SEARCH ENGINE STRATEGIES & PUBCON ROUNDUP:

Perhaps best summarized by Kevin Ryan:


"I was surprised when getting involved with this conference how many people could not distinguish between strategy and tactic."

Great Conference Coverage Recaps: SES Chicago & PubCon Vegas 2007




THIS WEEK'S NEWS
Salesforce.com Launches Social Leads Network
Salesforce.com is rolling out features that allow customers to share sales leads, product info and other communications securely. With the site's subscriber base expected to pass the one million mark by the end of December, the firm hopes to turn its membership to an advantage by inviting them to make transactions and share information, according to ZD Net. The service focuses primarily on sharing and building sales lead and CRM-related information. Dell and DoubleClick are already on board with the new features. Connections between businesses cost just $100 a month, with the inviting party paying the fee.

Major Copyright Bill Boosts Penalties, Creates New Agency
Congress is preparing to amend copyright law. Politicians want to increase penalties for copyright infringement. Top Democrats and Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives on Wednesday introduced a sweeping 69-page bill that ratchets up civil penalties for copyright infringement, boosts criminal enforcement, and even creates a new federal agency charged with bringing about a national and international copyright crackdown. The legislation, called the Prioritizing Resources and Organization for Intellectual Property Act, or PRO IP Act. Probably the most extensive part of the PRO IP Act is its creation of a new federal bureaucracy called the White House Intellectual Property Enforcement Representative, or WHIPER. The head of WHIPER would be appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate.

Nielsen Launches Video DRM/tracking/digital mark Service
Nielsen is releasing a new service that will guarantee that online videos are distributed in ways that are approved by the owners of the original content. The Wall Street Journal reports that the service may be announced as early as Wednesday. Nielsen is looking to offer this to media companies including the Discovery Channel and NBCU. It was reported that the company has already approached Fox and Google regarding the service called Digital Media Manager, which will be available next spring the report continued.

Google Offers Free Trackable Phone Numbers
As reported by Sebastien Provencher, Google is now offering free trackable phone numbers to advertisers in the U.S., with phone activity reporting through the AdWords interface.

Research: Social Media Spending to Zoom
A survey of 260 senior marketing PR and marcom professionals by the Society for New Communications Research found that two-thirds plan to increase spending on social media during the next 12 months and 81% expect to spend at least as much on social media marketing as on traditional marketing in five years. Someone is figuring this out.

Google and Yahoo Will Turn eMail and Personal Pages into Social Networks
Ignore Orkut, OpenSocial, Yahoo Mash and Yahoo 360. These are just the beginning. Google and Yahoo have come up with new plans to respond to the challenge from MySpace and Facebook: They hope to turn their e-mail systems and personalized home page services (iGoogle and MyYahoo) into social networks. Web-based e-mail systems already contain much of what Facebook calls the social graph — the connections between people. That's why the social networks offer to import the e-mail address books of new users to jump-start their list of friends. Yahoo and Google realize that they have this information and can use it to build their own services that connect people to their contacts.

Trademark Office Rejects Hormel's Claim Against Spam Arrest
In a stinging loss, meat company Hormel's effort to have anti-spam firm Spam Arrest's trademark registration canceled has been dismissed. This is a huge letdown for a company that has rigorously defended its SPAM trademark against dozens of firms. However, because of an odd accompanying decision, what this means to all the other technology firms battling Hormel over use of the word spam is unclear. A three-judge panel on Nov. 21 unanimously decided in favor of Spam Arrest, which argued that the word spam in relation to e-mail is a generic term that is not likely to dilute Hormel's Spam trademarks.

DoubleClick Performics Crashes!
DoubleClick Performics experienced a system outage due to a complete power failure at their data center at approximately 9:30 a.m. CST on Saturday, Dec. 8, 2007. They claim in an email that data was protected, the issue affected tracking, links and system availability. Power was restored and tracking and links were operational by approximately 2:30 p.m. CST. The interface experienced intermittent downtime throughout the afternoon but tracking is operational. The company reports, "The root cause remains under investigation and updates will be forthcoming as more is known."

Zuckerberg Flogs Himself, Apologizes
Perhaps Mr. Zuckerberg is the poster child for a coming bubble?

GSI Commerce agrees to buy European fulfillment provider Zendor.com Ltd.
Targeting retail e-commerce growth in Europe, turnkey e-commerce systems provider GSI Commerce Inc. has agreed to pay approximately $7.9 million in cash to acquire U.K.-based Zendor.com Ltd., a provider of fulfillment and customer care services with five U.K. retailer clients, GSI said today. The deal would increase GSI’s client base to 85 companies.

buy at, Inc. Launches Affiliate Network in the US
Read more from buy at Inc.'s President, Malcolm Cowley, as he describes his aim -- to eat the lunch of affiliate marketing networks/companies here in the U.S.

Nokia: The Future of Music
Nokia's plan to offer unlimited music downloads challenges the dominant pay-per-track sales model and is likely to upset carriers already worried that Nokia is poaching their customer relationships. The world's biggest cellphone maker announced a deal on Tuesday with top record label Universal that will give customers buying particular Nokia devices unlimited access to millions of tracks for a year and allow them to keep the music afterwards. Nokia hopes the deal with Universal Music Group -- a unit of Vivendi whose artists include 50 Cent, Sting, and Mariah Carey -- will be followed by deals with the three remaining major international labels, to whom it is already talking.

Google Unleashes a Google Local (Plus) Box Bidding Qar
Google is opening up new social media ad territory -- the coveted Local Plus Box. Ka-ching!

LA Times Invests in Online Music: Digg-like Site
Mixx, a social news startup from McLean, VA which announced its first round funding in October, has now added an interesting strategic investor: Los Angeles Times, part of the the hopefully-soon-to-be-private Tribune. Mixx is a bit like Digg, though for non-geeks, and LAT will now integrate the service within its website: Mixx buttons will show up o each LAT story, and LAT's stories will also be syndicated within Mixx' site/service. Mixx sports a number of established media veterans among its ranks: CEO and founder Chris McGill was formerly at USA Today and Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO) while board members include former AP chairman Burl Osborne and former Yahoo VP Dave Mandelbrot.

Posted by Editor on December 9, 2007 09:16 PM

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