If anyone doubted the wild, wonderful things a marketer can do with a phenomenon like YouTube, they can suspend that disbelief by turning to Blendtec. A $50 demonstration of sheer blending power attracted six million viewers in just five days.

After all, who wouldn't want to watch a man in a lab coat and goggles drop 50 marbles, or golf balls, or a crowbar, or a rake handle, into a blender while teasing the viewer with questions about whether those things can really be blended.

And what a sublime spectacle it is to see a full, unopened can of Coke blended with a whole chicken - just in time for Thanksgiving.

Ten thousand comments later, marketers are thinking these guys are on to something.

Blendtec's "Will it Blend?" video series has become an immediate case study for using online video to your advantage, rather than fighting with the site operators (I'm talking to you, music labels and TV producers) about the finer points of copyright law.

Writes the editors at PodTech:

Tom Dickson, the chief actor and executive office at Blendtec, establishes trust through his "extreme blending" product demos and down-home personality…Blendtec spins up a brand-building showcase through its use of social media technology that even the hippest Madison Avenue firms are struggling to figure out.
Visit WillItBlend.com, and the marketing team has a slew of interesting product demonstrations divided into two categories: Try This at Home and Don't Try This At Home. At home, those with a penchant for creative destruction can efficiently cut up credit cards, or speed up the fast food experience by pureeing their Big Mac, fries, and milkshakes.

This last one, of course, is like yelling at your microwave to hurry up with the bun-steaming.

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Only one week after the Chinese government released the ban placed on encyclopedia site Wikipedia, the ban appears to be back in effect.

Wikipedia had only regained the ability to reach Chinese viewers with their free encyclopedia site one week ago, however the good news was short-lived. The site has been reportedly blocked in some parts of China again.

Over a year ago the Chinese government placed a ban on both the English and Chinese-language versions of the popular encyclopedia site, Wikipedia, for reasons unbeknownst to even the site's creator. Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia said "We don't know what prompted the block and don't know what prompted the unblock."

Created in 2001, Wikipedia "has rapidly grown into the largest reference Web site on the Internet", according to the website's creators. Wikipedia's content is free and users around the world can collaborate on different articles. The website itself is a "wiki", which means that anyone with internet access can correct, edit, or add to any page on the site to improve upon the encyclopedia's information.

While the Chinese government never made an official statement as to why the site was banned, it was widely speculated to be due to the fact that Chinese citizens could use the site to find information on issues that are sensitive to the Communist government, such as the 1989 incident at Tiananmen Square.

Users and free-speech advocates in China welcomed the release of the ban with open arms, yet feared it to be only temporary because of the government's strict filtration of informative sites.

"It was great news for us," said Yuan Mingli, a contributor of articles to the site. "China's Internet users are not different from other countries' users. Wikipedia is a very important source of information for us."

The Foreign Ministry and Ministry of Information did not immediately comment when questioned on the reasoning behind the reinforcement ban, and it is unclear if access to WIkipedia is being denied because of a technical error or because an actual government order.

China's communist government has attempted to filter information from the Internet deemed anti-government or anarchic since it's inception.

They have even gone so far as to create a Wikipedia encyclopedia substitute, called Baidupedia, allowing them to rid search results of material that is seen as unfit. Baidupedia is operated by Baidu, China's most popular search engine.

Chinese Wikipedia users remain uncertain as to whether or not they will regain access to Wikipedia, or if the ban is permanent.

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The company's deal with seven newspaper groups will give Yahoo a possible extension beyond job classifieds to working with publishers on contextual ads, local search, and other revenue generating possibilities.

An updated report from Classified Intelligence on the arrangement between HotJobs and its new print media partners identified some of the 176 papers involved as among the top publications in the country.

The San Francisco Chronicle, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and the Dallas Morning News among others will be part of the effort. MediaNews Group CEO and vice-chairman Dean Singleton said in the report he expects the deal to be a transformational one for his industry.

Yahoo CFO Susan Decker, a former newspaper stock analyst, commented that the agreement would direct a "significant revenue boost" to HotJobs, but did not comment on projections.

There are a couple of problems HotJobs will have to overcome with the help of its new friends from the world of print journalism. Those problems would be CareerBuilder and Monster, rated one and two in the US market for job classifieds.

How Yahoo and its print partner approach the problems could be different for each partner. The report noted that Yahoo signed independent agreements with each company. Each one also has a separate letter of intent with Yahoo.

Classified Intelligence founding principal Peter Zollman said the time was right for Yahoo to make these deals, especially with Decker and Yahoo's senior VP of Marketplace Hilary Schneider, ex-Knight Ridder Digital, having backgrounds in the newspaper industry.

Likewise, newspaper publishers have been looking for a company to deal with for these opportunities. Zollman commented on the dynamics of the agreements:

"We've been asked, ‘Who's the bigger winner here - Yahoo or the newspapers?' It's tough to say; we'd vote for ‘both.' Yahoo has been struggling in a growing shadow cast by Google, and has been criticized for a lack of focus and direction.
"HotJobs had some of the best online recruitment products, but it had become an afterthought behind CareerBuilder.com and Monster.com. Meantime, newspapers have been desperately trying to find a breakout strategy in interactive media. Even though many are growing substantially online (30-50 percent revenue growth year-over-year), that's from a very small base."
Zollman's reference to criticism of Yahoo's performance was prefaced over the weekend by the publication of a highly critical memo dubbed the 'Peanut Butter Manifesto' by observers. The leaked memo called for substantial job cuts and a reduction in duplicated products in Yahoo's operations.

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Tags: Yahoo, HotJobs, Peanut Butter Manifesto

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An internal memo by a senior vice president at Yahoo, where he extensively criticizes the company's practices and culture, was leaked to the media; Yahoo comes across as a firm caught in a bureaucratic malaise, where too much duplication and too little passion are the order of the day.

Brad Garlinghouse made himself a blogosphere buzzword by composing an internal memo that was subsequently leaked to the Wall Street Journal. Dubbed "The Peanut Butter Manifesto," he is calling for the kind of internal reform at Yahoo that would involve slashing duplicate services and dispassionate employees from the company.

While outwardly the document praises Yahoo while exposing its less than effective practices, it represents something far more important. For a powerful executive like Garlinghouse to make this kind of statement internally, and for it to get exposed (the Journal chose to make it publicly available instead of hiding it behind the subscription wall), it looks like CEO Terry Semel may have a full-scale revolt brewing.

Garlinghouse cited a blistering New York Times article that dramatically excoriated Yahoo for its plodding business. In his memo, he said he "imagined" the most senior leaders at Yahoo were already discussing the company's problems.

"At the risk of being redundant, I wanted to share my take on our current situation and offer a recommended path forward, an attempt to be part of the solution rather than part of the problem," he wrote. "I've heard our strategy described as spreading peanut butter across the myriad opportunities that continue to evolve in the online world. The result: a thin layer of investment spread across everything we do and thus we focus on nothing in particular."

He provided a number of bullet points summarizing the issues confronting the company: lack of vision, lack of ownership and accountability, and a lack of decisiveness. For that last point, Garlinghouse listed eight examples of how Yahoo ends up with "competing (or redundant) initiatives and synergistic opportunities living in the different silos of our company."

Those redundancies include the creation or acquisition of duplicate services, like buying Flickr and del.icio.us when Yahoo already had Photos and MyWeb on its product roster. He also accused a number of employees of "phoning it in" while continuing to "hang around" the company without accountability.

To succeed at reclaiming its past glory, Garlinghouse wants to see a more focused vision as part of a "radical reorganization" of Yahoo. That means duplicate services and deadwood employees - "heads must roll," he wrote - have to go. He's calling for a 15 to 20 percent reduction in force at the company.

Response from various bloggers has been plentiful. Eric Jackson posted an open letter to Yahoo founders David Filo and Jerry Yang, calling for Semel's dismissal. He thinks Semel should take COO Dan Rosenweig with him, and CFO Susan Decker deserves the CEO slot.

Jackson didn't account for Decker's infamous assertion that Yahoo will be happy to be second in search, an observation that was strongly refuted by surprised executives on the company's search team. It's hard to equate settling for second with a more focused and presumably aggressive vision for Yahoo.

The impact of Garlinghouse's memo on shares of Yahoo stock when trading opens should be intersting to watch. Yahoo's peanut butter may be about to get very chunky before it smooths out again.

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Tags: Yahoo, Brad Garlinghouse, Peanut Butter Manifesto

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Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania isn't exactly a top destination for tech companies, but in spite (or because) of this fact, Google has built a new office there. It looks like it's going to be a pretty small operation, though - there are currently only about 30 Googlers working at the facility.

Rapid growth is possible, though. Google's Dublin location, which is now its main hub for all of Europe, started out with only five employees (the search engine company recently announced plans to bring the total up to 1300).

Daniel Lovering spoke to Andrew Moore, "a former Carnegie Mellon professor who heads the office," and Moore indicated that Google does intend to keep looking for people in "the Smoky City."

"Another five to 10 people are scheduled to join the staff at Google Pittsburgh in the next few months," Moore told Lovering, "and the hiring is expected to continue as long as job candidates are interested in working for Google and coming to Pittsburgh."

Moore also described his duties, saying, "We're working on things that are really at the core of Google. We're very much a back-end office."

Another person with ties Carnegie Mellon University also weighed in on the search engine company's new offices. "This is so important to CMU because of the educational opportunities this creates for us," CMU president Jared Cohon told the Pittsburgh Business Times.

"We expect big things from the Google center," Cohon continued. "We all the sense that Pittsburgh is about to see some wonderful things in terms of tech-based employment."

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Tag: Google

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There's one week left until the holiday shopping season begins in earnest, and a new shopping search engine has made its presence known just in time. PriceFight launched earlier today - the site's main page sports a couple of boxing gloves and the slogan "'Tis the Season to Shop Like a Champ."

The PriceFight beta may need to spend a little more time in the gym before it's truly useful, though. The site, like many others, tries to display the least expensive source for any given product. But TechCrunch's Marshall Kirkpatrick noted that PriceFight "currently searches over only twelve large merchants and is focused on consumer electronics."

The TechCrunch writer had a similar concern about PriceFight's "People's Choice" feature, which tells "where most shoppers go to purchase the same items you're looking to buy." Kirkpatrick observed that the shopping search engine needs to compile a reasonably large set of data before that can happen, but, he went on to say, "ratings have been compiled over the past seven months."

The "People's Choice" feature will should also incorporate "qualities beyond price that the shopping community values, such as customer service, return policies, shipping, and security," if all goes well at PriceFight.

Reactions to the site were generally positive. Following Kirkpatrick's article, "Sean" wrote, "I just played around with it, I do like it a lot, very nice looking site also. They definitely need more merchants but like you said, that will come with time."

It may not be long before PriceFight gets into tip-top shape, however. Michael Griffin, the site's founder and CEO, writes that he "enjoys working" in his free time.

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Tag: PriceFight

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Courts in Bejing ruled in favor of Baidu today in a lawsuit based on illegal MP3 downloading on the site.

The No. 1 Intermediate Court of Beijing ruled in favor today of Baidu, China's most popular search engine, in a lawsuit stemming from the illegal downloading of MP3's from it's website.

Created in 2000 by Robin Li and Eric Xu, Baidu's mission is, "to provide the best way for people to find information online, including Chinese language web pages, news, images and multimedia files though links provided on our website. In addition to serving individual Internet search users, we also provide an effective platform for businesses to reach potential customers online."

Almost a year ago several music giants including, Universal, EMI, Warner, and Sony BMG, filed a lawsuit against China's most popular search engine. The lawsuit alleged that Baidu enabled users to search and download music illegally on the site's MP3 search engine and could have potentially shut down the MP3 site for indefinitely.

Baidu is the fourth most viewed search engine in the entire world and derives 15% of it's traffic from visits to the MP3 subdomain on the site, according to Alexa.com.

The creators of the site say that "If Baidu shuts down the MP3 service, the consequences will be severe. Baidu derives about 20% of revenue from the MP3 service by showing advertisement on every page that leads to a third party download link."

Baidu's Vice President of Marketing Liang Dong said that Baidu.com only provides a music search service rather than downloads. He also adds, "From the copyright point of view, we think differently than the music companies. Baidu is just a platform for music search."

Filing suit against a search engine instead of illegal downloading sites seems to be an odd legal strategy. There have been several similar cases in the United States in which the music-sharing websites, such as Napster were sued rather than at search engines providing only song results.

Had the music companies won the lawsuit, Baidu would have been forced to compensate the music giants and the MP3 site would have completely been completely disintegrated on the alleged grounds of providing downloads of illegal music.

It would seem that every cloud has a silver lining as Baidu has signed an agreement with Viacom to stream it's music videos for free ad-supported services and premium. Five other major Chinese music labels have also joined in the arrangement, perhaps creating a truce between the Baidu and other music companies.

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Results generated from Yahoo's search engine now feature a more in-depth social component as part of the company's attempt to incorporate user-generated content via Yahoo! Answers.

WebProNews received this tip today from a Yahoo! Representative:

"Starting today, you'll be seeing some enhancements to the Yahoo! Answers direct display at the bottom of certain Yahoo! Search results pages. While the original version of the direct display featured questions from Yahoo! Answers, the enhanced ‘Shared by Yahoos' version includes both the full Yahoo! Answers question and an excerpt of the ‘Best Answer' - giving users a more detailed preview of user generated content from the Answers community. The new direct display also includes avatars of the users whose answers are selected, making it easy to identify the social nature of the Yahoo! Answers direct display."
"All of these changes are designed to incorporate more user-generated content into the search results pages for Yahoo! Search users to get insight from the millions of real people who make up the Yahoo! Answers community."
It seemed interesting enough for a Friday afternoon, so I decided to take the new feature for a spin.

Our Yahoo! contact suggested searching for "vacation ideas" to show off the new look of Yahoo! answers.

The content seems to be more or less relevant, although I can't quite relate to couples in Beaumont, TX when it comes to planning a family vacation. But I digress…

Moving on, I decided to try a more relevant term like "Christmas shopping" and see what the Yahoo! Answers community could offer.

The "best answers" here seemed to be completely relevant, and coincidentally addresses a couple of topics I have actually been curious about.

The glaring flaw of the system so far is the lack of user-submitted content. My search for vacation ideas yielded a mere 111 user answers, while Christmas shopping was only met with 63 posts.

Clearly, the feature is still in its infancy, and will require a much larger user base in order to provide a comprehensive answer resource for Yahoo! search users.

Tags: Yahoo

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When a particular campaign goes viral, where people forward a marketing message to others until it snowballs, the resulting traffic and awareness can be very impressive. Achieving a viral quality for a message is not something that can be just coded and pushed out the door; it takes a combination of efforts to reach that status.

When the PubCon session on Viral and Word Of Mouth Marketing Management began, our Chris Richardson settled in for some note-taking that we have polished for your perusal here.

Breaking through to an Internet audience that has millions of potential destinations to choose online has been a steep challenge for marketers. It can be done, and on a broad scale too.

Louise Rijk discussed this from the word of mouth marketing perspective. It's powerful because word of mouth happens on and off the Internet. There is a higher trust level for it due to the more personal nature of a shared opinion instead of a paid message.

To achieve this online, Rijk said marketers have to identify opinion makers and deliver the message. (That has to be done carefully; blasting a blatant marketing attempt at influential people online can backfire in humorously spectacular ways. - David)

While forums, blogs, podcasts, and videos all have their place in word of mouth marketing, email still demands some respect from marketers. It's a viable resource that can lead to a message going viral.

When targeting influencers, it's important to learn who they are and what they say about your niche. Monitoring buzz about one's product or service can be accomplished through sites like Technorati or BlogPulse.

Above all, Rijk noted, don't stint on customer service and listen to what is being said about the business.

SEOBook.com's Aaron Wall emphasized the research point as well, and the use of keywords and search to help build one's awareness of perceptions of one's online endeavor.

He also told session attendees to go beyond just search and keywords. Social media sites like Digg and Reddit can blow up a story very quickly, leading to significant traffic. It helps to have compelling headlines, and to be a little controversial, to draw viral attention.

Rand Fishkin of SEOMoz.com dropped an interesting factoid about Digg into the session. He said a story that makes the front page of Digg will receive an average of 2000 new links in 2 weeks pointing to whatever story was Dugg by users of the site.

If one can befriend one of the more prolific submitters on Digg, that could help getting a company's message onto the site and enthusiastically voted up by other Diggers on the site. But before that deluge happens, Fishkin highly recommends stress testing the destination server or servers to ensure they can handle a sudden spike in traffic without failing.

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Tag: PubCon

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Yahoo has purchased Bix.com an online site devoted to allowing users to rate and share photos, video, singing, writing, dance, comedy and beauty. Users compete in contests for prizes ranging from cash to other corporate incentives.

The site creates some of the contests while users create others. Anyone is allowed to create a contest from a corporation to a user. Bix, which was started in January of this year by Mike Speiser, CEO, employs 16 people. They launched in August and are based in Palo Alto. Speiser was the previous founder of Epinions, which was later, purchased by Shopping.com in 2003 and later by Ebay in 2005.

In a message written by Speiser about the Yahoo purchase of Bix he wrote, "This transaction will bring to the Bix community the Web's largest audience -- Yahoo! reaches ~500 million users per month on Yahoo!-branded services worldwide (1 out of every 2 internet users). This is huge folks! It means that every performer on Bix will be performing on essentially the world's largest stage with a potential audience in the hundreds of millions."
Yahoo plans to allow Bix to continue to operate independently while integrating them with other services. Spieser will be VP of Community for Yahoo responsible for Yahoo! Groups, 360, and Photos.

Details of the purchase price have not been released. Since the launch of Bix in August the site has enjoyed more than one million users. Yahoo has plans to allow users to run Bix contests on other sites like MySpace and Flicker along with other Yahoo sites.

Yahoo's purchase of Bix seems like a solid move. The site is young but has shown to be popular with users. The potential for growth could be strong.

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