'Net Features : digital media

Battelle: Physical and digital to merge

Administrator — Tue, 02 Apr 2013 18:45:00 GMT

:: by Lindsay Whitehurst, Website Magazine Special Contributor ::

John Battelle imagines a “world lit with data.”

This year, every human being on earth — in uneven distribution — will create 600 gigabytes of data, the author, entrepreneur and CEO of blog network Federated Media said in a March speech at the Adobe Digital Summit in Salt Lake City. That’s 3.6 exabytes this year, and it’s only growing.

Making sense of that mind-boggling amount is going to require a massive infrastructure, one that will make data into something we can see and touch.

“What I believe is about to happen is we’re going to merge the physical with the digital,” Battelle said. Take 3-D printers, a technology that’s already beginning to take hold and literally make data into a physical object. Taken to a logical extreme, that’s technology that could make “container ships go empty,” he said.

The principle goes in the opposite direction for our bodies. Skin conductivity, blood temperature, heart beat — we can measure and record every minuscule change and upload it to the cloud. Organizing and making sense of that data could revolutionize how we deal with our health.

And perhaps the most obvious illustration of the concept is Google Glass, the product that lets people see the world through the prism of data. For marketers and retail sales, Battelle’s vision of of the future could mean a customer’s phone becomes the centerpiece of the sale.

In a few years, a customer could walk into a store at the mall and feel the buzz of coupon offers coming into his or her phone from competing merchants. Buying the right gift, meanwhile, could be as simple as pulling up a map of the store and walking straight to a pulsing blue dot. Staff could already know exactly how much interaction each individual customer wants, and payment could happen online instead of at the register.

“We need to become, as brand marketers,” Battelle said, “creators of experiences.”

Protect Your Brand and Save a Headache

Michael Garrity — Tue, 07 Aug 2012 08:35:00 GMT

On the Web, the most valuable part of your business is your brand, and branding always starts with the name of your company and website. Thus, it’s critical that you protect that identity to safeguard all of the assets you have wrapped up in it.

Recognizing the importance of brand name protection, “value based” domain name registrar NameIT has partnered with Digital Media Monitors LLC to provide its clients with brand security and domain monitoring services.

Digital Media Monitors was selected because of its in-house expertise and access to “the most powerful domain monitoring tools available,” allowing NameIT customers to stay updated on the information needed to legally protect their brands. In addition, thanks to proprietary technology and alert systems, NameIT will be able to notify customers of any changes that may have an impact on their brands or businesses, which gives them an opportunity to take immediate, effective action.

This new service, known as NameIT Domain Monitoring and Brand Protection, offers four unique ways to help look after the identities of its customers. The first is Registrant Alerts, which alert businesses or individuals with registered domains anytime their brand name appears in a whois record for newly registered, renewed, or deleted domain names.

NameIT is also offering Brand Alert, so that businesses will know anytime a word or string of words close to their brand is used in a domain registration.

The third service is Domain Monitor, which provides information on the expiration dates and statuses of the domain names, and notifies customers of any status changes.

Finally, NameIT is offering its clients access to a plethora of industry experts and attorneys that can provide assistance in disputes, appraisals, and domain name sales.

Hot Reads for Web Marketers

Michael Garrity — Wed, 31 Aug 2011 13:30:00 GMT

Labor Day is right around the corner, which means that we're about to enter the busiest time of year for Internet marketers. Summer break will be over and people will begin to flock to the Web for a variety of reasons, making this the perfect time for marketers to brush up on their mad marketing skills.

The best way to do that is to spend the upcoming long weekend curled up with a nice book, preferably outside by the grill. That is why our crack investigative team has scoured the Web to find some of the most recent books on Internet marketing. These books cover a variety of techniques, from social media to SEO to analytics and much, much more.

Regardless of your experience as an online marketer, there is always new innovation and information to be gleaned, and these books will help you improve upon what you already know. Please keep in mind that there are only two weeks left to secure a free copy of WM's own book, Web 360: The Fundamentals of Web Success, which can be obtained by ordering a professional-level subscription to Website Magazine.

Until then, here are some of the hottest reads about Internet marketing:

Likeable Social Media by Dave Kerpen
This book is by Dave Kerpen, who is the founder and CEO of the award-winning social media marketing firm Likeable Media. So, needless to say, he has some experience in the field. This book covers an array of topics concerning social media marketing, such as the importance of responding to comments, defining your target audience and creating a presence for your company on the social network. This is one of the most highly rated books on the subject on all of Amazon, and it was just released earlier this year. This is a great start, then, for anyone looking to quickly improve their brand's social media profile(s).

The Internet Marketing Bible by Zeke Camusio
This was a book specifically written for business owners and marketers, meaning it doesn't contain much (if any) technical jargon that could confuse unfamiliar readers. Camusio designed the book to be to-the-point, removing all of the unnecessary elements that will often clutter other books on Internet marketing and getting right into the action, providing a step-by-step tutorial on how to become successful online. It covers a range of topics, everything from SEO to Pay-Per-Click to website design, and provides the necessary tools and strategies that will help you get a better grasp on the basics of the Internet marketing world. This is a great book for marketers who are just starting out, but also an excellent resource for seasoned marketers as well.

SEO Made Simple (Second Edition): Strategies for Dominating the World's Largest Search Engine by Michael H. Fleischner
The second edition of the highly praised and very popular SEO Made Simple is an excellent revision of an already great book. The focus of this book, as the subtitle tells us, is not just how to improve your SEO, but how to conquer Google. Fleischner has been working in online marketing for over fourteen years and is considered an expert in the fields of SEO and Internet marketing. Included in this title are tips and tricks for social media SEO, using Google Places, meta tags and even a step-by-step link building guide. This new edition adds over 20 new pages of various techniques to optimize your brand or website's search results. This may be the most comprehensive book on the subject of SEO, and with the additions included in the second edition, the best keeps getting better.

Content is Cash: Leveraging Great Content and the Web for Increased Traffic, Sales, Leads and Buzz by Wendy Montes de Oca
Content may be the most overlooked aspect of Internet marketing, and this book aims to fix that. This books shows you how you can integrate and syncronize some of the best Web marketing techniques available today to, as the title states, drive traffic, sales, leads and buzz for your brand based on your preexisting content. Among the subjects covered in the book are how to use undiscovered content that is both helpful and actionable, make your content easier to find and use content to create more visibility and awareness for your brand or site. Montes de Oca has over twenty years of professional experience and is currently a marketing blogger and writer, as well as owner of the Precision Marketing and Media consulting firm.

Affiliate Program Management: An Hour a Day by Evgenii Prussakov
This is the affiliate marketing release by the hugely popular An Hour a Day series of Internet marketing books. This guide is meant to provide a detailed, real-world, task-based approach to developing and managing an affiliate marketing program. It covers various aspects of the affiliate business, such as market research, payment models, recruiting and more. This book is full of helpful hints, tips and techniques that can help any aspiring affiliate really get off the ground and should be considered essential reading for anyone looking to launch their own network. Plus, it's co-authored by Evgenii Prussakov, aka Geno, the founder of AM Navigator and one of the most successful and famous affiliate marketers in the world. If you're going to trust anybody, he's not a bad choice.

Brand Media Strategy: Integrated Communications Planning in the Digital Era by Antony Young
Unlike Likeable Social Media, this book, by Optimedia International U.S. CEO Antony Young, is about promoting your brand all over the Web, instead of just on social media sites. Of course, social media is heavily featured in Brand Media Strategy, but so are YouTube, the iPhone and other areas of the Web where your brand needs to make itself known. Young covers the future of advertising in traditional media and how it will interact and compete with digital media, as well as how to get maximum impact out of digital media portals like search, social and mobile. This book offers a look at the Internet from a media-based perspective and will help you stretch the Web to raise awareness for your brand as far as you can.

Optimized Digital Media with MediaMind

Pete Prestipino — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 17:00:00 GMT

Integrated digital advertising solution MediaMind launched version two of its ad serving and campaign management technology today. The new platform features focus on greater data integration across ad channels to boost efficiency and ROI.

If you find yourself managing media planning, buying and trading on multiple platforms, the Media Mind solution aims to end the digital landscape fragmentation. Its platform allows marketers to build capaigns from start to finish, including media planning, analytics and optimization. Noteworthy features of the new release include:

1) Smart Planning which infuses performance and historical cost data within research, negotiation and buying stages to plan better media opportunities.

2) Smart Versioning which aims to simply the planning and distribution of dynamic creative messages by allowing advertisers to create one master ad and define the variables and goals.

“The growing scale and diversity of disparate digital marketing opportunities can overwhelm advertisers and agencies alike,” said Gal Trifon, CEO and Co-founder at MediaMind. “The level of integration in MediaMind version 2.0 makes it simple for marketers to communicate insights and make decisions when it counts.”