Just like Burger Kind had it’s subservient chicken, Tipp-Ex has developed an interactive YouTube video allowing the user to select the bears fate. This video asks you if you want to shoot to bear or not, and then using the Tipp-EX, erases the video headline allowing you to input your own text of what should happen. Go through and have some fun. See what the hunter will do for you!
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The Next Viral Video?
I thoroughly enjoyed reading Maranda’s Affiliate Summit Aftermath and though we were booth buddies my experience was slightly different. New York for me is well known for its food and wide variety choices but when it comes to conferences I do tend to forget to eat and eat properly. I was lucky enough to sample the fine food street cart experience within a two block radius of the conference. I had several New York styled hot dogs along with chicken and rice with spicy sauce (I did regret the spicy sauce choice on both the hot dogs and chciken). With my New york dinning experience covered it gave me enough time to check out the show floor and the sessions.
I managed to go to a few sessions at the Affiliate Summit and thoroughly enjoyed the session for using social media for SEO. The tips which I found useful for this session were:
I am not sure if this session is online but if happen to get a hold of it please check it out as my summary does not do it justice 
Back to my booth buddy (Maranda was impressed with constant chatter!) and me we did meet a number of great people at the booth and we thank all those people that stopped by and chatted with us. We are in process of contacting you 
Look forward to seeing you all shortly, oh yeah how could I forget to mention walking 20 blocks with Melissa and being hugged by the Joker with Melissa saying “Do you know him” – Classic moment.
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Members of the AdSense team from all over the world say hello from Mountain View, CA!
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A Global Greeting
JavaScript was 10 times slower, HTML5 support wasn’t yet an essential feature in modern browsers, and the idea of a sandboxed, multi-process browser was only a research project. All browsers have come a long way in the last two years and the web has become much more fun and useful.
Omnibox, and adjusted the color scheme of the browser to be easier on the eyes.
Sliding back into Doc Brown’s DeLorean and setting the dial ahead by a few months, we have more in store for Chrome. As always, we’re hard at work on making Chrome even faster, and working on ways to improve graphics performance in the browser through hardware acceleration. With the Chrome Web Store, we hope to make it much easier to find and use great applications on the web. We also ratcheted up the pace of our releases so that we can get new features and improvements to everyone more quickly.
If you haven’t tried Chrome recently, we invite you to download our new stable version today at google.com/chrome. For those of you who have been using Chrome, thanks for a great second year! We hope that Chrome has made your life on the web even better, and look forward to the next year.
Excerpt from:
Back to the future: two years of Google Chrome
If you haven’t already updated to the new asynchronous tracking code, here’s how:
Excerpted from:
Update Your Google Analytics Code and Enjoy Some Added Benefits
As a new player at Ten Golden Rules, part of my role will be to help our clients develop sound interactive marketing plans that will have a positive impact on their bottom line sales goals. This philosophy is ingrained into the very fiber of the Ten Golden Rules team. We strategize, test, execute and measure our programs every single day. But how does this methodology apply to our B2B clientele? Traditionally, you might think that B2B marketing innovation has always lagged behind its B2C counterparts. Not so anymore.
Beyond the catchy music and clever design, what I love about this video are the statistics.
81% of B2B companies maintain a company account or profile on social media vs. 67% of B2C companies
75% of B2B companies micro-blog vs. 49% of B2C companies
As the video suggests, no longer are the B2B marketers lagging behind their B2C cohorts. In some cases, they’re even leading the charge. We’ve seen the onset of the new digital C-Suite who not only enjoy using technology, they embrace it. And with 93% of B2B buyers starting the purchase cycle via search, doesn’t it make sense for your company to be searchable no matter what your business?
Read more:
Who Leads Marketing Innovation?
Look at the latest moves by Amazon, Apple, and USA TODAY, all reported in the past week. They have a commonality that suggests traditional communications are being swept away by a digital tsunami of historic proportions.
Amazon is readying a web-based subscription service that will deliver content via a web browser or through new televisions with Internet connections, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal. It will rival Netflix, the movie rental company that is increasingly moving its DVD mail order business to digital delivery.
Amazon would like to have the new service available by the holiday season, but it will depend on whether companies such as NBC Universal, News Corp., Time Warner, and Viacom agree to provide content. Amazon already sells individual television episodes, and it sells and rents digital movie downloads, but the subscription service would be a first for the leading online retailer.
Amazon has also been an early innovator in the e-book market with its Kindle e-book reader, which is now available in WiFi and 3G models. By the end of this year, according to Forrester Research, over 10 million people in the U.S. will own e-book readers and buy about 100 million e-books. Last year, under 4 million e-book readers and about 30 million e-books were sold.
Amazon has managed to transition its online business from once being a seller of traditional books to, today, being an all-purpose online superstore. With its digital initiatives, it looks like Amazon will again reinvent itself.
At the same time as the Amazon subscription service report surfaced, Apple unveiled an upgrade to its “Apple TV” device. The smaller $99 set-top device offers a lot more content – “the largest online selection of HDTV show episodes to rent from ABC, ABC Family, Fox, Disney Channel and BBC America for just 99 cents,” according to Apple. The device also streams content from Apple’s MobileMe service, Flickr, Netflix and YouTube. Not unlike Amazon, Apple sees the burgeoning opportunity in digital content delivery.
And now Apple is entering the social networking space with Ping, an iTunes add-on. The new service allows users to follow friends and see the music they have purchased, as well as music they’ve reviewed or concerts they attended.
Sound familiar? It should – think of MySpace, which has gravitated towards music in recent years, or Pandora and Zune Social. Apple is now squarely in the music-related social media game, and it could be meaningful. According to the New York Times:
“While other social networks have struggled in the shadow of Facebook, some analysts said that Apple had a chance to turn Ping into a success. The service will be instantly available to 160 million iTunes users, as long as they download the latest version of the software…”
Meanwhile, USA TODAY recently announced a major restructuring that basically acknowledges what we’ve discussed for some time on ReveNews that, in order to survive, newspapers must reinvent themselves into digital publications. The newspaper will reorganize its operations around “content rings,” consolidate and lay off staff, look into new licensing and business opportunities, and most importantly, focus the majority of its attention on providing web-based and mobile content.
The decision by USA TODAY is not particularly surprising, given the fact that print newspapers have been desperately seeking ways to maintain their circulation and protect profits, in light of being undercut by the wealth of free news and information available on the Internet. Some newspapers have gone out of business, while others, like Seattle’s Post-Intelligencer,
The USA TODAY announcement signals that Gannett, which owns 82 daily newspapers and 850 non-daily publications in addition to USA TODAY, is on the verge of throwing in the towel on print publications. (Gannett also owns 130 websites, 23 television stations, and Captivate, a service that delivers news, information, and ads to nearly 7,000 elevator screens).
Digital delivery of every kind of content has now reached mainstream importance. Taken together, these developments are strong evidence that we’ve been engulfed by a digital tsunami.
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The Digital Tsunami
This week I thought it would be helpful to go back to the basics of Twitter ReTweeting. Want to get your tweets retweeted more often? Below are ten tips for just that:
1. Interesting/Entertaining. Tweets with a bit of humor or color to them always have a higher probability of being retweeted. No one wants to spread boring tweets to their followers.
2. Educational. Provide timely and valuable content.
3. Engaging. Be authentic with your community and connect with them. Be social and show that you aren’t just a program with scheduled tweets.
4. Ask for the RT. Sometimes simply asking for the retweet, “Pls RT”, does the trick.
5. Short Tweets. Leave around 25 characters of space in your tweets. Tweets are more likely to be retweeted when it takes less editing to do so.
6. Thank you. Ensure you thank those who do RT your tweets. That sincere thank you might gain those additional retweets. However a note of caution, do not thank others for RTs just for the possibility of a future retweet, be genuine.
7. Useful. Provide information to others that is helpful such as “how tos”, “tips” and “lists”.
8. URL Shorteners. Using services such as bit.ly provides additional tweet real estate as opposed to including full URLs.
9. Social Plugins. Make it easy for others to retweet your content by conveniently placing “retweet” calls to action on your posts.
10. When you tweet. Social Media Scientist, Dan Zarrella, has conducted studies showing the days of the week/times with a higher probability of RT worthiness. Zarrella concluded Fridays yield the highest number of retweets between 3:00pm to midnight.
The above list is not advocating all tweets be designed for retweeting. But for the tweets that you do want to have a viral component to them, designing for the possibility of retweeting is important.
Do you have your own retweet tips to add to the list?
Image credit: Josef Dunne
Read the rest here:
Ten Tips to Be ReTweeted
It’s been 10 years since the first version of Google SketchUp was released, and there are more people modeling in SketchUp now that we ever could have imagined—over a million of you a week, in fact. That’s a pretty humbling number of 3D model makers.
People around the world are modeling everything—from a new design for their kitchen to entire cities in Google Earth. For our small part in this global phenomenon, I’m proud to announce that SketchUp 8, the next major version of our 3D modeling tool, is available for download today. We’ve added significant new geo-modeling capabilities that leverage Google’s vast collection of geo-spatial data to make it quicker, easier and more fun than ever to build models of the world around us.
Head on over to our website for the whole story, or just grab yourself a new build and get back to modeling.
You may have read on Revenews that Overstock was considering terminating its California affiliates and that it likely wouldn’t unless AB1625 passed (that is the bill that changes the definition of nexus, or presence in the State, to include any out-of-state store with online affiliates who are based in California).
Last year, Overstock terminated its relationship with all of us after the Governor vetoed the legislation. The Governor’s office called Overstock’s CEO and issued a statement that he would not let this bill pass. He is still governor. [Note that I think that the bill will become law if Jerry Brown wins the gubernatorial election in November but not if Meg Whitman wins.]
It happened. We just received an e-mail from Commission Junction, Overstock’s affiliate network, informing us that we have been terminated from its affiliate program (see below). Note that CJ’s policies require a one-week notice so I assume that Overstock is sending a message to state legislators that this is what will happen should they enact AB1625 into law. [Note: I cannot find any information that would show that AB1625 was passed by either house of the California Legislature.]
Dear Cashbaq,
We regret to inform you that the Commission Junction advertiser BizFilings has chosen to expire its affiliation with you effective 7-Sep-2010.
If you would like to locate another advertiser in the network to partner with, login to your Account Manager (http://www.cj.com/login.jsp) and visit the Get Links tab.
Best Regards,
Client Services
Commission Junction
It looks like Overstock is playing chicken with the California Senate:
If you are an affiliate manager, please wait until after the bill passes, the Governor vetoes it and the Legislature doesn’t have the votes to override the bill to terminate us. We’d really appreciate it.
Read more:
New Flash: Overstock Terminates Its California Affiliates
This is the latest post in our series on the future of display advertising. Today, director of product management Jonathan Bellack looks at our efforts to help online publishers generate more advertising revenue – Ed.
For millions of online publishers—from the smallest blogger to the largest entertainment, news, e-commerce and information sites—online advertising revenue is vital. When publishers can maximize their returns, everyone benefits from more vibrant online content and websites. But the pace of change in the industry can be intimidating—how can a publisher keep up with what’s new, let alone grow their business?
We believe that the new technology we’re developing to make display advertising work better will help to grow the display advertising pie for all publishers, by orders of magnitude. We shouldn’t be asking how publishers can eke another 5 or 10 percent out of display advertising in the next few years. We should be looking at how the industry can double or triple in size.
We’ve previously described our three core display ad products for publishers:
I wanted to highlight the key principles guiding our future product innovations in this area, as we work to help all publishers maximize their online ad revenues.
1. Making life more efficient
For most large publishers, directly sold ads (ads sold by their own sales force) comprise the vast majority of their ad revenues. But today, selling and managing these ads is frustrating, expensive and often involves tedious manual processes.
Imagine a TV network that receives TV commercials in 100 different formats, languages, lengths and video dimensions, and then has to manually convert, translate and edit them all, then manually count the number of TV sets on which the ad appeared before sending a bill. Sounds crazy, right? Well, that scenario is far less challenging than what most large online publishers face today with display advertising. Today, across the industry, for every dollar spent on display advertising, 28 cents is eaten up in administrative costs. If we can reduce that proportion, it would mean a lot more money going to publishers.
Things like new standards for video ad serving and systems that connect buyers and sellers are helping publishers support the most engaging and creative ads across their sites. But there are quantum leaps to come in this area, for small and large publishers. Think of a political candidate who is seeking donations on his or her website—the candidate can receive money in seconds. Imagine if publishers—even the smallest website—had tools that enabled advertisers to click a button on their site to upload an ad, let them pay for it with a credit card, and then deliver this ad—through the publisher’s ad server—within minutes. This sort of “immediate ad” will become possible as ad serving technology continues to simplify the process of buying and selling ad space.
2. Total revenue management
AdSense selects the most valuable ad for publishers from a large number of ad networks, to maximize ad revenues every time a page loads.
New ad serving and “dynamic allocation” technology, like the DoubleClick Ad Exchange, is emerging that enables ad revenues to be maximized across both directly and indirectly sold ad space, ad impression by ad impression, using real-time prices. Second by second, across millions of ad impressions, this can meaningfully boost major publishers’ revenues. Using this technology, the average price that a publisher receives for ad space sold through the Ad Exchange is more than 130 percent higher than the average price of ad space sold directly to ad networks. In fact, without this type of dynamic allocation across sales channels, a publisher’s revenues can never truly be maximized.
In years to come, this true revenue maximization can get even smarter. There’s no question that delivering the right ad to the right user at the right time delivers better results. We have years of experience in doing this with search and text ads; we’re now bringing that experience to the world of display. This means investing in a smarter ad server that can automatically learn where and when a given ad will get the best response, as well as manage delivery to deliver those improved results for publishers. This new ad server can even anticipate a publisher’s future events and adjust delivery accordingly—for example, if traffic drops off every weekend, the ad server can automatically speed up during the week to keep everything moving smoothly.
3. More insight and control
Our vision is to provide all publishers the smartest possible advertising system that can give them knowledge and control of everything going on with their ad business. The vision is already becoming a reality: the upgraded DoubleClick for Publishers platform offers publishers 4,000 times more data than its predecessor. And in recent years, we’ve been constantly adding new reporting options for our AdSense partners.
By putting publishers in firm control and empowering them with more data, reports and controls (for example, over what advertisers and ad networks they allow), they’ll be able to make fully informed decisions about ad space forecasting, segmentation, targeting, allocation and pricing. This helps them to extract the maximum value from their sites and uncover new advertising opportunities—the gold that’s buried under their own sites.
4. Betting on openness
An open ecosystem drives meaningful results for publishers. When a wide range of buyers can bid for a publisher’s ad space, through an advertising exchange or network, this creates more competition for that ad space, while giving publishers choice over whose ads they want to appear. On the DoubleClick Ad Exchange, an enormous number of advertisers, belonging to over 50 ad networks, compete for publishers’ ad space. Of course, at the same time, we’re also providing publishers robust technologies and controls that can block any unwanted ads or networks.
Similarly, we believe that one of the best ways to encourage innovation is to open code to the web developer community. Look at the incredible mashups that have been created through the Google Maps API, or the range of mobile devices that have been created from our open source Android code.
This same approach can generate significant advantages for publishers. When we rolled out the upgraded DoubleClick for Publishers, we launched a new public API. This gives publishers and developers the tools to drive innovation and deliver value-adding “advertising apps” for publishers—like inventory analysis, sales workflow tools and more—without having to build an ad server from scratch. This will help drive the next generation of better, more valuable ad innovations.
5. Everything is going to be “display”
Display advertising is about much more than ads in web browsers. People are watching video, reading newspapers, magazines, books and listening to digital music at an ever-increasing rate. They’re turning to a plethora of new devices—smartphones, tablets, e-readers and even video game consoles. We’ve designed our platform, and are continuing to invest in it, to give publishers a single base that can deliver ads into this expanding world—including streaming video, mobile ad delivery and more.
Looking forward, what we call “display” today will just be “advertising”—a single platform that can coordinate an advertiser’s campaign across streaming audio ads in car stereos, interactive mobile experiences on smartphones, and HD video ads on set-top boxes. Imagine if that single platform could optimize the campaign, automatically delivering the best-performing ads, best returns and best mix, across all those platforms. That’s the future we envisage.
An exciting time ahead
We’re unapologetically optimistic about the future of display advertising for online publishers. There’s great innovation taking place in this area that will make the current landscape look primitive within a few years. We’ll keep working hard to help all publishers take advantage of these opportunities.
Originally posted here:
Online publishers: growing the display advertising pie
Yesterday Overstock announced its intention to terminate California affiliates should AB 1625 pass. In a letter to all of its affiliates, Overstock urge opposition to AB 1625 stating that:
There is a measure under consideration in California, likely to be voted on tomorrow, which, if it passes, will likely result in the termination of our business connection.
The letter goes on to urge California affiliates to oppose the passage of the legislation and specifically calls out Section 1 as being the point of contention.
In reading AB 1625 (PDF) the measure is essentially a motion by the Budget Committee to allow changes to the Budget Act of 2010. The section Overstock identifies as being problematic, Section 1, reads:
SECTION 1. It is the intent of the Legislature to enact statutory changes relating to the Budget Act of 2010.
In the bill itself there are no definitive statements as to the Legislature’s intentions. The only clues to what changes might be enacted are based on the political climate within California. AB 178 was only stopped by a veto from Governor Schwarzenegger. Odds are that proponents of that bill will use AB 1625 to enact measures supported in AB 178 including California’s version of the so-called Amazon Tax.
We queried Overstock as to its specific concerns over AB 1625 and received the following response from their PR department:
It is the end of the California legislative session and the budget isn’t done. We continue to learn that those who seek to impose this tax measure have some new strategy. Yesterday, we learned more new information (in regards to AB 1625) on which we acted. We don’t want to be forced to terminate our affiliates, and we are glad those most affected are responding and their voices are being heard by senators who need to understand the strong counterpoint to this unwise tax legislation.
So it would appear that Overstock is leveraging their affiliates to act as a counterpoint to a bill they see as threatening, even if the actual purpose of the bill is nebulous. Rebecca Madigan, Executive Director of the Performance Marketing Association, posted an excellent synopsis of the politics of the situation.
Although we don’t necessarily agree with Overstock’s tactics we do feel that any enactment by California of an Affiliate Nexus Tax is a terrible decision. There is still time for California affiliates to contact their representatives. The PMA has a great resource that provides a painless guide on how to find your representative including suggested email templates for you to use.
View original here:
News Brief: Statement from Overstock Regarding California Bill AB 1625
Priority Inbox splits your inbox into three sections: “Important and unread,” “Starred” and “Everything else”:
As messages come in, Gmail automatically flags some of them as important. Gmail uses a variety of signals to predict which messages are important, including the people you email most (if you email Bob a lot, a message from Bob is probably important) and which messages you open and reply to (these are likely more important than the ones you skip over). And as you use Gmail, it will get better at categorizing messages for you. You can help it get better by clicking the 
or 
buttons at the top of the inbox to correctly mark a conversation as important or not important. (You can even set up filters to always mark certain things important or unimportant, or rearrange and customize the three inbox sections.)
After lots of internal testing here at Google, as well as with Gmail and Google Apps users at home and at work, we’re ready for more people to try it out. Priority Inbox will be rolling out to all Gmail users, including those of you who use Google Apps, over the next week or so. Once you see the “New! Priority Inbox” link in the top right corner of your Gmail account (or the new Priority Inbox tab in Gmail Settings), take a look.
Read more from the original source:
Email overload? Try Priority Inbox
Ever wonder what’s the one common factor among entrepreneurs who create and grow successful online businesses today? Join Jim Kukral in, “Attention! This Book Will Make You Money,” as he answers this question and explains:
• How to create a Compelling Hook
• Best Practices for maintaining a healthy brand name online
• Going from Idea to Success in eight hours
• Making money from Online Videos and Social Media
• …and much more!
Jim Kukral is an accomplished business web coach and web marketer, speaker, customer evangelist, writer, long-time award-winning blogger, online monetization expert, and well, a bunch of other things. That’s why Jim Kukral has become one of the Industry’s most sought after consultants and public speakers.
This free webinar will take place Wednesday, September 1, 2010 12:30pmEST – 1:30pmEST. To register and for more information please visit: Attention! This Book Will Make You Money
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InternetMarketingClub.org Presents Attention! This Book Will Make You Money
Now that I have your attention, Overstock may terminate its California affiliates tomorrow. The State Legislature is once again considering a bill that would make the Affiliate Nexus Tax law in California. If you are not familiar with this legislation, it defines affiliates as salespeople in order to establish nexus (the legal word for presence in the state) to out of state retailers (namely Amazon and Overstock).
We’ve been through this before. It started out as AB178 a couple of years ago. Kerri Pollard and I went to Sacramento to testify before the Budget and Finance sub-committee. As my cab pulled up at the State Capitol, I received an e-mail that the bill was pulled by its sponsor. It turns out that there weren’t enough votes to get it out of even the sub-committee.
Now its here… again. Last year it was passed under the cover of darkness and the Governor vetoed it. Overstock terminated us last year as part of the process. Only after the Governor vetoed the bill and issued a statement that he would not allow the Affiliate Nexus Tax to become law did Overstock reinstate all of us. Fortunately, CJ’s policies give us all a week before the termination takes effect so we would have time for the Governor to use his veto stamp (can’t you just picture it in slow motion… the stamp dropping onto parchment on the Governator’s desk…. cigar in his mouth (yes, it would be in the tent outside the Capitol)).
If you are a California publisher in the Overstock program, contact your state senator… NOW. Forward Overstock’s letter and explain how AB1625 (the current form of the Affiliate Nexus Tax) will hurt small businesses in your senator’s district. If you need more information or drafts of similar letters, take a look at the Performance Marketing Association’s website.
Also, there was a good op-ed piece by Loren Bendele in today’s LA Business Journal.
If you didn’t get Overstock’s letter, here it is. Remember not to beat up Overstock for this. This is a bad law that will hurt California’s small businesses and will not generate any revenue.
OVERSTOCK.COM, INC.
6350 SOUTH 3000 EAST
SALT LAKE CITY, UT 84121
PHONE: (801) 947-3100
FACSIMILE: (801) 947-3144August 30, 2010
Dear Cashbaq:
Overstock.com values your advertising efforts, and hopes to be in a position to continue our business connection for years to come. However, as we notified you in February, there is a measure under consideration in California, likely to be voted on tomorrow, which, if it passes, will likely result in the termination of our business connection. We are urging you to contact your Senator in the California Legislature immediately to oppose the affiliate nexus tax.
By tomorrow the California Senate will have to consider the new tax, which appeared in the Assembly’s final budget proposal as AB 1625 (Section 1), or it will die for this year. In order to pass, AB 1625 needs a 2/3 majority vote. Its chances of passage are unclear; consequently, your efforts in opposition will be highly effective.
Last year the Governor vetoed a similar measure, and we are told that the Governor has not altered his position on this new tax; however, despite this, we are concerned about last minute political compromises.
You will find information on how to contact your State Senator at this location on the Performance Marketing Association’s website.
Please waste no time in contacting your Senator today to oppose the affiliate nexus tax.
Respectfully,
Jonathan E. Johnson III
President Overstock.com, Inc.
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Overstock to Terminate California Affiliates Again Tomorrow
