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Articles from The GottaQuirk eMarketing blog

There are no winners here 2007-05-03 03:13:17 It is with incredible sadness that I write this post.  I could not bring myself to sit down and type it until now.  In fact, I could not bring myself to get out of bed for a few days afterwards.  Depression had hit hard.  I kept telling myself that it could have worse somehow, but deep down inside, I knew this was a lie.  The World Cup has drawn to a close, once more sending dejected and despairing South Africans into a deep, dark slump.   It was only today; 4 days after Australia ruined another World Cup for the rest of the world, and a week after our hopes, the hopes of a nation, were smashed like a dropped wine glass on the concrete floor of ineptitude that anybody bothered to check who had actually won the “Bloggers Fantasy Cricket League.”     The short answer is Grant.  First the SA Blog Awards logo design competition, and now the Fantasy League.  Although this time he is looking more dejected than smug.     ...

Don't talk to strangers, just listen to them 2007-05-02 03:37:11 One of the first things we are taught when we’re young is to be wary of strangers, not to accept sweets or rides from them, and with the threat of terrorism looming, we are to approach the people around us with caution. Yet the Internet is the exception to this rule. With an increase in consumer input, we are relying more and more on strangers. Anyone can write and edit for Wikipedia. We trust peer reviews on Amazon.com and eBay, even though we don't know anything about the people who write them. Blogs provide a soap box and their popularity can only suggest that people are interested to hear opinions. Never before has the opinion held such a high value. The average person who listens to music (i.e. the average person) doesn't need an expert opinion on whether they will like a CD. They don't need a technical opinion from someone who has broken down and analysed every harmony. What is far more telling is to find out from people with similar tastes whether they like it. Effect ...

A culture that works 2007-05-01 04:22:30 I’ve always thought Google sounded like a pretty cool place to work and the link Riaan sent around to this article; “Meet Google’s culture czar” yesterday only reinforced these thoughts. In the article Elinor Mills, from CNETNews.com interviews Google’s "Chief Culture Officer" and Director of Human Resources, Stacy Savides Sullivan. Her job is essentially to maintain, enhance and develop the Google culture and to ensure that the core values that they had at the very beginning, “a flat organisation, a lack of hierarchy, a collaborative environment” are still as important as ever. Now this has got to be pretty difficult seeings as there are 12, 000 Google employees. While Google may seem to be an all conquering entity in an exceptionally cut throat industry, what sets them apart from the rest is that they truly seem to care about their employees. The annual happiness survey ensures that management are aware of every problem as well a ...

Things are getting Personal 2007-04-30 08:01:11 We are all aware of what a big place the Internet is, and it’s getting bigger every day. One of the main problems, as far as Search goes, is not being able to find what you are looking for, but in fact, it’s not knowing where to look for what it is that you need or want. As opposed to always having to remember specific pages and addresses and forgetting them and not being able to find our way back to the places on the net where we really want to be, search engines who have users who log in for other services, are staring to embrace the usefulness of personalised search. The search engine company monitors your movements and logs your net searches, creating a profile of things that interest you, and where you like to search on the net, and then presents it to you in a way that allows you to utilise the information effectively. Using Google as a primary example, this principle is easily explained. Basically, Google has two ways of personalising online experiences. The first ...

Sweat is 93% urine 2007-04-29 04:37:44 When I spot unusually sweaty people coming towards me I always think of how much urine is actually coming out of them and it totally freaks me out. Needless to say this Gree air-conditioner ad really appeals to me. The ad was featured in Wednesday’s edition of the Bizcommunity newsletter; check out the article for more info. Comment on "Sweat is 93% urine" ...

Bud Light with a bite 2007-04-28 04:21:01 Following on from the previous Bud Light commercial here's one from three years ago. Originally flighted on Superbowl XXXVIII the ad is one of the funniest  that I've seen in ages. All I can say is that I'd pay a lot of good money to have a dog like that. Comment on "Bud Light with a bite" ...

What would Carlos do? 2007-04-28 04:20:34 Worst case scenario: May 23rd arrives. Manchester United have capitalised on their home-lead over Milan and now find themselves in the European Cup Final. Lined up opposite them, the old enemy. Liverpool. A night of reckoning. The greatest rivalry in club football to play itself out on the world's biggest stage for the first time in history. Such a night requires careful preparation and planning with meticulous attention to detail. You call all of your mates, arrange for the viewing to be held at your house, “borrow” your folk's enormous plasma screen for the day, organise snacks and, most importantly, purchase plenty of fuel to see you through the night. Then the unthinkable happens. You arrive at home with your mates and are faced with every man's worst nightmare – a girl's night has been organised on game night. Faced with a dilemma of upsetting your better half or of missing the match what would you do? Or rather, what would Carlos do? Ok, I admit it. I ...

Link Sellers: Web2.0 pimps 2007-04-27 04:10:14 “I link you long time. Only five dollar” Yesterday, Quirk’s token Blue Bulls fan, Werner “I can like to SEO” de Bruin wrote a post asking what Google plans to do with reports of paid link. One view is that they plan to exclude those links from their algorithmic calculations. Another speculates that Google will penalise link buyers and sellers. Whatever they’re planning to do, the debate seems have got the SEO industry’s collective back up. Matt Cutts post on the subject has been positively buzzing with comments for nearly two weeks now. Paid links are, by my own common-sense definition, any link that exists solely because one party paid another to put that link there. So, pretty clear cut then. But not really. Has PR (and here I mean Public Relations not PageRank) not for years operated on the principle that money *can* buy popularity? It’s a cold hard fact and there’s no way to get away from it. Are news articles (plan ...

No paid links? No problems! 2007-04-26 08:00:30 In last week’s post - Money can’t buy you link love – I asked the question that was on the minds of many webmasters - What will Google do when we report a link as a paid link? Well, we have an answer… Google plans on using the information supplied by you (the average user), and testing their new algorithm to better identify and deal with paid links (so does this mean that they can’t pick them up themselves anymore?). So there you go. Question solved… <pause> <pause> <pause> NOTTTTTTT!!! Matt Cutts has been avoiding the most important part of the question… What do you plan to do with theses links? One of two things: 1). Discredit the link Google decides to remove the link and basically handle it as a nofollow command. Nothing too bad, should keep the people happy that buy links for traffic. 2). Penalise the site Google feels that you should clearly mark your paid links as a nofollow. So if you ignore it, then you cre ...

Niche is nice 2007-04-25 08:18:10 Social networking sites are not only bringing people together in a general sense, but are now also starting to bring niche groups together. There has been a small wave of new social networking sites that have been developed specifically for certain groups sharing particular interests or vocations. This means that people will be able to communicate shared ideas and shared interests with regards to very specific things. This has been already been initiated by Facebook, who developed extensions within their site for people of particular vocations who would like to share news and advice about their chosen careers etc. and who wish to up the level of their game by teaching each other things involving their shared profession. Niche groups are becoming more important, as the population expands and careers become more specialised and in larger groups. A prime example of this wave of niche social networking, if it can be so called, is a site by the name of FamilyLink, which has just recently ...

Social Media - Raising the Stakes 2007-04-25 01:41:26 In 2005 filmmaker Brian Flemming made a controversial movie called The God Who Wasn't There. Following in the vein of Bowling for Columbine and Fahrenheit 9/11 the film aimed to tackle a heated debate, stir up controversy and challenge the commonly held beliefs and opinions of viewers. Except this time the topic wasn't gun-laws or the Bush Administration. Rather it focused on the much more combustible subject that is Christianity. Flemming utilised luminaries such as Richard Dawkins, who is an extremely outspoken atheist and critic of creationism, to support him in his picture. Dawkins, who was voted as one of the world's top three intellectuals alongside Umberto Eco and Noam Chomsky, and the others were intended to add a certain amount of credibility to the movie. Nevertheless one can say that all three of these movies, while purporting to be educational, ended up being perceived as merely antagonistic by viewers who did not share the views of the director. In a movie with a on ...

Is Tom Anderson an eProduct? 2007-04-24 04:45:56 MySpace's Tom Anderson is the most popular person on the Internet (currently he has 173549379 friends). Hunched over his computer with his geeky grin for that impromptu photo moment; it's an infamous image. Tom's not an imposing guy and the photograph seems to suggest that MySpace is a one-man team, with humble Tom based in his momma's garage, just trying is darndest to keep his members happy and generally shying away from the world. “MySpace: The Business of Spam 2.0” was published by Valleywag, and claims to have it in good knowledge that Tom was initially hired as a copy editor by his 'co-founder', Chris DeWolfe. Giving Tom the title of 'founder' and effectively making him the face of MySpace was simply a public relations exercise. So what does Tom do for the MySpace image? Tom gives MySpace a human side to it, a personality. Thus: Tom's enthusiasm to interact with users and his 'first friend status' suggest that MySpace has no hidden agenda (“T ...

The Social Butterfly Effect 2007-04-23 08:25:30 Last week Duncan Watts, a professor of sociology at Columbia University, published a fantastic article in the New York Times entitled Is Justin Timberlake a Product of Cumulative Advantage? (registration required to view). The article illustrates the results of Watts' studies into the extent to which people's choices in music are dependent on the preferences of others. Watts conducted an experiment in which he split 14,000 participants into two groups, and then asked them to listen, rate and, if they liked them enough, to download a number of songs from bands that they had never been exposed to. The first group was only given the name of the songs and of the bands – pretty meaningless as they were virtually all complete unknowns. The second group was given an additional piece of information – how many times the songs had been downloaded by their peers. This second group (that Watts labelled as being under the “social influence” condition) was then split into ...

Hate Something, Change Something 2007-04-22 04:10:32 This is pretty cool ad from Honda. Don't know about the viral properties of it, as I can't imagine people wanting to send it around quite as much as some of the funnier or more “contagious” (read sex) clips that we've posted, but all in all I think that the ad itself is cool enough to ensure its spread. Cool song, hey? Comment on "Hate Something, Change Something" ...

B2B Viral, or Not 2B Viral? 2007-04-21 03:48:24 After running around like a headless chicken trying to find a cool clip for most of the day Sarah M bailed me out of trouble by sending me this clip. Basically this is Xerox giving viral marketing a shot in the B2B arena – not something we see too often. The advert ended up getting an estimated 1.5 million views – not bad for something primarily targeted at business viewers, whom you usually don't normally associate with social media. Wonder how many of the employers out there have been tempted to spike the water to up productivity... Comment on "B2B Viral, or Not 2B Viral?" ...