The BuzZzZ…Word On The Street 4.17.07

Written by Pablo Palatnik on April 18, 2007

*Google/Double Click Buy-Out. Did you know Google bought out the company Double Click? I thought so. It’s all over the place and STILL the big news around the industry. Many believe this creates a very big conflict of interest considering Double Clicks owns Performics, one of the largest search engine marketing firms. Google owning the largest SEO company a conflict an interest?

Performics client roster (according to search engine journal) include: America Online, Blair Corp., Bose, Cingular, CompUSA, Eddie Bauer, Fairmont Hotels, HP Shopping, J. Jill, Jos. A. Banks, Kohl’s, L.L. Bean, Motorola, OfficeMax, PC Connection, RedEnvelope, My Sony, Quickbooks, Staples, Verizon Wireless, and Wyndham Hotels.

Personally, If Google is wise about this, sells Performics, or at the very least sells the SEO/SEM part of the company. No one search engine should own a search engine marketing firm…let’s call it search engine ethics 101.

*WhoIsSick.org. This is actually a really cool tool Google launched. If you have a stomach virus, headache, cold, or anything you worry about being contagious in your area, Google has now a tool that can show you statistics about the percentage of people who have your same “virus’” or local sickness. Still in Beta.

*Yahoo CheckOut. Come on, did you not expect anything out of Yahoo! When Google came out with Google Checkout? Yahoo Teamed up with merchant monster PayPal to start their own Checkout system which will actually be displayed in Yahoo’s sponsored results.

*Microsoft PowerPoint..Meet Your Match. Need online presentations for your business? Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt is reported saying Google’s software (web based, of course) will enable meeting presentations online. Will this replace PowerPoint? Not yet.

ALERT: Google Acquisition of Performics/Double Click at $3.1 Billion Cash

Written by Pablo Palatnik on April 14, 2007

I’m sure you’ve already heard about this. I was actually trying to follow this story since Microsoft was chasing this acquisition but I guess its official…Google will buy out Double Click at an astonishing 3.1 billion dollars CASH. WOW.

For those of you who don’t know what/who DoubleClick is/are:
“DoubleClick enables agencies, marketers and publishers to work together successfully and profit from their digital marketing investments. Its focus on innovation, reliability and insight enables clients to improve productivity and results.

Since 1996, DoubleClick has empowered the original thinkers and leaders in the digital advertising industry to deliver on the promise of the rich possibilities of our medium. Today, the company’s DART and Performics divisions power the online advertising marketplace. Tomorrow, we will continue to enable clients to profit from opportunities across all digital advertising channels as consumers worldwide embrace them.”

PepperJam’s Kris Jones has a really good blog about this HERE. I agree with him 100% on his opinion about everything he mentioned on his post about 1- Microsoft to make a quick move before it becomes an “old software” company and 2- The argument about Google and its current quest to take over the internet!

In the Search Engine Journal, I believe it was a post by Cumbrowski; a fake press release is out in THIS LINK about Google purchasing the internet in 2017. As funny and crazy as that sounds, every new Google acquisition is more power to the beast.

This change can literally change the landscape for affiliate marketing and other aspects of search, exactly how? What do you guys think? This is actually scary if you ask me. No one single corporation should have such dominance online.

Yahoo! to be purchased soon?…

epiTUNES.com- Next In Music Social Media?

Written by Pablo Palatnik on April 13, 2007

One of my passions in life and something I couldn’t live without is, of course, music. One site to be on the look out for in the near future is epiTUNES.com.

As social media grows, it will be divided more and more into their own niches as we’ve seen with a couple break outs already. Myspace, being the largest social media website, is in fact the largest medium to bring bands and fans together on the internet right now.

One website that really caught my attention is epiTUNES.com. This site is exactly what both bands and fans can feed each other of. It’s really cool what you can actually do and I don’t want to get into everything so you can check it out for yourself and I just signed myself up for an account and got this confirmation email:

———————————————————–
WELCOME TO EPITUNES
“Where it’s all about the music”
epiTUNES is a local music portal that encompasses searchable directories, podcasts, online radio, socializing, and much more.
Your username is: *******
Your password is: *******

Some of the great features you’ll enjoy include:
• Search for venues near you, find out who’s playing, listen to their music and check out their epiTUNES artist page.
• Invite other epiTUNES friends to shows you’ll be attending.
• Receive band alerts when a particular band is coming to town.
• Build your own customized epiTUNES page and let others know about you. Share your photos, musical tastes and more.
• Write reviews of bands you’ve seen and venues that you’ve been to.
• Receive recommendations of artists playing around town that fit your musical preferences.
• Discover new music!
• …and much more!
———————————————————————————–

1.Toren, why did you start epiTUNES?

T: The idea for epiTUNES is something I’ve been kicking around for years. There has never been a good way to find bands playing live locally. It’s always bugged me when I’d go to a show for some new band and they ended up sucking or worse I missed a gig of a band I ended up loving just because at that point in time I didn’t know what they sounded like or where and when they were playing.

It used to be that the only way to find who was playing where was to pick up the local independent paper and thumb through all the ads, maybe read a preview for one or two bands and hope when you went their show they didn’t suck. It seemed obvious with the Internet there should be a way to preview a band before you went out and saw them but every site out there pretty much just replicated the newspaper experience, static listings with maybe a review.

It was nearly impossible for the average music fan to find good bands unless they had already made it big on radio. When Myspace first came on the scene I figured they were finally the solution but the reality is it is still a serious pain to discover new music there. Sure sometimes you get lucky when some band spams you and they are actually good but there isn’t any targeting or personalization.

That’s why we went ahead and launched epiTUNES. On epiTUNES a fan can browse upcoming events, venues, artists, or songs all of which can be sorted by city and genre. Most importantly all you have to do is click the listen button next to each listing to hear exactly what the artist or band sounds like.

Our motto is “It’s all about the music” and that is truly how we operate. We’re making it easy for fans to discover new music based on what they like and for artists and venues to market their music and shows to their existing fans and potential new fans without spamming the hell out of everyone.

2. What is the future of epiTUNES.com from where it stands right now?

T: epiTUNES launched its beta site August 31, 2006 however we are just beginning to actually market it to the general public. We’re still rolling out new features on a weekly basis and just recently expanded our listings to include venues worldwide. We also have a number of major new upgrades that will be rolling out in the next two months.

Right now we’re working with a number of labels as well as artist management teams to expand the number of artists on the site. We’re also working directly with venues to manage their event calendars and help promote their shows. One of the features that we’re about to launch that we’re really excited about is online ticketing. Venues and artists will be able to sell tickets directly from their epiTUNES profiles.

To this point we have been 100% self funded but we are now open to outside funding so we can expand quickly. The whole music industry is in a state of major transition. For the first time ever artists can be really successful without signing with a major label but it is hard work. Touring and selling merchandise is where the future lies for most bands but without a vibrant live music scene it won’t happen. We’re trying to help build that music scene by providing tools for artists, venues, and fans to easily connect and spread the word about good music no matter what genre.

3. How many members does epiTUNES.com currently have and what is projected in the next coming months?

T: We have a little over 500 artists/bands currently, covering a wide spectrum of talent including major label artists like Massive Attack, hot new artists like Silversun Pickups, Hello Operator, and Forward Russia, veteran touring bands like Slightly Stoopid, Pepper, and Flogging Molly, and local talent that you might otherwise never hear but should like JP Fitting, Romance, and Carmen Chiles.

4. From the members that are signed up right now, what is the demographic that is attracting epituners?

T: Our membership is actually pretty diverse because we have artists that span the musical spectrum from rap to classical, modern rock to blues and everything in between. As one would expect the 20 something demo is the most highly populated but it is by no means their exclusive domain.

5. What is epiTUNES.com currently working on? (projects, plans, etc..)

T: As I mentioned we’re about to launch an online ticketing solution for venues and artists to sell tickets directly from their profile pages. We’re also going to be launching online stores for selling band merchandise and are in talks with several companies about offering direct song and album downloads for sale. Right now artists that sell music through iTunes and Amazon have their albums automatically linked to their profile pages but we also want to offer bands the option of selling MP3s directly on the site.

We already recommend artists and shows to members based on their ratings of songs and artists on epiTUNES. Whenever a member logs into the site their latest recommendations are waiting for them. Those personalization features are getting incorporated into a number of our new features so stay tuned for some big announcements in the next few months on that front.

We currently offer artists and venues widgets that automatically update their calendars on all their other web sites including MySpace whenever they add a new show on www.epiTUNES.com. That has proven to be a great time saver for bands and venues. We’re going to be launching a number of new widgets shortly that will add additional functionality on members, artists, and venues sites.

We’re also expanding our podcasting efforts. We currently have a Best of the Week Live Music Guide podcast highlighting top shows taking place each week around the country. We also have a weekly podcast that focuses just on the LA/Orange County music scene. We’re going to be adding more localized BOTW podcasts and expand our interview podcasts as well.

In all honesty we have so many things in the works you could write a book but I think it would be far more interesting to just keep coming back to www.epiTUNES.com yourself to see the latest and greatest .

Digging For Diggs

Written by Pablo Palatnik on April 12, 2007

I did a small “case study” or project I guess you can call it from all the data and info I read about or people tell me about Digg.

I submitted various stories to Digg, Reddit, Netscape and had different result with each of the bookmarks depending on the stories of course. I chose to only focus on Digg this time and see what results I can get. I was never too successful with Digg but never played around with it too much either.

If you guys read the interview I had with Neil Patel, he said something that can really sum up the results you will get when using the social bookmarks for traffic, “You should focus on the social site that your target audience hangs out at. If your website is related to mortgages then you probably don’t want to target tech related social sites.”

There are several things you have to understand to be successful in Digg.
1-You need to request friends on Digg and be active. If you don’t Digg stories, it’s hard that they will Digg yours as well.
2-You need friends who have a Digg account so when you launch your story, they can help you Digg, and the quicker you can get Diggs at the moment of submission, the more chances you have of hitting the homepage or at least just doing well traffic wise.
3-Understand the demographic!

Digg Demographic:
-12 & up
-Techies, Political, Entertainment

Let’s look at this moments top stories to get a quick idea:
-The 25 Best Beers In America
-Sony: 1,000,000:1 OLED TV on sale in 2007
-Bush to extend war tours for ALL soldiers?
-Top 7 Tower Defense Flash Games

Here are my results from the past 3 days from stories submitted:

-Google Launches Free 411 Service…Diggs: 3 Traffic: N/A not much at all really.

-X-Box Gamers Get Message With IM Diggs: 21 Traffic: 28 Visits

-28 Facts & Reasons Why The Apple iMac Rocks! Diggs: 24 Traffic: 118 Visits

**Keep In Mind: Some of the Diggs were “friendly Diggs”