I started linkrolling my bookmarks during during this weekend’s U.S. Open but soon became obsessed by Rocco and Tiger. So here’s my marketing, SEO, and social media links for last week.

• The Marketing of Fear – “The challenge of marketing with fear isn’t efficacy. Of course fear marketing works. The challenge is ethics and brand.” My first “real job” out of college was working in financial services. Fear marketing worked, it also made me feel dirty, that’s why I switched career paths.
• Marketing Sherpa: How to Grow an Email List From Nothing to 2 Million Loyal Fans in 2 Years (Hint: Give Them Something They Enjoy) – I like the example of ice cream on your birthday. My wife always wants to go get her birthday club freebie on hers.
• Copy Blogger: How to Increase Your Blog Subscription Rate by 254% – The power of carefully choosing your words to elicit responses.
• Official Google Blog: Fresher Related Search Suggestions: “Recently, we improved our algorithms to process new information faster, and the result is quite tangible — you should now see fresher suggestions for queries on current topics of interest.” [via Andy Beal at Marketing Pilgrim]
• Poynter Online: Seven Traits of Highly Effective Community Managers – Good list of traits for community management superstars [via Connie Bensen]
• How to Build a Useful Site @ chrisg.com – “Track where your visitors come from and what they are after, and if you can actually talk to them. If you know why visitors arrive you will be in a better position to make them happy.”
• Web Ink Now: Search Engine Optimizing a crap-filled site just makes it a little less crappy – David makes a good point, easy to find crap is still crap. Starting with good content and then optimizing for that content is the key. See my post at Marketing Piligrim thinking like a reader, a marketer, AND a search engine. Otherwise you have a one-legged stool.
• Google Trends Adds Cool New Statistical Weighting Features : SEO Book.com – Google Trends announced a cool new feature for determining the relative search volume between keywords. Aaron Wall riffs on the new Google Trends features.
• Is Google Making Us Stupid? – It is clear that users are not reading online in the traditional sense; indeed there are signs that new forms of “reading” are emerging as users “power browse” horizontally through titles, contents pages and abstracts going for quick wins. The supreme irony about this article is its length.
• SEO Tools. Link Checker. Check Backlinks for PR, Anchor & Nofollow – Tools for checking backlinks and their quality [via Chris Brogan]
• SEM Check – Service that provides an audit of your website from an SEO standpoint. (via Marketing Pilgrim)
• Andy Beard: Never Underestimate The Power Of The Dark Side of Search – If you removed all forms of search from the internet, finding information when you need it would be highly inefficient in response to Tim O’Reilly’s post.
• Why Arrington is Wrong about Yahoo!-Google Deal – O’Reilly Radar – Great Quote from Tim O’Reilly : “Create more value than you capture” the most succint and sage advice I could ever give a commerical open source company [via Aaron Wall on SEOBBook]
• Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: Duplicate content summit at SMX Advanced – Suggestions for dealing with duplicate site content including sitemap specifications and robots.txt.
• Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: Deftly dealing with duplicate content – How to deal with duplication of content as seen by Google.
• Google: we don’t know how to make money from YouTube – Times Online – Google has said that it is still unsure how to make money from YouTube, the enormously popular video-sharing website it owns, but hopes to be able to do so soon.
• Micro Persuasion: Friendfeed will Change Journalism, PR and Marketing -Amazing stats for how much credence we put in the opinions of people like ourselves — 58% of opinion elites 35-64 in 18 countries said they trust “a person like me,” according to the Edelman Trust Barometer.This has been growing steadily since 2003. People are increasingly turning to their peers for news, information and recommendations.

Technorati Tags: Links, marketing, SEO

This month’s Fast Company cover story is Ning’s Infinite Ambition. Ning is a social networking company founded by Marc Andreessen. The article discusses the concept of viral loops (The image on the right is a graphical representation of a compound viral loop).

Viral loops have emerged as perhaps the most significant business accelerant to hit Silicon Valley since the search engine. They power many of the icons of Web 2.0, including Google, PayPal, YouTube, eBay, Facebook, MySpace, Digg, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Flickr. But don’t confuse a viral loop with viral advertising or videos such as Saturday Night Live’s “Lazy Sunday” or the Mentos-Diet Coke Bellagio fountain. Viral advertising can’t be replicated; by definition, a viral loop must be.

Andrew Chen further riffs on the viral loop:

“most advanced direct-marketing strategy being developed in the world right now.” And make no mistake: Viral expansion loops are about marketing, just not in the traditional sense. “Nothing can be truly viral unless it is good,” Wilson allows. “You can create a crappy application, build viral hooks in it, but if it’s bad, then nobody will follow the viral channel, and the company will go out of business.” But if you create something people really want, need, or merely enjoy, then your customers will grow your business for you. Users, just by using a product, are, in essence, offering a testimonial. “When your currency is ideas, people become emotionally attached,” Ning’s Bianchini says. “Then you become a public utility like Blogger, YouTube, or Facebook.”

Alex has some great information on his blog.

Now here’s what really got my attention:

The company calculates that each person signed up for a Ning group is worth, on average, 2 people, compounded daily: On day two, that individual brings in 4 group members and on day three, 8; within a week, she has brought in 128 people. Which is how Ning has been able to grow at a daily average of more than .4% and add 500 new groups a day, doubling roughly every 137 days. “It’s the power of compounding, predictable growth rates,” Bianchini says.

That’s a beautiful thing acquire a customer that recruits other users at a compound rate. Given the description of open source software as viral in nature it makes me wonder how we might get the I don’t know how to incorporate a viral loop into open source software . I am not sure exactly what method would work for systems management software like Zenoss but maybe the guys at OSS start-ups� Ringside Networks and Appcelerator might have a clue…

Technorati Tags: Appcelerator, marketing, Ning, Ringside Networks, Social Networks, Viral Loop

• Collaborative Thinking: Microsoft Continues To Fill SharePoint Social Gaps – Microsoft fills in the gaps of Sharepoint with NewsGator and Atlassian Confluence but is that good enough?
• Wired: How Apple Got Everything Right By Doing Everything Wrong – One Infinite Loop, Apple’s street address, is a programming in-joke � it refers to a routine that never ends. But it is also an apt description of the travails of parking at the Cupertino, California, campus.
• How to be an Authority Maven: 21 Tips for Keeping Up to Date in Your Niche @ chrisg.com – Keeping abreast of news in your niche can be tough. Chris G’s productivity tips..
• zAgile – About Us – New open source collaboration company for distributed development.
• Launchpad Blog: Austin Coworking – An interview with Alex Hillman who discusses coworking in Austin.
• eWeek: Open-Source Business Influencers – Odd list but some good picks. Had lunch with Tim Golden last week, he’s a hoot.
• The Best Linux Marketing Tip: Don’t Mention Linux – The VAR Guy talks about the AsusEee at CostCo.
• Marketing Pilgrim: Buzz Monitoring: 26 Free Buzz Tracking Tools – Interesting ways to gather buzz and intelligence on your industry.
• openqabal: OpenQabal: Open Source Social Networking & Collaboration Suite – Open source Java-based open source social networking thanks to Phillip for pointing it out in my comments this week.
• stevenf.com: The First, The Free, and the Good – Steven Frank on free software, Apple and open source. Nice thought piece.
• 8 common lies told by enterprise software sales people | IT Project Failures | ZDNet.com – You know how an enterprise sales guy is lying? His lips are moving.
• Why You�ve Got to Dig Digg to Get Dugg – The thought of making the front page of Digg is something that divides most content-creators into three camps: those who want it and strive for it, those who want it but feel they don�t have a chance, and those who don�t want it at all.
• First look at Ubuntu 8.04 �Hardy Heron� beta | Hardware 2.0 | ZDNet.com – First impressions by Adrian Kingsley-Hughes shows Ubuntu to be much easier to test drive then ever before.
• Micro Persuasion: Three Internet Careers That Soon Won’t Exist – Everyone will be expected to know how to navigate the online landscape if they want to have a thriving career and there will no longer need to be specific to Internet or Social Media it will be a much broader requirement.
• What Is Marketers’ Biggest Challenge When It Comes to Social Networks? – Advertising Age – Digital – Social networking is all about relationship building, and while that may be in the DNA of the public-relations industry, it has done a poor job of claiming that birthright.
• Conversation Targeting: Find the Influencers in Social Media and Blogs with BuzzLogic – Tools to identify social media influencers and buzz.

Technorati Tags: AsusEEE, coworking, marketing, openqabal, opensource, Ubuntu

If you’re going to be crazy, you have to get paid for it or else you’re going to be locked up.

Hunter S. Thompson

Drupal recently made a deal with the devils (venture capitalists) by virtue of the a $7 million investment in Acquia. Acquia owns the Drupal brand (or at least legally they do). Drupal lead (and Acquia co-founder) Dries Buytaert and the fine people at Acquia along with their backers are now at the crossroads faced by every vendor who sells free software… How do they supply a return on their investment without recommitting the sins of their proprietary software brethren or alienating the community that so far has driven their success.  

Despite being the owner of the Drupal brand and employing the project lead Dries Buytaert, Acquia has to figure out how to balance their commercial concerns as well as the care and feeding of the vibrant Drupal community.  Luckily on the announcement of their funding Dries is saying all the right things:

However, a good number of Acquia people will be working 100% on Drupal, alongside the rest of the community. This is an important investment,because Acquia succeeds only if Drupal succeeds, and we’re going to do our part. We’ll contribute code, QA testing and other important things like user experience design, marketing, documentation, etc.

Read the full story

Technorati Tags: Acquia, Alfresco, Drupal, Hunter S. Thompson, Joomla!, marketing, Open Source, SugarCRM

Some good stuff for the marketeer… 

How To Move CMOs Out Of Harm’s Way 

Since I typically don’t like traditional marketing types, they tend to believe their own hype. Apparently after 26 months their CEOs tend to stop believing it though.  

In a study of 100 leading consumer companies in June 2007, executive search firm Spencer Stuart reported that the average tenure of CEOs is 44 months but CMOs last only 26 months. In fact, 40 of 100 CMOs turned over in 2006 and 31 of 100 lost their jobs in 2007, noted Greg Welch, a practice leader in consumer goods at the Chicago-based search firm. 

I like this take on hiring them. If you are hiring a marketing professional especially one who will market a product is sold or distributed over the internet and they don’t have a blog, don’t hire them.

Even the hiring of CMOs needs to be overhauled. To select a CMO, most companies review traditional resumes and the person’s prior marketing experience. "I would refuse to accept a resume. Send me to their blog. point 13e to what they’ve accomplished on the Web. When you Google their name, what appears," Scott said.

Today the hard part is  

(Via David)

A Quick Introduction to Twitter for Bloggers

I was slow to take to "twittering" but I think it’s very useful now. Nice post from Chris Garret on how to use Twitter as a marketing tool. 

Read the full story

Technorati Tags: corporate blogging, marketing, MySpace, Twitter