Image via Wikipedia
Reading the rules the IOC is imposing on athletes competing at London 2012, makes me cry out loud. IOC, STOP and THINK. You are potentially challenging the largest consumer-powered communication engine to a fight to the death and I think I know who’ll win.
What is social media best known for – quick updates and fast thinking sound bites. Here’s what people accredited for the Games can do “…postings, blogs or tweets should be in a first-person, diary type format and should not be in the role of a journalist – i.e. they must not report on competition or comment on the activities of other participants or accredited persons.”
So I can say what I’m doing but not that I just beat someone else or noticed them eating, breathing or taking off an (unbranded) shirt.
All sounds unworkable and just too onerous – except that the threat of being chucked out and de-accredited may mean athletes decide just not to do any social media at all to be on the safe side.
As one commentator, Chris Matyszczyk, says
…the IOC might not yet understand the instant impulses that tweeting engenders. You grab your phone. You cradle your laptop. Out pop words whose speed is that of a Usain Bolt from the blue.
The long history of regulation and control of the Olympic branding and logo is well known (A client of ours, Rowperfect even got a “cease and desist” letter in 2000 for using a photo of an athlete in GB kit and mentioning that they trained using their product).
So the rules include the statement “Participants and other accredited persons must not use the Olympic Symbol – i.e. the five interlocking rings used alone on their postings, blogs or tweets on any social media platforms or on any websites.” You also can’t create a website with the word olympic in the URL but can create a sub-page like rowperfect.co.uk/olympics – for the duration of the games….till 15th August 2012. What’s the point? Make and leave a legacy not create and take down.
And above all there’s full personal legal liability AND the Games police will be watching from the Olympic offices www.olympicgamesmonitoring.com password protected and restricted access.
Read the full IOC Social Media Internet and blogging guidelines.
Nick Burcher is a super star… but I didn’t know that when I first met him. We had coffee together and he gave me very early advice on setting up this blog and since then I’ve followed his work.
Nick’s latest views are about the integration of advertising, marketing and social media in the context of the internet being the central plank of a brand’s marketing, recommendations and opinion-formation with audiences.
This is a really important part of comprehending how the “Old” marketing techniques are migrating to the “New”. For example, do you know how to change your communication methods so that your “old” customers are not alienated by the “New” tools and so that the “New” tools can sit comfortably alongside “Old” styles?
Nick Burcher's Paid:Owned:Earned
Take a look at the image here. This is Nick’s thesis.
There are websites whose purpose is based on payment (brands pay to advertise on them); there are others where brands own the information up there (mainly content-led) and lastly there are others where brands have earned the right to be listed.
Note that some sites (Facebook, Twitter) are listed in all three categories…. this is a really important part of the paradigm.
Your Brand needs to have communication strategies that work in all three contexts, and uses the feedback arrows at the top and bottom as well as in the ones middle of the diagram.
Here is the strategy we use for a client, Rowperfect. They sell rowing sports equipment.
Paid: Google adwords and other sports sites who carry banner adverts.
Owned: Blog content, You Tube videos, forum discussions, Twitter feed, Facebook page.
Earned: followers on FB, Twitter, YouTube and others linking back to the Owned
I was delighted to watch this video where Nick sets out the lessons behind the simple headline “Paid-Owned-Earned”.
Does this have resonance for your brand strategy? Where do you think there may be issues or conflicts with traditional brand-led marketing?
New Trends in Digital Advertising [exclusive video] from Hayko on Vimeo.
Related articles
- Paid Owned Earned – how it works [image and video] (nickburcher.com)
- Paid Owned Earned: Paid Owned Earned on Star Wars Day – VW The Force and Blackberry (huguesrey.wordpress.com)
- Advertising’s Future Is 3 Simple Words: Paid. Owned. Earned. | Story Worldwide (huguesrey.wordpress.com)
- Separate content from platforms (beingpeterkim.com)
Image via Wikipedia
There was a once a time when global brands selected their marketing and advertising departments on their creative ability and trained them in the philosophy of business. The most successful staff members were the ones with the most unique ideas which would push their brand to success.
This last sentence is still true these days, with one exception, the internet has allowed for the most successful and unique ideas to come from anybody around the world. No longer must you work as a ‘staff member’ for a company or brand to have your creative ideas fulfilled, nowadays it’s as easy as entering an online competition or registering on a website.
Sharing brand ideas
Take video sharing specialist, Tongal, for example. This website gained global attention last year when it entered in a US based initiative programme where “emerging” companies were asked to submit entries detailing their unique tools and services. This programme secured over 400 entries, and one of the winners was Tongal, who are now participating in a project for Brisk Tea.
The irony of this is that Tongal, itself, is a competition based website which allows anyone around the globe to enter their skills in creative thinking, filming, pitching and testing products.
Do brands need creatives?
It would seem that to work in the marketing department for a global brand in this day and age, you don’t need a creative bone in your body; you just need to know how to run a competition and recognise a great idea when you see one.
PepsiCo, the food and beverage giant, recently launched a competition very similar to the one in the US which found Tongal. The project, called PepsiCo10, asks “emerging” companies to submit entries detailing their unique tools and services by mid-July 2011. The primary fields of interest include social networks, mobile marketing, location-based properties, digital video, gaming and “learning” platforms.
“PepsiCo10 will bring value to our business by ensuring that we are at the cutting edge of whatever digital and social media technology is out there,” Peter Charles, a PepsiCo marketing manager, said.
This movement to ‘hunt’ the globe for great creative ideas is gaining more and more popularity, and so it should. Essentially, everyone wins, the brand gets the creative ideas they want for a reasonable price (PepsiCo is offering £10,000 to the winner), the winners or top entries get recognition, make contacts and gain experience in how to pitch winning ideas and the public get to see the most cutting edge, unique and creative advertising and marketing campaigns from sources which otherwise, would probably have never surfaced.
Other brand contest sites
A leading agency in this ‘buy an idea’ movement is idea bounty, a website that that allows clients to ask the world for creative ideas in exchange for a reward, or Bounty. The clients review the submissions and select the best Idea as the Bounty winner. Clients can only use Ideas that they’ve paid a Bounty.
And what about Swagapalooza - turning it round this is new products pitching bloggers with large followings. A product in search of an audience…. creative? Innovative? Worthwhile?
What does the marketer of the future DO?
Are we heading towards a future where a marketing departments primary job will be to select winners of competitions for creative ideas? As bad as that sounds for all you marketers out there, I think the answer is probably even worse. Why even have a marketing department for that task when people can submit their entries online and have the public vote for the creative idea they want to see actioned the most.
Be warned – The End is Nigh!
11 Crowdsourcing websites:
- 99 Designs – graphic design
- IdeaStorm - ideas
- CrowdSpring – Graphic design
- CrowdWorks – more for corporates
- Brandstack – logos
- InnoCentive – problem solving for businesses
- Spudaroo – specialist for copy writing
- AdHack – advertising experts who’ll write your next ad for you
- Brainrack – a brainstorming site
- NamingForce – to name your product
- Clipik – video editing
Related articles
- Is spec work evil? (creativeagencysecrets.com)
- PepsiCo and Highland team up in hunt for ten new social media hits (telegraph.co.uk)
- 10 ways of crowdsourcing your needs or talent (the10most.com)
- Evil Genuis Finds Case Study in her Pepsi (inc.com)
- Mashable Teams With PepsiCo To Find Europe’s Most Promising Startups (mashable.com)
How big does your company need to be before you use marketing professionals?
For brands who are growing and becoming profitable there comes a time when you choose to professionalise your marketing. Many businesses decide at this point that they have two choices: to hire a staffer or to buy in expertise from an agency.
Why you need better marketing
The needs are clear – you want more traction with your marketing, you suspect that there are better ways of doing promotion and marketing to get inbound leads and you can afford a budget just for marketing. These are good signs.
You have identified clearly that your brand has a need and the possible shortcomings of your current set-up.
Hire versus buy: the dilemma
There are advantages and disadvantages – the internal member of staff will need to have well-rounded skills in a range of marketing disciplines (web, advertising, PR, copywriting, print design) and therefore a senior hire with this range of skills is more expensive than a junior.
Using an agency also requires decisions about their skills and area of expertise compared with the type of marketing and communications activity your brand has done in the past or plans to do in the future.
Costs are usually the determining factor
It may be less costly to hire external advisers compared to the cost of a senior member of staff – compare the full cost of hiring and paying (including office costs) a new senior marketer with the price an agency would charge you.
Have a couple of ‘chemistry’ or getting-to-know-you meetings with local marketing agencies and ask their advice. Also ask to speak to a couple of their recent clients to see if they also made the same transition.
A third option worth reviewing is using a freelancer. You don’t have the full hire costs of a full time person but can often get very experienced people at lower fee rates. Check out the freelance hire websites like eLance.com and Freelance.com, Freelancer.com and guru.com. I’ve successfully hired people for my agency and for clients using eLance.
Creative Agency Secrets has two current clients who use us for mentoring work. They hired a junior marketer and we speak weekly to review their work, priorities and give guidance. Could this work for you? Give us a call – we always offer a free 20 minute first call.
In the meanwhile here are a few other articles that may help you figure out what to do
- Advertising – do it yourself or hire
- Hire a PR firm or do it yourself?
- Do it yourself internet marketing, or hire
- Hubspot offers inbound marketing tutorials for people using its website / content marketing system.
- Read Creative Agency Secrets’ assessment of Hubspot and how to do it yourself
- SEO do it yourself or hire a professional
- Small Business marketing – DIY or hire a pro?
- Web design – do it yourself or hire someone
- DIY or hire a market research company?
I 've known clients like this
A guest post by Stephen Greensted.
Cynicism, Duplicity and Institutional Incompetence
In my last post, I looked at thirty reasons for advertising agencies not winning an account when they thought they were ahead. I could easily have added another seventy reasons.
But it’s not always the agency’s fault. Clients are just as likely to mess up the process. Recently, I’ve been sitting on the client side of the table more than I have on the agency side.
And very interesting it has been, too.
Here are ten common reasons for Client screw-ups:
- The clients knew before the pitch whom they wanted to appoint but were compelled by Procurement to go ahead with a pitch nonetheless
- The pitch was called by the new marketing director to enable him to appoint theadvertising agency from his former job
- The pitch was a statutory pitch, the purpose being to make the incumbent agency to try harder and charge less
- The client was looking for free ideas but had no intention of moving his business
- What the clients really wanted was a digital solution, but failed to mention that in the brief
- The new marketing director called a pitch, fired the incumbent agency, and then got fired himself by the managing director
- I’m going to have to be a bit careful about this one since a lot of people, me included, still feel litigious about what happened. Here goes: a bullying sort of recently hired client called an agency review. He knew which agency he wanted to appoint. However, this agency didn’t really come up with the goods in the pitch, but the least well-known agency which pitched produced a cracker of an idea based upon a very well-known pop video from the 1960s. The small agency was not appointed. Three months later, that idea was running on TV in a slightly different guise. The client had passed on the idea to his favoured agency, and told them to run it
- The client had specified that he was not going to appoint an agency with conflicting accounts, and then complained when the agency could not show a relevant case history
- The marketing director said she was in charge of the pitch process. She wasn’t. It turned out to be her bosses in the States who were not going to appoint a French advertising agency
- When we drilled down through the substrate and peered around in the gloom, we realised that the potential client didn’t really want great advertising to sell his company’s beer. What he really wanted was advertising to make him famous. He probably could have spent his time more wisely with a PR company
Again, neither all agencies nor all clients are either sinners or saints. You can find all sorts there, but you also come across some fairly extreme ones who are really only in it for themselves. I have as many client side friends as I do from the agency world. But, if you’re going to pitch, remember that you’ll never really know what went on in the clients’ heads. Pitches are hugely exciting, but they’re also disruptive and expensive, and should only ever be undertaken once you have answered yes to the following three questions:
- What is the true reason for this pitch?
- Who on the client side is really in charge?
- Are you sure you can work with them?
Geoff Howard-Spink had an additional three:
- Can we do great work for this client?
- Are we going to make a lot of money out of it?
- Is it going to be fun?
He went on to say that if the answer was yes to any two of these three, you should seize the account. If you can only say yes to one question, politely decline.
Which we did from time to time.
Related articles
- How To Lose A Pitch When You Thought You Were Winning (stephengreensted.wordpress.com)
How much do marketers and their agencies need to know about technology. Code is now on a par with content.
- Allison Mooney, head of trends and Insights, Marketing Google
- Ben Malbon, Director of Strategy, Creative Lab Google
- Matt Galligan, SimpleGeo
- Rob Rasmussen, Tribal DDB
- Rick Webb, The Barbarian Group
#agileagency
How much do marketers and their agencies need to know about technology. Code is now on a par with content.
Rasmussen - campaigns aren’t dying but seasonal work continues. Campaigns work on top of the platform of engagement. We try to do it backwards – all the funding is against campaigns especially media buying not spend on platforms.
Webb - Platform = brand; Campaign = products
Malbon - at BBH we tried to dismantle the “masterpiece mentality” of it had to be perfect before we show it to colleagues let alone clients. Tech companies are better at killing stuff that doesn’t work.
Webb - campaigns are humdrum.
Malbon - Tech companies make things that last much longer than a campaign, which lasts 5 minutes
Mooney – creative is being tested on YouTube by BMW.
Rasmassen - it’s almost backwards to create it and later push out to channels… reverse the order the core idea rather than individual executions.
Galligan - FourSquare and Amex combined deals so Amex built a tech platform to enable this it’s more than a campaign because it uses multiple platforms and FourSquare happened to be launch partner – they’ll extend it to others later. It was an experiment the first implementation. Take interesting bits and remove the poorly performing parts and go on. Software companies have one core concept we stick to one thing that we do.
Webb - software companis need marketing and Brands can’t take it back like software can.
Galligan - Marketing is every aspect of what you do as a tech company. E.g. Twitter began as Twittr and was a hideous purple website. Someone turned that brand round. The danger is to think the core product is what matters. We market as a consumer internet comp[any even though we don’t deal with consumers
Malbon - Three things in summary
- Software companies need agencies to capture and distill the culture. Because inside tech the world is your company. Agencies can do this and understand who you’re designing for.
- Importance of having untethered creatives around the place inside tech cos. The best agencies have random crazy people who think Tech has too many people who are samey.
- Agencies push tech companies in directions we could never have thought of. Brining the two worlds together is great. Tech can be used to create magic plus agency crazy thinking person.
Also covered by RachCreative
Related articles
- Do Agencies Need to Think Like Software Companies? (adgeek.us)
- SXSW Day One Delivers…Everything (adrants.com)
Imagine a world in which brands tell the truth, advertisers act like publishers and all communication is real-time. Is this world possible? #brandjo
- Kyle Monson – Editor JWT
- Brian Clark – President of GMD Studios
- Bob Garfield – Advertising Age
- David Eastman – CRO JWT North America
- Shiv Singh – Head of digital, Pepsico
Eastman: Everyone understand the brand bit – the journalism is an editorial approach to brand buildling – thinking engagement and transparency over messaging and control. It’s a non-fiction attempt at advertising which people would rather engage with. From an agency point of view it’s about thinking as publishers rather than marketers.
Clark: I think everyone would prefer advertising to be like content rather than the other way round.
Monson: Been a journalist for 6 years. We are making journalists more relevant rather than less because this skill of publishing is more relevant than ever.
Garfield – the marketing maven part of me says ‘interesting’ and the journalist in me makes me want to punch you in the face.
Singh – this is a clear imperative. Important. The definition is all about real time marketing – as life happens.
This is a JWT event…. demonstrate your bona fides.
Monson: Who’s doing good stuff? MacDonalds 5 years ago. Mormon.org is running – turning their brand over to church members to say why they are members of the Mormon church in video. They aren’t editing it at all just deciding whether to run or not run. Representing the brand to the world.
Clark: MacDonalds took a PR agency solution the Moms programme. They took 8 mothers to where they grow the potatoes all on video. ”the mom says they use real eggs?” This is custom publishing (a print industry) this has been around for years and has been created using the same process. [interesting....I disagree] The process how a brand and a content editor can work together is ‘muscle memory’ and can happen.
Singh: We compete with everything else for consumers’ attention we have to act and think the way someone who is writing a status update does. We can’t just launch something about co-creation – it has no resonance or meaning for consumers or us. If it’s not aligned with our values it has no meaning. It’s about the resonsnce between our brand essence and values and where they meet together.
Eastman: The bigger picture is everything is becoming digital and becoming media and when everything is media it’s becoming marketing. When everything is marketing how should brands and agencies behave with each other?
Garfield: Advertising goals are awareness and persuasion. In Social Media the goals are credibility and trust. How do you forge a relationship around sugar water?
Singh: None of us have a deep relationship with this building. Our relationship is with SXSW which is at the Austin Convention Centre. With Pepsi the relationship is with the brand, it’s often the moment and what the drink evokes. Goes beyond the product itself. The Pepsi Refresh Project – we gave away $20m to good causes. This wasn’t philanthropy budget but marketing.
We saw a lift in persuastion, brand health, brand equity. People who voted / participated formed a closer relationship. We are scaling it up for 2011 because it worked for us.
Clark: Ford Bold Moves was part-documentary enabling film crews to access new places like board meetings, plants being closed and part-journalism they agreed not to edit what the journalists wrote. Point, counter-point articles. Debate about what Ford should do to turn the corner. Because we let them say what they believed, they were willing to work with Ford. Ford uses a lot more real people, informal tone of voice, got away from “sheet metal porn” and into more real stuff. This can still be seen today.
Monson: Aggregation is hard – pulling in negative news stories is a hard nut to get clients to agree to. We’ve got Microsoft to hire freelance journalists and publish things that MS doesn’t agree with – they post a response post to these articles.
Clark: I disagree – third party content exists already – why are we still talking about bad things on the internet being an issue? It’s here. don’t be afraid of something that isn’t a glowing testimonial. A good review should be showcased. 80% might be as good as you’re going to get.
Singh: That misses the point. If I publish 25% of my content that’s bad about my brand just to show I’m transparent it is inward looking even if consumers think we ‘get it’. I think it’s about adding value to consumers’ lives – the 183,000 ideas submitted gives us insight into what matters to people in the country today. This is an example of doing something new but adds value.
Garfield: Chrysler “I find it’s ironic that Detroit is known as the #motorcity but nobody knows how to f** drive!” The employee got fired from the social media agency. This is a pretty good line about Detroit. Does highlight how vulnerable a brand can be – careless candour, morbid humour, maligned conduct. How to reconcile the control freakdom of brand management versus individuality of social media.
Singh: It was by the PR agency – they got fired as an agency by Chrysler. If we as brands want to take brand journalism seriously the jounalists need to be part of your organisation and they know brand values. Chrysler didn’t have an employee tweeting on their behalf – if he’d been an employee he might have said the same thing and he shouldn’t have been fired. They should have taken this opportunity to fix the driving issues in Detroit.
Eastmen: without the word f*** it is a perfectly acceptable sentiment. Doesn’t this say more about the reaction from Chrysler – they look slightly foolish for having over-reacted. Not particularly smart.
Monson: It’s a Public Relations thing – this is a tweet that the public actually related to and they fired the guy for it.
Singh: To think that in social media a brand can have a big fat anonymous voice [is wrong]. A tweet error mistake hapens. we know our executives also make errors. We’re all human.
Garfield: The guy should have gotten a raise. The tweet is about the community – it made a human connection. Are we engaging as people or as brand messangers?
Singh: if Chrysler had their other 300k employees tweeting about what they think about driving in Detroit that would have been authentic about the brand and the city.
Eastman: in 1990 Iraq invaded Saudi Arabia and they managed to keep it secret from the populace of Saudis – now the social media transparency makes that impossible.
Monson: employee social media policies. Write as if your boss isn’t reading over your shoulder. As consumers we are very good at avoiding advertising.
Eastman: Should a cereal have a twitter account?
Monson: but who are the 1100 followers? Are they relevant to the brand? [these guys never work in a niche].
Singh: I don’t think the number of followers are a measure of active engagement. I think we all need to ask Twitter and Facebook to move away from followers as the core metric. But daily engagement or active engagement gives much more value. Can they improve the public metrics?
Monson: is there a direct relation between attention and quality of writing. The Internet is tooled to respond to ‘awesome’ not to respond to quality and it could be terrible.
Eastman: there’s a backlash beginning with un-friending happening.
Q&A
Schwartzkopf new home page is all focused on content (Oscars hair styles) all produced by Conde Nast editors. After 4 weeks we have 10x more usage. Is it the wrong idea to employ journalists in agencies?
Clark: Use custom publishers, second bring someone in-house to cross fertilise to colleagues; or freelance writers. Brands can do the same thing.
TimeWarnerCable Blogger – what’s the best way to teach people storytelling skills that doesn’t just say ‘this sucks’?
Monson: Are you doing conversation monitoring? Pick up themes and how you turn those into contents that can draft off what your readers are talking about. You need a mix of proactive and reactive content. You guys have gotten involved with me when I was in despair from my twitter feed. You encourage me to complain by responding to me. Is this a good idea?
Singh: One role of customer journalist and social media can’t be merged. The training for customer journalist is not the same as customer support. Acknowledge the differences.
Garfield: I disagree the public sees one brand, Pepsi not separate job titles.
We’ve been takling about content creation not about journalism “non-fiction” content by brands.
Monson: I agree. What about non-fiction narrative as a definition of journalism.
Clark: if done right you are holding up a lens to show what’s happening in the world. Ad agencies put vaseline on the lens andgetting them to buy in is a key change.
Eastman: we are talking about agencies and brands doing things in a different way – agency hire different skills. Ultimately what you call it doesn’t’ matter. We know there’s an interest in doing this. Clients think they can do it themselves. When we talk about editorial calendars, real time responsiveness, the implications of legal then they realise they need an agency.
Related articles
- Chrysler dumps agency linked to F-Bomb tweet (windsorstar.com)
- Employee canned after sending out F-Bomb on Chrysler’s Twitter account
- Brand Journalism: “It’s a Trap!” (adgeek.us)
- SXSWi Video: JWT’s David Eastman (clickz.com)
- Chrysler red-faced and fuming after employee posts obscene tweet against Detroit drivers on company’s official Twitter feed (dailymail.co.uk)
Here at Creative Agency towers, we are usually coy about sharing information about our clients. But today one blogged a detailed update about the work we’re doing to help improve their website design, CRM and usability.
The client is Feedblitz.com – an RSS to email service provider. A very neat tool that enables marketing newsletters and blog RSS feeds to be merged into a single site service. The advanced functionality is very useful.
Take a read about what they wrote about the project.
Creative Agency Secrets has worked on
- User interface redesign
- New site features
- Logo redesign
- CRM customer analysis (value ranking and customer needs analysis)
- Marketing communications – to come later.
We congratulate Phil Hollows and the Feedblitz team on the work so far and look forward to an awesome relaunch… more anon.
Taking your website offline is rarely welcomed by the marcomms team. sometimes you have go do it.
Brand Glue did a great job of making a strong message come through their holding page.
In fact, since I took this screen shot, the timer doesn’t seem to have ‘counted down’ any more…. wonder if it’s really a permanent thing. Tho they have added an article below it about their newsfeed optimization service.
in any event, don’t allow a 404 redirect to show up if you can avoid it.
Plus, having a ‘timer’ on the page keeps the focus pressure on the team building the new website.
Which’ll probably be late.
That’s life.
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- Image via CrunchBase
Zemanta is a superb recommendation tool for blogs – we’ve bee using it here on Creative Agency Secrets for years after seeing it on David Cushman’s blog. Its easy to use, helps us create professional content in minutes and best of all enables our content to feed back to other blog sites.
What gave you the idea for Zemanta?
My co-founder and I were working on a project for national TV as journalists, we noticed that professional media journalists have a huge machinery of assistance and research, proofreaders and picture editors to ensure the article they write at the end is perfect.
An individual blogger has none of this. He is on his own.
At the time, blogging was becoming an important media channel online. By using smart technologies we could create a similar experience for a blogger as a professional jounalist.
We did a proof of concept and we raised angel funding. Version 1 got seed funding and launched.
From day one every blogger who tried it totally liked it. We got rave reviews calling Zemanta the “blogging god”.
In 3 years we have almost no complaints or people saying it is useless.
What does Zemanta do?
Zemanta is your friend that helps you tell a story on the internet in the most interesting way. By listening closely to your ideas you type in the blog post draft, Zemanta finds pictures and explanations to illustrate what you want to say. By looking at other ideas that are similar to yours Zemanta lets you know where they are and how they connect. You then click and drag them into the post draft as images, related content, links and so on.
What are the main features of Zemanta?
People are excited about how much time it saves and discovering content that they didn’t know about before. Every blogger who uses it has the right to share his blog content into our network to become recommended quotes for other bloggers creating cross-promotion that wasn’t possible before.
How many bloggers use Zemanta?
Tens of thousands.
How is it useful for business bloggers?
It is even more important that business blog posts look professional and are set out and featured as a professional article would be with references, illustrations and pictures. Creating a “rich” post is even more important.
At the same time business blogs have more interest in being promoted on other blogs as references and bringing in more traffic.
What is your business model to make money?
Two ways – we offer our core technology as an API,to clients like Flight Share and Lonely Planet, who want to categorise their content.
Promoted recommendations is the second method of monetization; some businesses who are not our users would still like to contribute content to us so we charge them based on the number of times we recommend their stuff.
Their stuff is of core value so it goes into the same recommendation engine but when it displays, the word ‘promoted’ is next to the link. Yahoo Finance is our largest client for this service.
Take the Zemanta demo yourself – post any text into the box and watch the images, tags and related content recommendations display for you. Suggestion – use one of your recent blog posts as the text!
