Exclamation blog: Stories, Ideas and loud noises
One Stop Shop for Docs
There is a new start-up in Southern California that I have been excited about for almost a year now. Docstoc is the latest brainchild of one of my former business school classmates, Jason Nazar and his partner, Alon Schwartz. It’s a user generated community where you can find and share professional documents, ranging from legal to technology to business and beyond. Docstoc announced this week that it has raised $3.25M in its series B round of funding from Rustic Canyon Partners.
Docstoc is a great example of the increasingly transparent world that we live in, a vast database of useful information that is part blog, part social community and part encyclopedia of free information. An interesting attribute and arguably the most compelling reason that this start-up attracted the attention (read: money) of such an esteemed, media-savvy venture firm is that it has popularized the ability to embed documents into any blog or website, a feature that we know very well in the PR world is popular in the blogoshpere and on news sites.
I like Docstoc for many reasons; the site has become my go-to resource for information that I might have had trouble tracking down previously, but I also think that it is leading the charge in changing the way that people use, store and share information. The site is still in beta, the company is brand new, so for me, I will be watching to see what it does with its $3.25M and whether Jason can get another winner off the ground…
How Does Consumerist Know I’d Like Amon Duul II?
I was really surprised when I clicked through from a Consumerist posting in my NetNewsWire last week to get to an ad halfway down the page that featured the semi-obscure German psychedelic band I had been thinking of checking out: Amon Düül II.
Had it been a brick or a banner for the new Wilco album or something, I wouldn’t have even looked twice. But Amon Düül II? That was just way too strange (and coincidental). I might have even overlooked something like the Fiery Furnaces, figuring everybody and their mother listens to indie rock these days.
I quickly opened up a new Firefox browser tab, and noticed that I was logged into my Amazon profile, where I’d seen the band pop up in my Amazon favorites, after I’d indicated that I’d liked albums by Ash Ra Tempel (after my wife bought me a Hawkwind disc for Hannukah). So, this strange chain of events has me now seeing targeted advertising in one of my favorite blogs. How in the heck did this happen?
I turned to Chris Batty and Erin Pettigrew at Gawker for the answers. It turns out, it’s all a part of the public Amazon associates program. Geeks, you read that right: blogs like Gawker (or any dynamic page that’s part of the Amazon associate program) can read a cookie from another domain. Granted, they’re only using this program on Consumerist, and not on any other Gawker Media domains, Batty said. But this is big stuff.
This means that there’s a unified, individual-targeted advertising campaign going on in the blogosphere, potentially across hundreds of blogs. And it’s just a pre-packaged ad widget that comes from Amazon - no crazy coding. This type of link debuted about a year ago (with a few other integrated functions), according to Gawker’s Pettigrew. While it’s not unusual for a site to run an Omakase links (Japanese for “protected” or “entrusted”), I’ve never come across them in such a seemingly unlikely place. According to the link above to the Ask Dave Taylor post and discussion of Omakase links, Norton AntiVirus/Internet Security causes some ads not to appear properly. That’s bad for companies like Amazon, but good for people who want less personalization.
So, that means that most PC users could shut off the personalization if they found it a little bit too invasive. But I’m on a Mac, and, yes, I bought three Amon Düül II albums with my eMusic account this weekend. They were pretty damn good. Too bad I didn’t click through and give some change to Consumerist. But, who buys CDs anymore? Amazon’s digital music download program is still at least a few months away. Bummer. We could have had a deal.
Search Bait: Social Media’s Taking Out The Garbage
A candidate contacted LaunchSquad a few months ago and informed us that he could crank out up to 15 content pieces per day. We thought that was a pretty bold thing to say. When a LaunchSquad team member looked at this content, he realized what is really was: search bait (a.k.a. link bait).
I didn’t even know what search bait (or link bait) was until about a year ago. Since I’ve been working in social media for a few years, I’ve taken on numerous search engine optimization campaigns - everything from restaurants to real estate agencies. I’ve always thought that the only good SEO is holistic SEO, and there are a few solid books on this subject. Link bait has become a questionable, but necessary tool for SEOs looking to cut corners, or for short-term gains, since the number of links a site has going to it typically raises its ranking in Google and Yahoo. Effectively, this kind of linkage dilutes the usefulness and accuracy of search engines.
So, articles that are “link bait” can actually attract more links than organic, genuine links. They also contain no relevant content; some are just “ego-links,” praising something another person has said in a blog somewhere, and others are “attacks-for-the-sake-of-traffic” - controversial nothing-statements aimed at getting linked-to, so the links that they contain will climb up a search algorithm.
Unfortunately, things have gotten to the point where social news networks like Digg have had to increasingly deal with search bait over the past six months, and the frequent culprits are individuals who are paid to plant stories for corporate users (like Jetnumbers, a virtual phone number company). News networks like Digg are worried that this type of content could erode their credibility as user-driven sites, and they’re willing to remove users’ accounts in order to prevent it from happening.
If you really have the time or the notion to write search bait, take a look at these articles. If you want to know what really bad social media optimization looks like, this is it. And if you hear someone talking about “creative link building,” it’s just a euphemism for search bait. Phew!
