Internet Marketing and Social Media Consultants

Peter Kafka at SAI has a good report on the fortunes of MySpace and Fox Interactive Media (FIM).

Growth for MySpace has leveled out while it increases for competitors like Facebook. That is the bad news, certainly. However, engagement by those who are still on the site is going up. What’s the point of having a ton of new users if they don’t spend any time on the site? The fact of the matter is that while Facebook has taken the worldwide unique visitor lead, MySpace is slaughtering them on engagement with about 50% more average minutes per visitor.
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This fall, Facebook will integrate Microsoft’s Live Search with their social network, giving Microsoft the ultimate return on their $240 million investment. Along with Live Search will come Microsoft’s search advertising. Things were already looking up for Live Search, and now they’re looking even better.

Live Search had a big month in May, getting 15% more visitors than the previous month, and they have also inked a deal with Hewlett-Packard to get the Live Search toolbar installed on HP PC’s.

MySpace has a similar search and ad deal with Google, but so far, things aren’t exactly going to plan. Lackluster results have led to finger pointing from both sides, notably with MySpace accusing Google of doing a poor job with their ad service. Searches just aren’t utilized through social networks very much. People are accustomed to using the search bar in their browsers by now.
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Google today has formally launched Knol, their service for the sharing of knowledge about anything the author may have in mind. While on the surface it may resemble Wikipedia, there are some key differences that make it unique and unlike an online encyclopedia.

First of all, there is no one entry for a particular topic. In Knol, a search for a particular topic will bring up any number of results, all individually rated and commented upon. The author is the only one allowed to make changes to a particular knol, and can moderate based on his or her preferences. Instead of Wikipedia’s one entry for “ford mustang,” there may be several on Knol written by several different authors. The most relevant ones will be thus rated by users and will appear at the top of the heap.
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It’s generally good advice not to go to a Halloween party dressed as a prisoner when you’ve just put someone in the hospital while driving drunk. In fact, it’s rather ghoulish and makes Steve Irwin stingray costumes seem positively highbrow.

Joshua Lipton, a huge tool from Rhode Island, drove drunk and put an unfortunate 20 year-old woman in the hospital for weeks. Before sentencing, Lipton decided it would be funny to dress up in stripes and an orange jumpsuit for Halloween. The problem is: he posed for some pictures, and they ended up on his own Facebook page. These pictures were used in sentencing, and he got two years. Hope he kept the costume.
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Web video aggregator Veoh thinks it has cracked the elusive video advertising code with a behavioral targeting system based on their recommendation engine.

Veoh founder and CIO Dmitry Shapiro stresses the difference between targeting the behavior of viewers against targeting the shows they watch. For instance, while it may seem like a good idea to advertise Alpo on a video about dogs, Shapiro would recommend that you market Alpo to individuals who have been known to watch a lot of videos about dogs. If a viewer watches ten straight videos about cars and then one about dogs, that person should still be served an ad related to their previous viewing rather than based on one individual view.
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