Tagmarketer

Become Famous With YouTube !!!

2007-12-06T16:03:00.000-08:00

It's easy:
put your clip on youtube and if it's cool... you'll be famous!

Lots of people would think so watching Youtube's most viewed videos!

but... is it so easy?

I think that behind amateur clip success there is a specific and aimed viral campaign.

watch this video:

Marie Digby (girl of this clip) has obtained hundreds of thousands visits

She has lots of fans and estimators
She has a fansite
She has a myspace profile
She has a page on wikipedia

Her first song ("Umbrella") was subsequently played on the radio station STAR 98.7, was featured on the third season opening episode of the MTV show The Hills, and peaked at #10 on the Bubbling Under Hot 100 Singles chart [Wikipedia.org]

Ok, she is a good singer but...is that all?

No, she forgot to tell us "marginal" information: in 2005 (before her youtube appearance) she signed with Disney's Hollywood Records!

without it... do you think she would have achieved the same results?

Pay attention!!! I'm not saying i don't believe that a person can become famous with his own videos but...I think that is not easy!

It's important to create a cool product and to find the better way to release it.

Uploading your video to youtube is not enough, this is only the first step!
Then you have to find a way to allow the greatest number of people to be able to watch and share (viral aspect) it.

good luck :)

Google 2.0 - Social is the Future !!!

2007-12-03T14:29:00.001-08:00

Social is Better!
Google will be Social!
Google will be Better!

Google will allow us to rate search results.
It's a turning point for the search engine because it allows users to tell their own opinion about sites.

This feature reflects the web 2.0 philosophy and looks like a social networking tool (StumbleUpon etc)!

Users, in fact, will be allowed to thumb up/down sites:

" Like it ?
This button will move the result to the top of the page and add this orange marker next to it so you can easily recognize it. The result(s) you promote will appear at the top whenever you search for the same keyword(s) in the future.

Don't like it ?
This button will remove the result, and it will remain hidden when you search for the same keyword(s) in the future."

These buttons will let you say what you think about a site:
it's social.... it's 2.0 !!!

what do you think? :-)

read official google page: http://www.google.com/experimental/a840e102.html

Communication: iPhone vs Android (part 2)

2007-11-29T01:58:00.000-08:00

Our previous Android vs iPhone post seems to have gathered a lot of interest and some negative reactions as well. Hence the need to go back on the subject and study into more detail its implications.

First of all, for the moment, we don't want to talk about products themselves: we know everything about iPhone while we still know very little about Android. We'll talk about this when we are able to hold a Android enabled phone in our hands.

The purpose of these two posts is to analyze the pure communication strategy and its results.

While we still cannot measure any result about Android, iPhone data are evident: "Apple Inc. said that it reached its goal of selling its 1 millionth device almost three weeks ahead of schedule" reports Marketwatch for example.

All of us know about the people waiting in line for three days to get the first iPhone. This is the mere result of the marketing caimpaign: no one knew the product at the time, there was no need to stay in line since you could easily get one just a few days later. All this iPhone fever was because the art of communicating of Steve Jobs and the guys at Apple. Call it prophet-wannabe attitude, call it hype, but those guys really hit the target. We'll see what Google guys will do.

At Google they're very good at technology, at business, at service and so on. They're pretty good at communication as well, but when it comes to marketing strategy Apple is the leader. And Steve Jobs is the best commercial you could ever imagine.

Apple communication mix: the key features

1) It's gotta be easy to explain: if you have a hard time describing your product it simply ISN'T a good product. Or, if it is, people will perceive it's too complicated/boring/not attractive.
2) It's gotta be gorgeus: if you're in love with your product people will love it as well; you'll be more persuasive and in so doing you'll make your product more attractive for your target.
3) Just talk about the user experience: if you can avoid talking about technical features and manage to focus on what opportunities your product unleashes for its users, just do it. People want to hear what a product can do for them, not what the engineers meant to put into it.
4) Just enumerate they key features and stress them: long lists of features are like bullet points for keynotes: boring. They will turn your audience attention to anything but your product. Needless to say Steve Jobs doesn't use bullet points.
5) Design a good product: of course communication is useless without a product. If you're going to insert some features in your phone which you're don't feel like talking about they probably won't work. Just forget them (or make them better).

This is a strategy which just seem to work. We'll see what Google communication will bring.

10 Easy Steps To Increase Blog Traffic

2007-11-26T23:47:00.000-08:00

- be cool: to attract user's attention, it's important to write something unusual, something different... something that surprises the audience. If the user is astonished, there are many possibilities that he saves the link and shares it (increasing the viral effect).

- be global: web official language must be English. If you want to have a big audience, you have to write in English.

- be simple: English is understood by many users all over the world, but their languages' knowledge are very limited. For this reason it's important to write simple and effective concepts.

- be constant: the peculiarity of a blog is to be up-to-date. It's important to write regularly and constantly, so you can avoid to lose user's confidence.

- be qualitative: It's not important to write very long posts. The importance is the quality and the message.

- be commentable: you shouldn't undervalue the possibility to interact with the users that read your blog. It's important that a blog stimulates to comment. You shouldn't apply strictly censure to the posts. You should use them to create a dialogue with users. You have to listen to the advice, the praise, the critics and you have to learn to them. The users are satisfied if they notice that you are listening to them.

- be transparent: you have to share your competences, your purposes, your aims with users. You mustn't hide your reasons. If users don't find clearness, they can lose trust in your blog.

- be social: you should insert buttons that help users to spread the posts on the major social network (stumbleupon, del.icio.us, dig, reddit...).

- be tagged: you should add tag to your posts, so you can help the users surfing your blog and they will find easily interesting posts. If the research is easier, also the navigation will be better.

- be in beta: a blog should be always in beta version: it should be always modifiable, improvable, perfectible... so when you reach a considerable number of users, it is only the beginning... you have to continue to work and so number of users will grow.

Don't be afraid of being judged and criticized. User's opinion must be an instruments to improve your blog. Users love a blogger who listens to them and grows following their advice.

Communication: iPhone vs Android

2007-11-20T04:19:00.000-08:00

Don't get me wrong: I love both Apple and Google. All these guys do an amazing job in making our technology experience more fun and performing and probably Android will turn out to be an amazing product as the iPhone is. But when it comes to communication, Mountain View disappears and Cupertino rules. The guys at Google simply seem to be still stuck in the web 1.0 of communication. See for yourself:

Android presentation:

iPhone (still need to see it?!):

Here is how Duncan Riley at Tech Crunch puts it: "Admittedly Sergey Brin is soo wooden he might be trying to impersonate an android, but ignore the intro and look at the demonstrations of what Android can already do. Now pretend the iPhone didn't exist. Cool, right?"

Ultimate guide to gaming Alexa (for free) - AKA How to increase your Alexa ranking (etc..)

2007-11-12T13:33:00.000-08:00

It's pretty clear by now: Alexa is a marketing tool, and many people are aware of this.

Most advertisers and ad networks use your Alexa ranking as a measure of your website traffic. Actually, to most of them, this is the main gauge. This makes Alexa a powerful marketing tool for your site.

Now webmasters and editors are wondering how to take advantage of it. Therefore pages explaining how to increase your Alexa web ranking, or even how to game it, are gaining more and more attention: if you perform a Google search for "Alexa" and "Ranking" you'll find tons of sites explaining many ways in which you can better perform on Alexa.

But there's a more subtle explanation to this phenomenon. One which can help explain how to really succed in your goals. And which explains why so many blog posts' title read like this:" How to increase your Alexa ranking" or this: "Ultimate guide to gaming Alexa (for free)". They make up the title of this post not by chance. Read further for more details...

ALEXA FACTS (AND SOME TIPS):

1) Alexa receives data only from those users who have the Alexa toolbar installed on their pc: this is a fact, read this for further details.

2)Alexa gathers data mainly from webmasters and webmarketers: people who want to optimize their Alexa score are the more likely to be Alexa users, infacts they want to monitor their website performance and, in the meantime, they want to understand how Alexa reacts to their actions. As a result, many Alexa toolbar users are website editors and designers.

3) An increase in the traffic coming from those users will result in a higher increase in your Alexa performance: if you speak to an undistinguished audience and you have 100 people visiting your site, you might find out that only one of them has an Alexa toolbar. Therefore Alexa will be aware of that visit only. But if you target your communication to webmasters and webmarketers it might result in less visits (say 10) and more Alexa hits (I would say 2). Which happens to be a 100% increase in your Alexa performance.

4) Simple but still true: Alexa users - since they are mostly webmasters and webmarketers and they're aware of the importance of ranking well on Alexa - share one main common interest; guess what it is... Alexa of course! And what is the most interesting Alexa-related subject for these guys? That's clear: "How to increase your Alexa ranking" of course!

At this point you probably got it right: by writing a post about how to increase your Alexa ranking you already are doing it.

Post scriptum: click on one of those "gaming Alexa" links. You'll find out that most of them lead you to empty posts or useless links: they've already pursued their goal (and you probably have an Alexa toolbar on your pc!)

"The Importance of Being Earnest" in 2.0

2007-11-09T05:51:00.000-08:00

One of the aspects that most companies neglet while creating a marketing campaign is honesty.

Lately it has become important to reflect upon this word as never before.

In the past consumers/users were obliged to live a passive role towards the media, continuously bombed by information with no possibility of checking its truthfulness; they just had to trust it and their confidence was mostly betrayed.
The only defence possible was that of sharing their own experiences and opinions with other people close to them.

This scenario is undergoing a quick change thanks to the development of the internet: the possibility to compare yourself, your tastes and opinions with other users is rapidly growing thanks to fact that in the net there is no time - space limit as in the real world.

Thanks to the broad diffusion of consumer generated media (blog, social network, forum, newsgroup...), users can find virtual places where they can meet and communicate with each other.
Usability is the core of these aggregators, nowadays anyone can easily get in touch with other people and the audience keeps on growing.
This allows people to share their personal opinions about products and brands more easily, rapidly, and at no costs.
Therefore it has become more and more difficult for consumers to rely upon traditional media when they have to choose a product to buy there is a higher and higher need to compare with others to protect themselves from "advertising lies".

In 2005 Yankelovich (a consulting firm specilized in finding solutions for improving marketing plans for companies) noticed that 76% of the sample taken into consideration didn't trust in advertising announcements.
This is an aspect which shoudn't be underestimated by companies. If they want to survive in this new scenario they should understand that the marketplace and its dynamics have changed: nowadays consumers' opinions play a decisive role.

Consumers are less and less vulnerable and sensitive to suggestions that traditional media spread: new and alternative information sources are becoming more and more important.

For this reason, the first purpose of a company should be that of pleasing the consumer because his/her badmouth could have a great influence on the opinions and purchases of many other consumers.
Honesty should be the core point of every marketing policy and it should be followed by a continuos research of alternative ways to satisfy the needs of consumers.

Confidence has become a very strong element that could influence people's choices, but no confidence (and faithfulness) could exist if there is no honesty by the company.

It is no more the company that tells the consumer what he/she should buy, it is now the consumer that decide the rules: the consumer is now the centre of the market world.

Web 2.0: The Machine is Us/ing Us

2007-10-29T06:27:00.000-07:00

An interesting video about web 2.0 technologies potential. It puts down in a very easy way what revolution web technologies are undergoing:

Make it relevant, make it sexy!

2007-10-24T10:17:00.000-07:00

Some products/services are sexy, some are not. For all of them you'd better come out with a message relevant to your audience. Then, if you make it to sexy, the job is done!

Here are some tips you might use:
1) Make sure you're addressing the right audience: you must know them, be aware of their specific characteristics and interests.
Tip for Stumbleupon users: SU makes you reach potentially anyone. When you submit your site make sure you use the right tags and description according to point 2, you don't want to hit the wrong audience.
2) The message has to be involving: tailor contents for THAT specific audience. They must be interested in what you have to say. And you must speak directly to them.
3) Make it touching (i.e. "sexy): make them laugh or make them cry and they will do the marketing for you. How? Thumbing up your page, forwarding your link via email, talking about it with friends. In other words: spreading the word!

Now, if you want to sell an expensive business intelligence tool you'll have a harder time than if you had a free videosharing site focused on funny recipes. This doesn't mean tag marketing won't work for you. In both cases it is an highly effective tool. Under a cost/benefit point of view this will always remain a model which is worth the costs. Just make sure you address the right people with the right topics. Then, if you don't win anyone attention, it means no one is interested in you product!

Marketing with Stumbleupon

2007-10-23T04:55:00.000-07:00

Stumbleupon is a perfect marketing machine. It brings you interested people. All you need is a relevant, possibly sexy, message (see my next post for an insight about this subject).
People are happy: they get what they are looking for. You are happy: you hit your target. Stumbleupon is happy: more people, more contents.
Ok, you probably think it's harder than it sounds: just a bit. Let's see how it works.
You probably already know what Stumble is. If you don't you can find out here. What interests us here though, is related to marketing. And what Stumble does in terms of marketing strategy is simple yet useful: it gathers a segmented audience. And it happens to be an interested one: they're there waiting for the next page to load, ready to pay their whole attention to it.
That's a giant leap from banners, popups and intrusive advertising, isn't it?
Now, let's see how Stumble segments its audience. When you sign up Stumble asks about your interests, letting you flag some keywords or asking you to add more (keyword=tag). Then, once you start stumbling, it feeds your browser with sites related to your interests. At this point you'll be able to thumb up or down these pages. This gives new information to the system which now knows more about your interests and can cross these data with other profiles in order to forsee what other sites might be interesting to you. Stumble lets you also manage your community of friends. This is a further step in profiling users. Stumble takes advantage of this crossing your friends' tastes with yours. This lets it select the sites to show you also from the thumb up list of your friends.
Here comes the real marketing 2.0: no annoying users at the wrong time or with the wrong message. No interruption. No inattention.
"This is still advertising and it's bothering me!" you might argue. There are at least two reasons why this is not true.
The first reason is that Stumble let's you jump to the next site as quickly as clicking on the button "Stumble". It also lets you thumb down a page letting you get rid of it forever. No bothering: just half a second of your precious time.
The second is better explained by an example: it comes from Facebook but it perfectly delivers the concept of "relevance". In my Facebook profile I have inserted Elvis Costello as one of my favorite artists. The other day, as I logged into my music application, it showed an alert about Elvis Costello tour dates. Does anyone think I felt annoyed?
Now all you have to worry about is making up an appealing message and inserting it in the Stumble circuit (you might use some friends stumbling your site, I'm sure Stumble won't mind).

It's all about the tags!

2007-10-22T09:17:00.000-07:00

As this video clearly demonstrates!

Enjoy...

David Weinberger "Mover and shaker of the year"

2007-10-22T02:21:00.000-07:00

Our Guru, David Weinberger (see my first post here), was awarded by the Mass Technology Leadership Council as the best "Catalyst/Industry Influencer" of the year (with co-winner Linda Plano from Massachusetts Technology Transfer Center). Needless to say, we very much agree on this: go David go!

That Tag in the Marketer

2007-10-21T07:02:00.000-07:00

TagMarketer is intended as a collection of information, tools and reflections about tagging and all the opportunities it uncovers in terms of online marketing. This is meant as a sharing of thoughts rather than a statement of what I think is the "Truth", therefore any comment, suggestion, critic is welcome.

Why "Tag"-Marketer? Because among the array of innovations on which this whole web 2.0 thing is based, tags are by far the most interesting to me. And because sites that base their system on tagging - like del.icio.us and Stumbleupon - are the most useful from a marketing point of view (Facebook being another story of course).

As I started writing, tough, I realized it's impossible to take tagging apart from many other aspects of this new internet. Say participatory web, user generated content, social networking, folksonomy or whatever you want it all reads the same: Web 2.0.

Now, one thing is for sure: there really is a "2.0" era, and it's already there for the internet. What about online marketing 2.0? It's coming, and you'll find some bits and pieces here. Fasten your seat belts, and every now and then let me know how the trip is going, and if you have the directions, just tell!

Why Tags Matter (thanks David!)

2007-10-20T05:44:00.000-07:00

This post title is taken from an inspiring article by David Weinberger. It perfectly explains the relevance of tags in marketing 2.0. I wanna start by giving this to you as a gift. And as an acknowledgement to David for his precious work! I won't add one more word, here it is:

A tag is a little thing. A word, or maybe two. But the rise of tags carries big implications, precisely because tags are so small. The excitement about them goes far beyond their practical utility. They announce a fundamental change in how we think our world is ordered - and who gets to do the ordering. At bottom, the importance of tags is political.
At their simplest, tags are labels readers apply to what they have found and want to re-find later. So, if you come across, say, a recipe for apply curry, you might tag it "apple," "curry," "main course," "Indian," and "medium spicy." I might encounter the same web page and tag it "foreign food," "low calorie," and because my tolerance for curry is low, "extra spicy." Someone else might tag it "fruit" or "disgusting." We would do this tagging at a site such as http://del.icio.us, the page that began the current interest in tagging. Del.icio.us is a bookmarking site where people can keep lists of pages that they want to remember. As we accumulate hundreds or thousands of pages, del.icio.us lets us find all the ones we've tagged a particular way. So, with a mouse click, we can find all the pages we've tagged as "extra spicy" or "apple." This is the basic utilitarian function of tags. They are convenient, but not much more.
But del.icio.us also lets us see what pages everyone else at the site has tagged. So, we can find all the pages anyone using the service has tagged "curry" and "low calorie." Suddenly, we are benefiting from the discoveries others have made. Subscribe to a tag such as "plastics" or "environment," and now every day in your email inbox you'll receive a list of pages tagged that way by others. It is like having the world do your research for you.
That is more than a matter of convenience. It brings you information and ideas you simply would not have discovered otherwise. It makes groups smarter. Sometimes they are groups of strangers, as at Del.icio.us, and sometimes they are groups spread across a particular organization, as at companies adopting tagging software from IBM, ConnectBeam, and others.
But to see why tagging is a matter of the politics of knowledge, we have to look at the context into which tagging has erupted.

We have argued for millennia about how our world is ordered. Is homosexuality a disease? Was the slaughter of American Indians genocide? Is the platypus a mammal? Is Pluto a planet? We have assumed that there is an order and that everything has its place in it. This makes sense when talking about arranging physical objects: If an underwater digital camera arrives in your store, you'll have to decide whether you're going to shelve it with the cameras or with the sports equipment. It can only have one place because that's how physical objects work. Likewise, when you put away your laundry, you have to decide whether this pair of socks goes with your business clothing or your informal clothing. It can't go in both places.
Since our knowledge has been preserved and communicated in physical objects - usually made of paper - we've had to devise informational orders that assign each a single place. So, the librarian has to decide if the new book on fruit curries goes with the Indian recipe books, the health recipe books, or the "just arrived" books.
The same limitations of the physical also determine what gets published in the first place. Paper is expensive and it takes up room, so book publishers have to choose only a relative few works to publish. Newspapers hire editors to decide what will be in each day's edition, and which items will make it onto the front page. There can only be one front page, the same for all readers, because atoms are too expensive to personalize.
So, an entire structure of authority has grown up based on the scarcity of the physical conveyances of knowledge. Experts winnow and arrange, based on what they think will be interesting and importance to us. Generally they do their job well. But they are still doing it for us. They have authority and power.
We benefit from their advice, but we also pay a price. The day's newspaper simply cannot represent the interests of all its readers. Most of us skip most of what's in it, and we don't see the articles that didn't make the cut that we might have found fascinating. The same is true for every other one-to-many medium. And, worse, we suffer a terrible sense of alienation from our own culture because this culture is something done to us. Our choices are not only limited, they are limited by faceless others. We often like what we read or watch, of course, but still what we're viewing is theirs.
With tagging, the power over significance changes hands. Rather than the author, publisher or librarian telling us what matters and why it matters, the readers now do. We stick a tag on it. The book that our teacher, librarian, publisher or even author marks as "classic," we may mark as "boring." The official photo of a politician his campaign has tagged as "leadership" we may tag "poseur." In fact, thousands of readers may create hundreds of different tags, each meaningful to the individual taggers.
From this might come chaos. But instead order often emerges. Some tags get used more than others and they may be used with other tags in patterns that can be surfaced. The order that emerges bottom-up from a set of tags is called a "folksonomy," a play in English on "taxonomy." Folksonomies express how a group of people think about a domain. They are almost always looser, messier and less hierarchical than the sorts of taxonomies built by experts who are trying to express the order of their domain. But that also means that folksonomies can capture more of the relationships the group finds among the various elements around them.
In fact, we now have evidence that as tagging sets get bigger, they do not necessarily get more chaotic. Search for photos tagged "capri" at the popular photo-sharing site Flickr.com, and you will be asked if you want to browse among photos of the island or photos of the Ford car by that name. The groupings are surprisingly accurate, and they are based on nothing but a statistical analysis of the tags used on those photos.
This is meaning we get for free. People tag photos at Flickr and Web pages at del.icio.us - and books at Amazon and LibraryThing, and academic articles at CitULike.com and household possessions at MyThings.com - so they can find them again, but these individual actions create something bigger than a single-person retrieval system. Each tag adds meaning to the shared Web. Meanings are both intensely personal and deeply shared. That is why people have fallen in love at del.icio.us with people who share tags with them. That is why a tag cloud - a visual representation of the tags one most often uses - can be such a telling indicator of one's interests and desires.
The short term importance of tags is that they enable us to manage large collections of resources, and they let us share what we find. The long term importance is that they add a layer of human-generated meaning that we will be able to farm and build on in ways we haven't yet imagined. The deeper meaning is that they prove that we do not need experts providing single, unambiguous structures of order to keep chaos at bay. Rather, we can live with multiple orders, each enriching our world.

Social Experiment: Can Social Network Users Kill Spam ?!?

2005-11-28T06:51:00.000-08:00

Social Experiment: Can Social Network Users Kill Spam ?!?

Spam has always troubled the net!
Do you think that spam could infect social network too ?!?

How can a user spam on StumbleUpon?
- Sending private message to users,
- Saving in Stumble sites he wants to advertise,
- camouflage the site to diffuse. How? Using a cool title, writing a winning (and fake) review,
choosing tags (not related to topic site) that attract large audiences,
- ...

So, when user makes a tag-search, he will obtain spam-site as a result.
But we don't want that it happens, right?

The peculiarity of network 2.0 is "to be social" and so it should be desirable that users union can contend with spam.

Does Stumble give these weapons to users?

Are you interested to verify it with me? (don't worry: it's legal ^_^ )

How?

Read it!

EXPERIMENT: Can Social Network Kill The Spam ?!?

I simulate to be a spammer (don't worry: i'm not a real spammer).
I have created a link that we consider "spam-link"(!!! LINK !!!). In this page the main topic is "!!SCEGLIERE!!". As a spammer, I'll try to diffuse everywhere this page (in this case...only in StumbleUpon).

What could I do in Stumble?
First I add it to my favorite sites (clicking on )
Then I review this page (if my scope is advertise this site, I'll write something good)
and I use cool tags (to appear in users searches). Naturally those tags don't reflect the main topic of spam-site. I use them only to advertise my spam-page.

So, now if an user searches these tags probably he'll obtain my page. But he doesn't like it because it's a fake and spam page !!!

In this situation I (aka "the spammer") would achieve my aim!

But what happens if users start to be active?
How?
Each user have to tag in another way the spam-link, using keywords that really reflect site topic.

I hope that doing it... searching spammer's tags (used for by him to tag his page), spam-link doesn't appear as Stumble search result.
And so... we would defeat the spammer !!!

But I don't know if it happens and so... I would like to test it with you !!!
More users will participate and more precise this experiment will be

So, if you are interest to discover if WE can REALLY kill spam, click here and tag that page in a correct mode !!!