Last October, Radiohead shook up the music industry by allowing potential buyers to download their newest “In Rainbows” album for free.
This time Trent Reznor from Nine Inch Nails is even taking it further with their new album, “The Slip”. After you provide your email address, they give you the opportunity to send the invitation to up to three friends via email.
I wound up getting two emails before 9:00am from friends who filled out these forms.
This isn’t too much more than what Radiohead has done, but here’s a nice social media suggestion made by Nine Inch Nails.
Here’s another one, right on the nin.com home page.
Throw in a little user-generated media with their new single, more of a picture with audio, but that’s fine.
…and you have some great social media marketing coverage.
In slightly different news, it’s rumored that both Nine Inch Nails and Radiohead are are on headlining this year’s Lollapolooza, which is very strange since both Radiohead and NIN are known for dissing these types of events.
Those who know Ward Tongen know that he’s a very smart, outgoing, and funny guy. I’m happy to say that I have co-won the first searchbaiting award from Wardo, searchbaiting extraordinaire.
The middle of the award looks very similar to a soccer ball, which is fitting as I have an old person huff-n-puff rec game tomorrow. From there, I’m going straight to a church confirmation open house for my cousin’s son. My apologies go out in advance to Janie and Neal for smelling like a used jersey, but I’m digressing.
How it Works It’s a fun combination of linkbaiting and memes, and is explained very well through the link above. Ward linked to this blog and four other Minnesota search marketers with the intent of having us notice it through analytics and stats, vanity Google alerts, or word-of-mouth. The first one who comments on his blog posts wins the sweet ’soccer ball with flames’ award.
This blog is hosted by WordPress and has limited stats and analytics capabilities, but does have basic information including showing who links to this blog. When looking at stats the other day I saw Ward’s incoming link, which is basically how I found his contest.
Maybe I’m the last kid on the block to see this but it strikes me as a bit strange.
I am in the naymz network I guess, but was surprised to see this. It can give the assumption that I would actually pay for a PPC ad for users to see my Naymz profile that I’ve never really done much with.
For those unfamiliar with Naymz, it’s an online reputation management and networking tool where members can say nice things about each other and get a good rep score because of it.
I don’t know if it’s clever or annoying. Any thoughts? In Naymz? Google your name and there’s a good chance they’ll have an ad in your name.
Update - Thanks for the comment Tom. That explains it. I should check out my Naymz email more often
I’ve been both fortunate and honored to be a guest writer for Search Engine Guide since late 2005 (Jennifer and Robert, I’ll write more - really!!)
Since 2005, there have been some great writers that have jumped on board. I’ve met a few of them and hope to meet more the next time I hit a search marketing conference. It seems fitting to give SEG some (well-deserved) love back and provide a Search Engine Guide favorite posts of the week.
The first is from Manoj Jasra titled common web analytics issues. Manoj makes some great points, including a paragraph about the wrong data going to the wrong people. Depending on whether your client contacts are marketing managers, CEOs, or Internet marketing departments should give you an idea of what type of data you can provide them.
Next, David Wallace writes on Matt McGee’s local search workshop presentation during the recent Small Business Unleashed conference. The post is quite lengthy, but it sounds like the presentation was too at 90 minutes! Kudos to both Matt and David. Matt talks about maps, SEO, PPC, local search engines, and even provides a relevant lists of industry sites. It’s a great post! Just read it.
Liana Evans is also at the conference blogging on Sage Lewis’ building a community workshop presentation. During the presentation Sage talks about different community channels such as YouTube, Facebook, and Digg. He begins with YouTube and how easy it is to use, and how to properly optimize and tag your videos. He goes on explaining how you can promote this with other social sites such as Facebook. Lastly, he stresses the importance on participating yourself.
Minnesota-based again, with the first favorite being somewhat based from Minnesota.
One of the YouTube founders is from St. Paul, and they are now offering up analytics. I don’t know how detailed they get, but it can possibly be a remarkable tool to measure and market your YouTube videos to your targeted audiences. Jennifer Laycock from Search Engine Guide provides a very good write-up on it.
I’m biased on this, but one of the Jeremy’s at Rochester-based BuyOnlineNow.com has a cool yet informational YouTube video on one of Fellowes new Intellishred jam proof shredders sold at the niche OrderPaperShredders.com site. The 70’s “adult” music theme adds to the touch.
You want this shredder. You need this shredder. You don’t want to be without one, do you?
Aside from bad hypnosis in the previous sentences, I’ll probably buy this one. My current shredder truly sucks.
Finally, Holly from the New Brighton-based Risdall Marketing Pie blog writes on how Facebook is not LinkedIn. I especially like point number four stating that LinkedIn is getting really good at what they do. It works there. Does it really need to work on Facebook? I’ve benefited and gained clients from LinkedIn and use it as a professional networking tool, yet my current Facebook profile picture is this:
This will probably change at some point as I do “loosely” use Facebook as a business tool, but right now I guess it’s “what it is”.
About an hour ago, I was flicking through channels and caught an interesting CNN segment regarding social networking in the 2008 presidential debate. It featured the new Rolling Stone magazine cover story that helps explain Senator Obama’s popular Internet campaign that has surpassed any other by far.
They’ve married the incredibly powerful online community they built with real on-the-ground field operations. We’ve never seen anything like this before in American political history.
The whole article is five pages. I’ve read it twice, but plan to read it more.
Note - the following Facebook links require a Facebook account before viewing.
A main premise of the article points to Obama’s own social networking site, plus how he’s using similar opportunities such as his Facebook page.
Senator Obama isn’t the first politician to use social networking. In fact, both Senators McCain and Clinton have their own Facebook pages.
The same goes with “Yahoo Answers”. All three remaining candidates have official profiles, although none of them have utilized it very much. The first I saw it was over a year ago while viewing an inquiry from Senator Clinton regarding health care.
Another note - This is from a social networking point of view and not an elephant/donkey/indie point of view.
One thing I really like is how the Obama team has integrated social networking with their ground campaigns. This hasn’t been done before and I can see the push vs. pull marketing aspect.
We all see the TV ads where politicians of all parties try to push their opinions on us. These social networking pull campaigns allow us to view and be solicited from whom we choose.
The above example could also be useful for marketers whether they are focused on traditional or online search efforts. It’s one thing for consumers to see you, but it’s another for consumers to react.
LinkedIn has a pretty cool news feature that’s currently in Beta.
I used to work for FindLaw (part of Thomson West) and have many friends and LinkedIn contacts because of it. It does make sense that these news results would appear when I sign in. I was pleasantly surprised to see these news bits, especially the one that gives them an entry to social networking.
The one thing I don’t like about this feature is many of these news bits (possibly including the link above) require you to register to read the actual articles. I suppose that’s for a different post.
The folks at Punch Pizza are doing something pretty cool. They’re running a photo contest while embracing social media in a big way. Apparently, it wasn’t long ago when they didn’t allow photos of their ovens. You can now turn that completely around as they’re running a Capture Our Fire photo contest.
It’s a contest that allows customers to take pictures of their ovens, pizzas, moments at Punch, and there’s even a special category for pictures taken from camera phones.
A few cool things to note:
One of their photo categories state “Ovens of Punch - Photographs of Punch ovens and fires in Punch ovens. (Photos must be taken from behind the food preparation area.)”
One bullet point states “All entries must be submitted online at Flickr.com.”
One more - “Entrants should upload contest submissions to their Flickr account (which are free) and apply a tag of “PunchPizzaContest” to each submission as well as the category for which the submitted photo applies: “OvensOfPunch” or “PunchPizzas” or “PunchMoments” or “PunchPhonePhotos”.”
I’m loving how they’re using Flickr. They’ll be able to sort of the contestant pictures by tagging, and the pages themselves will most likely receive a lot of traffic.
I’m guessing this will turn out to be a great social media campaign. Maybe they’ll even gain new customers such as myself (suppose that’s the end goal anyway). I’ve lived in Minneapolis for eight years and have never dined there (yeah, I know - apparently that’s a sin).
There are probably five readers out there who know why I’m excited about this. :)
In early November 2007, I gave some thoughts on video optimization. It’s a great vehicle, but has been manipulated by overzealous webmasters looking for high search engine results.
The Attorney Store has recently integrated legal video marketing, and in a very cool way. It’s not an attorney staring in a camera speaking in monotone explaining why he can help my needs. It’s compelling online conversations that build trust with me even though I’m a thousand miles away (the company holiday celebration video is my favorite).
I’ve written about Avvo a few times. For those who don’t know, Avvo is a legal portal that provides free ratings to find attorneys based on different criteria. Once launched, they were immediately sued by a Seattle attorney who didn’t like his Avvo rating. Last time I wrote about this, I hoped that the next post would be to announce that the silly lawsuit has been dismissed.
This is a little personal to me. By nature, attorneys get a bad rep by being called ambulance chasers and shysters. At my last position, I did a ton of search marketing for attorneys. Out of the hundreds I’ve worked and talked with, I can probably count on one hand that fit into the “ambulance chaser” or “shyster” category.
The select few just happen to be more vocal… hence the silly lawsuit and the notorious bad rep.
Note - Avvo is still relatively new and has not yet provided Minnesota attorney profiles. I’m guessing the next post will be to announce that this has happened.
1 Comment | 
Social Media, User-Generated Media, Viral Marketing | Tagged: nin, nine inch nails, Social Media, the slip | 
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Posted by Paul
