In exchange for just one search on Bing, Microsoft's new search engine, Microsoft will grant you free WiFi access on hotspots nationwide (but mostly in airports and hotels).

Apparently the offer began in September but perhaps they've been steadily unrolling it across the country as they only just announced it officially yesterday.

It's an interesting approach to marketing, and no doubt not the cheapest one either. But they're reporting good 'engagement rates' well above the usual .1 or .2% and will continue the scheme for the foreseeable future -- so enjoy your free wireless access! (As a juicy, related titbit, and in no way coincidental, Yahoo will be providing free wireless access at Times Square in New York City, for an entire year.)

Whether it's worth Microsoft's money or not may never be known. But one thing's for certain: Microsoft are famous for their brazen and fearless love of loss-leading -- they have the cash to do it, so why not?

And I tell you what... I would switch to Bing if Microsoft paid for my Internet connection. Wouldn't you? Now there's an interesting thought.

[via MediaPost]

A marketing firm in Knoxville, TN, is suing its former client, a pizza place, over negative comments left on Facebook and Twitter. Even if this lawsuit weren't doomed to fail, and even if the marketers, Low and Tritt, had asked for less than an absurd 2 million dollars from The Pizza Kitchen, this would still be a terrible, useless bit of litigation. Without this lawsuit, I would never have heard of either of these businesses, and I certainly wouldn't have known about these supposedly libelous comments.

Without this lawsuit, you wouldn't be reading this post. If their goal was to avoid a negative image in the media, this marketing firm has failed on a grand scale. In fact, they could learn a thing or two from The Pizza Kitchen. Even though they only have one store, attracting this lawsuit has led to global media attention beyond anything Low and Tritt could have landed them when they were still a client.

What do you get when you take a gaggle of enthusiastic, early-adopting online marketers and introduce them to one of the world's largest directories of job-seeking college students? We're about to find out, now that Facebook is acquiring FriendFeed. The move should mean improved versions of the real-time status and conversation features that Facebook was already moving toward, but that's not all Facebook bought. It's also getting most of FriendFeed's users.

It's not as if social media, um, d-bags, didn't know Facebook existed. Au contraire, they've been all over it for at least a year, begging people to become fans of their clients. College students, however, are about to find out that social media jobs exist, and are one of the best rackets going. Wait, you mean I can bother people online, using networks I was already signed up to anyway, and get paid for it? When do I start?

Social media isn't going away any time soon, and it has a lot of upside, but it also has a lot of our attention. It's one of the few places marketers can still get eyeballs, and members of the first generation that really grew up with it are about to enter the workforce and start selling things to one another. Maybe it was inevitable -- and maybe it will burn out after a while, to make room for new models based on new technology -- but I'm willing to bet we'll look back and point to the time FriendFeed met Facebook as the moment it really started to accelerate.

I'm a huge fan of the AMC TV show Mad Men. My wife and I have gone as far as making ourselves gin martinis to sip while watching the show, though I haven't yet tried an Old Fashioned. If you're as much of a fan of the show as we are, check out AMC's new Mad Men Yourself site.

Just like the site that lets you create a South Park character with the distinctive features you choose, Mad Men Yourself lets you create a stylized version of yourself in the vein of the late-60's era when the show is set. You have your choice of hairstyles, clothing options, and even accessories, all perfectly appropriate for the period.

While these sites are simply blatant marketing efforts intended to raise awareness for the shows they represent, I think this is marketing at its finest. Give us something fun to play with that lets us associate with the show, and lets us take away a little creation that somehow feels uniquely ours, even though it's simply one of a set number of overall options. Clever, and a win-win for the user and the network.

Now excuse me while I try to find a way to make myself look a little more like Don Draper.

There have been a lot of speed claims lately when it comes to web browsers - when Apple released Safari 4, I put half a dozen options through the paces to see who came out on top. IE8 didn't appear in my chart, because it handled the benchmarks so badly that I canceled them before its javascript engine seized up completely and cracked the block.

"Hey, wait just a gosh darn minute!" shouts Microsoft. "We ran our own tests, and they showed that our browser is the fastest!" On a related note, I've done my own testing that conclusively proves that I am, in fact, the all time leading goal scorer for the Detroit Red Wings. Sorry, Gordie Howe!

But really. Come on, Microsoft, are we supposed to take this seriously or is this some halfhearted attempt at humor like the recent news about Firefox conquering one entire continent (Antarctica)?

That is, Keep Internets Serving, Stupid. During the Superbowl VIZIO used an ad to encourage everyone to immediately visit their website and register to win a TV. Guess how that ended? Yeah, for several hours their Flash-laden site wasn't available. Anyone remember the ill-fated Dr. Pepper campaign?

Today, Denny's is giving away free breakfasts. Of course, dennys.com is dead as a hammer. Something tells me cutting IT staff isn't helping. I'm not saying Denny's has cut staff, but IT has increasingly been tasked with "do more with less" even before the recession hit the fan.

So what do you do, as a marketer? We all made lots of fun of Twitter for a while when the service would fail, didn't we? But the Fail Whale has made increasingly shorter appearances (sources say the robot wanted less money anyway and the whale got a gig on "Flapjack" for Cartoon Network). I met one of the engineers of Twitter recently, and I learned that they learned some very important lessons in scaling the past year or so...

Marketers need to learn to anticipate promotional effects on servers, end of story. Don't write a check your host can't cash, basically. Does it mean spending money on infrastructure? Not necessarily. It will, however, likely mean some code and server jockeying to ensure your site is lean and distributed and capable of a temporary spike in traffic. Digg, Twitter, Flickr and plenty of other sites have learned this the hard way. Now it's Madison Avenue's turn, I guess.

Hey, want to hear some big news? Well, don't expect to find it in this article from The Telegraph about how Facebook plans to finally monetize their service.

Now, despite what articles like Nick O'Neill's on AllFacebook say about "official word" poo-pooing the Telegraph article as being totally off-base, it certainly seems plausible enough.

It's not as though Facebook is a home for orphans or an animal shelter. It's a gargantuan social networking site that employs hordes of people and requires a massive IT infrastructure to keep the wheels turning.

How exactly do people expect them to pay for that? Bake sales? Telethons?

No, they're going to do it in the way that makes the most sense for a site that has gigabytes of personal information about: they're going to whore out their polling system your data to any company that is willing to pay for access to it.

It's not like people didn't see this coming. Last January, Grant wrote about how Facebook put the boots to Robert Scoble when he tried to scrape his own friends list for data. Would they have been that upset if they didn't have other plans for that information up their sleeves?

At this point, Facebook's claims that quotes were misinterpreted sound a bit like damage control. Time will tell, but come on, folks. What do you expect a business to do with a database chock full of tasty marketing data like the one Facebook has amassed?

Considering the Google brand in the popular vernacular and the launch of Chrome, I went to web marketing poster boy Seth Godin to get his perspective. Seth wasn't particularly loquacious (no doubt he's a bit busy) but here's the conversation:

Me: Would you be willing to take about 10 minutes to talk to us about your take on Google Chrome? While the tech is neat and pretty and awesome, I think you'll agree this is all about the brand. Where Firefox failed (sort of), Google has an honest shot. Once Chrome is out of beta (in 10 or less years) they are one Superbowl ad away from a true IE-killer. That's what I'm thinking, anyway.

Seth: 1. firefox is hardly a failure. 2. chrome is about web as operating system. not controlling ff is a huge risk for them going forward.

Later I explained what I meant by calling FF a "failure"

Me: I guess by "failure" I meant "failure to capture the average user's attention." There's no doubting they have gained market share against the IE juggernaut, but for the majority of users the Internet = Internet Explorer. Was wondering if you think Chrome has a shot at changing that perception, since people now think Internet Search = Google.

Seth: yep!

The American dream is alive and well -- on the internet. Whether you truly believe that anyone can grow up to be president, it's absolutely true that anyone can plaster their name on a couple of web sites and call themselves a candidate. If you're looking for a slightly more professional look, check out News3Online, a fake news website where you can create a video like the one above.

You can fill in your own information or play a little practical joke on a friend by changing the name. The whole thing is really just a viral marketing tool from the makers of PalTalk, an online chatroom service. But as viral marketing tools go, it's pretty fun, if not entirely original. Showtime created a similar fill-in-the-blanks style video to promote the TV show Dexter last year.

[via Calacanis.com]

AOL has announced plans to let users opt out of targeted advertising. Right now AOL (which happens to be this blog's parent company) and many other web sites place cookies in your browser allowing the site to serve up targeted ads every time you visit an AOL web site.

By the end of the year, AOL plans to offer you the ability to opt out of targeted advertising. You'll still see advertising, but AOL won't be tracking your personal data. The company will also launch a public service campaign letting people know about their right to opt-out by placing banner ads on various pages.

Advocates of targeted advertising say the cookies make it easier for web publishers to serve up ads that readers will be most interested in by tracking browsing habits. That doesn't do much to ease the privacy concerns of people who read 1984 as a work of non-fiction.

The opt-out technology was developed by behavioral marketing firm Tacoda, which AOL purchased earlier this year. Somehow we didn't think AOL was buying a behavioral advertising firm in order to serve up less targeted ads. But the New York Times reports that while AOL will let users opt out, it will try to convince them that they should opt in. After all, if you're going to get ads anyway, wouldn't you rather they be for sales on your favorite movies, music, and other items?

Of course, the only way for AOL to know which computer users have opted out of targeted advertising is to place a cookie in your browser.

Someone apparently thought there was plenty of room for innovation in the "Flash-driven creepy talking head ad" space, and Motion Portrait has certainly picked up the reigns. Since our screencap really can't do the video justice, check out the real deal at Motion Portrait's site, and be sure to move your mouse over her and ring the bell.

The obvious advantage here is a stunning aesthetic boost; this digital secretary moves in a way no other talking head presentation has, even while talking. Still, we hope to see this far more advanced tool used with restraint when it comes to advertising on the web (and let's face it: it will come to that). No matter how real or natural presentations like this may seem, they can still be a thorn in a site's experience and drive visitors away if they start blabbing immediately or simply won't shut up.

Motion Portrait, we tip our hat to the impressive work you've done in the creepy talking head space. Let's just hope you can recommend some equally impressive advice on restraining the use of these to the marketers who come a'knockin'.

"And we want to be on the first page of Google," another new client said matter-of-factly, as the after-thought of our Web design meeting. I nodded, inhaled, and began my spiel.

"What are your stats now?" I asked, although I knew the answer. Many small businesses don't review their site stats, don't know how to view them online and can't really interpret them, but all Web site rebuilding plans include being on the first page of Google results. Let's try to marry the want with some how-to and understand how this works.

KNOW YOUR STATS
Know what your Web stats are. Contact your Web firm and demand the link. Bookmark them. Look at them! Pay attention to the "search keyphrases" and "search keywords" that users enter into search engines and find your site.

Site traffic is saved to logs and statistics programs display the data. Web stat programs are usually loaded on the server, so they have to be available from your hosting company. One of the most common stat packages is Webalizer, a fast and free log file analyzer. There are countless guides to help you interpret the numbers. And the mystery between "hits" and "visits" is explained here. Another common stat program is AWStats, an open source project at SourceForge There is a plethora of stat programs, many of which are free [see DLS for more info]

BUY BETTER STATS
You can buy access to better, more colorful stats with graphs and charts and circles and arrows. If you have a marketing department, they should take a look at WebTrends for small business, one of the older analytics, and check out the demos. WebTrends, like many other quality stat packages, is not free, so decide if the pretty pictures are worth the price.

I WANT TO BE ON THE FIRST PAGE OF GOOGLE!
You want higher ranking in the search engines' results? In the olden days, everyone played on the same field. Nowadays, it takes a village to raise your rankings. Try these suggestions, many of which are human-intensive.

Answering the challenge brought by sites such as Revver, Google's YouTube is looking to launch a revenue sharing model for top posters on the popular video sharing web site. While YouTube is still the most dominant force in online video sharing, sites like Revver have attracted top video posters by offering to share in revenue from advertising on the site. However, unlike Revver's service, YouTube's revenue sharing won't be available to all users - only those that Google feel are worthy of entering into deal with.

According to a post on the official YouTube blog, Google has already chosen top YouTube celebs such as LisaNova, renetto and HappySlip to share in the cash that's rolling in from advertising revenues on the site.

But while the number of posters that will share in the profits is currently small, YouTube says that new posters who create original material and build a substantial audience will get an invitation to the revenue sharing program. In other words: if you have a video camera and a good idea, now seems like a pretty good time to up your game.

A web 2.0-sized boatload of buzz has surrounded Twitter, the addictive service that allows its users to answer one simple question: what are you doing? The service has made appearances in everything from your friend's blog to the New York Times, and everyone seems jazzed about how fun tweeting is. While we're all having a good time, however, its creators, Obvious, keep hinting at how many practical uses they have up their sleeve for Twitter. Even though they haven't revealed any of their cards just yet, the rest of us are left wondering: how is such a seemingly frivolous service going to make money?

As a user who has taken the Twitter pill hook, line and sinker, I've been mulling this question for some time now. I came up with a few strategies, but then I figured: why not run them by the Twitter crew themselves? The least they could say was 'no comment,' but fortunately Evan Williams, one of Obvious and Twitter's founders, responded with a few of his own. Read on for my attempts at making Twitter some money (I'm waiting for my job offer Ev), as well as some choice words and ideas of his own from Evan.

Are you ready to be hit with ads on your mobile device?

The mobile advertising industry is expected to hit $3 billion in 2007. That figure includes a lot of advertising that we're due to be bombarded with on our devices. You can forget about SMS ads as well, the majority of that figure has been said to be focused on the advertising associated with mobile video, which will aid in the rise to $19 billion by 2011.

Mobile marketing is strong in Europe and Asia, but still extremely young in the U.S. So it's just a matter of time before we get hit nicely with different strategies and business models that attack mobile operators and advertisers.

[via cnet]