I spent most of this past week in meetings or on an airplane. I missed some good stuff. Like:
* The 15 year anniversary of Wired was in late January. The first issue (which was one of the most amazing journey’s I’ve ever been on, creatively), is broken down here.
* Speaking of Wired, a co-founding editor, Kevin Kelly, is still writing amazing shit, this post is his latest missive.
The internet is a copy machine. At its most foundational level, it copies every action, every character, every thought we make while we ride upon it. In order to send a message from one corner of the internet to another, the protocols of communication demand that the whole message be copied along the way several times. IT companies make a lot of money selling equipment that facilitates this ceaseless copying. Every bit of data ever produced on any computer is copied somewhere. The digital economy is thus run on a river of copies. Unlike the mass-produced reproductions of the machine age, these copies are not just cheap, they are free….When copies are free, you need to sell things which can not be copied.
Believe it or not, this idea has important implications for the future of advertising online.
* Google launched a “Team Edition” of its Office Killer. Ars notices that it seems to want to sneak by the IT Department. Not a good idea.
* Ask works with Digg to launch a site called Big News.
* Everyone thinks social applications will thrive in a recession. I tend to agree, for different reasons. More on that later, I hope.
* Raises some very interesting issues.
We have been asking around the blogsophere for a few months this question. Is anyone experiencing any good ROI with these social sites. It seems that the sites make money but that’s about it.
We have invested around 40 hours building a Local SEO lens on Squidoo.com, at http://www.squidoo.com/tucsonseosolutions, over a two week period. Much of that time viewing videos on Youtube to provide quality content that was useful. The lens started out at around #360,000 and eventually climbed to #5,600.
For our effort we had 15 people visit the lens, two rated it a 5 out of 5 and two left a comment. However, no one visited our website. We provided a link in every written posts, about a dozen or so. So let me buck the trend and suggest you try some other sites.
Yes, Digg might produce 50,000 or so visits in a few days, but they seldom purchase. The best you can seem to hope for is a few hundred links, which is a god thing. Yet, again is it worth the effort?
We are looking for options that actually creates traffic that is ready to buy my product or service. Any idea’s? You know social sites that small businesses can actually use to grow a local business… Thanks.