Social Media Strategy & Engagement Marketing by Karl Long

We always knew that someone had to be clicking on penis enlargement emails and not only that, someone had to actually be buying that crap. It’s kind like late at night when you’re watching horrible infomercials that you think to yourself who the hell is buying this crap, well enough people to make it economically viable to make those repugnant commercials.

Well some CS students at Berkley have released the first empirical study of spam conversion rates called Spamalytics: An Empirical Analysis of Spam Marketing Conversion and the best part is they did it through hacking the Storm botnet itself and studied the results from 469 Million spam messages.

By infiltrating its command and control infrastructure parasitically, we convinced it to modify a subset of the spam it already sends, thereby directing any interested recipients to servers under our control, rather than those belonging to the spammer.

we have documented three spam campaigns comprising over 469 million e-mails. We identified how much of this spam is successfully delivered, how much is filtered by popular anti-spam solutions, and, most importantly, how many users “click-through” to the site being advertised (response rate) and how many of those progress to a “sale” or “infection”sion rate).

Genius, download the PDF here

Thanks Sweis on friendfeed

First of all, what the hell is a business model anyway? As with many terms used in strategy and business it is often used in different ways and interpreted differently by different people. Lots of entrepreneurs and misguided bloggers will conflate advertising and business model, but this is a mistake. Advertising could be your “revenue model” but it is not your business model. Your business model is all the things your company does to create value, and how some of that value gets turned into revenue. I like to think of business models as systems, groups of interconnected, and reinforcing activities that your company enables. Anyway, I was inspired to rant a little bit about this as I was looking through Mary Meeker’s presentation at Web 2.0 and a couple of things lept out at me.

1. Companies with cogent business models that provide consumer value should survive/thrive
2. Advertising spend tends to track to GDP (that’s going down)

In some ways it’s a little redundent to say “business models that provide consumer value” because if it doesn’t then it’s a broken business model, but I digress. The point is that if your business model is dependent on advertising revenue you should be looking for other ways to A. create value and B. get people to pay for that value.

via Austin Hill who is also on twitter at twitter.com/austinhill

I have actually been getting and sharing a lot of ideas recently through using twitter, if you are not using it yet, do it, it is becoming incredibly useful and for me has become the ultimate social network, i’m at twitter.com/karllong. I have not posted here in a while but that’s mainly because apart from my full time job i’m working on a couple of startups and applying some of my theories and ideas, the good news is it’s working I was just featured in both the Huffington Post and Boing Boing for my T-Shirt blog and T-shirt shop (oh and both of those connections were formed through Twitter with twitter.com/KristinGorski who writes for Huff Po and of course twitter.com/xenijardin of Boing Boing fame, are you starting to see the value of twitter?).

More reading about business models check out the comprehensive but rather uncritical wikipedia

UPDATE: for other sources of thinking about business models, also check out the Business Model Design Blog and Victor Lombari’s Noise Between Stations and Smart Experience that does workshops on Business Model Design

The insanity of music DRM stolen from XKCD

What makes me laugh so much about this brilliant parody and almost homage to viral marketing is how it’s almost plausible. Remember LonleyGirl15

GooseGrade is an interesting new service that is launching tomorrow that puts the power of editing in the hands of the audience. These corrections can be anything from spelling errors (yeah, i’m installing it for that), to more importantly fact checking even. As readers correct things on your blog your “goose grade” score goes down, until you start accepting and implementing suggested changes, and your score goes back up. A very interesting aspect of the service is how readers also get scored on their corrections so there is a quality score that shows you how much a person is generally right, which is of course critical in establishing the validity and reputation of people who are suggesting changes. Watch the video, it’s pretty interesting:

Anyway, great idea for a service, I can totally see a lot of bloggers who want to engage with their readers on this kind of thing doing this, I just don’t see some of the more polarizing bloggers (who really need fact checking installing it). Hopefully the service will have a central directory where people can submit errors for blogs even if they don’t have the tool installed might then serve as a clearing house for how factual or erroneous many blogs are.

Not sure why I have not heard about this yet, but this looks like a great conference. Social Media seems to have been a concept that is gaining a hell of a lot of traction in the last year or so as a term to describe the enormous disruption that the internet is bringing.

The summit is at the Moscone Center in San Francisco on October 1st and 2nd and will feature some top speakers in the social media space.

• Charlene Li - of Forrester and Groundswell fame (anyone know where Charlene is blogging now?)
• Edward Terpening - VP of Social Media Strategies for Wells Fargo (first time I’ve seen that title)
• Brian Solis - PR 2.0 Blogger
• Shel Israel - Naked Conversations co-author
• Tara Hunt - of HorsePigCow, Whuffie factor, Citizen Agency and on it goes
• Daniel Riveong - of E-Storm and the Emergence Media blog
• Stephanie Agresta - Internet Geek Girl
• Renny Gleeson - of W+K

And the list goes on With this list of speakers I’m pretty confident this will be a pretty valuable conference.

Twitter song by I hate mornings and via

My poor blog has not been updated in a while, and yes I have been on twitter a lot and Plurk.

I’ve also been working on my own line of T-shirts and here is my first design, it’s the Prez Dispenser Obama T-Shirt by a local artist called Eric Rewitzer of 3 Fish Studios.

Nadav Savio, now a user experience designer at Google (GOOG), and mobile usage expert Jared Braiterman, founder of Jared Research, wrote in a 2007 paper.
From the Business Week article “Moving to the Mobile Web”.

Word!

They do mention a few design/UX agencies in the Business Week article including Punchcut (who I only heard about last week as a good friend of mine just left Frog design to join them, also follow them on twitter), and of course the good people at Adaptive Path who have always focused on the people and not the technology.

I know most of us with significant web experience have been hearing for years how the mobile web was going to take off, but it really does feel like the current environment has got some very disruptive forces and new entrants that are going to heat up the competitive environment.

Highly recomend reading GigaOm’s post this morning titled Symbian, iPhone and the new mobile reality

Well that is Bill Hicks ripping marketing a new one, heard about this via Johnnie Moore’s weblog where he also mention he’s starting a new collaborative blog. The the new blog is called Marketing 2.0 in which some very respectable marketing bloggers are getting together to post on how marketing is changing.

I rather like Johnnie’s inaugural post where he even questions the validity of marketing 2.0, I mean, doesn’t marketing just go away if it’s built into the DNA of products and experiences?

Reminds me very much of victor papanek’s sentement from his seminal book from the 70’s called Design for the Real World

Now, both me and Johnnie do have one other thing in common and that is we are from England, which I think gives us a somewhat different view of marketing, because to be quite honest America is a nation that has been marketing better than any other nation in history. What we often refer to with slight disdain as that American razzmatazz is in fact the American marketing machine revving up into high gear.

That being said advertising is becoming less effective, customers are becoming more aware of the impact of their consumption, are holding companies to higher standards, and are seeking more meaning out of the products and services they buy. As post war marketing theory, segments, demographics, focus groups, monolithic ad networks and the mass market are becoming increasingly irrelevant companies have to look for new ways to engage.

Just heard of this new service called Plurk which is a similar “microblogging” service rather like Twitter, Pownce, Jaiku etc. According to Venture Beat it launched in January this year and seems to be targeting a more teenage demographic.

bub.blicio.us asks the question “is Plurk another Twitter?” and in many ways it is, it’s a lifestreaming/microblogging platform with friends and fans etc. The one major difference that I see in Plurk is it’s “Karma” measure, and that is one of the only reasons why I think it will be interesting to watch what happens. Karma is essentially a measure of your level of participation in the Plurk system, and it’s the kind of explicit feedback that I think can fuel the growth of social systems. One of the reasons that Yelp is so successful is it has multiple feedback mechanisms that reward and recognize the right activity in the social network, and therefore encourages more of that activity. If you reward the right “value creating” activities on your social network you set up very powerful virtuous cycles.

Mind you, as bub.blicio.us also pointed out there is no apparent business model or revenue model, agreed, but what else is new.

Oh, you can find me on Plurk here

UPDATE: Looks like Plurk is the new twitter… it’s down