Cameron Olthuis

Coke, who orginally didn’t want the free advertising from the Diet Coke/Mentos videos is now copying Mentos, who has been “tickled pink” from the beginning.

Mentos, who quite obviously understands and loves viral marketing, announced their Mentos Gyser Video Contest the other day. Now Coke is doing the exact same thing. **yawn*

Mentos is setting a great example by embracing the new mediums and executing quickly. Coke is doing a great job of showing that they’re unoriginal and will only come around after they’ve been smacked around a little, I guess that’s better than Paramount who responds with their attack dog lawyers.

Update: Logic + Emotion has a good take on the story.

It’s amazing how dumb the decisions that some companies make can be. Paramount briefly shut down the blog of a fan who’s been a huge evangelist for the upcoming “Transformers” movie. The Church of the Customer Blog has the scoop…

Last week, the studio asked John Campea, co-author of The Movie Blog, to remove a photo he posted from the forthcoming movie “Transformers.” He complied, only to find yesterday that Paramount had dispatched its attack dogs, a DMCA shiv firmly clenched between their broken, smoke-stained teeth, to take down John’s entire site. (This free-speech/fair comment assault weapon is used quite frequently.) They didn’t like another image on the site, but Paramount neglected to tell John about it…

…Now John is pissed, his readers are pissed, and Digg’ers are pissed. Boycotts of the movie, Paramount DVDs and theme parks are being discussed. Probably won’t be long before the word of mouth jetstream propels this story to new heights.

Paramount obviously doesn’t get it. Why on earth they would do this to such a loyal evangelist (or anyone for that matter) is beyond me. Instead of embracing marketing 2.0 they are squashing it. If I was in Paramount’s shoes I would’ve been feeding John as much content as possible.

This is sure to be a great example of how buzz can work against you if you don’t embrace it.

eBay made a lot of noise today with the announcement that they are banning sellers from requesting payment through Google Checkout.

eBay is banning sellers from requesting payment through Google Checkout. The online auction giant updated its Safe Payments policy this week to add Google’s new payment service, Google Checkout to its list of online payment methods not permitted on eBay.

I’ve been reading all day about how this is such a big mistake for eBay. I disagree, and I’m obvioulsy in the minority but I don’t think this will have any negative effect on eBay.

No one is going to stop selling items on Ebay simply because they can’t accept Google Checkout, and that’s really the bottom line. Because eBay has such a monoply in the online auction space sellers don’t really have much of a choice. They can either list their stuff on eBay and sell it, or not. Do you honestly think anyone will boycott eBay because they can’t accept Google Checkout? Maybe if Google Checkout had the market share that PayPal does but they don’t, and they never will. Or maybe if there was an alternative to Ebay but there isn’t.

Unsatisfied with the current comment tracking solutions, we (ACS) decided to build a solution of our own, it’s called Commentful.

Commentful is a service that watches comments/follow-ups on Blog posts, Digg submissions, Flickr pictures, and many other types of content. When ever there is an update, such as a new follow-up or comment, Commentful notifies you instantly.

It’s easy. All you need to do is create an account and add the comment URLs that you want to track. There’s even a FireFox extension that allows you to add items with a simple right-click, and when there’s a new comment you will see a small blinking light in your toolbar.

We’d love to hear your feedback, so give it a try and let us know what you think.