David Dalka mentioned on his blog that folks at SES Chicago 2007 were discussing video marketing’s potential for marketing boring products (today!). I was immediately reminded of the Howie Hard Drive videos. Even though data security is not the sexiest of topics, the video is a solid example of creating buzz for boring products.

I wrote short list of (what I consider) success factors for businesses creating viral videos as sales tools. Please feel free to debate these or add your own in the comments.

Many bloggers already currently optimize their RSS feed to encourage feed discovery, post reading, or click-throughs back to site. But contextual feed readers like BlogRovr open up completely new possibilities for feed reader optimization.

What is Contextual Feed Reader Optimization?

I would define contextual feed reader optimization as optimizing your blog, RSS feed, and blog posts, so that your blog posts display to BlogRovr users when they browse contextually-relevant web pages.

Just to recap, BlogRovr is a feed reader that analyzes the webpage you are currently viewing, and then displays a list of relevant blog posts from feeds that you already subscribe to.

Embeddable videos include YouTube, Google Video, Metacafe, Revver and Vimeo. Pownce has just added additional customization options, too. Read a good review of these new Pownce updates at Jeffro 2pt0.
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Look me up on Pownce @
http://pownce.com/socialmedia
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Hiitch is a desktop social networking platform. It’s open source. You can actually download the source and create you own private social network with others you invite.

I’m still new to Hiitch so I’m still exploring its functionality, but it looks very exciting. I will definitely post updates as I get more accustomed with Hiitch’s social networking functions and others features.

Pali Capital considers August 17, 2007 a monumental day for social networking and Myspace in particular, as Coke paid $1 million to have a Coke-branded MySpace home page for that entire day.

MySpace and Coca-Cola have in fact struck up a larger advertising deal that involves targeted advertising on all MySpace-produced MySpace pages (they won’t be advertising on pages that contain user-generated content.)

How was MySpace able to gain the confidence of major advertisers?
Let’s review the recent chain of events:

1. MySpace quietly added a bunch of unoriginal content sections that already exist on a number of other websites. (Ringtones, music videos, chat rooms, news, weather, horoscopes, etc.)

Round up of SMO coverage from the San Jose SES conference taken from unofficial SEO blog. SMO Speakers at SES included:

• Neil Patel, Co-founder, ACS
• Rand Fishkin, CEO, SEOMoz
• Todd Malicoat, Independent Search Engine Marketing Consultant, stuntdubl

Todd Malicoat gave examples for types of linkbaiting hooks:

• attack
• humor
• contrarian (contrary opinion)
• news
• resource
• ego
• picture/movie

He also listed top title ideas and other social media optimization tips.

Rand Fishkin explained social media marketing and said that the social media marketing goal is to build friends and relationships in the blogosphere and at online social sites. Your target social media marketing audience is not same demographic as your customers.

What is ShiftSpace?

This is one of the most interesting applications of social network that I’ve seen in a while. Instead of operating on a completely separate domain, like MySpace, ShiftSpace allows the entire internet to be included in the landscape that forms the ShiftSpace network. This means that ShiftSpace users can interact in real ways with existing viewpoints, discussions, and events that are actually occurring throughout the world. This makes ShiftSpace more relevant than any closed system could be.

Nic at Marketing Neophyte just posted the second episode of Howie Hard Drive. Howie seems to be fairly well-intentioned but unfortunately lands himself in bad situations.

This video is a great example of using buzz marketing for boring products. In fact, I’ve never empathized with a 500gb hard drive on such a deep level. Nic, please let us know how this campaign progresses.

Visit the Howie Hard Drive website.

Chrysi Philalithes published a social media strategy article on promoting vs participating.

Abbey Klaassen writes about marketers using social networks for CRM instead of ads. CRM & social networks seem like a perfect match.

The Second Life Insider reported today that the Second Life grid was experiencing large problems:

At 8:00AM SLT (US Pacific) this-morning, with 37,419 users logged into the Second Life grid, something began to go wrong. Reports began coming in of teleportation problems, difficulties accessing inventory, search failures, and difficulties logging in.

In a recent update, Linden Labs claims to have solves the issues.