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Marketing Like Bing: The Farmville Example
There are many ways to market your business through Facebook. Some are obvious, and others not so much. One thing you can pretty much count on is that there are incredible masses of people on the social network that you can potentially reach, and in ways that will allow them not only to engage with your brand in a comfortable setting, but with other Facebook ecosystems they are already engaging with.
A perfect example of this was recently demonstrated by Microsoft in one of the company's many marketing strategies for its "decision engine" Bing. I sat in on a Bing panel this week at SXSW, where some of Bing's marketers talked about a variety of ways they have used social media to gain users. One of these ways was through none other than Farmville (if you're a Facebook user, and don't live under a rock, you've at least heard of it).
More people use Farmville than Twitter, according to Bing, and People are sharing all kinds of activities within Farmville itself. That's why the company saw a great opportunity to experiment. What they did was offer a special offer inside of Farmville, that would give users free "farm cash" if they became a fan of Bing on Facebook, which would encourage continued user interaction with Bing. As a result:
- Over 72% of users who clicked on the engagement became fans
- 59,000 people published the story to their news feed
- Over 70,000 clicks were received on secondary feeds
- In 24hours, Bing had over 400,000 new fans to keep
Microsoft said its goals for engagement and social media efforts have been to:
- Add or create relevant value (stuff that's not even necessarily a Microsoft property)
- Add depth to Bing's personality
- Lead someone to a relevant engagement with Bing or each other.
- Yield passionate or emotional response from people
- Be intimate and/or scalable (can we be both)?
Bing's Farmville experiment achieved all of these. However, the point of this is not that you should go out and immediately start a campaign through Farmville (although maybe it's worth looking into if you think it's a fit). The point is that there are more ways to harness a massive social network user-base (Facebook recently surpassed Google as the most-visited site in the U.S. for the week), according to Experian Hitwise). That's a pretty impressive feat. Also consider that consumers favor brands who are on Facebook and Twitter, according to a recent study.
Really, it's not even about Facebook or Twitter. It's about getting out there wherever people are, and this is where they happen to be at the moment. That may change by this time next year, or the year after, but the principle will not. We're at a point in history where it's never been so easy for consumers and brands to engage with one another. Perhaps even better for brands, is that it has never been easier to reach customers in places they choose to entertain themselves, and I don't mean just get in their faces, but actually reach them and get that engagement from them.  Report: Google-Backed Cable Almost Complete
An undersea cable that Google helped finance is almost finished, according to a new report. Indeed, the completion of the Unity fiber optic cable, which will connect the U.S. to Japan, is supposed to be announced next week, and then Google and the company's Asia-based users should start seeing the benefits soon after.
 Tom Krazit wrote this afternoon, "[T]he Pacific undertaking will allow the company to link its data centers in the U.S. and Japan with one of the fastest pipes on the planet, ensuring that Google services will be delivered quickly and cheaply to Asia."
And more specifically, Krazit also stated, "In return for its investment--the amount of which was not disclosed--Google is entitled to 20 percent of the overall capacity for its needs, according to partners involved with the project."
This should help keep Google competitive in most of Asia for quite a while. All the more so if it pulls out of China, too, since servicing that large market could otherwise claim a lot of resources.
One last important note: the other partners in the Unity Consortium are Bharti Airtel, Global Transit, KDDI, Pacnet, and SingTel, meaning Google has made friends with some very important international corporations.  Is the Content Farm Strategy Just Misunderstood?
Demand Media CEO Richard Rosenblatt doesn't understand much of the criticism geared toward his company, which Time Magazine columnist Dan Fletcher refers to as "the Web's least understood and most vilified juggernaut." I attended a panel at SXSW this week in which Fletcher and Rosenblatt discussed Demand's content strategy that has become the basis of so much controversy (Read here for more background).
Rosenblatt thinks it's just a case of a new business model getting picked on because it's not understood yet. He compared it to the early days of other successful companies like Amazon and Netflix.
Is Demand Media's strategy just misunderstood? Share your thoughts.
 Demand Media evidently gets more traffic than the digital properties of ESPN, Time, or Disney. They claim to have more videos on YouTube than anybody. This isn't spammy content though. It's content created based on what people are looking for, or what a combination of Demand's algorithms and staff determine people are looking for based on extensive data analysis.
An audience member referred to a video she came across that was simply not the type of quality Demand Media wants its content to be known for. Rosenblatt acknowledges that there may be some of this out there, simply because the company began with a different model, but they are working to eliminate this, and only implement content that has gone through the company's exhaustive editorial process.
One huge misconception that Rosenblatt went out of his way to clear up is that of Demand Media's content being taken as news. He doesn't see what Demand Media is doing as journalism. Journalism is news, and this isn't news, he says. It's stuff that makes you laugh, solves your problems, etc. "Only the journalists call us journalists."
A great deal of the criticism that has been aimed at Demand Media is based around the notion that the company is somehow taking advantage of Google's algorithms, to get its content placed higher than other sources (isn't this what SEO/SEM is all about anyway?). Rosenblatt basically made the point that if Google doesn't think it's good enough content to be there, than it won't be there. To change an algorithm to not give an answer just doesn't make sense, he says.
"If people aren't looking for it on search, we're not there," he added. Demand properties like eHow often appear in search results for queries about how to do things. Well, that's exactly the kind of content that appears on eHow, and the mantra of the industry has always been "content is king" right? Demand simply wants to wear that crown, and make money doing it.
"We are driven by an economic model," Rosenblatt said. The company is focused on "evergreen, longtail, commercial content." They're focused on stuff they will make money from.
Rosenblatt says a lot of people think their content is auto-generated. "That's just wrong," he says. One criticism that Rosenblatt does think is fair, is that some of the company's content "could feel mechanical." In other words, some may lack creativity. "We need to learn, and we're trying to," he says. A lack of creativity does not necessarily mean a lack of accuracy, though, and through Demand's editorial process, there is a lot of fact checking going on. At least that is the impression Rosenblatt gave.
He says they have different models for different categories. With something especially important to the world, like health, he says they make sure professionals are writing the articles. With health, fact checking would also go to doctors.
If you are searching for information on Google about effects of chemotherapy, and you are met with an article written by an expert on the subject, with facts checked by doctors, is there really anything wrong with that? Would you rather get a Wikipedia entry? Remember, we're not talking "news" here. We're talking information, and in other cases entertainment.
Demand media does use some Google ads, as iEntry CEO and WebProNews publisher Rich Ord pointed out in an article a while back. He wrote:
The problem as I see it is that while Google is highly ranking the content of these mass production publishers it also has a financial incentive to do so. Almost all content farms use Google Adwords for their revenue. So while Google on the one hand encourages publishers to make content for their readers and not just for search ranking, it is in partnership with sites that do just that.
This should make publishers wonder about their business models. Should they spend thousands paying reporters and editors to create quality content for their users or should they simply create a content farm that pays little for bulk quantities of articles and videos but gets lots of Google love?
I guess if you can make content for the purpose of ranking in searches ... but make it targeted, unique and not horrible, then you might find that Google well reward you quite well.
The issue of Google's own practices with regards to this are really a separate issue from Demand Media's practices. As far as Rosenblatt is concerned, they're just producing the content that people want, and will find that through either search or discovery. And they're making a killing doing it.
Tell us what you think about it.
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