FriendFeed, a twitter like application that is in beta has implemented a “fake following” feature where users are told they are being followed by certain people, when in fact they really aren’t. The notice will show up in their browsers, but updates won’t show up on the followers feed.

With this new feature being implemented, gone will be the days where users expect you to follow their move. This just saves a whole lot of egos from being bruised.

Initially the impact of the message is limited, but by motivating readers to propagate the information, the campaign has the potential for exponential growth.

Viral Marketing is considered to be an art rather than a science - it doesn’t allow a lot of control, and you can’t always track results. Advertisers have no way of knowing what the recipients did with their messages. In many cases it’s hard to tell if new customers found the business because of the viral marketing campaign, or through more conventional means.

If done incorrectly, viral marketing breeds SPAM. In too many cases, individuals eager to make more money are motivated to spam the masses. This can be problematic for the client company image.

One way of ensuring the ‘worst case scenario’ doesn’t happen to your campaign is to spend more time than money doing market research, analysis and planning.

Learn more and read our full article on Viral Marketing; Threats and Opportunities! We have four more articles to share with you. Keep an eye on our article section and be the first one to read them!

In absolute numbers the most internet users are to be found in Asia (530 million), even though the internet penetration in Asia is only 14%. Europe comes in second here with 382 million internet users.

The current Canadian population is estimated to be 32,440,970 of which 22,000,000 are internet consumers. This is a internet penetration of 67%, which is higher than the US penetration. Google sites are currently the most popular and used websites in Canada, followed up by Microsoft and Yahoo sites. Facebook seems to be extremely popular in Canada and cover the #4 spot.

Read our full Internet Consumption Report for more demographics and statistics, featuring the most popular activities on the internet, social networking, mobile social networking and much more.

Placement at or near the top of the rankings increases the number of searchers who will visit a site. However, more search engine referrals does not guarantee more sales. SEO is not necessarily an appropriate strategy for every website, and other Internet marketing strategies can be much more effective, depending on the site operator’s goals. A successful Internet marketing campaign may drive organic traffic to web pages, but it also may involve the use of paid advertising on search engines and other pages, building high quality web pages to engage and persuade, addressing technical issues that may keep search engines from crawling and indexing those sites, setting up analytics programs to enable site owners to measure their successes, and improving a site’s conversion rate.

Since SEO strongly influences the volume of traffic to your website, it is important to invest into this. There are numerous agencies out there that can assist you to get into the top of the rankings. These agencies are usually quite expensive, so make sure a sitemap is present, issues such as broken links are fixed, etc. so the agency can focus itself on ‘the real work’. Since there are so many agencies out there, picking the right one can be quite hard.

There are a lot of different theories on ‘the perfect method’ to gain a high rank in the search engine result pages (SERP). The algorithms used by the search engines are secret and nobody can give you a 100% guarantee on a good position. However, through extensive research some methods have been proven to be influencing the ranking in a positive way. Which elements are the most important is unknown, but the following methods will help you gaining a better position in the search engine rankings.

For tips on how to apply SEO onto your website and what to look for in an SEO agency, read our full article on Search Engine Optimization; Tips and advice.

Podcasting is broadcasting on iPods or other MP3 Players. Created by ex MTV host Adam Curry, Podcasting is a new method of communication for the internet – unfortunately, it’s still limited to your PC. But thanks to companies like Apple, creator of the iPod,podcasts can be downloaded to your personal media device and accessed at anytime. Your trusty mp3 player can become a true audiovisual media player - this handy companion is not just for music anymore.

Apple is developing iPods that can play videos, handle live streaming, make phone calls, etc. Popular television shows such as “Lost,” and “Desperate Housewives,” are main attractions. Motion picture editors are busy transforming hour long stories into six minute formatted ‘vcasts’ to be played on your iPod. This raises some alarming questions about the future of television programming – perhaps it will become as short as the average viewer’s attention span?

However, will people enjoy watching their favorite television show on a 2.5inch screen? IPod itself is continuously going through changes. The original model had the capacity to save three hundred songs, yet the current versions hold over thousands. Please note that in order to listen to podcasts you do not need an Apple iPod. Any personal media device will probably meet the requirements, even your regular PC.

Podcasting is a fresh medium. There has not yet been a comprehensive marketing plan developed to guarantee positive results with advertising in podcasts. Because the medium is still in its infancy, many advertisers are unsure of how to maximize its potential - pioneers are still experimenting.
More progressive marketers are researching information / entertainment hybrids or what they call ‘focused programming’ that will let them distribute a compelling message through traditional podcast channels. Podcasting’s challenge is similar to video-on-demand’s own situation - What does a brand have to say to consumers on an ongoing basis beyond a buy-me-now message? Brand as content producer is a trend that’s not likely to abate any time soon.

Looking for more resources on how to create and market your own podcast? Read our full article on Podcasting in our article section.

The Wal-Mart case
In August 2007, Wal-Mart started its own Facebook profile, aimed on students. The goal was to stimulate the consumer behavior of students on their student rooms. After a few weeks the original goal of the ‘Wal-Mart Roommate Style Match’ was far forgotten.

Visitors of Wal-Mart’s room decoration page can leave comments; a function intended to receive praise on the decoration tool, or a few suggestions for improvement at worst. Wal-Mart did probably not expect to have their complete Facebook Wall filled with criticism on its low wages, aversion to trade unions and unhealthy competition practices.

Marketers should keep this in mind when offering customers the option to make their opinions public. You could have many satisfied customers, but when you expect a small group of ‘brand terrorists’ to vent their frustrations for the whole world to see, you might want to think twice about opening a brand page on a social network site.

One of the visitors said Wal-Mart’s biggest mistake was putting a ‘Wall’ on their profile.

Wal-Mart – The second attempt
Packed with the experience of their last campaign a new attempt on social marketing was made. Wal-Mart announced the launch of a Social Marketing Campaign by allowing users to review content on their site.

A Social network site was launched for kids on the Wal-Mart website named ‘The Hub’. What happened was, parents had to be informed of every new registration which isn’t very ‘cool’ for the kids, although it’s great for parents. All content got screened by third a third party, while social networks are joined to express yourself in the way you want to. Next to that there were no options to PM or mail each other. Communication possibilities are a basic requirement for a social network site.

The marketers should’ve realized that just one stage of child-protection is the best they can do to keep kids safe while building a popular social network. People need to be given control and have the ability to allow two-way conversations to flow without you being the only one talking.

Another good learning school and example of an unexpected turn out of events. If you found this interesting; more cases are featured in our full article on Social Media Marketing failures.

The way computers read data is very different of how we communicate. Let’s take a look at the sentence “Mike loves Kate”. The syntax of this sentence is the composition and structure of the sentence. The semantics indicate that Mike really likes Kate. If we change “loves” into a heart symbol, the syntax will change but the semantics will stay the same.

In the communication between computers the syntax has an important role. When you request a website to show up in your browser, you are actually doing a request to a web server. This server looks up your request and returns this in HTML format. Your browser reads the HTML syntax and translates this into a designed page. The meaning of what is on this page will stay unknown to the computer.

The same thing happens when we search for information on the internet. A search engine searches through billions of pages to find the keywords that you requested. It will then show you a list of pages that include the keywords you were looking for. The search engine knows which keywords are in these pages, but the real content of the pages remains unknown. This could be compared to learning a parrot a couple words, which it will replicate without knowing the actual meaning of the words.

Using this analogy, the current web can be considered as a “web of documents”. These documents are all linked to each other in one way or another, but for web applications the content of these documents is undefined. The content however is what is of interest to us.

The goal of the semantic web is to let computers understand the entities within these documents. When the semantic web is realized and successful, it will create a huge load of information exchange between organizations and individuals, producing a new level of findability and knowledge sharing.

So how exactly can we benefit from this? What does this mean for future marketing? Read our full and more detailed article on the power of the semantic web in our article section.

Let us know if you enjoyed reading this article. This is only our first article published, but expect a lot more to come during the upcoming two weeks. So don’t forget to come back tomorrow for a case study on social media marketing failures!

NYC Mindspace is a campaign created by the New York Health Department which utilizes social networking sites like Myspace to giving struggling teens resources to help overcome their problems. Through a series of fictional teen profiles, the NYC Mindspace “teens” interact through video blogs, pictures, online quizzes, music downloads, and help resources.

It’s an interesting concept, but we already know that teens won’t reach out to someone because they either don’t have someone to talk to, don’t want to talk to, or just don’t trust someone enough to confide in. Would finding out that the person giving out advice and befriending you was not real not traumatize the person into not knowing what to believe? Regardless, the initiative by a local government organization is a step in the right direction. It shows that web 2.0 systems can be used for something more important than twittering your dogs where-abouts.

Each workday a new article will be published for you to take advantage of. Let us know if you liked the articles and if they have been helpful to you.

Stay tuned!