Wix has developed a WebTop publishing platform; allowing users to create any kind of web content (web sites, widgets, blogs, myspace layouts) and publish that content anywhere they want. Wix is the only publishing offering that… Learn More Sprout is an online WYSIWYG editor for Flash that as of March 2008 has been released in a public beta. Designers can use Sprout to create, publish and track Flash widgets, websites and… Learn More Weebly is an AJAX website creator that allows you to create pages with template skins and content widgets. Users can easily drag-and-drop content widgets like pictures, text, video and Google Maps in WYSIWYG-fashion. They also have a new blogging… Learn More
Website:
wix.com
Location:
Ny, New York, United States
Founded:
September, 2006
Funding:
$8.5M
Website:
sproutbuilder.com
Location:
Honolulu, Hawaii, United States
Founded:
August 19, 2005
Funding:
$8.3M
Website:
weebly.com
Location:
San Francisco, California, United States
Funding:
$650k
October 12, 2008
Web Flash Publishing – WIX, Sprout, Weebly
October 10, 2008
Pasta Hut vs. Pizza Hut
Ed: Advertising impact without social media leverage. Imagine the results with planned social leverage.
Pasta Hut vs. Pizza Hut
Pizza Hut made the headlines earlier in the week after rebranding itself as Pasta Hut in the UK. If the move really is just a clever bit of PR, as some people suspect, then it seems to have worked. In addition to significant media coverage, the company has also benefitted online: as the chart below illustrates, yesterday the Pasta Hut website received twice as many UK Internet visits as the Pizza Hut UK homepage. In fact, yesterday was a record day for the restaurant chain online.
Of the people who did visit the Pizza Hut site yesterday, 37.4% went to Pasta Hut afterwards. Overall 6.7% of Pasta Hut’s traffic came from the Pizza Hut homepage. The site’s clickstream also reveals a surprise: as the table below illustrates, 43.9% of traffic to pastahut.co.uk came fromMSN UK, more than 3 times the amount that it received from Google UK. Presumably the company either ran advertising or a paid search campaign on the Microsoft portal / search engine.
Web Gets Obama (Chump) Change
Ed: Global advertising is $1.5 trillion. Google’s share is $20 billion. Not surprising that Obama’s online share is so small.
Web Gets Obama (Chump) Change
Barack Obama’s campaign spent over $3 million on TV ads in one state on Monday.
He’s spent about double that on the Websince January.Yep, according to my calculations based on FEC reports, his campaign spent around $5.45 million on paid online media on the Web, into August.
How’s that for sharp contrast?
As I wrote in my recent Reuters commentary piece on Obama’s online ads:
The fact is political advertisers typically don’t use Internet ads to sway voters the way they do television ads. When it comes to the Web, they rely on things like video on YouTube and their official sites to have persuasive impact.
Not only is advertising on television a tough-to-break habit for political campaigns, they have yet to see online ads affect an election in an undeniable way.
Until there’s proof that an online ad moved people to vote for or against a candidate, the first full-fledged Internet election may be far off.
October 8, 2008
Honda Taps Sony to Ramp Up Its Ad Strategy
Ed: To fight advertising clutter, Honda spends $500,000 with Sony’s Media Network.
Honda Taps Sony to Ramp Up Its Ad Strategy
By EMILY STEEL
In an unprecedented move for Web advertising, Honda is buying all the online and mobile advertising space sold by Sony Pictures Television for a week starting Wednesday to promote the launch of its Honda Fit.Honda
The Honda deal promotes Fit across all Sony’s mobile and online entertainment and third-party sites in the U.S.
While it’s not uncommon for advertisers to buy all the available ad space tied to a particular TV show or single Web site to drown out the competition, Honda’s half-million dollar deal with Sony takes that strategy a step further by extending across all Sony’s mobile and online entertainment and third-party sites in the U.S.
Marketers have long been concerned about breaking through the crush of advertising on television. Now, with marketers following consumers online in droves, advertising clutter is becoming a major issue on the Web as well. The average Web surfer is exposed to thousands of online ads a month — and remembers very few of them.
“The fact is, that like any part of the media landscape, it is harder and harder to break through,” says Edmund Purcell, vice president and interactive management supervisor at RPA, American Honda’s advertising agency. “We are not just throwing up a banner that could be passed over.”
The Honda Fit campaign, aimed at metropolitan people who like small, fuel-efficient cars, includes ads on Sony Pictures’ site Crackle, where viewers can share user-generated video. Ads will also appear on sites and music videos linked to Sony’s music label Sony BMG, and on mobile networks Sony partners with, including wireless carriers Sprint and AT&T.
Ads will be tied to Sony-created digital programming across third-party sites as well, including social networking sites MySpace and Facebook; video sites YouTube and Hulu; and the virtual world Gaia Online.
Sony’s digital programming includes minisodes, which are TV shows cut down to five-minute episodes for the Web and mobile; CSpots, which are original short-form videos that appear online and mobile; and Sony Pix, which are full-length films from the studio’s library available via online and mobile.
Consumers often have a hard time remembering standard digital display ads, but a marketer can make more of an impact if they sponsor all the advertising space on a particular site, says Alan Gould, co-CEO at IAG Research, a Nielsen firm that tracks the performance of advertising. With online videos, if one marketer is the sole sponsor of the content, the impact of the ad can be stronger than TV, he adds. “It’s more challenging to get your online display ads noticed in the first place, but once you do capture the site visitor’s attention, the branding can be very powerful if you own the environment,” says Mr. Gould.
Sony says it plans to pursue the Honda model with other advertisers in the future. “It’s a perfect fit for what branded messaging on the Internet could be, or should be,” says Amy Carney, president of ad sales at Sony Pictures Television, which sells all advertising connected to Sony’s television, movie and music content across its own and third-party partner sites.
It’s the not the first time Honda has tapped Sony: previous campaigns have included a contest on Crackle. Honda’s latest deal with Sony is part of a broader Honda Fit promotion that includes TV ads, which started appearing at the end of September, an animated game, a Web site and a promotion with MTV Web sites set for early 2009.
October 5, 2008
How Cisco Tried to Make Routers Sexy Using Social Media
How Cisco Tried to Make Routers Sexy Using Social Media
In March this year, Cisco launched the ASR 1000 Router Series. No big deal, but for the fact that it was delivered completely via social media. This was apparently Cisco’s fifth most successful campaign, and according to the company it has proved to be a turning point for the way Cisco takes products to market: “virtually, virally, and visually.”
The biggest lesson here is this: Routers aren’t sexy. If Cisco can make a router exciting enough for social media, you too can utilize social media to create a buzz about your product or service.
Social media is all about building an experience – not an event. LaSandra Brill, manager of Web and social media marketing at Cisco discussed the tactics and results of the ASR 1000 launch at the Social Media Marketing Summit this week. I’ve listed the steps taken by Cisco to reach its goals below; you can see Brill’s presentation on SlideShare.
ASR 100 Launch Campaign Steps
1. Created a fun micro site directed at uber users (the tech and early adopter audience) to help create and spread buzz.
2. Cross posted videos from the micro site to YouTube to extend reach.
3. Established Second Life presence that included a countdown calculator and pre event live concert to increase visibility; research showed much of their audience is on Second Life.
4. Created a FaceBook group to cater to users not part of Second Life.
5. Created an interactive 3D game - Edge Quest - to attract the large gaming audience.
6. Created a widget that holds a collection of key videos, documents and images that allows sharing for their content, while remaining on their server.
7. Blogged about it on the Cisco blog to try and intrigue bloggers and customers.
8. Heightened buzz with press with a vague two paragraph teaser press release to extend press coverage and fuel buzz.
9. Created a social media release to reach out to bloggers.
10. Introduced product via live online event; video on Second Life that was cross posted on FaceBook and YouTube.
11. Created ‘Ask the Expert’ - a forum where customers could talk to the engineers that created the product.Cisco says they met their goal of increasing visibility and involving their audience by using the social Web, creating buzz and building a community at a negligible cost; a soft cost that involved time, resources, and creativity instead of budget.
Given the state of the US economy right now, the social Web seems to be the smartest choice corporations (or individuals) can make if they want to create passion and excitement for their brand – at a soft cost.
