Davis ThinkingSlate recently ran this article about how the supposedly democratic world of Web 2.0 is anything but, with a select few tyrants holding full editorial power over such sites as Digg and Wikipedia. What’s the big deal? Complete democracies are for Coke commercials from the 1970s.
At first glance, it would seem that the new generation of product-bookmarking sites such as Pinterest and Svpply are nothing more than new tools to feed the consumer machine, driving us to buy more stuff. But, counterintuitively, my experience with these services is that they actually help me cut my consumption and to direct my money at goods that more closely align with my values.
In January 2010, Toyota faced a nightmare situation for any brand, but particularly for one that staked its reputation on safety and quality: The company had to recall 2.3 million vehicles because of faulty accelerator pedals.
It certainly was a diverse week in the social media sphere, with the the iPhone OS 4.0 reveal, Digg’s CEO shakeup, Tiger Woods’s new commercial and the Baja California, earthquake’s coverage on Twitter and YouTube. And, as if the aftershocks from the natural disaster wasn’t enough, we’ve been practically flooded with iPad news since its launch this past Saturday.
In late January, Toyota watched the hundreds of stories about its recall situation flow through Digg and saw the passionate comments and conversations triggered by those stories. Toyota was already an advertiser on the user-voted news aggregator, but execs at the company concluded that ads weren’t going to be enough. In a fast-changing crisis, the carmaker needed a PR platform where it could listen and interact with consumers.
Yelp has found a work-around for those wicked extortion rumors (and that pesky lawsuit). In a blog post with the no-nonsense headline "We're Increasing Transparency and Eliminating 'Favorite Review'," Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman explains its plans. The "transparency" part is met by allowing users to see reviews that would otherwise have been obscured by the review filtering system. Whereas the Favorite Review part sees this entire segment of the advertising package deleted from Yelp.
Looking ahead to 2010, marketers will be facing Olympic hurdles that will require steadfast agility just to stay in the game, much less to hit the finish line ahead of the competition. Here are 10 ideas, wrapped in Olympic glory that should deliver the gold.
Fed up with a barrage of letters that arrived at the FCC last week from net-neutrality opponents (or lawmakers urging a cautious approach toward the new rules), a coalition of Internet companies are urging the FCC chairman to hold steady. “We believe a process that results in common sense baseline rules is critical to ensuring that the Internet remains a key engine of economic growth, innovation and global competitiveness,” a group of 24 CEOs and Internet company founders wrote in a letter to be delivered to the FCC Monday in support of the proposed net-neutrality rules.
When the social news site Digg introduced sponsored links into its main news flow this summer, the company knew it was taking a gamble. Would the notoriously rambunctious community revolt or boycott the site for cluttering up its news feed with advertisements? “The response has been overwhelmingly positive,” said Mike Maser, chief strategy officer, during a recent visit to The New York Times. The experimental advertising platform, which began a measured introduction at Digg.com in August, incorporates the same social voting principles as the news site, allowing users to vote for the ads they like and against the ones they don’t.
Every hour thousands of new videos are uploaded online. Blog posts are written and published. Millions of tweets and other short messages are shared. To say there is a flood of content being created online now seems like a serious understatement. Until now, the interesting thing is that there are relatively few technologies or tools that have been adopted in a widespread way to manage this deluge. We pretty much just have algorithmic search, with Google (and other search engines) as the most obvious example. Social bookmarking and social news have been around for some time (ie - sites like Digg or delicious), and new models of aggregation like Alltop are springing up to help us navigate all this content as well. The real question is whether solutions like these will be enough. By some estimates in just a few years we will reach a point where all the information on the Internet will double every 72 hours. Double.
Time.com's traffic trajectory in 2009 has been skyward, thanks in no small part to a partnership with Digg.com. The venerable newsweekly's Web offshoot has seen its audience balloon by 41 percent versus last year, landing at 6.7 million unique users in July, per Nielsen Online stats. And according to John Cantarella, Time.com's general manager, some of that growth is attributable to a 164 percent increase in traffic from the social news property since January.
Users clicking onto videos links sent via Twitter spend significantly longer watching those videos than those arriving from Digg or Facebook, according to a new study by video stats site TubeMogul. The methodology (below) seems fairly robust, so it may offer a real insight into current Twitter usage: On Twitter you can follow interesting people, not just your friends.
Founded in late 2004, social news site Digg helped define Web 2.0 at the outset and made a celebrity of co-founder Kevin Rose. It has inspired a host of imitators and quite a lot of speculation over when or how it would become profitable and if or when it would be acquired. Now the site is launching Digg Ads, its bid to move away from static banners and apply the social nature of the site to advertising.
Considering the magazine-heavy resume of The Daily Beast founder Tina Brown, it stands to reason the Web publisher would take her cues from that world. But rather than adopt the banner, the most magazine-like Internet ad format, the IAC-owned Daily Beast has sworn off "traditional" Web ads in favor of custom executions.
Social news site Digg is rolling out its first major ad product, borrowing a page from Facebook by designing units that mimic the site experience itself.
You have to love - or at least pay attention to - Digg’s new advertising system enabling users to vote on ads: The more that users digg an ad, the less the advertiser pays. That’s a reversal of advertising but it’s the way advertising probably needs to go: The better your relationship (which springs from a better product and service), the more your customers will market it for you, the less you’ll have to pay to market it. That is the ideal. Advertising is failure.
2009 is the year of social media. Once, Twitter (Twitter reviews) was a place where you could read about someone else’s cat. Now, it’s the first place you go to when there’s breaking news. Sites like Digg (Digg reviews), Reddit (reddit.com reviews), and Facebook (Facebook reviews) can now leave a huge impact on the real world; lives are changed, important questions are asked (and answered) there. Many milestones have been reached; the growth of nearly every aspect of social media has and continues to be enormous.
When I first heard about the impending launch of the DiggBar, I was annoyed more than anything else. Now that the toolbar has been released to the public, however, it turns that this isn’t just a simple toolbar, this is one of the best decisions Digg has made in a very long time.
Social news-sharing site Digg is one of the web's top crowdsourcing success stories. By letting its users vote up content that interests them, thereby deciding what belongs on the front page and what doesn't, Digg has rewritten the rules of news gathering and information sharing on the web. The site has also earned a reputation as an excellent resource for breaking news -- whatever story, blog post, video or photo is currently burning up the web, chances are you saw it on Digg first.
In a discussion at my office last week, Steve Baker, author of "the Numerati," described a day when there would be services widely available to help people optimize themselves in the new digital world. He underscored there have long been individual optimization services in the analog world.
Twitter – the non-money-making start-up that lets a user update status in a pithy manner – had a banner day last week with the inauguration of President Barack Obama, which followed all the tweets about the successful airline crash in the Hudson River in Manhattan, which came after…well, you get the point. That kind of frenetic news cycle has kept Twitter growing quickly. And that has apparently setting the stage for raising a big new round of funding.
Copyright © 2009 Davis Brand Capital. All Rights Reserved.
