Hunter and Associates: Stories We Noticed 2007-06-22

Posted on June 25, 2007
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Price Losing Ground To Reviews

So what factor is taking the place of price? The answer may surprise you–18% of shoppers said that customer feedback is the most important factor. Only 7% picked customer feedback in 2003.

As the web becomes more and more dominated by user generated content, it is obvious that customer feedback about companies and products will continue to grow in importance. This trend especially gives hope to small online retailers that cannot compete on price, because smaller companies should normally have an advantage in customer satisfaction.

Changing Tech Keeps Marketers Hopping

Globally, marketers are expected to spend $33 billion this year on online advertising, according to media buying company GroupM. That represents 8 percent of total global ad expenditures. With all that cash on the table, traditional ad companies are doing all they can to arm themselves to survive and thrive in the digital marketing realm.

“Without any doubt, this is the hottest topic that there’s been in our business in many years,” says Jerry McGee, who works on digital projects for the American Association of Advertising Agencies trade group.

In this new world, successful marketing can be as much about consumer-made video and buying Google “sponsored link” search terms as about clever TV commercials.

That’s frightening to many. “A lot of creative (staff) and creative directors are looking at the emergence of digital like some people look at global warming: ‘This is not happening, this is not happening, this is not happening,’” says Bob Moore, chief creative officer at ad agency Publicis USA and a member of the Cannes jury for print ads.

LISTEN — Introduction (Part 4)

For those entrenched in the status quo, this can be a difficult concept to accept. Titans of the Old Model have spent the past five years wallowing in various forms of hubris and denial.

“The era of the creepy blue light leaking out of every living room window on the block is now officially at an end,” says my pal and occasional colleague Steve Rosenbaum, founder of video-sharing startup Magnify.net and one of the inventors a decade ago of citizen video. “The simple, wonderful, delirious fact is that people like you and me can now make and share content.”

Monetizing Facebook applications

A handful of developers have managed to rake in hundreds and thousands of users, without any explicit marketing, due to Facebook’s inherently viral platform. Majority of them, however, have not attempted to leverage their applications for earning opportunities. Seeing an untapped opportunity before us, a few have begun developing applications to monetize and build startups on top of Facebook’s platform.

My own application is a mashup between Facebook and Amazon API’s to recommend, share, and comment on books. The “My Favorite Books” application is designed to earn through the 4% profit earned off every successful referral to Amazon. Combine this with Facebook’s 24 million active users and a business model instantly emerges.

Myspace - the next Prodigy?

By providing a clear roadmap – and business opportunity – for the widget makers, Facebook has just increased its virtual R&D budget by over $250 million dollars. By welcoming third-party innovation, Facebook will reap the benefit of hundreds of millions of dollars of venture investment – and the Facebook user will have a much richer experience. I’d wager that every widget maker who has previously relied on Myspace for traffic is hard at work this holiday weekend on migrating their application to support the Facebook API.

Facebook has recognized (and embraced) something that Myspace has not – that there is more value in owning a web platform then a web property.

How To Keep Widgets From Slowing Down Sites: WEDJE

The problem is that in either of these cases, the completion of your site’s loading and rendering depends on someone else’s code living on someone else’s server. Including a fast and reliable Flickr widget still slows your site down by at least a split second and including a less stable one can leave your site hanging indefinitely.

Intern Rob and I hacked together what we think is a method of deploying widgets in such a fashion that they don’t affect the load times of their parent sites whatsoever.

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