about internet marketing

I’m Neil Glassman and my beats for Social Times include social media marketing and advertising tools, techniques and success stories. Sometimes my posts go off on a tangent, focusing on small business social media issues or research with broader implications.

How did I get the gig? Well, I certainly did not tell Nick O’Neill the whole story that follows.

I didn’t realize growing up that AM radio was one of the original social networks. It had Top 40 formats (mashups), DJ shout outs (tweets), contests to win logo T-shirts (badges) and exclusive clubs to which everyone belonged (Facebook groups).

I got into late night talk shows (blogs), which had an intimacy and affinity with listeners that radio has lost and web social networks have yet to fully discover. My parents didn’t think it was such a great idea for me to stay up late listening on school nights and took away my TV privileges for one night as punishment. That was the night of The Beatles’ first appearance on Ed Sullivan.

My luck with media improved over the years and I found myself marketing technology for media companies. My training was much like everyone else’s in the field: a box of Mad Magazine “best-of” books, learning how to touch-type and a brief career teaching emotionally disturbed junior high schoolers.

In the beginning, I worked with startups, turning underdogs into wonderdogs. Recently I’ve helped a few companies avoid a mid-life crisis. Whatever my responsibilities are for a particular company, my favorite part is finding ways to present a solution to the marketplace and having the marketplace react by saying, “Ah-Ha!”

Successful marketing means thinking outside the box while delivering campaigns inside the box. I leaped on the web-based and electronically delivered marketing platforms very early and with good success. When Nick put out a call for writers on marketing and advertising, I thought it was a cool opportunity and am grateful to have been chosen to contribute to Social Times. My posts are a great way to share my explorations of the potential of the social web, not just for marketers, but for the world’s cultures.

As marketers, our first priority is to develop campaigns that are effective. If we manage to leave a slogan, image or song in our collective unconscious in the process, that’s a great bonus. In my collaborations, I’ve had the chance to participate in some firsts — at least I think they were firsts. If you know something I don’t, teach me.

The first music video shown on TV that was shot and produced totally on video — no film conversion at any step. The Towel Tapes, February 1979.

Marketing the first hardware product to include mp3. Telos Zephyr, April 1993.

The first time the Internet ground to a halt because too many were trying to log in to a multimedia event. Streaming George Clinton concert audio to demonstrate Macromedia Shockwave, the precursor to Flash. November 1996.

On the personal front, I’m a New Yorker with a huge appetite for great songwriters and musicians of diverse genres. Tweet me and I’ll send you a link to my calendar of all the free concerts in town this summer.

Blogging works best when it’s participatory, so join in the conversation with the talented team on Social Times. Pitch me ideas for posts about using social media for marketing and advertising. Don’t forget to include how you are going to make the market say, “Ah-Ha!”

Retailing | Heidi MacDonald confirms rumors that well-regarded Brooklyn retailer Rocketship, the setting for numerous signings, release parties and art shows, has closed after five years. “We’ve come to the end of a five-year lease, and are deciding what to do now," said co-owner Alex Cox. "Five years went by fast, and my partner and I are suddenly making some large life decisions about what comes next. We love the shop, and as fun as it is, we have to figure out what makes sense for us on a practical level." [The Beat]

Pop culture | KRCW-Santa Monica (89.9 FM) will rebroadcast the 1991 radio production of American Splendor, starring Dan Castellaneta, from 7:30 to 8 p.m. PST today. This broadcast will appear on air and via KCRW.com live stream only, and will not be available on demand or via podcast.

Legal | The Wall Street Journal's Tomomichi Amano looks at efforts by a newly formed coalition of Japanese and American manga publishers to crack down on U.S.-based scanlation websites. "People might say it’s like whack-a-mole," says Vertical Inc.'s Ioannis Mentzas, "but we think even making one (legal) case will greatly change the situation." [Japan Real Time]

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1 internet marketing

There's an (allegedly) iPhone-taken video with 60,000 views that went on YouTube on June 9, 2010. It's not very good or very funny, but it surely is black ops marketing for one major burger chain, even though it's shot in another major burger chain. And this is how the greatest minds behind the big business of viral marketing today apparently think is the best way to get their video "picked up" by blogs: casual emails that look pretty much like emails anyone with a blog gets on a daily basis except… less good.

subject: "The [NAME OF BURGER CHAIN 1] Miracle Bun"

date: June 9, 2010

We werent sure where to send this, one of our friends suggested we try to email it out to a bunch of blogs and sites. So here we are.

Here's what went down. Last week my buddy dragged me to a [NAME OF BURGER CHAIN 2] for the first time in forever. What happened once we got our food was the craziest thing. I'm still kind of creeped out by it. You sort of have to see to understand. Check it out for yourself. And please please post and pass along, we are trying to get this to the world.

[VIDEO LINK]

Thanks a trillion.

Toby Crenshaw

Jake Smith

What's weird about this email is: those two names actually Google up as real people? So I was giving this a "wait and see." But then there were more emails!

subject: "tip/ submission something miraculous from [NAME OF BURGER CHAIN 1]?"

date: July 6, 2010

hey there. saw this the other day and thought it might be cool for the site or someone you know…

I found it on SFist and then saw it on Barstools too. It's two kids from San Francisco who went to the [NAME OF BURGER CHAIN 2] s @ Fishermen's wharf and found somebody special in their bun. Makes me wonder if it might be an irreverent marketing ploy to stick it to the Golden Arches. Check it out and pass it on.

[LINKS TO SITES AND VIDEOS]

Jen Marsh

subject: "new work for [NAME OF BURGER CHAIN 1]?"

date: July 20, 2010

been a fan of the site for a while now, and thought you might be interested in this.

I've seen this video a bunch of places recently was wondering.

Regardless, a fun jab at the Golden Arches.

[VIDEO LINK]

Regards

Tyrese Washington

They're still at it! They're going to make this video happen if it kills them.

If you really want to look at this video, which isn't much to see, you can copy and paste this URL:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KttI-q1UWD0

Maybe it's not even viral marketing for the burger chains! Maybe it's like, just guys who want to be famous, or to have proven their prowess at going viral. Who knows? We don't. But also: do not want.

Old Spice’s marketing gimmick—a macho guy played with a wink by Isaiah Mustafa—has reached a crescendo on TV and the Web. Tricia Romano on the evolution of black male sex symbols.

From the moment the Old Spice commercial featuring Isaiah Mustafa aired in February America swooned. Who, we wanted to know, was this dashing, tall, dark and handsome figure with impossible abs, a gleaming smile, and a twinkle in his eyes? (Oh, yes, and riding on a horse. One mustn't forget the horse).

Mustafa quickly became a household face—if not name—as the original commercial eventually racked up 13 million views on YouTube.

He's hot enough to make celebrity lesbian Ellen DeGeneres giggle like a school girl when he visited her set, causing her to beg him to recite his Old Spice lines.

Old Spice Guy Hangs Up His Towel

And this week, on the heels of its second installment in the series (featuring Mustafa swan diving into a jacuzzi and landing on a motorcycle), the company invited people to ask questions of "Old Spice Man" on Twitter which Mustafa answered in 30-second clips on YouTube. The result was an instant viral success—the Old Spice YouTube channel was ranked No. 1 on the website. (At least one person wasn’t impressed: Sockington the cat—who has resisted using his popularity for commercial purposes—threw up his paw: “HELLO @OLDSPICE much interest at your viral marketing campaign at sockington hq/litterbox I AM A CAT WITH 68 TIMES MORE FOLLOWERS discuss.”

Sockington’s dissent aside, the success of the Old Spice commercials hinges not only on the clever, almost absurdist imagery and writing, but on Mustafa and his inherent sex appeal.

The Root argued this week in an essay called, "Why The Old Spice Guy Is Good For Black America" that "the success of the Old Spice Guy ... might actually be a sign that being a black man in America is getting slightly easier." Cord Jefferson points out that not so long ago, the black man's role in advertising was as a scary figure to contrast against the white so-called gentlemen; or more recently, as a subservient figure.

I'll go one further than Jefferson: The Old Spice Guy isn't just good for Black America, Mustafa's place in the pop culture pantheon is good for all of America.

As Farai Chideya, former NPR journalist and host of forthcoming radio show, Pop and Politics Radio, explained to me, "You have certain black actors who could sell things, but they usually did them in these nonsexual ways, like Bill Cosby and Jello. Then you had people who were sexual like Billy Dee Williams, who pitched a brand for a black audience," she said. "This is something new where it's for a mainstream, general mixed-race audience."

Caption: Mustafa filmed video responses to some of his lucky Twitter followers, including actress Alyssa Milano.

The choice of a black man as the desired sex object for a national advertising spot aimed at mainstream America, which is to say white America, is particularly perfect right now. It's hard to say whether Mustafa and Old Spice would have paired up 10 or 20 years ago, unless he was a famous star athlete like O.J. Simpson. One could argue that having a handsome black president has softened a lot of people’s ideas of what’s attractive and sexy—Obama’s shaky polls notwithstanding.

Interestingly, Old Spice had another black spokesman before Mustafa: Terry Crews. The hyperactive ad series featured the ex-NFL linebacker topless and yelling in an intense (and funny) way. Chideya says of Crews: "He's not as handsome as Isaiah, but he's also really funny in a way that's more within the black vernacular." Of Mustafa, she says, "This guy is no doubt black, but he's someone who is the modern, urbane, living-in-a-post-racial-Fort Greene kind of a guy."

While Obama braves the fast-moving political tide (we love him, we are irritated and disappointed with him, we loathe him, we love him again), here is this other stunningly handsome, funny black man on our TV, transcending color lines, with—it should be noted—a Muslim name.

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1 internet marketing

As one of the founders of the original Napster and CloudMark (an anti-spam service), Jordan Ritter, has always been fascinated by the idea of combining the power of the cloud and the potential of human capital. Last April, he met up with Alex Edelstein, a former CloudMark executive, to hammer out their next business plan.

Over a round of beers, the idea for CloudCrowd was born.

Like CrowdFlower and Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, CloudCrowd is trying to bring labor into the cloud, by creating a vast network of workers around the globe. Today, there are roughly 25,000 workers, who have completed more than a million tasks since the site’s launch in October 2009. That represents a small fraction of CrowdFlower’s claim to 500,000 workers, but CEO Edelstein says their force is quickly expanding, with some 2,000 additions each week. Although it took 7 months to reach the one million task mark, Edelstein predicts they’ll reach 2 million jobs in 8 weeks. See video above.

CloudCrowd has two main segments. The bulk of its business is client-driven work: a company submits tasks to CloudCrowd and the service will farm that out to eligible workers. Workers access CloudCrowd through a Facebook app, where they can pick available tasks and arrange payment.The tasks can be as simple as checking the quality of an image or involve the translation of entire web pages. Because pricing is determined by the level of difficulty, the payouts range from one penny to several dollars. Once a task is completed, a different user will check the finished product for an additional fee, creating a level of quality control.

The second part of their business is a new layer of consumer-facing services.

CloudCrowd recently launched EditZen, a simple web site, where consumers can submit pages for editing at $4 a page. The company will soon launch TranslationZen, which will offer translation services at $19.95 a page (far cheaper than some alternatives which are priced at $60 a page).

Aside from their consumer services, CloudCrowd’s cut varies widely depending on the job— ranging from a 20% cut to as high as 80%. The average worker doesn’t get paid handsomely for their task, but it can be a nice source for supplemental income— especially for workers in developing countries where salaries are generally well below America’s mean. In fact, the company now attracts more workers outside of the US, with a heavy concentration in Southeast Asia and Eastern Europe (many from Malaysia, Philippines and Singapore).

The startup, which has yet to reach profitability, is a 15 person operation in San Francisco with modest funding. So far Edelstein is their sole investor, with $1.5 million in the project, but they are talking to major VC firms about a Series A round.

The main challenge for a company like CloudCrowd is keeping pace with its ever-growing workforce. Edelstein admits that feeding the machine with sufficient volume and variety is a difficult endeavor in this early stage. The company has not spent a significant amount of capital on marketing and courting clients, instead, CloudCrowd still relies on word of mouth to attract new business.

“Well it’s true that the number one complaint of our workers is give me more work, I want more availability of jobs. In both of the previous outsourcing, disruptive eras, the era of manufacturing moving to China and developing nations and the era of white collar work moving to India it took years of explaining, educating and showing corporations and all sorts of people who had work how much they could benefit…how consistent the work quality could be,” Edelstein says. “We don’t expect that overnight every single company in the Fortune 500 is going to outsource significant amounts of their work to the internet cloud but we’re sure that it’s going to happen over time.”

The key to their success (and beating rivals like CrowdFlower) lies in the credibility of their workforce and amassing as much information as possible on the skills of their workers. According to Ritter, the system  is structured to create dynamic profiles on each user. Every time a user completes a task and that task is reviewed, CloudCrowd will learn how reliable that user is and which skills they excel at. If all that information is organized properly, that could be highly valuable for a client who needs to finish a targeted task in a short time frame.

“We’re building sort of what we call the credibility graph of known reliable people on the internet,” Ritter says. “If there are particular customers who… say, ‘I want a thousand reliable people on the internet to do a particular job for me.’ Well today you really can’t find that. Where would you find 1,000 reliable people on the internet.”

As one of the founders of the original Napster and CloudMark (an anti-spam service), Jordan Ritter, has always been fascinated by the idea of combining the power of the cloud and the potential of human capital. Last April, he met up with Alex Edelstein, a former CloudMark executive, to hammer out their next business plan.

Over a round of beers, the idea for CloudCrowd was born.

Like CrowdFlower and Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, CloudCrowd is trying to bring labor into the cloud, by creating a vast network of workers around the globe. Today, there are roughly 25,000 workers, who have completed more than a million tasks since the site’s launch in October 2009. That represents a small fraction of CrowdFlower’s claim to 500,000 workers, but CEO Edelstein says their force is quickly expanding, with some 2,000 additions each week. Although it took 7 months to reach the one million task mark, Edelstein predicts they’ll reach 2 million jobs in 8 weeks. See video above.

CloudCrowd has two main segments. The bulk of its business is client-driven work: a company submits tasks to CloudCrowd and the service will farm that out to eligible workers. Workers access CloudCrowd through a Facebook app, where they can pick available tasks and arrange payment.The tasks can be as simple as checking the quality of an image or involve the translation of entire web pages. Because pricing is determined by the level of difficulty, the payouts range from one penny to several dollars. Once a task is completed, a different user will check the finished product for an additional fee, creating a level of quality control.

The second part of their business is a new layer of consumer-facing services.

CloudCrowd recently launched EditZen, a simple web site, where consumers can submit pages for editing at $4 a page. The company will soon launch TranslationZen, which will offer translation services at $19.95 a page (far cheaper than some alternatives which are priced at $60 a page).

Aside from their consumer services, CloudCrowd’s cut varies widely depending on the job— ranging from a 20% cut to as high as 80%. The average worker doesn’t get paid handsomely for their task, but it can be a nice source for supplemental income— especially for workers in developing countries where salaries are generally well below America’s mean. In fact, the company now attracts more workers outside of the US, with a heavy concentration in Southeast Asia and Eastern Europe (many from Malaysia, Philippines and Singapore).

The startup, which has yet to reach profitability, is a 15 person operation in San Francisco with modest funding. So far Edelstein is their sole investor, with $1.5 million in the project, but they are talking to major VC firms about a Series A round.

The main challenge for a company like CloudCrowd is keeping pace with its ever-growing workforce. Edelstein admits that feeding the machine with sufficient volume and variety is a difficult endeavor in this early stage. The company has not spent a significant amount of capital on marketing and courting clients, instead, CloudCrowd still relies on word of mouth to attract new business.

“Well it’s true that the number one complaint of our workers is give me more work, I want more availability of jobs. In both of the previous outsourcing, disruptive eras, the era of manufacturing moving to China and developing nations and the era of white collar work moving to India it took years of explaining, educating and showing corporations and all sorts of people who had work how much they could benefit…how consistent the work quality could be,” Edelstein says. “We don’t expect that overnight every single company in the Fortune 500 is going to outsource significant amounts of their work to the internet cloud but we’re sure that it’s going to happen over time.”

The key to their success (and beating rivals like CrowdFlower) lies in the credibility of their workforce and amassing as much information as possible on the skills of their workers. According to Ritter, the system  is structured to create dynamic profiles on each user. Every time a user completes a task and that task is reviewed, CloudCrowd will learn how reliable that user is and which skills they excel at. If all that information is organized properly, that could be highly valuable for a client who needs to finish a targeted task in a short time frame.

“We’re building sort of what we call the credibility graph of known reliable people on the internet,” Ritter says. “If there are particular customers who… say, ‘I want a thousand reliable people on the internet to do a particular job for me.’ Well today you really can’t find that. Where would you find 1,000 reliable people on the internet.”

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