First of all we would like to share some more hidden internet jokes that we have found. There is quite a range of Google jokes or hoaxes that somebody dedicated an entire Wikipedia “Google Hoaxes” article to them. For more jokes or Easter Eggs, as they are also called, check out the site eeggs.com. Back in the days Microsoft used to be quite funny and there were hiding quite a lot of easter eggs in their programs like Excel but that has been reduced because people were complaining about the waste of resources (how mature!).
Secondly we have noticed that the Ebay Sale of the Online Shopping Community Yieeha (we have previously reported) has come to an end at the stunning selling price of EUR 24.550,00 incl. VAT. The Sale has not been commented on their blog as of now (no new entry since June 23, 2008) however the average sale price of 2EUR per registered user is definitely not very satisfactory but it was definitely worth a try. There are not that many Shopping Community Sites for Sale on Ebay to compare with but our feeling is that the price could be more!
Spiegel has published a few examples of funny jokes that are hiding in programs and sites that we are using everyday without knowing it. I have quickly summarised the findings in a few lines:
Firefox: Checkout the address “about:robots” and this page will show you a new interesting site! The robots want to communicate with us humans!
Yahoo Yodeling: Some years ago there was dispute about that Yahoo Yodel, which is actually still hidden on the site. Go to the Yahoo.com site and click on the “!” in the Yahoo logo in the top-banner.
Amazon: Check out the hidden special thanks to David Risher, former Amazon employee, by clicking on an invisible image below the copyright note on the bottom of the category overview page.
Picasa: if you want to see funny teddy bears, open your picasa and type “ctrl+shift+y” at the same time and you will see teddy bears appear!
Google Reader: if you want to see ninja’s in your google reader type the famous konami code: “↑ ↑ ↓ ↓ ← → ← → B A” and ninjas will appear in your reader.
These hidden gags are quite funny. Do you know of any other ones?
After having talked about branded communities there are also the Social Shopping Communities that are widely discussed now. What we found most interesting was that the German Social Shopping Community Yiieha is up for sale on Ebay. It has given all the necessary information that you need to know when buying a shopping community portal on EbayAlexa Ranking, Page Impressions, Adranks, and much more. Check it out and we will follow it very closely what is happening with it. The bidding is finished on 03.07.08, 14:45:25 German Standard Time.
Jupiter Research published a study saying that branded communities are a failure and don’t reach their consumers. As stated in Internetworld and Acquisa the average number of members of branded communities in Europe are 6,494 members with more than have half of the communities only counting 1,000 members in comparison to the investments sometimes going far beyond EUR 100,000. Viral marketing is also out of date and is not lucrative anymore for those branded communities in most instances because most companies don’t understand the modern internet users. They try to just give information to the members instead of making the effort of understanding their consumers and providing them with interaction possibilities or even reasons to communicate. According to a report by David Eicher, CEO of the internet agency Robert & Horst, one just needs to merely be smart and integrate the users at the beginning of the development of the community instead of creating an expensive “community platform” and then looking for members. That sounds easy! What do you think?
Fleishman-Hillard Inc. and Harris Interactive have published an excellent study about the influence the internet has on modern consumers. Their “Digital Life Index Study” highlights the main aspect of the modern shopping behaviours and compares the different impacts between the UK, Germany and France. The four key findings of the report are worth reading up on:
Digital Influence: The Internet is by far the most important medium in the lives of European consumers — but companies are underinvesting in that influence.
Behavioural Framework: Consumer use of the Internet falls into five distinct classes of behaviours. Smart marketers will clearly understand the mix of behaviours that is most critical to their business — and formulate integrated campaigns to address that mix.
Consumers use the Internet in different ways to make different decisions. The differences are driven by the impact of the decision on their lives and the range of available choices.
Consumers see the clear benefits of the Internet to their lives, but they still have strong concerns that need to be addressed.
You should read the article, which you can find here.
Two news have drawn our attention today, which we think should be noted:
Winner of the day
We had previously mentioned the Download World Record attempt for the Mozilla Firefox Version 3.0. According to Mozilla and the BBC, Firefox has been downloaded 8.3 million times within 24 hours, which is quite noteworthy. There have been server problems, who could not cope with the amount of simultaneous downloads and apparently some security flaws have already been discovered but the number of downloads is still very impressive. Congratulations and you can count us in for those 8.3 million.
Loser of the day
Another news, which needs mentioning is the fact that the Swedish government has passed a law, despite the civil uproar, that permits the state to check everybody’s emails, sms, phonecalls and any other telecommunication without any court order. Isn’t this disrespectful against the privacy of the individual? Besides the common argument that “you don’t need to be worried if you got nothing to hide” we consider this as an incredibly distrust against its people. Let’s say that we were less than positively surprised to put it that way!
The recently published article “This Ad Stinks: Let Readers Vote” by Business Week gives some great information about the result that viewers’ feedback on ads have for the advertiser. We have already previously taken note of StumbleUpon.com, a rating website for websites, people and videos, but we think it is worthwhile mentioning now in this context. The notion that advertisers ask for a review or rating of their ads before the roll-out of a large campaign can save tremendous amounts of money but also generate huge traffic in case you are voted positively. The only questions is whether advertisers like the idea of being criticised or rated?
It seems that they are currently more company acquisitions happening than dealipedia could hold but we were wondering what are the latest Key Performance Indicators (KPI) besides the known ones:
Page Impressions
Unique Visitors
Pages Viewed
Demographics
Acquisition cost per user
Adspend per user
Conversion Rate
Click-Through Rate
Page Rank
What else comes to your mind when you think about analysing the performance of your online retail site?
Oh yes, our new Letsbuyit mascot was born yesterday!!!
It weighs around 200mg, which admittedly is not very big, but it’s healthy and sound! It was also baptised yesterday and we will present it to you very shortly.
Thank you everybody who made it possible for our famous mascot to reascend from the ashes!
This is a viral marketing campaign as it happens: Mozilla Firefox is promoting its Firefox Version 3 by attempting to break the download world record, which is the amount of times the browser is being downloaded within 24 hours. There is currently no world record and this first attempt will be the world record but the goal is to beat the download record of Firefox 2, which was downloaded 1.6 million times on its launch day.
If you wanna be part of this World Record Attempt then go to the Spread Firefox Download Day 2008 website and register. We are part of it!
We have previously mentioned viral marketing however we were wondering whether anybody has examples for the monetary value of viral ad campaigns?
We read that the campaign “Will It Blend”from Blendtec generated $50,000 in ad revenue with 100 million views in total.
Apparently “Ask a Ninja” generates an unbelievable $100,000 a month in ad revenue and income from merchandising and licensing for creators Kent Nichols and Doug Sarine.
According to Wiki.media-culture the BMW viral ad campaign in 2001 generated BMW a sales increased by 12.5% compared to 2000 with peak times even crashing the servers.
What examples do you have for viral marketing campaigns where the benefit can be expressed in monetary value?
I have taken a particular interest to Mobile Marketing and M-Commerce and after having heard about Mobile Banking in developing countries I came across this article “Pakistan: Begging for alms via SMSe“. Apparently beggars are asking for mobile phone credit instead of money for food. This might sounds strange but most probably these beggars themselves treat mobile credit as some sort of virtual bank/money account, which they can use in return to pay for goods and services. I heard about this phenomenal idea, which seems to have been developed in Africa. If you have more information please don’t hesitate to letting me know.
I have taken a fancy to Visual Search Engines and have now come across Cluuz. Cluuz creates links between search result terms and different keywords and puts them in relation. To test it I searched for “Letsbuyit” and got the following results with two different visualisation effects. Sometimes I don’t quite see the links or relationships nor how they have been created but it is visual nevertheless. I like it. What do you think?
