Written on 15th December 2008
3 COMMENTS 
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
The Influential Marketing Blog wants us to consider a piece of data that leads a new Forrester Research report (register to download): only one in six consumers (just 16%) trust company blogs. In other words, 84% of corporate blogs today probably suck.
I’m not surprised, most corporate blog I stumble upon are blogs without a soul, but with press releases. Moreover, the pieces of personal PR are often isolated, living a life within the .com domain of the company. No outgoing trackbacks, social media presence, or articles about phenomena outside the safe haven of the offices.
Therefore, Forrester Research argues that a blog has to be part of a larger social media strategy. Teach a PR person the fine art of community management 2.0. Give him a free pass for Twittering, Digging, Stumbling, and blogging all the day. Read Naked Conversations, for crying out loud.
Oh, and don’t forget to have a look at some fine examples. Quintura from Russia (read the story behind it here) and Digital Nomads by Dell (another story here).
Read more:
Written on 2nd June 2008
0 COMMENTS
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, Serial Internet Entrepreneur
There are countless examples of Microsoft ads featuring macs. Here is another one but from the Michael & Susan Dell Foundation. It looks like they love 12 inch iBook G4s too. Can’t blame them:
Lost your camera? Find it back at ifoundyourcamera.net!
Last winter we went skiing and I brought my digital camera. We made some hilarious movies and a few photos that I would love to post here. But when we arrived back at the lodge the camera was gone. Lost somewhere between the top of the mountain and our lodge. We never found it.
But maybe someone did! It turns out that lots of people lose their cameras. In fact, so many people lose them that there is one website dedicated to found cameras and memory sticks. It has a strange voyeuristic quality to look at all these lost & found photos. New sets of orphan pictures are posted each Thursday. Here are a few:
Written on 27th January 2008
2 COMMENTS
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Three weeks ago we brought you the news about Reddit users making fun of Network Solutions’ domain front running. They checked domains like Networksolutionsisstaffedbyterrorists.com, which the service immediately registered. Although this was funny news, the problem itself isn’t. Last year, CEO and founder of GoDaddy Bob Parsons explained on his blog how big the problem is:
The domain name tasting and kiting industry is alive, well and running rampant. The practice of domain tasting and kiting continues to rage out-of-control. In February 2007, 55.1 million domain names were registered. Of those, 51.5 million were canceled and refunded just before the 5 day grace period expired and only 3.6 million domain names were actually kept. With the exception of just a few names, 93.5% of those names were registered simply to see how much advertising revenue – paid by big search firms like our “do no evil” friends at Google – will generate when they are associated with a one page Web site and related links.
As you can read, Parsons wasn’t really fond of the way Google made the practice of domain name tasting profitable. That will change now, and Google will gain some ‘do no evil’ points. Because the number one in online advertising will make it harder for the front running companies to show up in the search results. Over the next few weeks, Google will look up names that are repeatedly claimed and dropped in a five-day period. They will be excluded from the Adsense program, so that they won’t generate advertising revenue.
“We believe that this policy will have a positive impact for users and domain purchasers across the Web,” Google spokesman Brandon McCormick told to the Associated Press.
Fighting side-by-side with Google are Yahoo, Dell and BMW, who have filed federal lawsuits against domain name tasting companies that conflicted with their trademarks. It’s not hard to imagine that all these major companies will be able to ban out the shameless act of domain front running.
And to make the story even better, you can still have fun with the ‘mindless monkeys‘ at Network Solutions.
[WebTipr: David Petherick, United Kingdom]
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