Alert Blog Reviews

Back in April, Google added a Monetize tab within Blogger to help its users earn money from AdSense on their site and in their feeds. Now they’re adding a new feature to that stable— Amazon Associates integration . We’re used to hearing about the two companies as “frenemies” in the emerging eBook market—but hey, if cooperation makes things easier for users (and make the users and Amazon a buck), it’s definitely a good thing, right? You’ve always been able to use Amazon Associates “manually” in a Blogger blog, but now there are options to make it fast and easy to use from right inside Blogger. (And I’m pretty jealous.) The above screen shows the default. Once you set up or enter your Associates ID, you’re given the option to add the Amazon Product Finder to the Edit and Compose New Post pages. The finder not only locates products within the Amazon store: but also inserts the kind of link you want into your blog post: Though I”m not sure what pushed them to do this, this is a good move for Google, but the clear winners here are Blogger users—and Amazon. What do you think? Why did Google and Amazon partner like this? What’s Google getting out of the deal?

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Google’s Blogger Integrates with Amazon Associates

The results are in: Cyber Monday (and Black Friday) = success ! The numbers are actually up from last year, despite the state the economy is still in. And according to Hitwise, social sites helped to drive sales. (Yeah, FOR REAL.) Their data shows that not only was US traffic up to social sites over the holiday weekend, but downstream traffic to online retailers was also up—especially to Amazon (Cyber Monday winner), Wal-Mart (Black Friday winner), Target, Best Buy and Toys R Us. Wal-Mart also saw the highest increase in downstream traffic from Twitter (among the Retail 500 that Hitwise tracks). However, let me just pull out my favorite wet blanket—sort of. Let’s see, how can I put this? #1—Cyber Monday is a made-up holiday. Nobody outside of Internet marketing/retailing has ever heard of it and it has nothing to do with their shopping patterns. However, there’s good news here, too. We are a nation (world?) of procrastinators—and another day is actually the biggest (revenue-wise) online shopping day of the year—and it’s yet to come . The thinking behind Cyber Monday, created in 2005, was that workers returning from their Thanksgiving holiday would use the Internet to do a lot of their holiday shopping. (At work? Don’t they have the Internet at home, where they have all those glossy ads from stores to compare prices? Were they too lazy/agoraphobic to go out on Black Friday? (Hey, no worries, me too.) Clearly, the logic behind this “holiday” was always flawed.) Two years ago, it was “ Green Monday ” (although now there seems to be some confusion as to whether that label applies to the first or second Monday in December)—with $881M in online sales (versus $733 on Cyber Monday, tied for tenth among the big online sales days in 2007). Last year, it was the day after Green Monday, with $887M (versus $846M on Cyber Monday)—but with this year’s Cyber Monday total the same as last year’s highest sales day (and last year’s highest sales day only a 1% increase over the year before), could we hope for anything higher?

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Social Sites Help eCommerce (and Your Annual Reality Check)

In a word: branding. As a brand, both through their own efforts and through sheer luck, Google has been able to position itself as the #1 online brand in the US according to Forrester Research . Others among the top ten, including Yahoo, Amazon, Facebook and Microsoft, have generated some of the same emotional responses from their fans. The top ten brands (note that respondents selected two from a list): Since 2007, MySpace suffered a precipitous fall in brand favoritism. Yahoo and eBay also suffered. Amazon saw sufficient growth to move from distant third to nearly tied for second; Google grew significantly in its #1 spot. Facebook and YouTube (and what the crap, Sony?) joined the list. Interestingly, both Microsoft and Apple saw small growth over that time. So what qualities made these online brands stand out in respondents’ minds? Forrester points out that we might expect attributes like prestige, popularity, speed and “the social.” And we’d be wrong. Interestingly, some of the same characteristics that associate well with offline brands: trustworthiness, helpfulness and relevance to the consumer were the top-named attributes of these brands. (In case you’re wondering, Amazon was voted most trustworthy, Google most helpful and Yahoo, Amazon, Facebook, eBay and Microsoft most relevant.) There is one point that the report makes that I don’t know if I buy: Yahoo! gets it right with “Y!ou” re-positioning. Yahoo!’s brand revitalization strategy is right on target, taking rivals on directly and clarifying its fuzzy image. Its core focus is on “relevance,” a top-tier attribute that currently doesn’t have a clear online leader. Yahoo! rivals Facebook and Microsoft show some traction here, but relevance is a relative weakness for Google. Yahoo!’s new $100-million advertising effort also highlights “fun,” another critical attribute where Google comes up short. To drive its global revitalization, Yahoo!’s new CMO brought in Landor Associates and Goodby, Silverstein & Partners to work with its main agency, Ogilvy & Mather. It launched its campaign with big TV and outdoor buys to “root the brand position.” It is following this with multichannel messaging — including explainers on its own site — around product proof points. I agree that Yahoo’s image had grown fuzzy and that taking on its rivals directly would be helpful, but are we thinking about the same campaign? Has there been more to the campaign than that one cringe-worthy commercial? (Because seriously, I wince every time I come across it on a Yahoo property.) It didn’t say “fun” to me (well, I guess it did, just not that “fun” had anything to do with online) and it definitely didn’t clarify their brand image. (How is emphasizing that “we’re as diverse as every single human on the earth—I mean, we’re just like you!” clarifying anything?) I guess we’ll have to see the “explainers” and “product proof points” to see if the rest of the campaign is effective. But so far, I’m not buying it—especially not when Yahoo’s brand has taken a hit in not only this survey, but others that correlate directly with the campaign timeline . What do you think? How have these brands acquired these attributes? Is Yahoo repositioning itself to take on more favorable attributes?

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Why People Love Google