now installed with just a few clicks and an ever-increasing amount of code in site designs are reused. Portions of your site design may be reused on other sites such as social networks. Your CSS, product descriptions and contact information may be simply cut and paste between many sites.

In sum, conservation starts with a mindset and we all have the power to contribute in different ways.

Additional Reading

Web Standards Project

Sustainable Web Design

Sustainable Web Community

Seven steps to a green data center

Sustainability Defined at Wikipedia

Posted by Dali Singh
Posted in Graphic Design, Interactive Marketing, Marketing Agencies, Public Relations, Website Design, World, green marketing, web development | No Comments »
Tags: green web design, recycle, reduce, reuse, sustainable

Interacting in the Cloud

August 16, 2008 – 2:19 pm

“Working in the cloud” means you experience less data loss. Many applications in the cloud auto-save your work and offer ways to backup and or easily retrieve your data and documents. Storing your data in the cloud, like storing your videos on YouTube means you can save space on your local hard drive. Photobucket for example, helps you edit your videos online for free using Adobe ReMix aka, Adobe Premiere Express.

“Listening to music in the cloud” means there’s no need to store all the music locally either on your hard drive or a giant stack of cd-roms on your desk. Listening at Pandora or Last.fm means you can share music you like and listen to what others with similar tastes, recommend. Sharing is a large part of working and playing in the cloud.

A more interesting example is the blogging software I’m using now. Let me explain… Several plugins add functionality to the site. They get updated regularly by their programmers. When new versions of the plugin become available, a note appears next to the plugin in the admin section of the site. A link also appears so I can upgrade the plugin automatically. Clicking the “Upgrade Automatically” link is what triggers the magic. Although really cool, it’s not the fact that the plugin gets updated or that the process is basically a single click. The magic part is that the upgrade happens between two servers in the cloud. No files for the upgrade ever have to be downloaded or touch my local hard drive. The entire process is faster and potentially more secure. How is it more secure?

Most of the work we do in the cloud is on servers that are secured by professional security experts using best practices. All the usual caveats apply here but security and speed aren’t the only benefits to cloud computing.

Perhaps the best part of working in the cloud is always having access to your documents. This includes your photos and your videos regardless of what computer your using or where you’re using it. All you need is a broadband connection. A dial-up connection would be too slow and a pretty frustrating but that’s even improving with things like the new turbo/Google gears functionality built into this blog. But wait, there’s more!

• Tools like Zoho provide application suites that exist only in the cloud. Zoho offers the word processor, spreadsheet, presentation and meeting tools you may already be using locally.

• Acrobat.com offers similar features in a very different interface with a focus on Adobe Share and Adobe Live Connect, an online meeting tool.

• Google Apps have become very popular with documents, spreadsheets, presentations, email and mobile access.

YouTube, Flickr and dozens of other photo and video sharing services have been offering software as services for years now. Fotoflexer is a newer tool that allows you to edit a photo in the cloud. With many of the same features you’ll find in Adobe Photoshop, Fotoflexer edits your photo from your Flickr account and saves it back to your Flickr account without ever storing the image on your local machine.

The speed at which these programs work is incredible and in some instances (with broadband) nearly indiscernable from working on the file locally. Most folks may never even know they’re working in the cloud and there are limitations to what can be done with current bandwidth restrictions.

Those large print files and large videos will still need to be edited locally until our bandwidth needs are better met. More tools in the cloud are released daily. Give any of them a try and you’ll get a quick introduction to “interacting in the cloud.”

Additional Reading

Stateless computing to become core to cloud computing?

CNET News Daily Podcast: Tech giants head for the clouds

Watch who’s jumping on the Cloud bandwagon

Posted by Arman Rousta
Posted in Flash, Online Advertising, Social Media Marketing, Website Design, web development | No Comments »
Tags: cloud computing, stateless

Pushing the Envelope with Interactive Brand Marketing

August 11, 2008 – 1:40 pm

Today’s web presents unique opportunities, especially in socially-relevant contexts. Using the best web 2.0 social marketing techniques can bring increased exposure, especially if your target audience spends any time on the Internet. We recently covered Brand Streaming and the benefits of FriendFeed but there’s more to it.

New techniques may proliferate your brand but a larger brand management strategy can help insure longevity, adoption and integrity. For all the benefits brand streaming may represent, there are downsides. Proper care needs to be asserted.

No one wants their brand to be involved in the next online presidential campaign blunder. Brands are simply not welcomed in all social contexts and you know the saying about first impressions. Experience is an imperative. As web 2.0 morphs into version 3.0 more challenges and opportunities emerge. Web 3.0, defined as such in Wikipedia as the “Semantic Web” is a web where applications can talk to applications. Sir Tim Berners-Lee explains it this way in Wikipedia,

“I have a dream for the Web [in which computers] become capable of analyzing all the data on the Web – the content, links, and transactions between people and computers. A ‘Semantic Web’, which should make this possible, has yet to emerge, but when it does, the day-to-day mechanisms of trade, bureaucracy and our daily lives will be handled by machines talking to machines. The ‘intelligent agents’ people have touted for ages will finally materialize.”

When enough content has been tagged in Web 2.0 a tipping point occurs. At this point, demand for more advanced applications and interactions will pick up. Interactive designers and developers will create new designs and that will further benefit brands. Your online brand may actually have intelligence built in. Doing so would give your brand a better since of itself. Perhaps it will know its own location on the web and may even understand the potential value of an interaction with a prospect before the interaction occurs. But what kind of interaction would be valuable?

Ultimately, clients will determine their own needs but we can offer some thoughts.

Let’s suppose you distribute your brand in an interactive logo in electronic postcards and on partner and affiliate websites. An interactive logo in a socio-semantic web would be able to interact with information collected on that website. Sensing this information, your interactive logo could then present a customized message, medium or pointers to more relevant information. An interactive logo could present useful information to those that see it, based on where and when they see it. Your logo can be your brand’s personal agent and could also report back on it’s own abilities to befriend potential customers.

Reaching targeted users is getting more focused and relevant. Experience in interactive brand marketing will help you secure the most return on your investment. Knowing what lies ahead can help you develop a vision of what your online brand strategy might look like. The ability of your interactive marketing agency to “Get” Web 3.0 will remain a strong consideration through the evolution of social media.

Posted by Arman Rousta
Posted in Interactive Marketing, Online Advertising, Social Media Marketing | 2 Comments »
Tags: brand, semantic web, socio-semantic, streaming, web 3.0. 2.0

Brand Streaming - Increasing Your Brand’s Social Awareness Through Life-Streaming

August 1, 2008 – 9:38 am

Social Networking in the last year has taken a new shape. As many folks continue to sign up with social networks, some are moving beyond the network model into more of a social streaming or life-streaming model. This new model seems to offer the best of several worlds, literally. New, socially-aware content aggregators are helping socially adept, bloggers and community participants share at a meta level. Newly adopted services such as FriendFeed, allow their users to share a wide-range of social activities.

For example, a video posted on YouTube, a blog entry on your personal or business blog and a post in Facebook will all show up in your FriendFeed. Currently, 43 services are monitored by FriendFeed for their users. So if you’re listening to music on Pandora or last.fm and posting photos on Flickr, FriendFeed is monitoring your activity. The information is then neatly delivered via RSS. Embed code is also available for your website or just add their Facebook application to your Facebook site.

Combine additional activity from your friends and family and things start picking up quickly. As interest grows, social participation becomes more or less apparent in your sphere of influence.

If you’re very socially active in one or more of the services monitored by FriendFeed, your popularity may increase. Ahh, in walks another marketing technique and the reason for this post, “brand streaming“. Although the business case for using FriendFeed and “brand streaming” is still developing, life streaming aka life-casting is already proving to be a valuable tool in developing brand recognition.

More to come as we monitor the effectiveness of life streaming at increasing brand awareness.

Posted by Arman Rousta
Posted in Interactive Marketing, Marketing, Online Advertising, Social Media Marketing | No Comments »
Tags: brand streaming, community, friend feed, Social Marketing

Former Google Employees unveil Cuil, a new search engine

July 29, 2008 – 5:31 pm

Updated - Please see link at bottom of page to Ben Gomes article.

Cuil.com a new search engine, was recently released and with their release came a lot of publicity. Billed as a Google competitor, developed by former employees from Google, the expectations are high. A new search engine faces many technical challenges including perceptions and pessimism. Just ask the hundreds of Google competitors that came before Cuil. The path Cuil will travel will be challenging.

So how does a new tool work it’s way into our toolbox? Either it helps us perform a new task or improves our ability to do a current task. If either of these two goals are met, it gets in. Staying in the toolbox is a different story.

Cuil does have several useful features and a great privacy policy that reads in part,

…our privacy policy is very simple: when you search with Cuil, we do not collect any personally identifiable information, period. We have no idea who sends queries: not by name, not by IP address, and not by cookies (more on this later). Your search history is your business, not ours.

Cuil also claims to be the search engines with the largest index, more pages and better organization. Are users ready for even more features? Mahalo thinks so.

Mahalo.com for example, provides tabs of the same search results on the same page including, Google, Yahoo, Live Search, Ask, Wikipedia, Del.icio.us, YouTube and Flickr. This makes it easy to research any given topic in multiple sources. This feature is earning Mahalo a spot in my own toolbox. Cuil offers buttons across the top to suggest additional searches. The results on Cuil are interesting if only a wee bit unexpected at times.

They may have an uphill climb competing against the perceptions of millions of Google users. But then again, they only really have to compete enough to be bought. Maybe whatever they’re running under the hood is worth millions? Otherwise it seems they might have been better off releasing with some sort of an ad model that advertisers and publishers could potentially adopt.

Additional Readings:

Former Googleers unveil Cuil, a new search engine

Ex-Google engineers debut ‘Cuil’ way to search

Why Cuil is No Threat to Google

Search quality, continued by Ben Gomes

Posted by Dali Singh
Posted in Business News, Marketing Agencies, Search Engine Optimization | 1 Comment »
Tags: cuil, cuil search, google, mahalo, search, serps