Forbes reports that MySpace feted marketing and PR types after the release of new data that suggests that marketing dollars spend on MySpace go far. *Really* far. All because of the power of word of mouth.

Wheeee.

Super low acquisition costs are being tossed around, with Electronic Arts used as a model — something in the range of 0.30-0.40 cents per customer, because although they actually spent over a dollar per customer, all of those individuals told their *friends*, some of whom now expressed a desire to purchase said game. If their numbers are to believed, almost four times as many “friends” who were never exposed to the advertising now wanted to buy said game, thanks, we presume to word of mouth buzz.

Sounds good, but I have a few questions / issues.

1. The study was produced *by* MySpace: So of course its going to be a positive study, with great results. We should all take it with a grain of salt (as I know you all are already doing).

2. We need independent confirmation of these results: Can the results be replicated if it was tracked and followed by an independent firm on MySpace? Would MySpace ever allow marketing firms this level of access to create their own set of metrics?

3. Operationability of tracking users? How are these users tracked? How do we know that there was a direct connection between individuals exposed to advertising to individuals who weren’t (but still wanted to buy?)

4. Potential customers does not equal actual customers: You cannot talk about return on investment with *potential* customers. You have to follow them all the way to check out, and even then, a great study would follow up on purchases to see how many returned the game. Customers with an intent to purchase might be different in their ability to complete a sale with respect to direct advertising and word of mouth. Would those directly exposed to ads be more likely to purchase? Or would those who were getting “buzzed”? (If you could in fact prove that they were the recipient of said buzz)

I think it makes a great deal of intuitive sense that word of mouth marketing ought to work. It ought to have lower acquisition costs. Its message should spread, and it should spread quickly. And in environments of highly networked individuals, its an attractive thought that word of mouth marketing is an idea whose time has come.

But am I the only person who is wondering about this particular study — funded and commissioned *by* MySpace *about* marketing in MySpace?

• 5 Ways RSS Improves ROI
  Nice break down in a way that you could explain to your boss (or 10 year old, for that matter). Points one and two are the same, but for its importance, its worth repeating. Courtesy of Convesation Marketing.
  (tags: conversationmarketing roi rss)
• 9rules Closing Down Submissions — For Now
  Interesting issue of scale here. Last submission round was about 1100 submissions, which required a huge number of man hours to sort through. How many will their next round accumulate? And is there a way to make sure they don’t miss any good blogs?
  (tags: scale networks blog 9rules)
• Is This Radical Transparency?
  Or a lazy appeal to the masses? I mean, come on. Deciding on whether a tech journalist gets into a tech conference based on a poll? Is that radical transparency?
  (tags: notfunny funny jeffandquist radicaltransparency wired)
• Wikipedia As Citizen Journalism
  The Virginia Tech Massacre as a case study for citizen journalism. Pretty powerful stuff, and it all makes percfect sense. After all, who is going to be faster than “bloggers” at getting information out?
  (tags: virginiatech citizenjournalism wiki nytimes wikipedia)

So you may or may not have heard that MySpace stopped Photobucket from being able to embed its video into MySpace accounts. It was hailed as yet another way for Rupert to flex his MySpace muscle, and I was one of a few bloggers wondering whether this wasn’t just an elaborate sabre rattling manoever to get Photobucket to start paying its way into MySpace’s walled garden.

Seems like I may have been right.

Photobucket and MySpace are now fast friends, as detailed on the Photobucket blog, where a nice, but the vague post intimates that all is well, and they’ve sorted out their differences. I wonder if it was over a glass of milk and cookies. Anyway, as Valleywag reports, the juiciest details haven’t yet been revealed, such as what the terms of the agreement was.

• Is Photobucket indeed paying for the privilege of having its plugin being available to MySpace?
• Will we see other plugin users shut off while private “negotiations” take place?
• Perhaps they’ve reached an understanding that Photobucket is to never, under any circumstances, to participate in marketing strategies that involves plugins / mashups — unless MySpace gets a healthy cut?

What’s also of some passing interest is that the original post on the Photobucket blog, decrying MySpace’s pulling the plug on Photobucket’s imbeded videos — you know, the one advocating Photobucket users vote with their feet and consider leaving MySpace?

That original post is gone. It should have been in and around April 12

[correction! It exists over here, and clearly isn’t deleted, but not simply not available by going to the blog’s url]

A bit of a blogging faux-pas, as I understand it, as there’s now no ongoing record of the events that have transpired. From Photobucket’s point of view, they never got upset at the original point of contention (which was a big issue), and neither did they ask their users to consider moving their social networking habits.

Oh well.

Perhaps obviating history was part of Rupert’s agreement anyway. ;)

In spite of the somewhat universal derision that PayPerPost gets in some blogging circles, it continues to expand and grow in its own way; earlier yesterday, there was news leaked to TechCrunch that it was acquiring Zoodooka, a blog-to-email service with about 10 000 subscribers.  Look for PayPerPost to cross market its services to those 10 000 subscribers, and as Mike also chimes in, look for PayPerPost to perhaps set up different pay scales for blogs that use the blog-to-email service.

While there’s no question that paying for posts does generate buzz, its also important to remember that using a service like pay per post is also an expedient way of purchasing links.  With a blog-to-email service, not only would advertisers have the ability to buy targeted links on a blog, but they’ll also get the chance to branch out into email marketing (in a fashion) in a two-for-one type of deal.  That is, advertisers who sign up with bloggers who are using Zoodooka will get the post “pushed” to those bloggers subscribers by email — in addition to the usual post that resides on their post.

For all those bloggers who are in the habit of doing so, you can pooh-pooh the paid posting movement all you like, but it definitely fills a niche: for bloggers who don’t mind ceding control of their posts if advertisers pay for it, and for advertisers who are looking to purchase buzz and links in wholesale fashion.  Furthermore, with purchases like Zoodooka, it looks like its not going away either.  Furthermore, rumour has it that Zodooka isn’t going to be PayPerPost’s only acquisition.  There has been some skuttlebut, for example, that it is looking to purchase Dogpile.

Well, not in as many words. But as a follow up to Microsoft’s contracts stipulating that new PC’s to be sold in 2008 will *only* be allowed to ship with Vista, it seems like Dell is intent on making IdeaStorm more than a pretty “Digg Clone”. Ideastorm, for those not following the story, is a relatively recent site which aims to allow Dell’s users to vote up or down, pertinent customer service issues. One popular issue is to have pre-installed Linux.

The issue around not eliminating XP? Almost 13 000 votes.

Well, its one thing having a forum to listen to customer complaints, and its another thing to act on them. Dell, much to its credit, is acting based on their customer’s opinions. In response to the 13 000 votes, Dell is keeping XP as an option on new PC’s in 2008, it would offer the operating on a few models of Inspiron notebooks and two Dimenson desktop PC’s [update: looks like this is for customers in the US only].

Its unclear exactly how this will jive with Microsoft, as my prior understanding was that it was written into their contracts with PC makers that Vista would ship with new PC’s in the next year. Or, whether, as some commenters had mentioned in a prior post, that this was all a smokescreen on behalf of Microsoft in the first place. I think if its the latter, we should see an announcement world wide and in more than one vendor. If we don’t, it may just be the first example of Dell having the stones to stand up to Redmond — on behalf of its customer’s no less.

You might have preconceived notions about Dell’s hardware (as I have), but you’ve got to give them credit to keeping an open mind by not only implementing some crowdsourcing techniques, but actually acting on it in the face that these notions “might” seem counterintuitive. Case in point, a research vice present at Gartner was “baffled” as users usually want the “latest and greatest”. Which is a funny statement, given the way that Vista has been roundly avoided by the online community at large.

Scoble asks an interesting question: “How much video content is too much video content?” I’ve got a better question — who has the time to watch that much, if any, online video? And this is a question for bloggers now who have an interest in the technology part of the blogosphere.

My own prejudice is that I don’t have time for podcasts or video logging or what have you, if only because they take *so* long to digest. Yes, it really is a “google” world we’re living in when I don’t have 15 minutes to watch a video. But while you’re watching that 15 minutes of video, no matter how interesting it is, you can’t do anything else. Its totally non-asynchronous (synchronous, then?). I’d rather be blogging.

I’ll give it up to Scoble — its a lot of hard work putting together videos, what with all the shooting and the editing. But does anyone really watch *all* that stuff? Does it all fall into “milf“wilf time?

Interesting news out of a security conference in Western Canada. Apparently someone has actually hacked a Macbook through a zero-day security hole. Yes, we could insert lots of cheering and posturing on behalf of Micrsofies everywhere. While I don’t pretend to be a security expert, from what I read it looks like we should temper our feelings of schadenfreude with the following facts:

1. the rules had to be relaxed before the hack was made — because no one was able to accomplish it with the prior set of rules

2. the hack doesn’t grant root access

3. the hack exploited vulnerability in Safari, not OS X

Furthermore, while the contestant won himself a free macbook, the facts remain: although there are only a tiny percentage of macs that comprise the world’s computer market, this still represents millions of PCs. Millions of PCs where there hasn’t yet been a major, real, publicized security breach.

I might be critical of Apple, but it looks like there are some legitimate caveats to this “Apple Hax0r’d FTW!”