Graffiti Wall and the “Addicted To…” series aren’t the most popular apps in existence – I’ve been asked to become a zombie or vampire far more often than I’ve been bothered by anything having to do with them.  Still, they boast some impressive user counts – there are 300,000 of the “daily active” variety for Graffiti Wall alone, according to company stats – so the development is rather important.

Initial sponsors include HP and Wacom, and Nick O’Neill writes, “One of the main issues facing large Facebook developers is the difficulty to connect with the companies (and brands) best fit to integrate advertising campaigns into applications.  Federated Media will help bridge this gap for larger application developers and existing Federated Media partners.”

O’Neill also notes, “Federated Media is now the largest advertising network to join the Facebook platform.  This is a monumental step that will surely legitimize the platform’s potential.”

It’s worth pointing out, as well, that there doesn’t seem to be anything about the Federated Media deal that would either offend privacy advocates or annoy Facebook’s users.

It’s not that eBay is dying – far, far from it.  eBay’s just not the wunderkind that it once was, and in an interview with Julie Sloane, the company’s spokesman acknowledged, “About a year ago, the leadership of the marketplace business got together and took a hard look at what had been a successful business for 11 years.  The (buying) experience hadn’t kept up with what people expect when they go online.”

So eBay introduced a host of upgrades that were intended to enhance users’ experiences and keep them interested.  The company’s also planning long-term – in the past three months, we’ve seen it acquire a German auction management software company and talk about moving into Singapore and the rest of Southeast Asia.

These efforts may not have paid off yet – Compete statistics show an up-and-down rollercoaster that doesn’t follow any clear pattern.  Still, eBay’s currently up 2.2 percent for the month, and 2.5 percent for the year, so it would appear that the company’s doing something right.

A glance at eBay’s stock is less encouraging, but still lands us in a “wait and see” mode.

The company is scheduled to start working with officers from Europol next month and has begun training officers at Interpol in forensic computing and online tracking. Microsoft has had employees in Nigeria attempting to go after 419 scammers.

Microsoft’s chief security advisor, Roger Halbheer said the company has had a two-year relationship with Nigeria. "The police have had major success in arrests in Nigeria after a crackdown. The government was concerned about people’s perception of Nigeria because of the criminals and that this would affect the ability to attract foreign investment, "he told vnunet.com.

After the crack down the Nigeria Economic and Financial Crime Commission was broadened to allow the prosecution of online financial crime. Microsoft offered training and software to follow offenders.

Halbheer said the co-operation only goes so far and rumors of back doors in Microsoft’s software that could be used by government agencies track computer activity were proven false.

"As part of our Golden security program governments get access to our source code. The Russian government certifies our code, and you can bet they’d be looking for a back door," Halbheer said.

Participate appropriately, and your company will find "friends" interested in what you have to say (and sell). Cross the line and the mob may turn on you and reject your message. In this session you’ll learn to network and participate in an acceptable and effective manner.

Moderator: Danny Sullivan, Editor-in-Chief, Search Engine Land

Speakers: Cindy Krum, Senior SEO Analyst, Blue Moon Works

Dave McClure, Entrepeneur & Startup Advisor, 500Hats

Helen M. Overland, Director, Search Engine Marketing, non-linear creations

The second day of SMX Social Media New York starts with Danny Sullivan introducing the first speaker, Dave McClure, Entrepeneur & Startup Advisor of 500Hats who is here to talk about FaceBook.

Dave asks who uses FaceBook. Many hands are raised. Apparently, he is logged in and he shows us his updated status. Purpose is to show how FaceBook uses it to market by inserting URLs. The News Feed displays all shared activities between you and your online buddies. These include wall comments, applications used, videos etc. The real trick is setting up your network appropriately and then tagging to people who are relevant. Through this, you can meet new people and it helps you in making notable people include you in their network.

Tags show users who are tagged under photos, posts and videos. For eg” Videos. They get notified and this is a great way way to include them in your network. Also, a great way to show off your content. Photos- These can be changed to logos. Photos are changed regularly in profiles and logos can be added to it too. An important feature here is “Share”. Another feature in FaceBook called "mini-feed" displays all your FaceBook actions. There are lots of important people in FaceBook and you want to associate with them, tag them. This is a great way to get you or your brand ‘noticed’.

Start a group where you can form a community of people with whom you share common interests. Add and invite people to them. This further gives more visibility to your brand. Include links, videos, photos, content messages. These get picked up by the feed and spead across your network.

Next up is Helen M. Overland, Director, Search Engine Marketing, non-linear creations who will discuss marketing on LinkedIn. Hlen starts by asking if anyone in the audience uses LinkedIn for more purposes than just putting up or updating a profile. As LinkedIn is a professional network site, one can easily connect with colleagues and friends here. While you could connect with 11 million back in June, the number has now reached 15 million. The coolest part for LinkedIn is that the average salary is 140K.

One thing to note is the difference between volume of contacts or trusted contacts. The latter is better. Unlike FaceBook, you want to network where you can market your products and services. Something called "Linkedin Open Networkers" are making endeavors to make a lot of contacts. Select some, and connect so that you can get their first levels of contacts. This instantly boosts your contacts. LinkedIn helps to:

• Increase branding and visibility
• Generate sales
• Traffic and support SEO

LinkedIn Answers: This is where you can post your answers. Also helps in increasing your brand and your visibility. Also, you can show off your expertise and knowledge, inform everyone of new websites. However, take care to make your posts and announcements less spammy. If you can get people to recommend your products and services, your credibility improves a lot. Come to think of it, Barack Obama posted a question and received 1,500 answers.

Sales: To get direct sales, search and find potential clients and partners here. Take advantage of LinkedIn by answering to service requests like "Answers". On the other hand, use "I can help you out" and make someone refer you. LinkedIn’s links do not use ‘noFollow’. Employ LinkedIn "vanity URL" by adding keywords to your profile’s URL. Make your employees link back to your website.

Bottom line, LinkedIn helps you reach your targeted market in the best manner-for free!

Last speaker of the session is Cindy Krum, a Senior SEO Analyst, Blue Moon Works who will discuss the pros and cons of marketing in MySpace which she calles the "Whoas" and "Woes". Funny! MySpace, is a great way to reach an exclusive demographic.

First Example – Flying Dog Brewery.

The target is the "extreme sport" kinda person. MySpace is used to promote Flying Dog and its many products. Due to MySpace sales and traffic are booming. They altered their profile image in order to get attention and display ads for upcoming events, business etc. people who are invited can also RSVP to the parties via MySpace. Later, they can blog, post their comments and images about the parties. These images can easily be shared and passed around, hence leveraging their visibility.

Flying Dog’s MySpace profile has a higher ranking than that in WikiPedia

Second example: True, a Web-based dating community

The profile for True has quizzes, calculators, tools, fortune cookie widgets, and many other fun and interactive features that engage the community members. The website has a Date Search Engine and games like "Heart Beats," "Date-O-Rama" and "Create A Date". Not only are these fun but with this you stay for long in the MySpace page or head to the official website.

Cons of MySpace:

Westwood college wanted to connect with its students via MySpace in order to share all information from their website. It backfired because:

• You need to know, for instance CSS to make a profile which takes a very long time.
• Profile had to be updated frequently in order to make visitors return frequently.
• Needed unique content that was not available on the college’s official website.
• One has to manage and decide the ‘friends list’. Who to choose and who to not choose.
• Handle communications.
• Keep the visitors engaged- blogs, sending e-mails.
• Strategy to tackle negative feedback and comments.

Third example: Auto Europe

Auto Europe wanted a widget that would aid them in link while also being helpful to travel bloggers. The supposed widget was to run on all sites (MySPace included).

Now, if you want to create a widget, in the instance of FaceBook, Flash version 9 and Action Script version 3 works. However, links in Flash just will not work. Not all developers are capable of creating widgets. Either get a widget developer who understands MySpace widget development or wait for MySpace’s development platform.

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Long Live Free: How Free Makes Money

The RIAA doesn’t have a lot of friends these days, even from the traditional bandwagon – Radiohead and Trent Reznor are the latest to abandon their labels to foster better relationships with their audiences.

While the recording industry is busy filing lawsuits, it has ignored the relationship aspect of selling – it’s often a good idea to have your target market like you – and acts as though production costs aren’t significantly lower in the digital media age. Downloads cut out the costs of manufacturing, distribution, and, thanks to the socially viral element of the Web, even advertising.

Hence the reason Apple’s Steve Jobs has repeatedly told them to shove it when they’ve wanted to raise iTunes download prices by a factor of three. The low overhead of online business is what has led to some analysts placing 100 times revenue values on certain well-read blogs.

Major newspapers are learning this valuable lesson, too. Publishing 2.0 eliminates much of the cost associated with printing, which is (presumably) the reason to charge for content in the first place, generated advertising revenue notwithstanding. The New York Times is one of the latest to remove the monetary barriers to its online content.

You’ll have to register instead, though, to give the advertisers the demographic information they crave – even if there have been entire (if unsuccessful) petitions in the past to drop those registration pages. London-based Financial Times was less generous, allowing 30 free pageviews a month with registration.

Two Laws of Online Content

1.    People don’t want to pay for it.
2.    People don’t want to tell you their life story to get it, either.

That’s because Internet users, like humans as biological beings, are inherently selfish and lazy. That’s not a swipe at humanity, just the reality. People want their content free with a certain immediacy – damn the advertisers.

The NYT was making about $10 million in subscription fees, but has gone the registration route instead, believing they can surpass that number with advertising revenue – basically the broadcast radio and television model that has worked for the better part of half a century.

So we know that "free," as a business model, works to generate revenue – if not, then all those PR flacks out there are wasting company time and money handing out schwag-bags at conferences and public events.

The Law of Gimme-Gimme

People will take anything as long as it’s free, whether or not they need it or want it*.

The latest speculation is that News Corp. mogul Rupert Murdoch is looking to loose the content bonds on the Wall Street Journal. Some think he’s a fool if he does, arguing that quality content demands payment. But two things we do know: Murdoch has made a lucrative career by not being stupid; and see the First Law of Online Content above.

What Small Businesses/Publishers Learn From the Big Guys

1.    People visit content if the cost of doing so is low (registering) or nil in terms of time, money, and/or effort.
2.    Freeing your content, bringing it out from behind walls helps ensure more search engine traffic and pageviews                 (which is, of course, salable to advertisers).
3.    A happy visitor is a return visitor.
4.    You can sell two products at the same time: pageviews to related advertisers; your own, unique product related to             the content on the screen.

The Conundrum

Depending on what you’re selling online, the "free" business model may not make sense to you. It’s easy for publishers with no printing costs to say advertising and search will get you to the next level, but what if, like the RIAA will argue, you have a tangible product? Free won’t cut it.

Again, this depends on that which you’ve based your business. Radiohead has a new CD and it can be obtained for free. It’s more of a donation model, but they have larger packages for sale that includes artwork, lyrics, and even vinyl records. They’re banking on the up-sell, as well as concert ticket sales.

But you can also use free content as a promotional vehicle, so long as it’s not obvious search spam that will get you penalized or dropped from search results altogether.

Blender company Blendtec is probably the best at utilizing the new media to generate sales. The "Will It Blend?" series on YouTube and Blendtec’s homepage is a creative way to do entertaining product demonstrations.

Or maybe you sell vacuum cleaners and parts. You can build a content structure around that without giving away your product, of course. People are always looking for cleaning tips, or maybe they don’t know how to repair a snapped belt. You can be their source for that while avoiding being labeled as spam, and promoting your product at the same time.

Whatever you’re doing online, it will require certain things. Be creative, be open, be necessary, be useful. But above all, be free.  

^{*This law does not apply to content, but to more physical products — nobody likes spam or splogs.}  

I’m a sports fan, I should be excited about the Sports Shortcut debuting on Yahoo Search. It appears some testing still needs to take place.

Like other Yahoo Shortcuts, the Sports Shortcut delivers a block of information about an athlete. Yahoo Search’s Ya-Bing Chu gives Dontrelle Willis as a search example. The shortcut…doesn’t show up in Firefox.

Strange. I tried it in Opera, Safari, and even IE, and there’s Willis, beaming out of his Shortcut over his 4.98 ERA. (Note to non-baseball fans: that’s an atrocious Earned Runs Average). Same thing happened when searching for Seattle’s dynamic leadoff hitter, Ichiro.

The Shortcut seems to be just for baseball players right now. A search for Peyton Manning didn’t bring up a Shortcut. Neither does a query for Eli Manning, but it’s not like he deserves one.

Omitting Firefox from the Shortcut looks like a strange oversight. We may have to blame Chu for this, as he is a Red Sox fan. Let’s hope Yahoo can get a New York fan to look into this.

Sanjay Raman, the Google Apps Product Manager, issued with the announcement.  “Our mission is to ‘organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful,’” he began.  “Note that twice in this eleven-word mission statement, we mention that this is a global effort, not just a problem we’re solving only for English-speaking users in the U.S.”

And so “[s]everal features and components previously available only to English users and administrators of Google Apps are now available in other languages, too,” he continued on the Official Google Blog.  These goodies include a Premier Edition, a Partner Edition, and Google Docs & Spreadsheets.

That would make for a worthy list of accomplishments, but Google didn’t stop there.  “[W]e’re also rolling Google Apps out in six more languages,” Raman added, which brings the total up to 28.

All this comes right after word leaked of a free, ad-supported version of Microsoft Works.  Many onlookers were already unimpressed by that news; Google’s Apps announcement makes the move look even less important.

Note that it’s only a vice president – after ZDNet’s Mary Jo Foley was given this information by Satya Nadella, others in the Redmond-based company refused to confirm it.  Still, this exchange wasn’t just some sort of misunderstanding.

“Nadella added that Works will be just ‘the first of the ad-funded software we are going to do,’” according to Foley.  “When I asked for other examples of products might decide to make free and ad-funded, he mentioned Office Accounting Express – a product which is currently available as both a free download and as a component of certain Office Live paid subscriptions.  He also said software downloads/shareware was another category ripe with products that could be free and ad-funded.”

Nadella’s either a practical joker or someone with slightly loose lips.  Various people, including Barry Schwartz and Brad Linder, seem inclined to believe the latter.  Linder goes on to write, “Releasing Works, a stripped down version of Office hardly seems like the way to compete,” but I suppose Microsoft (and Google) will have to cross that marketing problem when they come to it.

And when will that occur?  There’s no telling.  Nadella said the ad-supported version of Works is already out, which – since it’s nowhere to be found – only adds to the confusion.

Whew – that was a mouthful.  And the folks behind the deal may have realized as much, because, in an unusual move, part of their press release is divided into bullet points.  One point states, “The newly combined entity will confirm TradeDoubler as one of the largest online marketing companies in Europe.”

Being that big is costly – TradeDoubler had to fork over 56 million pounds, or about $115 million, in order to see the acquisition through.  Nonetheless, the corporation’s CEO seemed pleased with the arrangement.

“Product expansion and further internationalisation are key components in TradeDoubler’s growth strategy,” stated William Cooper in the release.  “The acquisition addresses both these areas by rolling out The Search Works and The Technology Works throughout Europe and by utilising The Technology Works’ Asian foothold to assess the roll out of TradeDoubler’s product offerings into Asian markets.”

Whew.  Again, sort of a mouthful.  Hat tip to Carlos Grande of the Financial Times, who noted that, not too long ago, TradeDoubler turned down an acquisition offer from AOL.