Make Money Online

While there’s a ton of hype about micropayments and their role in virtual goods, many economic trends don’t really sink in until there’s a high-profile success story that people can dream about. It doesn’t matter that less than 10% make any serious money, since it’s easier to buy the dream of riches than to face the reality of the statistics.

The real money in virtual goods isn’t found in the iPhone App Store, it’s in social network games and virtual worlds. While I’ve personally seen 20,000 limited edition items sell out on Mafia Wars in one day, that’s just a tiny spec in the new digital economy of digital goods.

Want an idea of what that tiny spec was worth?  The math goes like this: 20,000 items at 42 points/credits each. 42 rewards points costs $10 (source in game marketplace), so 20,000 x 10 = $200,000 retail value in one day. While that item may have been special and not everyone pays cash or PayPal directly for the points; it’s a very suggestive revenue statement – virtual goods are serious business.

But before the bandwagon starts cheering that virtual goods gold rush, I respectfully submit that this is the same trend expanding from virtual worlds to games and has been building momentum for a decade.

Let’s consider some virtual goods economies where there are indeed several high profile success stories to dream about. Forbes discusses the topic, but I’ll point out some highlights with my thoughts. The first goes back to 2004 and is all about an ROI of nearly 400% and a cash outlay of $26,500, but keep dreaming as there huge sums of money to be made in virtual goods:

• Do you seek rare virtual animals or cater to those who do? Then Amethera Treasure Island should peak your interest. This business in virtual world Entropia costs $26,500, but returns ~$100,000 per year.
• Do you want the own the latest hotspot asteroid? Then Club Neverdie in Entropia is your type of business. Purchased for $100,000 in real money in 2005, the nightclub, shopping mall, and sport stadium based on an asteroid is estimated to be worth $1 million.
• If asteroids are too low class for you and you’d rather cater to the luxury minded types? Keep your eye on Crystal Palace Space Station in Entropia which Forbes reports was sold for $330,000 in hopes of charging the wealthy crowd fees to visit and experience the latest in space station luxury.

While the previous examples showcase the money made in virtual real estate and experiences, others are putting the sweat and blood into other ways to earn money:

• Skilled artist or just a collector? Consider dropping north of $11,000 on an Anatomically Correct Virtual Skeleton available only in virtual world Second Life. I’ve met virtual clothing designers who reported that they earned smaller, but respectable monthly incomes selling clothes in Second Life as well.
• White collar criminal or just a hacker? A hacker in Second Life stole the real equivalent of $10,000 when he hacked into Second Life’s stock exchange.

Back in 1999 I remember users of The Palace creating and selling props on eBay. These props could be used by in-world avatars to dress up and show your personal style. Many people made and exchanged virtual goods for free, but even then, people bought, sold, and even stole the virtual good props.

Virtual goods not only are hot, they’ve been hot since 1999, been breaking bank accounts since 2004, and are now becoming a significant factor in reshaping the way we think about making money online. More is happening in this space, so stay tuned.

More here:

These days, any discussion of social media usually refers to the “big three” – Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. MySpace, the social network that started it all, is conspicuously absent from the list.

The decline of MySpace resembles the first-to-market stumbles of such giants as AOL and Yahoo! Just being first isn’t good enough when technology advances at rates beyond the speed of light.

But apparently, MySpace isn’t ready to throw in the towel. In what is being widely regarded as a re-launch, MySpace announced this week that a new version of the site is in the works and will be implemented in stages over the next several months.

The direction MySpace is taking seems a little like back to the future: the network will re-trench and focus on its core strength of entertainment – music, videos, and celebrities. As MySpace co-president Jason Hirschhorn said, “It goes back to discovery and self-expression. That’s where we came from and where MySpace really made its mark…”

A work in progress, MySpace has already dumped such random things as classifieds, horoscopes, job boards, and weather. Instead, the network will employ information from its users to “recommend movie trailers, recently released songs and video games.”

Ironically, MySpace does lead in at least one area: the company recently announced that MySpace Mobile is the most popular social application for the Android smartphone. MySpace was also the first social network to be included in Microsoft’s new Outlook Social Connector, which adds social networking to the Outlook email application.

These victories notwithstanding, the larger question looms: Can MySpace regain any sort of leadership position in the social media world? Right now, all the statistics say no. MySpace claims to have over 100 million users worldwide, but Facebook has over 400 million active users. In February, about 111 million people in the U.S. visited Facebook, a 95 percent increase from a year ago, while MySpace had about 67 million visitors, a 5 percent decrease, according to ComScore. eMarketer projects over $450 million of ad spending with Facebook this year – a 26 percent increase – while MySpace will likely drop 23 percent to about $360 million. Even worse, the ad deal MySpace has with Google is scheduled to expire in August 2010.

If MySpace is to survive, the more likely scenario is that it becomes a niche player in the entertainment world rather than a major social networking site. But that online market is also crowded. Maybe this re-orientation would make it of interest to online marketers involved in the music and movie business, but still, MySpace risks becoming just another entertainment site.

Jon Miller, Chief Digital Officer for News Corp., the owner of MySpace, tells the Los Angeles Times, “We need to be a platform for self-expression that is clearly differentiated from the competition.” But you have to wonder – given the success of Facebook, the growth of Twitter, and the video creativity demonstrated on YouTube – is it even possible for MySpace to get noticed?

Excerpted from:
Last Gasp for MySpace?

Among the so-called Amazon Taxes Colorado HB 1193 is unique. Signed into law by Governor Bill Ritter on February 25th the legislation went into effect on March 1st and is heralded as a landmark bill, the first of its kind to put teeth behinds its attempt to collect sales tax. It requires all online retailers who do not collect sales tax to put a notice in the Colorado customer’s invoice notifying them they are by law obligated to pay sales tax in the state for their purchase. Beyond that it further requires retailers to submit a yearly list of customers and purchasing data to support Colorado’s enforcement ability.

The law also differs from its Amazon Tax brethren in that it purposefully, and with the support of large affiliates like ShopAtHome, attempted to spare Colorado affiliates from the fate they suffered in other states where similar laws have passed. For the Performance Marketing Association the removal of affiliate focused language was seen as a victory.

Unfortunately the attempt protect affiliates failed.

Amazon, who provided lobbyists during the fight against HB 1193, served termination notices over the weekend to thousands of Colorado affiliates saying:

We and many others strongly opposed this legislation, known as HB 10-1193, but it was enacted anyway. Regrettably, as a result of the new law, we have decided to stop advertising through Associates based in Colorado. We plan to continue to sell to Colorado residents, however, and will advertise through other channels, including through Associates based in other states.

Amazon is not alone in this stance. A handful of other companies including Oriental Trading Company, Hammacher Schlemmer, Terry’s Village and GiftBaskets.com have terminated affiliate relationships in the state. With Amazon’s announcement over the weekend many other are expected to follow suit including Overstock.

Many members of the PMA feel that such actions are due to advertisers who have not taken the time to familiarize themselves with the law’s new language. In Amazon’s case, Amazon does say it will continue to sell to Colorado residents, whether they will comply with providing lists of its customers who are Colorado residents to help with enforcement has yet to be seen. Knowing Amazon’s past behavior it is doubtful and a legal challenge against this legislation won’t be surprising.

Read the original here:
Amazon Terminates Colorado Affiliates, Joins Growing List of Advertisers

Reports are flying around cyberspace that Twitter will soon be introducing ads. Just recently, Twitter’s head of monetization, Anamitra Banerji, said the company would launch at least a beta test of ads, possibly within a month.

The word on the street is that Twitter’s ads will maintain the 140 characters-or-less mandate, and that the ads will be tied to Twitter searches, not unlike Google’s original ads. If this is true, then Twitter users will potentially only see ads if they are searching for something.

Ads on Twitter should be of interest to online marketers. Whether you personally use Twitter or not, you can’t ignore the 27 million users who tweet. And it isn’t just consumers – somewhere around half of the world’s largest companies are officially on Twitter.

That user base may be a far cry from the 400 million active users of Facebook, which also offers ads, but it is still an impressive number. Because of the nature of Twitter, its users are largely a mobile bunch. That means a Twitter advertiser could very effectively target an audience that is likely to be receptive to mobile marketing campaigns.

Apparently, some potential advertisers are already turning up their noses at the idea.

“Advertising on Twitter will feel like your social media strategy has failed,” says Paul Troy, global head of advertising and content for Britain’s Barclaycard.

“It doesn’t feel like something leading brands will do.” Cheryl Calverley, a senior global manager for Unilever’s Axe Skin, questions the value of Twitter ads because, she says, Twitter “doesn’t have the reach of broadcast media.”

Those comments not withstanding, if Twitter does indeed launch its own ads, there will undoubtedly be advertisers who will try them. The larger issue, however, involves the inevitable commercialization of every medium. At one time, there was an admittedly naïve belief that social media platforms such as Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter should remain ad-free. Let’s be real, though: they have to make money. As soon as a medium gains critical mass, its owners have to be thinking about ways to become profitable. Search and social media sites offer free access, so there aren’t many options for revenue generation other than advertising.

Still, some ads on social media platforms may stretch the limits, leading marketers to question whether such advertising is too intrusive. An article in The New York Times points to the “self-service” ads on Facebook as an example: “Many advertisers who use the self-service system are tempted to go as far as possible in making ads that attract attention and appear relevant, aided by the information that people give to Facebook.”

While very targeted ads may seem like a good idea, they can also turn off some consumers, says The Times:

“From the perspective of many users, the tailored ads can often seem, at best, presumptuous. Women who change their status to “engaged” on Facebook to share the news with their friends, for example, report seeing a flood of advertisements for services and products like wedding photographers, skin treatments and weight-loss regimens.”

If and when Twitter launches its advertising program, it may very well fall prey to advertising that is not always tasteful. But that is unlikely to stop Twitter from moving forward. Like other social media, Twitter must deal with economic reality.

Go here to read the rest:
Twitter Goes Commercial

It would be a major coup in basketball for the New York Knicks to land the caliber of talent the likes of LeBron James or Dwyane Wade; however unlikely this may be. Similarly, Catalina Marketing has scored such a coup in the advertising industry, announcing they have landed Chris Henger as part of their team.

Formerly the VP of Marketing & Product Development at Performics, Chris Henger was instrumental in guiding Performics’s transition into the Google Affiliate Network as part of Google’s purchase of DoubleClick in 2007. While at GAN Chris served as the Group Project Manager until early this year.

Catalina Marketing is a behavioral marketing focused company representing clients like Weight Watchers. Chris will manage the company’s in-store network, said to be comprised of 90 million households and 300 million weekly shopper transactions.

We wish Chris Henger the best of luck in his move. His leadership will be missed in the affiliate industry.

View original here:
Chris Henger Goes from Google to Catalina

The ReveNews team is happy to announce the release of the ReveNews iPhone application. Thanks to long time member of the ReveNews community Brad Waller and his excellent app development team at EPage.com. The app is designed to help you keep up with ReveNews content easily with feature sets for topic categories. The application is available now on the iTunes store to download for free here.

Below is a screenshot of the App in the iTunes store:

See more here:
Announcing the New ReveNews iPhone Application!

The beginning of a new year always signals an opportunity to create new growth and positive change. In preparation I sat down with Affiliate Summit, Commission Junction, LinkShare, Google Affiliate Network, and ShareASale to provide you with their insights to what’s ahead for the industry in 2010. The interviews focus on:

• impact of the recession on the affiliate industry
• impact of the anti-affiliate taxes (aka Amazon tax) in 2009
• how the battle against anti-affiliate tax legislation is shaping up in 2010
• lessons the affiliate industry has learned as it has evolved
• what technology will be at the forefront in 2010
• what their plans and goals where for current year

Don’t expect blood in the water. There won’t be any mudslinging. There will however, at the end of the series, be a “mystery” interview with a company that is about to launch a public beta this week with a very interesting new model.

The goal of these interviews will be to provide an insight into what each industry leader feels is important to the industry’s continued success and a preview of what they are focusing on in 2010.

Stay tuned.

Editor’s Note: We did attempt to include Buy.at in the series but were informed that their PR team was not interested in providing access. Charlie Calabrese runs a great team that has always been generous, giving, and approachable. It is too bad that internal restraints have prohibited them from taking part.

Excerpt from:
Announcing the 2010 Affiliate Industry Preview Series

When the Federal Trade Commission’s new blogger disclosure rules went into effect on Dec. 1, bloggers were not just faced with ethical exposure, they were also faced with a Web design dilemma.

With the FTC wanting to know the relationships between the writers and the products they write about, the question becomes how and where bloggers should display the information on their sites.

Because of the archival nature of the Web, every post about any product is just a Google search away, so it’s unrealistic for the FTC to expect bloggers to go back and retroactively disclose relationships on past posts. Instead, most bloggers have decided on a separate page with a list of their relationships with businesses.

Chris Brogan, the well-known blogger and social media consultant, has done just that with brief mentions of his disclosures on his site’s About page. Read it here.

Included on that list are Brogan’s affiliate relationships as well as products he has received for review.

In contrast, author Tim Ferriss is much briefer on his disclosure page, linking out to a bio of his investments. Read it here.

After Dec. 1, other bloggers decided to weave their disclosures into individual blog entries and leave it at that. Implementation of the disclosures has been inconsistent and will be even more so as social media endorsements start to gain more and more focus. How do you disclose a positive Tweet in 140 characters or less?

Bloggers need to consider what works for them best. Having these disclosures on a FAQ page seems convenient but could also become out-of-sight, out-of-mind.  For the sticklers at the FTC, top-of-mind is what’s going to quickly become the name of the game.

The rest is here:
FTC Makes Bloggers Ponder How to Disclose

Social media, by its very nature, is fluid. Constant changes in industry tactics and developments in technology happen at such a lightning pace that it’s hard to predict what will happen next week let alone what will happen in the next 12 months. But there are some trends that look to be cresting in 2010.

• The two key words for 2010 will be mobile and integration. With Google releasing the Nexus One and the iPhone continuing to become more and more mainstream, smartphones are going to become the rule rather than the exception in 2010 and while you are using your smart phones you are going to want to easily access all of your social media networks. That’s where the integration comes in. Applications that help you manage your Facebook or Twitter accounts are going to have to allow you to manage your complete online presence (plus LinkedIn, YouTube and whatever the next thing to come along is).

Sites like Ping.fm are already moving forward with a one-stop access point for social media and others, like Tweetdeck and Hootsuite, are following suit. Someone is going to become the clear leader, with the easiest interface,  in this space. Winner of that prize will be a household word by year’s end. But it may be a site we already know about (Facebook, anyone?) that decides to flex its muscles and become the headquarters for everyone’s social media.

• Businesses will ratchet up their use of iPhone apps and location-based information. I’ve written before about the growth of Gowalla and GPS-based services online, which allow users to check in from locations around the city. I think businesses will get wise about these type of services and offer premiums, either in partnership with Gowalla or independently, that reward patrons who use these services and promote, through influential word-of-mouth, their businesses. Discounts, virtual goodies or VIP access could be the reward waiting for savvy mobile users.

Gowalla’s emphasis in virtual tokens for every check-in has given it an edge on Foursquare, especially in the markets that Foursquare is just getting established in. But it also has some currency to leverage with the businesses, which want to see some ROI in using this tech to relate with customers.

• The use of social media during sports,  and any other shared experiences,  will increase in 2010. Look for more and more teams to develop not only their own mobile applications, but also allow fans to interact with each other and some members of the organization during the games themselves. Live Twitter feeds on some part of the scoreboard, live chats with the announcers during the events and the ability to get audio and video anywhere.

Teams outside the U.S. – like members of Britain’s Premier soccer league – are doing all they can to squeeze mobile money out of its die-hard fans. College teams have the highest ceiling in this area in the U.S., so look for more specialized info from them (for a price).

• Baby Boomer domination on Facebook. What once started out as a college site will totally turn itself over to the Baby Boomer generation in 2010, since they will now have access, motivation and the spending power to supercharge Facebook’s bottom line. The shift in demographics may mean younger users search out the next big thing, since they won’t want to be excessive sharing (or answering questions) with mom and dad. That could shake up the landscape or revive a brand that’s sitting dormant.

That’s a broad look at what could happen in 2010, beyond the continued mainstream adoption of sites like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. Of course, there may be a site that springs up out of nowhere and into the forefront of the space. That’s the fluid nature of the Web and what makes it so exciting to be a part of.

See more here:
Key Trends in Social Media for 2010

In recent weeks there’s been talk on the blogsphere, especially from a recent ReadWriteWeb post, about the imminent closure of the popular MyBlogLog blogging widget/social network. With the charge being led by bloggers irate that their beloved blog widget might be soon a footnote in Wikipedia’s logs, are they missing the bigger picture?

Looking at Yahoo’s (NasdaqGS:YHOO) financial report for the three months ending 30 September, it’s clear that the troubled search engine is starting to see a ray of light at the end of the tunnel, reporting net income of $186 million on revenue of $1.575 billion, a sharp contrast from last December’s quarterly loss of $303 million.

It would appear that this past July’s tie-up with Microsoft is starting to bear fruit. With Microsoft focused on the technology elements of algorithmic and paid search services,  Yahoo is free to focus on its role as exclusive worldwide sales force for both companies’ premium search advertisers (i.e.: adCenter and Yahoo Search Marketing). This is going to consume much of Yahoo’s “system resources” if it’s going to work out.

With a long way to go to catch up to Google’s coattails, especially with its dominant position in both organic and paid search, the top guns at Yahoo appear to be making a smart move  to focus on search engine and its associated pay-per-click income stream. This also means that “side projects” like Yahoo’s integrated communications portal 360 and social network Mash have been canned before they made it out the Beta stage gates. Next on the cards, possibly MyBlogLog.

Having bought the then-startup for a steal at $10 million, it would be  a waste to close it down now, as it had done earlier  with its “Auctions” portal site.

If there’s any doubt where Yahoo’s priorities lie, I’ve known several experienced Yahoo managers internally transferred from their social media positions to the search engine’s core operations or its developer network over the last two years. The resulting voids in the social media business units have been filled by second stringers or new hires. The consequence? The rollout of new features has slowed significantly, or chugged along with decrepit (by internet standards) features. This has ironically resulted in the archetypal “poor user experience” so despised by the search engines themselves. Every iTom, iDick and iHarry has fired up their blogspot or wordpress blogs to post a rant or two, or three.

But if it’s a matter of the internet’s third largest website survive the current state of economic uncertainty, what’s losing a couple of popular websites among friends? If Yahoo management decides to focus on the company’s core business of providing search engine results and bringing in cash flow to keep the business going, what’s a few rants on a couple of popular blogs, right?

Still, it is a pity to see some key features, like MyBlogLog’s Pro Stats, which provided idiot-proof analytics for bloggers with a simple yet detailed framework, listing referring urls, on-site urls and, outgoing urls that the most technophobic and neophyte blogger could comprehend.

Maybe the MyBlogLog development team could have incorporated Yahoo Search Marketing text or image results within its community site or even within the widget itself. But it appears the MBL might’ve been a branding play, hampered by the lack of a viable business model and difficulty with integration into Yahoo’s core search model. As time will shortly tell, MBL might have overstayed its welcome.

A decade from now, historians will gaze back and determine if it was prescience or foolishness for Yahoo to have dropped the MBL ball, even while Google started incorporating real-time social network updates into its search results. I might even look back at my blog logs to see if they are right.

Disclosure Note: Andrew Wee is a member of MyBlogLog’s advisory board

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If you’re wondering where social media is leading online marketers in 2010, a just-released report provides some insight.

eMarketer cites data from the “2010 Social Media Marketing Benchmark Report” published on December 11 by MarketingSherpa, a research organization, that indicates online marketers go through three phases in using and evaluating social media – trial, transition, and strategic. According to the report, only about 25 percent of marketers have reached the strategic phase.

In each phase, social media marketers are setting objectives that are targeted and measured. Not surprisingly, the leading measurable objective, regardless of phase, is increasing traffic to a website. However, things get a little more interesting after that.

For online marketers in the trial phase of using social media, the second most popular objective is to improve search engine rankings. Those marketers in the transition phase said improving search engine rankings and increasing sales revenue are of equal importance.

Marketers in the strategic phase, however, see increasing lead generation as the second most important objective, followed by increasing sales revenue. Improving search engine rankings is fourth.

The differences offer a clue as to the evolution of social media. As marketers move from one phase to the next, they become more accustomed to what social media can really accomplish. Moving from the trial to transition phase, the change is subtle, but there seems to be a significant shift in perspective when going from transition to the strategic phase.

Apparently, social media marketers who have entered the strategic phase have matured enough in their thinking to recognize the importance of lead generation. Why does this matter? It makes a statement about social media’s potential business impact for those marketers who have progressed beyond trial usage.

What it says to me is that marketers who have used social media for a while have gone beyond believing social media is a quick fix. If they view generating leads as a key objective, these marketers know the responsibility falls on them, not on social media, to convert those leads into sales. This is a pragmatic view of the business value of social media rather than one based on hyperbole and conjecture.

In an era where impatience is a virtue, and when the prevailing perception is that social media is the new road to marketing success, it’s not a bad idea to stop for a minute, think about it, and get grounded in reality. Social media certainly holds much promise for online marketers. But jumping into it with unrealistic expectations or flawed objectives just sets you up for failure.

Here is the original post:
Smart Thinking About Social Media

Back in October of 2008, We Watch Your Website’s security blog reported that malicious hackers were actually using successful SEO campaigns to spread a huge money making bit of malware to unsuspecting victims. The attack was maniacally brilliant. By finding vulnerable sites in the SERPs for the term “Halloween costume”, they infect the legitimate site with malicious code that will silently redirect (redirecting to a different page without changing the Url) a visitor to a site that claims that their computer is infected with a virus that can be quickly and easily removed by purchasing their advertised anti-virus solution. Don’t think this will work? Evidence from Panda Labs shows that the attacks were earning malicious hackers roughly $14 million a month.

SEO Strategies
The foundation of the attack lies in a company’s hard work to earn a decent enough ranking on the SERP for a targeted term. But abusing SEO doesn’t end there. Once the site has been identified and exploited, the attacker actually use keywords that have been optimized for higher search engine rankings in the redirect to help push their infected sites up in the rankings. So by increasing the rankings of their target websites, the attackers are able to create a greater need among their potential customers.
Holiday time attacks
According to Panda Labs, there is also a fluctuation in these types of attacks as the economy makes headlines. With an estimated $168 million a year to be made of this scam, you can bet that there is nothing to suggest this attack to slow down anytime soon. Being the holiday season, attacks are expected to increase as Christmas time is one of the busiest times of the year for malicious hackers. With IT staff taking time to be with family and shoppers more likely to let down their guard as they look for online deals, the holidays are ripe for attacks.

Prevention
As a user, the best way to protect yourself from this type of attack is to ignore warnings that don’t come from your installed security software. If your anti-malware solution isn’t warning you of infection, odds are a website or a pop-up that you have never seen before is there to help you out – no questions asked.
Owners of websites can do their part to protect their customers, and their SEO ranking. A few simple ways to tell if your site has been exploited with this attack are:

• Visitors complain about getting viruses from your site.
• Visitors complain about being redirected from your site.
• Google or Yahoo! have listed your site as a possible harmful site.
• Your traffic dramatically increases or decreases.
• Check the last login logs on your website’s server. If the IP address is unfamiliar, your site may have been exploited.

Of course, visit your site on a regular basis. If you notice a warning about a possible infection when you are viewing your site, you may be the victim of an attack.

Excerpted from:
Website Exploit + SEO = Payday

Twitter, long the poster child for hype-heavy, profit-low Web 2.0 sites, may finally be seeing where the money is.

This week, Twitter started to roll out a business-friendly feature which may portend a direction of more corporate focused applications. With its new “contributors” feature, businesses are going to enable designated Twitter users to tweet on their behalf. Those updates would be labeled as being by a specific author.

The nitty-gritty behind what Twitter is doing is not the new feature, which is fairly benign, but what looks like to be the site’s first steps into a much more sophisticated system for business.

In screenshots of the new feature, Twitter offers a glimpse at its advanced settings, which allow businesses to offer enhanced levels of access for users.

But the settings also hint at a Twitter dashboard, which will ‘soon’ be available to users. This is where Twitter will find a selling point. If your business is able to access important analytics of the way other users interact with your tweets, you will be able to tap into quite a lot of valuable information.

Dial back to what Twitter has done up to this point, including enabling geolocation of Tweets and the list feature, and then you see how it adds up to the creation of a great storehouse of info for businesses. With these analytics, coupled with geo-tagged Twitter users, business will be able to see where clusters of followers or Retweets come, as well as where they are getting no traction. They may also be able to get very granular detail about followers, follower’s followers and so on.

This may be where Twitter comes in and tells businesses they can have this all for the low, low price for $X a month. Suddenly, for the geniuses behind Twitter, a business model.

And who knows where Twitter can go from here, once they show businesses that there is real data to be dug out of the 140-character service? Red tweets for Coca-Cola and blue tweets for Pepsi? There is much to be done with those few little words and Twitter is the only one to peek behind the curtain so far.

View post:
Twitter for Business Services

One thing you can depend on: Innovation in the online world will continue in 2010. Granted, a lot of that may come from such well-known powerhouses as Amazon and Google. But you can also be certain that innovation will spring from lesser known names.

It’s a good idea for online marketers to keep an eye on innovators, because they often represent emerging trends that could become new ways of doing business. Two companies worth watching as we move into next year are Next Jump and Square.

Powered by Next Jump

Next Jump “may well be the most intriguing Internet business that you’ve never heard of,” writes Steve Lohr in The New York Times.  Interestingly, Next Jump is not a new company, it’s just relatively invisible. For years, employee discount programs and frequent buyer rewards programs have used Next Jump’s technology platform. Over half of Fortune 500 companies use it for employee discount programs. But Next Jump just held a coming out party of sorts to announce that it is no longer just a back-end system. In fact, the company recently launched Corporate Perks,  a website that for the first time allows small businesses and consumers to access its marketplace.

What’s so special about Next Jump? Founder Charlie Kim says it’s Next Jump’s “true microtargeting” capabilities. Next Jump gathers a lot of data from companies, customers, and credit card transactions and analyzes the data. Then the company carefully tailors offers to a tiny number of people, sometimes even individuals, sending email alerts or serving up appropriate Web ads. As a result, people see only offers that are most likely to interest them. Apparently, the system works: Next Jump claims for every eleven individuals who see an ad, they generate one sale. This is an unheard of ratio in e-commerce – it’s typically more like 1,000 to 1, not 11 to 1.

Chances are you will start seeing “Powered by Next Jump” on an increasing number of offer-driven sites. Yahoo Deals already displays this on its Personal Offers site. Next Jump just introduced applications for the iPhone, Droid, and BlackBerry phones that point consumers to one of its sites offering deep discounts on merchandise.

Square Transactions

Square is the new venture launched two weeks ago by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey. The “square” itself is a little plastic device that plugs into the headphone jack of an iPhone. What it does is pretty intriguing: Square makes it possible for anyone to swipe a credit card and make a payment via a back-end system created by Dorsey and his colleagues. Like PayPal, Square avoids the need for the user to be an authorized merchant, so the system opens up mobile payments to small businesses and consumers alike.

The Square application for the iPhone will soon be duplicated for the Droid and eventually for Blackberry. The implications are enormous – virtually any business can instantly become a merchant and accept payments. It could even facilitate simple consumer-to-consumer transactions, such as someone buying an item from a seller via a Craigslist ad. Square is creating a lot of buzz right now, and investors are reportedly lining up to fund the start-up.

Competitors are taking Square seriously. VeriFone, the leader in credit card payments, only days ago rushed out its “PAYware Mobile” application for the iPhone that includes a PAYware Mobile reader. Jack Dorsey was asked by blogger Michael Arrington of TechCrunch about the VeriFone application, and this is what he had to say:

Jack Dorsey on VeriFone

Keep a close eye on Next Jump and Square in 2010. These are the kinds of innovative companies that will help drive online marketing to new heights.

More:
Two Companies to Watch in 2010

With the launch of extensions for Google’s Chrome browser one of the most interesting and potentially troubling pieces of the Web has popped back into the picture: Google’s Sidewiki.

What is Sidewiki? It’s a creation by Google that allows comments by anyone on any Web site. Sounds innocuous enough, but in the hands of any lurker on the Web with a vendetta against a company or a competitor, it may send Web messaging into a tailspin.

Picture this: Someone running Sidewiki goes to your site looking to buy your product and on your homepage, in the Sidewiki window, is a comment by a rival on your high prices – with a link to their site. If you are a more controversial company or blogger, a systematic campaign could be build against you of Sidewiki commenters.

“Just like Google bombing, in an attempt to influence the top Google result for a specific search term, I suspect people will quickly master the art of Sidewiki bombing as they attempt to get their comment at the top of the Sidewiki comments on key pages,” wrote Adam Turner of ITWire.com.

When it was first launched earlier this year, Sidewiki caused a scare and a bit of unease, but failed to have gain much traction. The addition of it to the extensions of Google Chrome, which make for a one-click addition to your browser rather than the clunkier add-on to the Google Toolbar that it was, could see it grow in popularity.

Furthermore, Google has some rules built in to make sure that people play fair – in theory. According to its’ terms of service:

If you believe that someone is violating these policies, use the “Report Abuse” button within Sidewiki. We’ll review your report and take action if appropriate. Just because you disagree with certain material or find it to be inappropriate doesn’t mean we’ll remove it. We understand that our users have many different points of view, and we take this into consideration when reviewing reports of abuse. Although not all reports will result in removal, we do rely on our users to tell us about materials that may be violating our policies.

That’s tricky language to navigate: “We understand that our users have many different points of view, and we take this into consideration…”

Initial impact I think will be limited because, while Google dominates the world of search, its footprint with both Chrome and its apps are small, though influential. It would take a significant shift in user habits for Sidewiki to hit the mainstream. In essence it comes with the baggage that savvy Web users are going to be both aware of it and able to manipulate it. Ultimately Google might find limiting the manipulation of such an app in the wild, more trouble than it’s worth.

If you are a site owner, you need to be prepared for the baggage Google Sidewiki will bring and be prepared to spend additional time monitoring your brand on the web. Policing Sidewiki could become a daily routine for those who are sensitive about their brand’s image. The bottom line is that Google, not you, has ultimate control over what appears there and it, not you, will determine which comments to boot.

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