Online Marketing Blog

Known initially as the Lafayette Project, Kinja will serve as a blog of blogs created by web log pioneers, Nick Denton and Meg Hourihan. In a recent Business 2.0 article on Business Blogs, John Battelle reports Kinja will use a recommendation engine similar to what you see on web sites like Amazon.com. When you find a particular blog, it will recommend other blogs you might like. Kinja describes itself as, “a reader’s digest of weblogs to bring the medium to a larger audience.” According the the article, Kinja will be released early this year.

Very good article from MarketingProfs.com that makes sense out of some of the ambiguities in the recently passed anti-spam legislation and lists eight rules for CAN SPAM Compliance.

Article from Clickz

“If you can increase brand awareness, recognition, favorability, and favorable brand associations, you may be able to increase the quantity of click-throughs from the existing set of natural listings and paid keyword ads.”

On the 22nd I posted that Google might be up to something and as of yesterday it seems there was another pretty significant update. Webmasterworld.com was full of posts about “Austin”. Other forms had different names. What is agreed is that it’s a pretty good sized update. “Florida” was the last update in Nov 2003 that caused a lot of noise. I say relax - and we’ll see. If you’re not doing anything blatantly against Google’s guidelines, you should be fine.

Also, more news on Google’s Friendster-type effort. It appears they’ve taken the site down after 3 days. Article at The Register

Article from Direct Newsline

Digital marketing has high strategic importance to nearly two-thirds of marketers, according to a new study. And, over 75% of them plan to increase spending on digital marketing within their marketing budget this year. Link to article >

Article from News.com - Google made it’s entry into the social networking marketing live yesterday. Officially, Google says Orkut is not part of it’s product lineup - the site indicates it is “in affiliation with Google”.

Interesting move by Google, but is it a strategic initiative, or just a pet project by Orkut Buyukkokten, the Google engineer who developed the app? Anything new that Google comes out with prior to the IPO is going to look like a bit of beefing up, I think.

Google is up to something. Rankings are jumping all over the place up and down. Overall, it appears to be up for the sites I am checking. Interesting thing is, they have been different each day this week. In fact, I get different results 1 hour apart. The thing is, I know better than to micro-manage rankings like that, but it’s a bit addicting when you have top 3 listings for unbelievably tough keywords.

Press Release from Business Wire

Yahoo recently announced that it’s formed Yahoo! Research Labs, a team of scientists that will investigate and develop future Internet technologies. The team is led by chief scientists from Yahoo and recently purchased PPC firm, Overture.

If you’re not familiar, Google Labs has been around for quite a while. Cool tools like voice search and Google deskbar as well as features like Google News have come out of the Google Labs initiative.

Article from MediaPost - Media Daily News

Powered by the same technology that runs several social networking sites, social networking technology incorporated in the Eurekster search engine will give users personalized search results based on the search behaviors of their friends and colleagues.

With the quick growth of social networking sites like friendster, this type of search site could be an interesting avenue for advertisers to reach a very targeted audience. As far as organic listings go, ranking is up to the opinions of the users and not to any type of optimization per se.

Article from DMNews regarding a survey conducted by the CMO Council, B2B Magazine, USA Today and e-mail marketing firm Responsys. The survey polled 400 marketing decision makers at the end of 2003. No longer an experiment, online marketing has entered the mainstream of marketing tactics.

Article from Media Post - “…I think its safe to say that we’re in what should be that sustained period of growth, and that there are some elements of our industry - especially Search - that are heading nowhere but up in the foreseeable future.”

Discusses how data from the Pew Internet and American Life Project support forcast trends in search usage and implications towards web marketing.

Starting with “Tech marketing rebound”, this article from BtoB lists 10 marketing trends to watch for in 2004 based on comments by top marketing, agency and industry execs interviewed by BtoB.

Additional comments:
“Search will continue to be big,” said Greg Stuart, president-CEO of the Interactive Advertising Bureau.

Keyword search made up 31% of total online ad revenue in the first six months of the year, and Stuart said it will keep growing. “Search has not peaked, and it‚Äôs not going to level off any time soon” he said. “Most people are making profits on first customer contacts with search.”