May
29th

The Rise of the Three Wolf Moon T-Shirt

Posted by Luke on May 29, 2009 at 1:20 pm

Search and social media can have unimaginable results. Just ask Michael McGloin, Creative Director of New Hampshire based t-shirt manufacturer, The Mountain.

“I feel this will be in the history books of marketing, people will be trying to duplicate it. It’s just out of control.”

What was he talking about? Well, six months ago, Brian Govern, a Rutgers University student, penned a comical review on Amazon of the now famous Three Wolf Moon T-shirt.

Inadvertently, Brian’s comment launched the t-shirt into a viral sensation, practically giving the t-shirt a life of its own. His posting caught the eye of the editors at collegehumor.com, whose readers began a barrage of their own amusing reviews and claims of the shirt’s powers. The number of reviews now sits at 837.

Here are two of my favorites:

You don’t put this shirt on your torso, you put it on your soul.

Unfortunately, I already had this exact picture tattooed on my chest, but this shirt is very useful in colder weather.

Even the manufacturer has jumped in, posting an account of how the shirts are delivered to them after being saddled to the backs of Pegacorns(unicorn-Pegasus hybrids), hand-dyed by monks, dragged through the ocean by eagles and dropped back in New Hampshire.

These spontaneous bursts of creative reviews are now common enough that online reviews have developed into a literary genre with Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube serving as your distribution networks.

Since the viral thread took off earlier this month, sales have spiked. The shirt is currently selling at a rate of more than 100 an hour, and it’s the No. 1 seller in Amazon’s apparel line. There are currently nine Facebook pages dedicated to the shirt, a YouTube parody, hundreds of Tweets, content all over Digg and Squidoo, coverage in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times and a recently aired segment on ABC World News.

Search has changed and with that, marketing has changed. Build your online presence and listen to your customers as they “tweet,” comment or share blogs, and develop satirical product reviews on Amazon. If you’re looking for direction, you’ll find the guiding beacon at Oneupweb.

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May
29th

Google Unveils Google Wave

Posted by Maureen on May 29, 2009 at 10:45 am

Yesterday at Google I/O (Google’s annual developer event), the search engine unveiled a new tool for communication and collaboration on the web: Google Wave.

This is set to be a real-time communication platform. If you’re like me, you’re probably saying “that doesn’t explain anything!” So let’s dive in and take a closer look.

What is Google Wave?

Stop and think about all the different forms of online communication you engage in on a daily, weekly or monthly basis — email, web chat, instant messaging, social networking, wikis and more. Now imagine if you could take the best aspects of each, and combine them to create one platform. Essentially, that’s what Google Wave does (and is).

The idea behind Google wave is to unify communication on the web.

What Kind of Features Will It Offer?

According to Mashable, Google Wave will offer the following features:

Real-Time: You will be able to see what your friends are typing as they are typing, character by character.

Embeddability: You can embed a wave on blogs and websites.

Applications and Extensions: Apps can be built in waves, much like an app can be built in Facebook.

Wiki Functionality: Want to edit or comment on something someone has said? Go for it! In Google Wave, all conversations are public, and can be edited by anyone.

Open Source: That’s right, the Google Wave code will be open source.

Playback: You will be able to “playback” any part of a wave, to see what was said.

Natural Language: Google Wave will correct spelling and auto-translate.

Drag-and-Drop File Sharing: There will be no attachments in Google Wave. Just drag a file, drop it inside Google Wave and everyone will have access.

And a lot more.

That Sounds Great. But What’s a Wave?

According to Google, a wave is equal parts conversation and document. In other words, people can communicate and work together with text, photos, videos, maps and more. It’s shared, meaning any participant can reply anywhere in the message, edit content, etc. And don’t forget — it’s live.

Ben Parr at Mashable further breaks it down by comparing a wave to instant messaging, saying “that it’s like your entire instant messaging (IM) history with someone.”

Who Came Up With This?

Google Wave came from the minds of a development team from Sydney, Australia — that was also quite involved with the development of Google Maps. Some names that stick out on the team are brothers Jens and Lars Rasmussen and Stephanie Hannon. I, for one, can’t wait to see what they will come up with next!

Google Wave is expected to be ready for public consumption later this year.

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May
27th

2019 – Social Networks, Tribes and the Irrelevance of Search

Posted by Vern on May 27, 2009 at 1:00 pm

Step into the DeLorean, crank it up to 88 mph and let’s go back to the future.

Image: Bttfblog.com

We’re careening down a path leading back in time to a tribal society, a digital society, where communication is exclusively among tribal members. Knowledge is shared among the members through one-to-one interaction. And where all things outside of the tribe become alarmingly irrelevant.

The catalysts for this societal shakeup are social networking giants MySpace and Facebook. Text messaging and Twitter “tweets” facilitate tribal communication while on the go. How we interact as a society will become exceedingly compartmentalized by 2019 and serve to further isolate and polarize the Earth’s population. This is the exact opposite of the vast potential to unite the planet that we saw in the internet just a few years ago.

Upon initial examination it would appear that the internet has expanded our ease of knowledge sharing and communication. Certainly in the early days (present time) search engines made it possible to tap the collective intelligence of the planet. Barriers to worldwide communication crumbled thanks to wireless devices and the internet.

Through the expansion of offerings from social networking companies, a decade from now, you’ll have established tribes of our own and won’t need the likes of Google, Yahoo, Bing or Ask. You’ll have a Facebook tribe for keeping connected. Your Twitter tribe for sharing your daily activities. Your Digg tribe for news. Your Diigo tribe for knowledge sharing. Your UrbanSpoon tribe will tell you where to eat. Your Buzzillions tribe, what to buy. Your WebMD tribe, why your back aches. And you’ll have a Friendfeed account to keep track of it all. Talk to the neighbors? What for? They’re not part of your tribe. Search Google? Why? Your tribe has all the answers.

If you’ve done a good job establishing your tribes — Friends, Groups, Followers, etc., you’ll never need to go outside of your networks for any interaction, knowledge sharing or information gathering. One of your tribes will certainly include a member that can answer your questions and satisfy your every need.

Traditional media advertising, already struggling, will take a backseat to the Word of Mouth recommendations of your tribe. Companies that embrace social network marketing will thrive.

In the future, gaining tribal membership will be quite challenging as we become more selective. The vetting process will be similar to a fraternity or sorority rush, complete with digital hazing. Only those with the most to offer your tribe survive the selection process.

As you embrace the social web, build your networks carefully. They will profoundly impact your opportunities, people’s impression of you, your capabilities, and even your personality.

Is social networking all fun and games? Well, just as it was in high school — run with a bad crowd and it will eventually cost you.

Is my vision of the future a positive or negative one? Let me know what you think!

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May
27th

Mobile Takes the World by Storm

Posted by Chip on May 27, 2009 at 12:57 pm

It’s been a couple of months since my last mobile update and a lot has happened in that time — both within the mobile space as well as in terms of my own personal mobile experience.

That’s right, since my last update I’ve purchased a new Blackberry Storm AND a new iPhone 3G.

Having taken a dive into the deep end of advanced mobile experiences, I’ve managed to renew my awe of this space and am motivated to pull together another post on the topic.

So without any further ado, let’s get right into it.

Mobile Devices

The last couple of weeks have brought a few mobile device-related items that are worth mentioning.

The much anticipated Palm Pre is officially being released, finally. After much anticipation, Sprint announced both a definitive launch date (June 6th) as well as pricing information ($200 after mail in rebate) for the latest aspiring “iPhone killer”.

Despite the fact that Nokia has not officially gone on the record about this, there is talk about a new program that would allow companies to brand Nokia mobile devices by wrapping them in their logos or custom images and pre-loading them with branded multimedia content. The cost of these branded Nokia devices would be offset by the corporate sponsorship for the user, and would offer a new, unique mobile marketing opportunity for the brands involved.

Mobile Apps

Now there’s no way I’m getting through my first mobile post after purchasing a Storm and an iPhone without talking about some apps.

Nokia Ovi Store — hoping to follow the success of Apple’s App Store, Nokia launched their own version this week. Since apps are critical to successfully gaining market share in this space, this is a positive step for Nokia (though they have a very long way to go to reach the level of Apple’s App Store).

SkyMap — Google released a new Android App at this month’s Searchology event called Sky Map, which turns any Android-based phone into a virtual guide to the galaxies. This is one app that I very much hope gets released for the iPhone soon.

Product Search — also from Google and also for Android, the Product Search app is now capable of scanning the barcode of a product. Using the built in camera of your mobile device, comparison shopping has never been easier.

Elvis has NOT left the building – a new iPhone app called Elvis Mobile was also released this month. It allows Elvis fans to view images and videos released by Graceland, listen to podcasts from Elvis Radio and even report Elvis sightings from around the world.

Well, that’s probably enough to chew on for today. As always, please feel free to add your favorite mobile highlights to the mix by commenting — and stay tuned for your next monthly mobile installment.

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May
26th

Hungry Like The Wolf(ram Alpha)

Posted by Bob on May 26, 2009 at 1:10 pm

Well, the much anticipated release of the potential “Google Killer” has come and gone. Wolfram Alpha (gesundheit!) was speculated to be the newest semantic search engine to dethrone Google. Alas, it would seem that Wolfram Alpha will not be the engine to fell the mighty king. In fact, it would appear that Wolfram Alpha is not a typical search engine at all.

Here is an excerpt from the Wolfram Alpha website:

“Wolfram Alpha’s long-term goal is to make all systematic knowledge immediately computable and accessible to everyone. We aim to collect and curate all objective data; implement every known model, method, and algorithm; and make it possible to compute whatever can be computed about anything. Our goal is to build on the achievements of science and other systematizations of knowledge to provide a single source that can be relied on by everyone for definitive answers to factual queries.”

Translation: It will attempt to answer questions.

Wolfram Alpha is the brain child of Stephen Wolfram, a noted scientist and the creator of Mathematica computational software. This newest creation from Steven Wolfram performs queries and returns results that aren’t quite what you would expect from a typical search engine. Wolfram Alpha does things a little bit differently.

When you perform a search with Wolfram Alpha the results are not the typical list of websites and links, but rather a set of answers. For example, if you search “Google” using Wolfram Alpha, you will get a SERP with information relating to Google’s stock price and trading information, as well as historic stock market information related to Google. This is a far cry from what you would see using a traditional search engine. This is because Wolfram Alpha does not bill itself as a traditional search engine, but as more of an “answer engine”, or as their website calls it “a computational knowledge engine.” It was developed to give the user answers to questions directly on the results page — not point the user towards a website.

Now that Wolfram Alpha is live and we understand how it intends to deliver answers, the next logical question is, how will this “answer engine” earn revenue? A few large companies, like Scottrade and Lenovo, have already begun showing sponsored ads on select results pages.

According to the Wolfram Alpha website:

“At present, Wolfram Alpha is concentrating on major corporate sponsorships. In the future, there may be opportunities for more targeted advertising.”

So, it would appear that at some point, Wolfram Alpha may open its results pages to targeted paid advertisers. But since this engine is designed to answer specific questions, and not to point searchers toward relevant web pages, most of the people using it will be (at the very least) in the earliest stages of the buying cycle. When starting an advertising campaign using this type of engine, very intimate knowledge of the consumers buying cycle, diligent statistical research, and active account management are absolutely crucial for success. Of course, a competent and accomplished digital marketing company, like Oneupweb, can help you to successfully achieve your online marketing goals.

What do you think? Will Wolfram Alpha become a viable platform for a successful PPC campaign?

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