pinch, swipe or poke billboards

Last week, I visited the Modern wings at the Chicago Art Institute. I was impressed by an art which you can interact with. If you waive your hands or move your body the form of the art will change simultaneously. But it turns out that the technology or trend in the modern art is also relevant in the modern ad.

According to Engadget , now iPhone users can control the billboards using WiFi or 3G network, thanks to the cooperation of CBS outdoors and Clusta. They can pinch, swipe, and poke at the objects on digital posters to make them zoom, spin, and change color using their iPhone screen.

It seems really cool concept. Specially, if advertisers place the billboard where people can take time and play with it for a while. Perfect locations, I think, would be train or bus stations, malls etc.

The question is what if two or more iPhone owners try to manipulate the same billboard at the same time?

Alert! Lunch meeting with Joe in 30 min.

Businesses spend millions to analyze the consumer behavior and predict their future actions. They bit their nails to send the right offer at the right time.

What if some business knows what exactly you're doing next day at noon without any effort or analysis. It knows where you're going to be, who you're going to meet, what you're going to do and when you're going to do it.

I started using Google calendar to organize my schedule. I basically tell Google what I will do today, tomorrow or even in months with precise timing and detail. I post every event from eating lunch with friend to flying to Mongolia on vacation.

If Google decides to monetize on this ( I am pretty sure they will). They do not need to spend millions on market analysis to come up with right offer at right time. They would simply read the events on my schedule and send a timely offer relevant to my need accompanied with the alert for the event.

Alert! Lunch meeting with Joe in 30 min. By the way, if you haven't decided where to go, Camile's cafe offers you 25% discount if you go there. Click here to see direction.

Personally, I would not mind receiving such ad, since these ads are generated according to my plan.

Online PR Campaign

Public relations (PR) is the practice of managing the flow of information between an organization and its public. Is Online PR a practice of managing the flow of information between organization and "crawlers"?

One of the practices SEO specialists do to increase the ranking of a website is submitting an articles strategicly created to reflect the keyword phrases of the business. Some SEO services advertises that they will craft an article that will improve the brand name awareness and submit them to dozens of online news distribution channels.

However, most of the channels that they distribute are not the ones we read on the daily basis. Is it because those news releases are not dedicated for humans to read rather for crawlers?

Twitter Monitoring for Business 101

I created an account on Twitter a couple of weeks ago and I have been on it sparingly since. First, I really didn't see what the big deal with Twitter was. Myspace and Facebook have a similar “status update” bar. After reading an article about how a pizza place attracted a customer using the Twitter, I decided to test what twitter can do for a business.

I created an account for my small food delivery business and using search.twitter.com started monitoring twits that are taking place in my targeted area. People twitted frequently and generously about their days past and plans ahead. I was specifically interested in keywords such as food, restaurant and picnics.

When someone tweets about how bored they are alone at home, how weather was bad and didn't want to go out I replied with restaurants suggestions or that we deliver food from different restaurants.

At first I was little nervous about conversing with strangers or interrupting peoples conversation with sales pitch. Surprisingly, people didn't seem to be annoyed at all. They were twitting back with me and checked out our website many times.

ChloeLaCroix@FoodOnBoard omg I've been there!!! I love their tacos ;)
BearDesignGroup@FoodOnBoard Thanks! Sweet Baby Ray's sounds good!
saravonsega@FoodOnBoard How much do you charge? What's your phone number?

Now, more confident, I uploaded emails of all our customers and checked if they had twitter account. Turns out that more than 50 people have twitter account. I followed them all and many of them followed me back. With few of them I had some conversation. I even asked their opinion on their last order. They replied with some great feedback.

I also searched people who are in our service area and started following them. After a few days of easy chats I have more than 100 people I monitor on Tweetdeck and about 30 people who follow my updates on tweeter.

What surprises me the most is that the same people who do not open printed or electronic ad from us are willing to converse or follow our updates on twitter, at least for now. The question is why people are more open to business offers on Tweeter and how long it will last.

In-Text Advertising

As we discussed in class, one of the challenges that online marketers are facing is that people paying less and less attention to the ads on websites. Researches show that people ignore banners and margins. Some of marketers' reactions include using more flash contents to drive attention. But the challenge is Ad-blockers. Some desperately placed ads right in the middle of the text as described in Joshua Wilson's blog.

While I was researching blog ideas, I came across the term "In-Text Advertising". I thought it might be better idea how we could market our products/services without being blocked or ignored.

In-text advertising is a form of contextual advertising where specific words within the text of a webpage are associated with advertising content. (Wikidepia.com)

Although contextual advertising in general refers to the inclusion of advertisements adjacent to relevant online context (e.g., Google AdSense), in-text advertising places hyperlinks directly into the text of the webpage. Most in-text advertising has the following characteristics:

1. The text associated with an advertisement is identified by a double-underline to differentiate it from regular hyperlinks.
2. An in-page window containing advertising content appears when the cursor is positioned over the corresponding text. (Wikidedia.com)

This type of online advertising within the text of an article, has been around for a while. But it used to be relegated to niche sites like the videogamers' haven IGN.com and ScienceDaily.com.

Now it is appearing on some mainstream journalistic Web sites, like those of News Corp.'s Fox News, Cox Enterprises Inc.'s Atlanta Journal-Constitution and Hearst Corp.'s Popular Mechanics magazine. (Is It News...or Is It an Ad?,online.wsj.com)

Following is the list of websites,that provide the in-text advertisement.

http://www.vibrantmedia.com/
http://www.infolinks.com/
http://www.kontera.com/

Let's Get It Started

Greetings,

Thank you for being one of the first visitors of my blog about Online Marketing.

This week, I decided to write about my blog and what I would like to share or discuss with you in the following weeks.

As you already know, the plain text and the intimate part of body attract one's attention most in advertisement. Therefore, I have chosen a display name “intimate text" instead of my long-hard to spell-unattractive name. It was proven to be an unattractive name because, I created a homepage on the blackboard and posted couple messages on the discussion board. Despite the effort, I did not receive a single comment or response during last two weeks.

I hope the name attracted your attention and made you visit my page. If so, I am one step ahead in my Journey to Onlightenment.

Every week, I will raise one issue related with online marketing, such as challenges for email campaign or choosing the right key word etc., to develop a discussion and learn from you in the process.

WEEK 2 QUESTION: How significant is the choice of name for blogs to become successful and have many readers? I will leave this question open for discussion for you and I will greatly appreciate if you comment and share your knowledge with readers of the blog.

Cheers,

"Intimate Text"