Marko Saric’s thought stream

Marko Saric’s thought stream

Marko Saric  //  I am Marko Saric, marketing manager based in London, England. Here I publish my daily thoughts on all things marketing 2.0.

I also blog at http://HowToMakeMyBlog.com on WordPress, Thesis Theme, blog branding and promotion, search engine optimization, and affiliate marketing.

Jul 22 / 3:44am

BBC and other traditional media including your tweets in their news coverage

Fans who listened to the iTunes Festival gig, which was broadcast live on radio station XFM, wrote on the Twitter website during and after the concert.

Oasis at Roundhouse was brilliant
Fan Emma Mitchell on Twitter

Rob Ramsey said Liam had accused students in "stupid pointy shoes" of hurling the beer.

And the Camden New Journal newspaper twittered that the star was "throwing a tantrum because Camden students soaked his stage with beer".

However, fans did not seem disappointed with the band's performance.

Emma Mitchell wrote: "Oasis at Roundhouse was brilliant."

On a page devoted to the iTunes Festival on website Facebook, Steven Buss wrote: "What an amazing night. Forgot what a stroppy sod Liam could be. Loved it."

It is a very interesting trend lately. BBC and other traditional news media are increasingly using information from tweets created by public in their news coverage... be it some eye witness news from a natural disaster or a fan review from a local concert.

Twitter has given everyone a voice and the traditional media is definitely listening.

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Jul 17 / 4:01am

Advertisers paying less per click, Google gives less to bloggers / webmasters

"The downturn is finally getting to Google," says Jeffrey Lindsay, a senior analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein who has an outperform rating on Google's stock. The drop in revenue per click shows that Web users are clicking on ads to comparison-shop without buying products, and buying lower-cost items online compared with a year ago, Lindsay says. Those behaviors mean ads are less valuable to marketers, and result in lower payments to Google.

So advertisers are paying less per click to Google, Google in turn pays less per click to bloggers and other website owners, and customers are increasingly having the Adsense blindness where even the text ads blanded with content are not focused on.

If you're only monetization method is Adsense ads, you must be looking for other ways to earn money. Be it selling fixed fee banner ads, be it selling products via affiliate program, be it charging for content or be it by creating and selling your own product.

Adsense is not the way to go anymore...

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Jul 16 / 12:44pm

How NOT to build buzz about your product (by writing fake reviews)

Lifestyle Lift, a cosmetic surgery company, has reached a settlement with the State of New York over its attempts to fake positive consumer reviews on the Web, the New York attorney general’s office said Tuesday.

The company had ordered employees to pretend they were satisfied customers and write glowing reviews of its face-lift procedure on Web sites, according to the attorney general’s statement. Lifestyle Lift also created its own sites of face-lift reviews to appear as independent sources.

One e-mail message, discovered by the attorney general’s office, told employees to “devote the day to doing more postings on the Web as a satisfied client.”

The company will pay $300,000 in penalties and costs to the state. It has also agreed to stop publishing anonymous reviews on Web sites in the voices of satisfied customers and to identify any content created by employees, the statement said.

I wonder how widespread this method is. Creating fake buzz about your product by writing good reviews about it, fake tweets, comments on blogs, votes / likes in social media and so on. Just look at the sales letter sites all around internet that sell everything possible, they all have great testimonials from "real people"...

I bet that this case in only tip of the iceberg and as a consumer you must be very careful about not trusting what random people write online.

For companies, you might fake it for a while, you might get some money out of it, but by not creating really great products there will be no word of mouth (at least not positive) and the customer you cheated will make sure that they nor anyone in their social network comes back to you.

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Jul 16 / 5:11am

Recipe to success: Get attention by being stupid and sign celebrity agent deal!

He survived for 12 days in dense Australian bush, sparked a massive search and rescue effort which cost more than A$100,000, and just 24 hours after walking out of the wilderness of the Blue Mountains Jamie Neale has signed up with a celebrity agent to sell his story to the highest bidder.

Mr Markson said Mr Neale's story could prove lucrative with magazine, print and television deals and further endorsements.

"It's such a good survival story," Mr Markson said. "He could go on to do some speaking engagements, he should be doing some educating, talking to kids at school to help them learn about survival skills.

"There could even be a diet book — Jamie's 12-day diet."

Road to success:

1. get your name out there, even if you're doing that by how stupid you are or how talentless you are.
2. Sign a deal with some agent and go to anyone who might offer you money for anything at all... interviews, book deals, tv shows...

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Jul 14 / 12:34am

Hilarious market report that shook the City

Teenagers see adverts on websites (pop ups, banner ads) as extremely annoying and pointless, as they have never paid any attention to them and they are portrayed in such a negative light that no one follows them.

The above is just one of the remarks in the report written by a 15-year-old intern that supposedly shook the businesses in the city of London and got a lot of attention in the media last couple of days.

I think it is hilarious and just shows how out of touch some of these companies are with their target groups. If they need someone to tell them in July 2009 that teenagers do not listen to radio, do not read newspapers, do not like advertisements, do not buy music and so on, then they really deserve to be in a bad position many of them are currently in.

Wake up!

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Jul 10 / 7:43am

Press releases are dead and Google is showing the way

Schmidt and Google's co-founder Larry Paige gave a briefing to reporters yesterday, which in itself is an interesting point, given that Google took a slightly unusual route when releasing the news in the first place--opting to use only its own blog, rather than a press release.

The old way of pushing information about your product to as many people as possible via mass mail is gone. There is just so much noise out there and no one cares.

The new press release is work on your product, create something people want to use and talk about, and then people themselves will spread your message for you. And they will spread it to many more than your traditional press release was able to. And people will trust it more as it comes from real people, not a PR department.

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Jul 9 / 12:01pm

WordPress blogs entering the real-time world of publishing

The WordPress Jabber client uses a different push technology, XMPP, to speed up RSS. The effect is that headlines pop up like instant messages. Jabber is mostly used for IM clients such as Gtalk, but Wordpress is using it as a feed reader and micro-blog publisher. The great thing about it is that it is two-way. In the demo, Skelton will show how the Jabber client can be used as an interface to to post directly to your blog. Feed reading and blog posting can all be done from the same place in a more real-time fashion. The Jabber client can also be used as a blog commenting system and embedded as a widget directly into a Web page, turning comments into more of a chat room.

What we are seeing is the world’s of publishing and IM colliding. The faster we can close the loop between publish and response, the more we are going to see real-time data streams take on the look and feel of public IM systems. Twitter is asynchronous, but it often feels immediate with back and forth conversations sometimes happening almost fast as a private IM chats. That is just a taste of things to come, as all publishing platforms get up to speed.

People that were talking about blogging being dead weretalking about blogs missing this. Real time integration between your WordPress blog and your favorite social network. Post to blog from social network, post from social network to blog, and all comments integrated as well. Tomorrow at the TechCrunch CrunchUp WordPress will present something new which will make your blog real-time... very interesting!

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Jul 2 / 8:43am

People chew and spit out stuff very quickly online

When Michael Jackson died, I wondered how quickly the conversation about him would fade online and how long it would persist on TV “news.” Well, it didn’t take long to see the divergence: TV thinks we’re still buzzing about MJ. But online, we’re not.

blogpulsemj

News spreads fast online but dies just as fast. People chew and spit out stuff very quickly online. Greatest tweet you send now will be forgotten and will not receive any more retweets and clicks 15 minutes after... everything goes into archives / into old news very quickly.

Keep this in mind when producing any kind of content online, be it a tweet, a blog post, an e-book...

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Jul 2 / 3:29am

Is your blog next in line to get a book contract?

The mini-genre of books based on popular blogs shows no signs of abating, as the folks behind “Texts From Last Night” score a deal with the Gotham Books imprint of Penguin. The blog, which has been in operation for just a few months and, according to the agent who did this deal, currently averages 3.5 million hits per day, amounts to a regularly updated stream of sometimes funny, often embarrassing user-submitted text messages concerned mostly with sex and drinking.

'Twas a time when a book deal born of a blog was surprising (remember Julie and Julia?). These days it seems more and more like people start goofy Web sites practically counting on seeing their stuff between two covers.

More and more books based on popular blogs are published... are you creating something unique with your blog? Is your blog idea next in line to get a book contract? Keep building your blog and your readership and it may just be...

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Jul 1 / 11:41am

The American Dream / Nightmare

I was well on my way... college, got student loan, got into debt... then I learned my lesson... stopped going deeper into debt... simplified my life, minimized my costs, started paying off debt... now working on optimizing my earnings... and running a blog is perfect for that...

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