inter:digital strategies

Everybody seems to be writing about Twitter. I can’t decide whether it’s so big because people think it’s cute, because people think it has marketing potential, or because it’s just so popular that they want to jump on the bandwagon. Nonetheless, it seems like I’m reading something about Twitter just about every day. The Twitter “micro-blogging” phenomenon is pretty intense.

I can certainly see that it has a huge potential for marketing spontaneity: if your target market is the shopping spree/spontaneous spender type, you may have a winning possibility with Twitter. Woot! has jumped on board, and I think it’s probably got fantastic potential for them. I’m less certain how valuable it may be for others…

The characteristics Woot! has which make Twitter so useful?

• Very short term of availability. If you want to Woot, you need to know what’s up NOW.
• Very technological market segment — Woot sells a lot to gadget geeks. Twitter ALSO appeals to gadget geeks. Match made in heaven.
• Woot appeals to a sense of immediacy: if you make a decision quickly, you can get a great deal. Twitter appeals to the same sense of immediacy in human interaction, by keeping constantly updated about the activities of your Twitter friends.

There are definitely other companies who could benefit from Twitter — any business which makes heavy use of limited time offers, limited inventory sales, or daily featured items could probably make use of Twitter fairly effectively.

Outside of these? I’ve got my doubts. However, with the amount of attention it’s currently receiving in the blogosphere (and the search marketing blogosphere in particular,) it seems likely that we’ll see it applied in numerous creative manners in the near future.
It’s worth watching, at any rate. There’s no question that there will be plenty of very unique applications coming from Twitter.

Jill Whalen has a nice article at SearchEngineLand on duplicate content. Although I don’t necessarily have anything to add to the article, I think I can summarize it pretty nicely:

What Search Engines DON’T do about Duplicate Content

Search engine spider to website:

“Hi! It looks like you’ve got two copies of the same document here! Well, humph. I’m not going to index EITHER of them and I’m going to dock your rankings while I’m at it!”

What Search Engines DO about Duplicate Content

Search engine spider to website:

“Hi! It looks like you’ve got two copies of the same document here! Well, it looks like this one is the more original, so I’m just going to try and index it. I might get confused, though, and sometimes try and serve up results for the other page.”

This applies to any duplicated documents — whether it’s multiple addresses for a document on your own site or a document which appears on several different websites. The search engine wants to pick one copy to point people towards, and they’ll try and pick whichever is most original.

The “penalty” that you’ll see is actually the fact that a) some copies of the page may be missing, b) search engines may not pick the version of the page which you want them to, and c) if you’re syndicating material, they might pick a copy on somebody else’s website. The fact that an off-site copy gets picked up ahead of yours isn’t necessarily a bad thing, however, since that copy may be on a site with more authority and still drive traffic and reputation to you.

So, there it is. Duplicate content in a nutshell.

Spotplex is an interesting idea. You install their code, and they’ll track how often your blog (in general) and our blog posts (in specific) are viewed.

It’s similar to MyBlogLog, in that it tracks visits to your site. It’s like Technorati, in that it provides ranking of blogs on the basis of popularity and provides links to current and popular blog posts.

It looks interesting — it’s in Beta right now, but I’ve requested an invitation — see what happens and what I can learn!

As a note, the only reason I’ve noted this is because it’s currently at the top of Alexa’s movers and shakers list, having shot up to 5,969 today from a previous ranking of 247,451. On Technorati’s Where’s the Fire, it’s been
described as a “Trafficracy.”

From Spotplex:

Spotplex provides internet users with real-time ranking of blog articles based on actual impression count.

In other words, you can find what is the hot news today, this week, or this month in real time at Spotplex. This is not a list of articles people recommended or voted for, but a list of articles read most in a given timeframe.

It’ll be interesting to see how this works. I feel there’s some risk that what will essentially happen is that the site will show most prominently whatever article is currently being Dugg, Slashdotted, or otherwise barraged by traffic from having gained prominence in one of the other major social aggregators. Still, I do like the absence of a visible vote/bury option: it’s just traffic.

In short: it’s not whether people liked your story — just whether they visited it. (Whether this is a good thing or a bad thing is open for debate.)