SEO 2.1: Speak clearly, rank higher on google’s SERPs

According to the Red herring blog, Google’s Marissa Mayer said at a silicon valley conference yesterday that the search giant is using google’s automated free 411 service - 1-800-GOOG-411 - to strengthen their software’s voice recognition capabilities and eventually use speech in videos to enhance video search results.

Eventually, google aims to further improve video search by adding visual search to the mix - in which google’s indexing software “searches through the images in the video for patterns, matching faces to another image, etc.”.

History repeating itself? Google was the first search engine to ignore author generated meta-tags in “Web 1.0″ pages and rely heavily on pagerank instead. In video, Google seems to not want to rely on user-generated tags to index video as soon as they have the capability for a more advanced method, which they are already developing.

More on the Red herring blog

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Nuvy.com: Social Shopping + Video Reviews + Affiliate Marketing:

There is a very interesting new social shopping / video reviews website that Jamie Birch just posted about on the revenews blog.

Nuvy - is a youtube clone plus a comparison shopping engine, that - pays - users to upload videos, that are product reviews.

The idea is this: Anyone, can review any product on video, and upload it on the website, the community votes on how good the video is, and based on that, the reviewer is paid a anything between $1-$10.

Video pages are very similar to youtube - but also a little more - there are three tabs below each video - “Product Description” , “Comments” and ” Where to buy” (so that covers the social part in a simple but elegant way)

There are two reasons why I like this:

First, Nuvy is making really fantastic use of the social media/web 2.0 as an affiliate marketing platform.

Secondly, they are actually paying “consumers who are also content creators” - you don’t see that a lot on web 2.0, but that’s what web 2.1 is for - if users create content that helps make a social media platform money, then the users should be treated partners in the business, the best way, IMO is to reward users according to their contribution - in cash.

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Update: I was reading costpernews a while ago, and read Sam’s 600th post there where he is upset at the pace at which affiliate marketers are adopting the new media. So … To cheer Sam up, who is a fellow believer in the salvation of Affiliate Marketing through Web 2.0, I send this Trackback.

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How about an Ebay/Yahoo merger?

Few weeks ago, there was a mega-rumor started by the NY post that Microsoft is all set to buy Yahoo (this was later rubbished by Yahoo and many publications as what it was, a rumor). Then, yesterday, Jerry Yang, yahoo’s founder took over as it’s CEO and although he denied any plans for the sale of the internet giant, this has once again sparked the debate of yahoo’s potential sale or merger and many are speculating this would happen sooner than later.

eBay, however is rarely talked about as a company that could potentially buy or merge with yahoo — The weblog ebay strategies has posted some interesting reasons on why an eBay/Yahoo merger would make a lot of sense.

This fits in so many ways it really is a perfect match. This gets eBay back into Asia with ecommerce, it gives eBay/Y!/PayPal a Google Checkout option. The Y! toolbar+skype are a great desktop combo. Skype and YIM go well together. Y!’s graphical ads would come onto eBay and eBay sellers could buy them. Y!’s graphic ads could monetize Skype. Yahoo Stores is a great fit for eBay.

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The Crazy, Messed Up World of eCommerce

Just got an email from Blogger and “Head Geek” of the Web 2.0 marketing company Capulet, Darren Barefoot about a video project he did with Elastic Path - which is a an e-commerce company that also hosts a fantastic blog about e-retail (that I am a long time subscriber of and have linked to often from here).

“The Crazy, Messed Up World of eCommerce” is a series of totally hilarious videos. “In a nutshell, the videos ask “what if real-world shopping was as cruel and difficult as buying online?” writes Darren in the email.

Here’s one of my favorite videos:

There are also three more equally funny episodes here and one new video is being posted each week. Enjoy!

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New social shopping network: ShoppingWords.com

On the 18th of June, which is today to most readers of this blog, a new social shopping network has been announced - Shoppingwords.com.

Don’t mind the overly dramatic introduction to this - the shopping network isn’t all that great. Just another social shopping network with a slightly unique approach to things in that unlike wists or thisnext, this isn’t quite a social bookmarking or comparison shopping service. it’s more like a 2.0 criaglist, a huge, free, discussion forum around ‘keywords’ related to shopping (the founders of this must be SEOs or something, hehe) that could be, by some miracles - that usually happen in social networks, turned into an actual marketplace.

For example, let’s check out the Thinkpad tablet page. 4 people with profiles want to buy it. one person already has bought the computer. and one person has changed her mind about the product. there are also two comments on the product page with people suggesting other, similar products. That means, for now atleast, this isn’t quite an online shopping aid, more of a shopping research platform that plans to use the wisdom of crowds in helping people make buying decisions.

IMO, the website could start using a better design and get rid of the google adsense clutter if they would like to be considered as a worthy application by shoppers worldwide.

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Customer Support 2.1 - ClixConnect.com

Mitch Cohen, entrepreneur and undergrad student at McGill University in Montreal, Canada sent me an email last week.

Mitch writes:

I’m a long-time reader and subscriber of Final Tag. I wanted to shoot an e-mail over to you to let you know what I’m up to - I thought you may be interested because I’ve leveraged many of the teachings from your blog in my new “Web 2.1″ endeavor

(LOL @ “teachings” hehe … I just talk here, never thought these posts would be perceived as teachings, hehe. But thanks for the ego-boost.) Cool! :D. It’s awesome to know ideas are being extracted out of the what is posted here!

That’s the first email of it’s kind I have seen in my mailbox since starting the blog a few months ago.

Anyway, Mitch and his friend - also an undergrad students at the McGill university have started a “customer support 2.1″ web company called ClixConnect.

Here’s why it’s cool:

The thing about online shopping is that there is no time constraint. Stores are open when you want to shop. The live chat feature that many sites offer is a great way to make online shoppers feel they are interacting with real people and persuades them to make their buying decisions quickly. In most cases, however, the live chat feature is only available when a store employee is online. If one wants to shop at say 2 AM in the morning, smaller shops will have no live chat, and probably, the sale will happen ultimately at a larger shop where instant customer support is available at that time.

Clicxconnect enables small to mid sized internet companies, specifically e-retailers, to offer 24/7/365 customer support on their websites. The idea behind how this is done is pretty simple and unique - You take care of the customer support while you are online. When you are offline, someone from the clixconnect call center will take over and offer customer support on your behalf. Pricing, apart from a monthly fee is based on the number of customer support minutes provided by the clixconnect call center. Plans (with a certain number of minutes included with each) start from $79/ month - which most smaller e-retailers can easily afford to spend in order to attract much better conversion ratios and very satisfied customers.

That was only customer support 2.0. Here’s the 2.1 part:

In Mitch’s own words:

hat’s half the innovation. The hugely innovative component of ClixConnect (and the part that for which we were truly inspired by your blog) is that we also have a new technology in our software which enables automated chat recommendations for customers, based upon the product they are viewing. So say someone is looking at a red t-shirt on a website, an automated chat window can appear recommending a blue pair of pants to them.

That’s the “if you like this, you may also like…” feature as seen on amazon.com, but done by a human - well, at least it will seem to the shopper that a human is making the product recommendations. if the customer replies back, a real human takes over over. Cool, eh? the only problem here may be a scenario where a shopper wants to quietly browse the store and “people” keep interrupting her by recommending stuff - because of which the shopper gets irritated and leaves the store. That’d be too much customer support and that’s equally bad as too little customer support.

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e-Retailers taking advantage of the Facebook API

Since Facebook announced it’s API and opened itself up as a web-platform a couple of weeks ago, many internet companies have taken advantage of the same to promote their businesses to users of the social networking phenomenon. Most of them, web 2.0 type businesses like twitter, ilike and last.fm

It is good to see though, that already, more traditional ‘web 1.0′ e-businesses have started to figure out how to use facebook to further their marketing objectives and expand their audience.

Blue Nile - one of the biggest jewelry and diamond retailers is one of the first in the e-retail world to do this by allowing shoppers to share their blue-nile wishlists on facebook.

Some may think that facebook, known as a social network of mainly college-students may not be the right market for blue-nile and similar e-businesses. That, however is not the case anymore. According to CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s F8 keynote presentation, the fastest growing Facebook demographic is 25 and older, and currently 60% of its users are outside of college.

[via Get Elastic]

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eBay to sell radio ad spots

Reuters reports that, in direct competition with Google’s Radio Ads offering, eBay will soon begin to auction radio ad spots on 2,300 participating U.S. radio stations.

The move, which puts eBay into competition with Web search leader Google Inc.’s recent expansion into radio advertising, involved eBay partnering with Bid4Spots to power what it calls the eBay Media Marketplace for Radio.

The new auction marketplace is set to go live on wednesday and include online as well as terrestrial radio stations.

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Selling ad spots on your website as hourly time slots

I was browsing techcrunch the other day, and noticed the ad of a sponsor there, Adicate - an online advertising network with a twist.

Adicate has taken the television advertising approach to the world of online advertising - they allow publishers to sell ad-spots on their websites - by the hour.

Adicate claims to already deliver as many as 35 million impressions each day using this model.

Their pitch is also pretty convincing. An email from them that I recieved upon requesting more information states:

One of the advantages with Adicate TimeAds is that advertisers can show their ads at their own prime time. This means that a medicine company can advertise for stimulants daytime, diet pills around dinnertime and sleeping aid at night time. This also gives the advertiser the unique opportunity to stand by waiting in the advertising period and interact with the customer immediately.

Now I don’t sell medicine, but this logic can potentially be applied to many other areas. For instance, advertising a job-site just before the end of the work day, etc.

I haven’t signed up with them as an advertiser (or publisher) yet, so it is still to be seen what kind of statistics and targeting they provide to advertisers - which can be a very crucial thing with such a system.

Nonetheless, looks like an interesting new concept and worth giving a try, although I am not too certain if adicate will be able to introduce and create the CPH (Cost Per Hour) advertising metric as a standard in online media.

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Widgets now live on shareasale

Brian littleton just twittered that shareasale’s much anticipated widget ad platform has just been activated.

Update: Announcement on shareasale’s blog.

As an affiliate, you can now preview and retrieve widget code for live use. Have fun!!!

Click the yellow link under the “Get Links” menu titled “Get Widgets”….

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P.S: this is my first blog post from a mobile phone ever!

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