Look What Digg Dug Up – Rating Ads

For five years, Digg has been a leading social news website, allowing users to find and share any Internet content by submitting and/or voting on links and stories. As you probably know by now, rankings push a story either up (“digging”) or down (“burying”); the fundamental utility of Digg is that users can then see what is popular or not. This model has been copied throughout social media.

Digg, which recently broke exclusive ties with Microsoft‘s advertising network, has launched its own with a twist – it allows users to “vote” on ads, allowing them to digg and bury ads just like links.

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IM your ESP to offer SWYN, ASAP

An interesting development for Network Centric Marketers has developed from Charm CityBlue Sky Factory of Baltimore, Maryland has developed a “Share With Your Network’ (SWYN) feature for their email customers which allows email recipients to easily post email content onto their social networks.

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Slick & Mortar

Last week, Sears Holding Corporation announced it will launch two social networking sites for its Sears and Kmart brands.   At MySears.com and MyKmart.com, participants will be able to “share their insights, experiences and product reviews” with one another.   The “two-way dialogue” (The Marketing Consigliere always thought that dialogues were by default at least “two-way”) will include forums, blogs, ratings, reviews, polls and surveys and a “suggestion” area (this last feature could prove very valuable to the Sears powers that be with its own Reddit-style peer rating system).

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SuperAds XLIII

The Marketing Consigliere prepared himself for Superbowl XLIII by reviewing his guest blog at Scott White’s blog, The Big Kahuna.  He thought it would be interesting to see how far Marketing has come in a year.

Superbowl XLIII

This year’s Superbowl had some well announced changes such as GM pulling out of its long time sponsorship.  Fine – not everyone was willing to pay $3,000,000 for a spot this year.   While no agency stood out significantly among the crowd, there were definitely some bombs.  Brand management professionals may need to think hard for next year. [Read more...]

A Network-Centric Stocking Stuffer

Santa comes to the mall once a year (although he does get there earlier than he used to).  This year, when you bring your children to see him, imagine that after the photos are taken, you don’t need to get the hard copy right away or even wait for them to be emailed.  They’re on a photo sharing site where all your loved ones can enjoy them.

Now Santa is not on his usual North Pole LAN, but that doesn’t matter.  The photographer has an SD card that is special – it’s the Anniversary Edition SD Card by Eye-Fi.  This card is compatible with cameras designated for SDHC and uploads files directly to flickr, Facebook, Kodak Gallery, photobucket, shutterfly, TypePad, and many other photo sharing sites.  It even uploads to Wal*Mart’s Digital Photo Center and Costco.com.

Eye-Fi 4Gb SD Card

Now, this perfect world scenario does depend on WiFi access for the photographer in the mall, which can be problemmatic.  However, Wi-Fi is still a growing phenomenom and the Marketing Consigliere sees this as quite feasible by next holiday season.  Clearly, this mobility is great for B2C type of happenings, and can facilitate lead generation and social networking adoption.  Additionally, there is a B2B angle for this.

PropertyPreviews.com allows Eye-Fi card users to upload real estate photos and videos to specific sites.  This can be used for commercial as well as residential real estate.  While the network-centric capability for photographers already exists with either the manual effort of using a cable to hook a camera up to a PC or just inserting the camera’s memory card, a wireless capability such as this will most likely proliferate along with more WiFi networks, growing memory, and increasing battery life.

Portability – More than Meets the Eye

In a blog last month entitled “Social Networking : For the Doubting Thomas,” the Marketing Consigliere advised readers to heed the ubiquity of consumer-focused social networking sites like Facebook.  An excellent addition to the discussion is seen in the slides called “Portable Social Graphs – Imagining their Potential” put together recently by Jesse Pickard, May Shi, and Malcolm Ong of Avenue A | Razorfish, and Jesse Stay and Daniel Stern.  Take the time to read each of these slides… they really spell out the promise of social networks for marketers.

Obviously the B2C implications of this are staggering.  But what about B2B?  Can the data mining and predictive analysis  advantages of social networking be extrapolated into the B2B space?  While certain procurement, partnering and acquistion activities of organizations should correctly remain confidential, can’t B2B professionals use social networking tools to make better decisions, relying on their peers for information?  Perhaps professional membership associations could help foster these platforms and provide more value to their constituency.

The Marketing Consigliere would like to to thank Jeremiah Owyang of Forrester Research for making him aware of these great slides through his blog Web Strategy.  He is also also grateful to Jeremiah for inspring him to blog on his own when he mentioned the Marketing Consigliere in his blog in 2007.