Between Stations » user generated content

Web 2.0 Idea That Screams ‘Uh-Oh’

Julie — Wed, 29 Aug 2007 20:51:23 +0000

The Romney campaign is doing an advertising mash-up contest in partnership with some online software people and Yahoo.

The chirpy press release assumes that this will be done by supporters. I can’t quite tell if there’s going to be full editorial review of submissions before they post to the site. If not, this just screams ‘bad idea.’ It screams it as loudly and screechily as an auditorium full of tween girls watching the dreamy boy band of the month. Given the high negative ratings, uh, enjoyed, by Romney in polls, this has the potential to be either a big ouch or a big editorial time suck for some poor intern.

Hazards of Web 2.0

Julie — Mon, 27 Aug 2007 03:04:02 +0000

The greatest hazard of Web 2.0 is a failure to be genuine.

Today’s failure to be surprised moment is that WalMart’s back-to-school foray onto Facebook didn’t ’start a conversation’ on dorm decor. It got them slammed for labor practices. Mind you, they’re claiming future roomies are using the site to coordinate, but it just doesn’t look that way on the surface.

WalMart’s past ’social’ experiments have been a bit lackluster in actual result.

The real takeaways on this are first, it’s risky to be Web 2.0 when you have a lot of bad PR to start with. Second, you can’t change the conversation just by trying to participate. Web 2.0 actions need to be compatible with who you are, and recognize who others think you are. Sure, you can use Web 2.0 to ‘move’ who you are to who you want to be, but depending on where you start… it will take a while.

Social Media is Getting Out of Hand

Julie — Wed, 01 Aug 2007 21:58:37 +0000

Sure, we all know Digg. Search marketers have Sphinn to play with.

But every niche is getting their own social media site. A cyclist? Become one of the three people apparently using cyclecluster.com! I’m sure there’s something for every niche either in progress, or coming.

How long can search engines pretend this stuff is relevant? It’s a lot like the proliferation of ‘SEO Friendly Directories!’ in my mind.

I know that Squidoo finally got a bit of a spam-slap. I sort of hope to see the same with a lot of social media. I’m having bad flashbacks to UseNet back when AOL opened up access to the real Internet, and not just their locked-up version of things, when something that didn’t suck rapidly began to suck.

Political Search

Julie — Tue, 03 Jul 2007 19:40:26 +0000

Rolling into the three-decade long primary race, we have studies evaluating the search effectiveness of various US presidential candidates already.

One limiter of the study is that it seems to focus purely on PPC spend. I find some of what various candidates are doing from an organic perspective to be far more interesting. They’re all on all the social networks, YouTube, and Flickr, for instance, and then each candidate seems to have their own spins:

Mitt Romney has a blog, ostensibly by his brothers, on a subdomain. He’s also been using his domain since 2002, and hasn’t done anything limiting like add office or year to the domain — smart.
John Edwards has a freaking SPLASH PAGE. Ugh! But he uses wacky code to avoid having it indexed. Again, he’s using his ‘name’ domain, no wacky offices or years. Again, a blog. And nice rollover menu code.
Barack Obama is more of the same, only he’s added a UGC section over at my.barackobama.com. Nice.
Hillary Clinton, like John Edwards, has a dumb splash page with wacky code. Once in, it looks like she has a UGC section… but wait! DEAD LINK!!!! I’m also underwhelmed by her meta-description on a SERP.
Meanwhile, Rudy Giuliani is on a dumb domain (JoinRudy2008.com, registered 2006, and not reusable if he doesn’t get it this round, or if he DOES and needs to be re-elected later). He’s got some nice ‘add these widgets to your blog!’ for quick link-building.
Sam Brownback officially makes me ask: WHAT IS WITH SPLASH PAGES THIS SEASON. Especially for a guy without a metric ton of name recognition. Interestingly, once you make it in, he’s got one of the cleaner designs and a text-driven home page — which most of the others just don’t.

Looking at bad political sites makes my head ache. I may go research nice places to go during the Republican Convention in 2008, happening right here in my home town of Minneapolis-St. Paul. I am SO going to be out of town, after having lived through the 1996 Democratic Convention in Chicago. I’ve had a full lifetime worth of Secret Service Agents preventing me from getting a coffee, thankyouverymuch.