Twitter’s Unsung Spamme– Hero, We Mean Hero

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Twitter's Unsung Spamme-- Hero, We Mean Hero

LOLQuiz, taking over Twitter one quiz at a time

Interesting article over at Fast Company about LOLQuiz and its twenty-seven year old founder and CEO, Dave Zohrob.

For those of you who haven’t had the privilege of seeing the quiz enticements created by LOLQuiz (similar to all those quizzes your Facebook friends can’t get enough of), the idea is simple.

Take a hot topic.  Write or take a quiz about said hot topic.  Rinse, repeat.

And for all of you who are trying desperately to reach the Twitterspheric heights of Zohrob, read on:

In just over a month, LOLquiz has amassed more than 300,000 users and scored at least 20 of Twitter’s top trending topics – all by letting people write, take, and tweet about five-question quizzes. Yet Zohrob has no advertising budget and works with just one business partner: Jim Young, founder of HotOrNot.com. The success of LOLquiz, he says, is part luck, part tech, and an army of tweens.

“I was just experimenting,” says Zohrob, noting that he created the site after spotting the similarly popular quiz apps on Facebook. “I had no idea it would get this big.”

You had no idea it would get this big, huh?  I’m busting my ass here to get 45 followers to my company’s website, and you just happened to stumble upon 300,000 users?  You son of a —

Lesson?  Never underestimate the scaleability of a seemingly innocuous idea in the hands of a social network.

[Fast Company scoop] {link no longer active}

Remember The Best Job In The World?

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Remember The Best Job In The World?

Someone needs to get that guy fired.

Hamilton Island in Queensland, Australia had a relatively small $1.7 million budget to try and promote their gorgeous neck of the woods, so they decided to have a job hunt.

In what was dubbed The Best Job In The World, Queensland would pay AUS$100,000 to someone to tour the beautiful island and blog, Twitter and video about their adventure.

Very quickly, media from around the world picked up the story, and over 34,000 video entries were created, with over seven million people visiting the site for more information.

Rohit Bhargava takes a detailed look at the campaign and the reasons why it worked so well.  A choice excerpt:

Make it believable. Many marketing groups would never make a claim if they can’t provide substantial evidence. How might Tourism Queensland prove that their job is the best in the world? They can’t. But it is believable because it is a beautiful place and fits what many people’s definition of a dream job might be.

Sometimes it’s as simple as saying you’re more fun than the other guys, and showing how you are more fun.  Look at how quickly Nintendo Wii has gained mass market acceptance.  It took Nintendo creating a compelling concept, but selling it like mad to the masses through outlets like The Today Show, Oprah and more.

[More reasons at Rohit’s blog]

$65 Billion And Nothing’s On

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AList shares Websites reach audiences that are becoming increasingly elusive.

Websites reach audiences that are becoming increasingly elusive.

Forbes recently interviewed Outsell, Inc. chief executive Anthea Stratigos about the research firm’s analysis that $65 million could move away from traditional marketing and back into company websites and Internet efforts. A few highlights:

[Stratigos] The marketing dollars companies now spend on their own sites is equivalent to all TV ad revenue for the year. Eight years ago we said that the Global 2000 would be the dot-coms of tomorrow. That’s what’s playing out.

She also agrees with Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer, who recently said global advertising budgets aren’t in a recession, but a complete “reset,” and they will not come back to their original levels.

[Stratigos] Advertising which has left the news industries, for example, is not going to come back in its same shape or form. But you can still make a case for cross-media buys and the combination of display ads plus search optimization as being effective.

The entire interview is a quick read and worthy of a few minutes, especially if you need some reassurance that Internet advertising isn’t on its way out, but may actually be the dominant force in coming years.

[Full interview at Forbes]

Advertising’s Digital Push Continues

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Xbox Live Dashboard with Toyota Ad Integration

The Digital Push Continues — Xbox Live with Toyota

Josh Bernoff takes some time to analyze the ongoing push of advertising towards digital mediums, not the least of which is video games.  From AdvertisingAge:

The result is that digital, which will be about 12 percent of overall advertising spend in 2009, is likely to grow to about 21 percent in five years. Along the way overall advertising budgets won’t grow much.  This is huge.  It means we are all digital marketers now, since digital is at the center of many campaigns anyway.

The signs have been there for quite awhile, and companies like EA have been at the forefront of taking advantage of the increased engagement clients are seeing with audiences in virtual spaces.

Microsoft has been making significant strides as well, two of which are extremely notable.

First, if you have an Xbox 360, boot it up and see if you notice anything new on the dashboard.  Chances are there’s an embedded video playing alongside some of the featured game slots as soon as you log into Xbox Live.  These are extremely eye-catching, and most of them have ties to digital downloads (games, themes, contests) that offer additional chances at engagement.

Secondly, 1 vs. 100 is a game, currently in beta, that has Xbox 360 players answering trivia questions in a visually appealing game show presentation, complete with their avatar as one of the stars of the show.  The best part for potential clients?  Those commercial breaks that occur every several questions, with tens of thousands of gamers happy (enough) to watch them in exchange for the free game.

We’ll keep you posted as this develops, and we’re very curious to see how Sprint and Honda are enjoying their 1 vs. 100 advertising at the gaming forefront of this advertising push to digital.

[Full analysis at AdAge]

Twitter More Effective Than You Think

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Twitter haters, beware -- It may be more useful than you think

Haters, beware — It may be more useful than you think

Twitter is all the rage, but plenty of naysayers are hopping on the Twitter backlash, questioning the benefits marketers receive from being on the microblogging platform.  You may want to turn their attention to a recent article in SearchEngineLand which shows Twitter could be underreported in Google Analytics data by as much as 1600 percent.

From SearchEngineLand:

“Based only on referrers, at best, Google or any analytics program would have said Twitter sent two visits. But because I used tracking codes, I was able to overcome the lack of referring data and see that Twitter (itself or via applications or web sites using Twitter data) sent nine visits. That means analytics packages might be undercounting Twitter visits by nearly 500 percent.”

“Meanwhile, Bit.ly was showing those 58 clicks to the page. Let’s say it wasn’t filtering out some of the robots. I can still see that there are 32 visits that the log files recorded, all with the tracking codes that never existed until I tweeted the link with them. So those are all Twitter-derived visits. That means an undercount by a standard analytics tool depending on referrer data by 1600 percent.”

SearchEngineLand has already pinged Google to find out what they’re doing about the problem, and outlines several ways to prevent the undercounting from affecting your referral stats.

[Lots more data and discussion at SearchEngineLand]