The one cautionary note a Forrester analyst added to the release was that many retailers are apparently planning to advertise more in social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook, even though it’s “still unproven how such sites might build direct revenue for retailers” (paraphrased).

I’d note that many of us in internet marketing have identified fairly significant promotional potential in social media sites, and that some degrees of integration with them are possible in many cases without incurring advertising costs — so, it may be that judicious campaigns should still be attempted, even if there is not a lot of research evidence indicating good ROI. Just as with any promotional campaigns, it’s important to try to measure results as you go, and adjust as indicated.

Some companies’ legal departments think that blogging is just too risky to allow, and that it’s not worth the time and administrative headache to try to manage. The problem that I see with this is that it causes a company to be stuck in a Business 1.0 world of the past, disallowing the grass-roots-level public relations that employees can provide — blogging allows a big corporation to have a human face and can help explain and communicate what the company is up to. (more…)

This is great news, and I think it could become an overnight major competitor to YouTube — having both types of media available via one site/service makes for a lot of convenience.

Though, people may not realize that it’s already been possible to a small degree, if you upload an animated GIF to Flickr (see this example where I uploaded an animated sequence of a glider’s movement from Conway’s Game of Life).

I’m still adjusting to the radical time zone twist from over here — it’s currently about 2:20 pm Tuesday here at the office, while it’s about 7:20 pm Monday back in the Central time zone in the US. So, I’m responding to emails and such a bit later in the day than I normally do.

If you want to see some of the beautiful sites I’ve been seeing while over here, keep checking back at my Flickr New Zealand Photos album which I’ll be updating consistently.

Many thanks to all of you who voted for it! (more…)

Stephan Spencer has been nominated for two articles he wrote, and I’ve been nominated for one as well:

• SEO category
• Analytics category
• Local Search category

I hope you’ll take a few moments to vote. There are a whole lot of great articles listed there that are well worth reading.

Even before the holiday vacation hit for me, I’d gone pretty silent/infrequent with my postings since I was heavily focused upon helping our major online retailer clients get shipshape for all the Cyber Mondays and we made little tweaks to help them maintain their juice as needed. (Oh, yeah — we were also targeted here by some malicious hacker, but that proved to be mostly an annoyance and it’s not really why I’d slowed down postings. Thanks to all of you who sent us notes of encouragement and offers to assist with that, btw!)

While the business sections of the newspapers have subsequently reported a mediocre-to-bad holiday season for retail sales at the end of 2007, it looked quite different from the stats that we watched pouring through our many servers for our GravityStream clients.

I’m pleased to report that this holiday season was very sunny for the majority of our GravityStream installations, and our automated SEO service made a significant difference for the retailers using us, resulting in many millions of dollars in sales. I’ll check and see if I can later circle back and share some actual performance figures.

I’m looking forward to this new year, and I’m now revving back up to blogging and article writing and such along with the usual analytic/consulting work I do behind the scenes at Netconcepts along with fantastic teams of other pros within our company. In the near term here on Natural Search Blog, I expect to write a bit about future developments I foresee happening in the search space — my little contribution to the many 2008 predictions that are globbing about in the blogosphere.

Stay tuned!

Software security company Sunbelt blogged about how the attack was generated: a network of spambots apparently added links into blog comments and forums pointing to the bad sites over a period of months in some cases, enabling those sites to achieve fair rankings in search engine result pages for a great many potential keyword search combinations. The pages either contained iframes which attempted to load malware onto visitors machines or perhaps they began redirecting to the sites containing malware at some point after achieving rankings. Sunbelt provided interesting screenshots of the SERPs in Google:

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And also showed some screenshots of some of the keyword-stuffed pages which apparently got indexed:

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I think it’s not at all a coincidence

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This is an interesting development…

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Spock is one of a new breed of people search engines which pulls data in from a variety of online sources including MySpace, LinkedIn, My Yahoo!, Wikipedia, company websites, blogs, and other sources to compose these composite profiles which include photos, descriptions, links to people related to the person in question, and tag lists of common keywords. Check out this search I did for “Danny Sullivan”:

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And, here’s the profile Spock generated for the search engine marketing “Danny Sullivan”:

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This automatic generation of profiles from other data sources, similar to a meta search engine, is not all that new, of course - ZabaSearch has been touted for doing similar stuff to compose info on people out of various public records, sort of like a poor man’s background search. And, ZoomInfo has worked to build a directory of searchable business profiles of individuals. IceRocket also used to have a metasearch engine that pulled in data from a handful of various singles/personals sites.

What makes Spock a bit different is how they’re actively composing these profiles from sources that really haven’t been associated with one another previously, and making them publicly available, for “free” (eventually paid for by ad revenue, of course). While the general public likely hasn’t been aware of it, the CIA or NSA has actually also been working on a similar sort of search engine system which automatically composes secret dossiers of information on individuals from a multitude of sources including credit card information, criminal databases, as well as many of the same online sources used by these web services like ZabaSearch, ZoomInfo, and Spock.

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