If you wonder what you may have been missing during the holidays about buzz, viral, blog, social media and web 2.0 marketing, here is a small recap of the best articles, posts and links I have been gathering in august....
Online Advertising
- Ad networks surge and CPMs plunge
- The latest study of Bain & Company in coordination with the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) about digital ad pricing
- AB numbers ignite ad network controversy : Who is to blame for falling CPMs, and which ad network gives marketers the reach they crave?
- Ad Skipping is going to get worse. Court Paves the Way for DVR Home Invasion -- and Potential Ad Evasion
- Live journal launch a new blogs ad banner format
- Google Endows Marketers with Search Insights and makes Search Engine Marketing easier :
- How to bridge the Digital Gap and keep ahead. Brand-Building Principles Have Changed, but It's Now Easier Than Ever to Understand Consumers
- Advertising and casual gaming, it is all about advertainment!
Offline Advertising
- R/GA Expands Into Branding Biz, Taking on Traditional Players : Agency Launches Division With the Idea That Digital Increasingly Influences How Consumers See Brands.
- Some Ad Tactics Don't Age. Why 9 Out of 11 Ogilvy Commandments Still Ring True Four Decades Later
- The tyranny of the big idea
- A study about the relationship between Advertisers and agencies and one about relationships between advertisers and interactive agencies (French)
Word of mouth, buzz, seeding, influential and viral marketing
- Marketers Love Conversation, Unless the Consumer Starts It. Listening Gets You More Than Complaints -- You Get Positive Brand Association and Word of Mouth.
- In YouTube World, Humor Can Get Lost in Translation. US Marketers Learn That Ads Made for Consumers Overseas Can Still Offend American Sensibilities
- The PR industry still don’t get it with bloggers (in French), maybe they should start reading Ogilvy's 7 Tips on Pitching Bloggers, their Executive Bloggers Guide, their blog or their collection of feeds from some of the most influential blogs out there.
Brand Reputation and buzz monitoring
- The future of Internet is all about reputation (in French)
- Bzzagent partners with Attensity, a buzz monitoring and text mining solution
- 6 New Social Media Tools to track Brand Reputation
Community management & social media
- A good article about the difficulties in defining a efficient rewarding system for your community
- Yahoo created a framework to define and rank reputation in a community. More info here and here.
- Online community best practices by Forrester
- How to Measure Social Media ROI for Business
- Is a social network right for your brand?
- Build branded widgets
- 9 ways to build your own social network :
- Is Blogosphere becoming boring?
- Blogs seem to be much more business efficient that traditional media : With an editorial staff of about 700 people LA Times produces 127 million page views a month, while Gawker claims to create 254 million page views a month with 8- staff only! Silicon Alley Insider published this list of traffic for their sites: Gizmodo 73.5m, Kotaku 44.3m, Lifehacker 25.6m, Gawker 18.9m, Fleshbot 17.4m, Jezebel 15.5m, Consumerist 13.7m, Jalopnik 13.4m, Deadspin 12.6m, io9 8.8m, Defamer 6.4m, Valleywag 3.3m
And offcourse, Google is launching Chrome, its own "browser"!
I hope these few links will be useful, feel free to send me yours...