Marketing
Grab Your Vanity Facebook URL On June 13!
Tuesday, June 9th, 2009 | Facebook, Marketing, News | No Comments
Starting at 12:01 a.m. EDT this Saturday, June 13th, you can finally get an easy-to-share username for your Facebook account! Facebook explains the process that will start once their countdown page – www.Facebook.com/username/ reaches zero in a recent blog post on their site.
No longer will you have to copy and paste your profile link (which just consists of a string of numbers representing your user id) when sharing your online profile with others, now you can give your Facebook account it’s own vanity URL. Not only great for sharing but it has it’s own obvious SEO benefits which is why I wouldn’t be surprised if there is a large amount of “username-squatting” come Saturday! Below you can see an example of what the search results for that username would pull up on Google.com.
With Facebook.com being a high authority site in the search engines, this has the potential to benefit your brand and/or campaign if used correctly. In the meantime get ready to see a whole gaggle of variations on www.Facebook.com/people/Lose-Weight-With-Our-Diet-Pills/234234324 addresses pulling up in the SERPS.
Tracking Twitter – Directory of Brands on Twitter
Friday, March 6th, 2009 | Business, Marketing, Mashup, Tools, Twitter, WebApps | No Comments
Brand management firm ElectricArtists just recently launched Trackingtwitter, a site that tracks media, entertainment and consumer product accounts on the microblogging site.
Trackingtwitter follows Zappos, Whole Foods, Starbucks, Jet Blue and Comcast, among others. It broadcasts the brand category (”sports,” “television,” etc.), the Twitter usernames, number of followers, most recent tweet and any personal notes they may have collected about the account.
Amazon Plays Catch-up And Buys Video Game Producer Reflexive
Tuesday, October 21st, 2008 | Business, Games, Marketing, News | No Comments
Following in Google’s footsteps, Amazon just announced today that they have acquired Orange County based video game company Reflexive for an undisclosed sum (translation: a whole lot of dough). Does this mean we might see a new player in the online advertising market? Is Amazon going to make a move to try and compete with Google for contextual ads? With million of Amazon stores & affiliates out there, could a new CPC offering be right around the corner? I sure hope so.
Founded in 1997, Reflexive has produced fifteen games for the Xbox 360, PC and Mac not to mention offers flash based games through their Reflexive Arcade website. In 2005 the company won 3 awards at the 2005 Independent Games Festival for Fable of Souls and Wik.
Quoting the company founder Lars Brubaker in an article taken from the Reflexive website:
It means we’ll be able to expand our distribution network to include Amazon’s amazing distribution channel. With Amazon we will bring a huge new group of customers into play
Should be interesting to see what happens next.
Just Released: Google AdSense for Online Gaming
Wednesday, October 8th, 2008 | Beta, Business, Games, Marketing, News, google | No Comments
Google just announced the release of Google AdSense for Online Gaming. It works pretty much the same as your pre-existing AdSense program, where you place video, image or text ads within your application/game and it displays contextually targeted advertising based on the surrounding content.
From the official Google AdSense blog:
You’ll be able to show these ads in placements you define, such as interstitial frames before a game, after a level change, or when a game is over. Members of our AdWords team will sell your in-game ad placements directly to top brand advertisers, and you’ll also see contextually targeted text and image ads based on content and demographic information.
Now if you’re a budding flash developer, don’t go getting your hopes up just yet – in order to be eligible for this beta program your games must have a minimum of 500,000 “game plays” with at least 80% of the traffic originating from the US or UK. If you fit the mold, here’s a direct link to the application.
So far there are only three marketers listed as partners on the info page: Sprint, Sony Pictures and esurance. I’m sure it won’t be long before that list starts to grow, the publisher round-up is already full of major players in the online game realm: ArcadeTown, Konami, Armor Games, Boonty, Demand Media, Heavy Games, Grab.com, Mochimedia and cafe.com.
This move was inevitable for Google seeing how they recently acquired Adscape Media, a small in-game advertising startup based out of the San Francisco, CA area.
Surprisingly, they already have a “Success Story” listed on the about page for social networking game developer Playfish. These guys primarily produce games that you can add to your Facebook or MySpace profile, so it’s a ‘little’ deceiving in nature.
Sell advertising space on your Twitter account!
Tuesday, September 2nd, 2008 | Affiliate, Business, Marketing, Mashup, Tools, Twitter | 1 Comment
It was only a matter of time before people started finding ways to monetize Twitter, last week announcing the arrival of a short-url CPC program and this week announcing the arrival of Twittad.
Twittad.com lets you put up your twitter account on their marketplace where advertisers can see the number of folks who are following/followers as well as the price you are asking to allow their products/advertising to be displayed on your twitter page.
If you’re a Twitter user looking for advertising – You get to select the duration that the ads are displayed as well as the price. Anyone interested in purchasing that space will then contact you through twittad.com, giving you the ability to accept or deny the offer.
How does twittad.com make money then?
They get paid a 5% service fee on the total purchase price (minimum of $0.99 cents).
What’s to stop an advertiser from contacting the user directly, skipping twittad altogether?
NOTHING! You’re given the user’s twitter profile, there you have any number of ways of contacting them without twittad even knowing! Email, through their website and even through twitter.
Right now the most expensive twitter account only has 599 Followers/605 Followings. Get this, it’s going for $100!! The highest paid twitter account though is only $25 for an user with a following of 351. I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s one of the developers who purchased the account!
I can’t see how this will last… but it’s an interesting attempt at monetizing Twitter. I give it a week before script-kiddies with auto-generated twitter accounts take-over the site. Good luck.
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