When I say interesting things I mean things like… iphones (Video below may take a few seconds to load).

The video has 4.7 Million downloads on Youtube alone - and there are a whole series of these videos. so how does a small (very small) company in Utah suddenly get millions of people talking about their goods? Well George is speaking as I type… here’s his story.

Two or three years ago, Blendtec had great products, but a really poor brand. George went to the company owner and said he needed money for a brand awareness campaign. The boss offered $50.

So George wandered through the warehouse and manufacturing plant and found a demo area, with sawdust on the floor where the product tester was testing the strength of the products. So they made a video and put it on YouTube. He spent the $50 on the domain, a white lab coat, a MacDonald’s breakfast and a rotisserie chicken and some marbles.

Now they have 70-75 videos. Their only failure was … Chuck Norris

They sent this video to Chuck before they posted it, but they got no reply. So they posted it anyway. Months later, they got a call from a friend saying that Chuck Norris was talking about the video on a major radio station. Blendtec now had an A-list celebrity helping the product go viral.

So what makes a video go Viral? Here are some tips George learnt from his campaign.

• Make it interesting and entertaining enough for friends to open their address book and send it to their friends.
• Make it tie in with the corporate objective
• Let it be sponsored by the manufacturer. Don’t go too “under the radar”
• They based their idea on real people - in this case their product testing engineer
• Develop interactivity - let people comment and suggest what to blend next.

(George unfortunately had those comments going to his Blackberry… which he eventually had to block!)

• Make user subscription very easy.

George also looked at the risks of a viral campaign and suggested that the biggest risk was to NOT try it. But he also pointed out:

• A viral campaign means you surrender control of the message upon distribution. (They had some problems with ceramic magnets… )
• Accept that you will have public scrutiny of your content
• Distribution is global (Is it legal in all countries)

Altogether they have acheived:

• 65 Million views on YouTube
• 120 Million visitors to willitblend.com
• 200,000 subscribers
• 700% increase in blender sales
• Pull through increase in their other product lines

You’ve got to admit, that with that kind of pull, a salesman selling advertising is going to have a pretty hard time selling ad space to this guy.

The other types of media were pretty interested too. He showed how he was on a US program called “the Big Idea” where he blended a pack of glow stick with the light off. The kind of coverage you just can’t buy.

Viral works… They even got a mention in congress.

He finished by Blending a rake… but I’m pressing “publish” right now

Dixon.

This tool, though, lets you remember ONE password. You then combine it with the domain you are logging into. So “password” combined with “facebook.com” will always generate “3d46176a”. So something nice and unique, and retrievable when you are sitting in a Las Vegas hotel lobby thinking “sod it, he’s on my Linked In network… and I don’t have my master password file”.

Why is this good? Well one password is intrinsicly unsafe, as are generic ones. But this becomes even more problematic when you combine widgets and gadgets between social networks. You end up giving out passwords to gadgets all over the place. If you layer this… use your generic password with the gadget URL, then use the result with each social profile that the gadget uses, then you might just start protecting yourself… a bit.

The Google Gadget coding should be credited to Zsolt Molnar - Helsinki, Finland and I got the original idea from here.

You currently have 2 pending proposals for 2 client accounts. You can view a complete analysis for these accounts by clicking the ‘Want more clicks?’ links on your My Client Center page:

For example, according to our analysis, the following campaigns would benefit from budget adjustments:

Account: XXXXXXXXXX: 
Campaign: YYYYYYYYYY
This campaign met its daily budget of GBP £64.50 on 10 of the last 15 days. Increasing the budget to GBP £143.28 would allow the ads to show more often and get approximately 11% more clicks per month.

So let’s look at that advice from Google… Increase the spend by 122% in order to increase the clicks by 11%.

Am I missing something - or does Google think I am a complete plank?

The awakening happened on a boat on the Thames. Maybe the Glass capsules of the London Eye provided the trigger? Maybe not. But there were 500 people on the boat - and pretty well every one of them is affected on a daily basis by Google… because A4U is by far the largest affiliate conference in the UK and - if Mathew Wood’s peformance was anything to go by, will soon be the largest affiliate conference on the planet. These guys are good!

So I heard a person say “I can’t seem to break through a glass ceiling of XXX visitors a day from Google”. I then asked another well known affiliate, Loquax, who also admitted that even though his major site had dropped to 10th for his big one phrase keyword recently, his traffic had remained static from Google for nearly a year. Plot it weekly… flatline!

I talked to Jo Conner - with his inspired Can’tBArsed.com, a man who does far too much Tai Chi and far too little “real” work as I understand it. He said the same. I look at one of my own sites, Murder Mystery Games and I see the same. It seems to be that sites are “flatlining” on Google and although everyone seems to be settling at a different number, that number represents Google’s Glass Ceiling for the domain. You can push through it, but you’ll need to do something just a bit more… or at least a bit different.. to break the ceiling and take it to the next level.

Now I’m happy enough for Matt Cutts or Brian White or Adam Lasnik or John Mu to jump right in here and say “no, no, no Dixon - you must be dreaming” - but then it’s only going to take a few people to say “hey - yeh - that’s happening to me” for the idea to stick. At that point… if their really is a Glass Ceiling for some if not all sites, then one has to ask if Google are being fully transparent here? (Pun intended… an affiliate suggested I use it… I won’t name him).

It doesn’t - on the surface - seem to make sense. Google is all about pushing the best result to the users… aren’t they? But when your site is in that twilight zone of being well enough established in Google to stop looking at the daily rankings with fear and intrepidation, but not established enough to start getting “One Box” results (the ones where you get several links in poition one) on your almost generic brand name, then these are the kinds of sites that seem to be getting the Google throttle. Google knows there are several sites that may offer similar value to the user and it is in everyone’s interest (conveniently including Google’s) to give each of these sites a slice of the proverbial free action… in the spirit of “competition is good as long as it’s all done on Google”.

Not all styles of site face this ceiling. Wordpress and the general blogosphere really wouldn’t notice this, as the blog content tends to work on link baiting and social network seeding rather than the traditional index to succeed. The result for bloggers is a far more volatile existence. There should be a saying - if there isn’t already - you are only as good as you last blog.

What worries me the most, is that if this hunch is correct, why has it taken so long to be “outed”? surely most of us look at traffic not rankings as a better key performance indicator don’t we? Maybe we jumped straight from looking at rankings before the Florida update many years ago all the way to looking at conversions from organic without stopping to look at the obvious middle statistic of the good old fashioned click?

He gave some promotion tips and some conversion tips.

Promotion tips:

• Go where the readers go. Sphinn, LinkedIN, Reddit, Digg. Social Networks.
• Don’t bait with bad content, because users unsubscribe and never return.
• Do Guest posts on bigger blogs. Saves the big guys writing posts, and you get the promotion for your own blog.
• Turn visitors into fans, by getting the users to subscribe. The subscribe button just can’t be big enough! (I’ll make mine bigger soon).
• Most readers don’t know what RSS is - so give users a chance to subscribe by email as well.
• Remind people to subscribe after each post.
• Comment Redirect or Comment relish helps new commenters by redirecting them through to a subscriber message.

Improving conversion on your blog:

• Ask for comments
• Thank people for commenting
• Get to know your readers. Follow the links they leave and see why they like you
• Answer all questions and respond to all feedback
• Reward Good remarks, by giving them credit for their comments by way of another blog post
• Keep people involved, by commenting on others’ comments and maybe getting a plugin to receive comments by email when they are posted.
• Don’t distract users. Get the Track-backs pushed to the bottom.
• Always fight spam in the comments (at least by enabling Akismet)
• Keep it simple to comment
• Measure, Improve and Repeat

So to use the Pubcon discount code, type in jo-55220 at checkout when you register at Pubcon.com

Dixon.

I have to say it’s not with a little intrepidation  that I am letting her loose on the Interweb. It’s far too unregulated, she’s going to post things she’s going to regret, and quite frankly an 8 year old going anywhere near my web server makes me keen not to show her how to install plug-ins for a fair few years. But in the end - what am I going to do? When both my kids were born, I bought the .co.uk versions of their names, with the intention of somehow giving them the domains as presents when they were old enough. At the time I thought “old enough” would be 14-16 or so. But kids today need different skills to the ones their parents needed. They need to start young and I can’t teach things that haven’t been invented yet. So I guess all I can do is show her how WordPress and a website gives you the tools to talk to the world.

She’s been asking for me to have a web page for ages now. What scares me is just how quickly she has stopped asking questions and just started using it.

I don’t think I’ll add her site to my blogroll JUST yet though.

(Added…) I guess that to make this post useful, I should give a few ideas on how to protect an 8 year old blogger. I’d appreciate any other ideas. So far:

1. The family computer is in a family room. Keeping an eye out is easier if she’s not locked away in a bedroom.
2. I did not give her admin access - just set her up as an editor for now.
3. No FTP access!

Unfortunately, it’s based on Google’s first ever Index in 2001, which they have brought back for their 10th birthday. We were number 1-3 for about a year on Google, Lycos and Yahoo, generally sharing the results with Mark Garwell from Webplacing and Barry Lloyd from MakeMeTop.

Then after a year two things happened. The first was that our site at number one got booted from DMOZ by a zealous editor and we found out that the customers with the money weren’t looking for “search engine optimisation”, they were looking for “internet marketing consultancy” or some other term.

So where was your site ranking in 2001 on Google Matt Cutts? Go and check it out.

I’ve talked on the Future of Search before, but the world really does change quickly and to me, what has been really burning on my brain recently is just what happens when marketers are able to tap into aggregated personalized data. You may or may not have stopped to think about why Facebook is free… but here’s a three minute video which will probably put those thoughts in context. But the video is only the start of the long term vision…

The video maker makes an odd conclusion at the end, which I don’t agree with, but in any event, this is the tip of the iceburg really. What happens when the Facebook data is overlaid with data from (say) ping.fm or another service that links all your logins together, and then this data is linked with data continually transmitted back to base from (say) your web browser and overlaid again with the profiles of people going to sites tracked using and analytics system that reports back to the mother ship?

What will happen is the complete opposite of the video makers end piece. We as marketers will be able to target right down to the individual, influencing them at regular intervals through the day. You could very realistically deliver adverts to ONLY leaders of specific organisations, planting doubts in their core belief systems. Darren Brown would have a field day. Don’t believe me? Then imagine this level of influence in Derren’s hands and see how marketers of the future (if not the present) will be able to using this. This should just about convince you:

So the non-scalable part of Derren’s trick here is the amount of effort he went to in the above video to be able to do that trick. But an aggregated media database able to target you right down to your choice of passwords gives a scalable way to completely change a person’s view on almost anything.

So I do not see an explosion of consumption as the first video suggests, I see the change for this system to change advertising from charging a few pennies per thousand ad impressions, to charging a few thousand just to be able to control the messaging seen by almost a single individual.

I do not know how you can possibly regulate such an industry. Who would be able to say what was advertising and what was coersion? One is a clever profession, whilst the other is illegal in many countries. Definiing an ethical standard as an advertiser is really important here. This can be used for good - persuading Amy Winehouse to go to rehab of her own accord, or targeting would be criminals to help them change their ways. But it could also be a force for evil - getting people to gamble when they are most desprate for money - or turing an honest man into a religious fanatic or terrorist.

Or what if you used it to overthrow a government legitimately? Imagine if you could convince people that Obama was a muslim? or that the Earth was only 6,000 years old. In the face of every fibre of your being knowing these things can’t be true, I wonder how many people you could get believing such fantasies?