Cameron Olthuis

Noah Kagan wrote a post today on the Top 5 Stupid Trends of Marketing 2.0.

1. Our product is viral
2. Paying $10,000/month to advertise on Techcrunch
3. You need a blog
4. Digg will save us
5. Oh, don’t worry we have a MySpace badge.

You should really head over to Noah’s site and read the description of each one before you read my counters, otherwise you’ll probably be wondering what the hell I’m talking about.

Noah’s a friend of mine and he’s a very smart guy, but this time I think he’s gone a little overboard with the whole hippy marketing thing. Just kidding Noah. Anyways, it’s on bro.

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I think my TiVo is THE greatest thing since sliced bread, it has literally changed the way millions of people consume television. It allows us to watch TV on our rime. I can rewind, pause, and of course fast-forward through all the commercials. And that’s the very reason why a product loved by some many millions is hated by advertising executives all around the world. Even though I’m sure they all secretly fast-forward through commercials themselves.

According to the New York Times, TiVo is now looking to get into the research business. TiVo is able to track the viewing habits of users but it’s limited on what it can do with data because of its privacy policy, which the company is looking to change this year. At this time TiVo isn’t able to share any of the demographics from their customers but they are able to provide the information about which commercials are watched and those that are skipped during recorded TV shows.

This information is extremely valuable to advertisers because they can finally see that no one is actually watching their advertisements anymore. The networks on the other hand don’t want this information to get out, as it will hurt their ad sales. Maybe this is what it’s going to take to wake these executives up so they can finally realize push marketing is giving leeway to pull marketing, at the very least it opens up a new revenue stream for TiVo.

I’ve been tagged, by Will McInnes. The meme is for the top 5 social media & blogging tools.

My top 5 social media tools are…..

1) del.icio.us
2) Digg
3) Bloglines
4) Techmeme
5) Akismet

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Widget marketing is really starting to heatup. Today, TechCrunch announced that Hugh Macleaod of Gapingvoid fame has launched blog widgets, you can now show his daily cartoons on your website.

Fergus Burns says… A new space is beginning to develop – widget marketing.

Led initially be desktop widget services such as konfabulator, we are now seeing tons of services supporting widgets/gadgets – especially in social media applications (typepad, wordpress, myspace, aimpages, netvibes, etc).

Widgets are great marketing tools. They give you free exposure and improve the user experience (or sometimes not). They can also be used for SEO, they’re great for building inbound links.

Many companies are missing out on the potential of widget marketing, but there is a right and wrong way to use them.

Last night I posted on page views as a business model and why I think it will work this time around. This morning I stumbled across a new twist on page views.

The Huckin’ Chicken is a viral marketing site setup by Burger King. The site features the Burger King chicken mascot performing stunts on a dirt bike. Here’s the twist, the videos are locked for viewing and as the site gets more visitors then videos are unlocked, and the stunts keep getting better and better.

This is a very clever take on marketing 2.0 to encourage page views. However, the Huckin’ Chicken is missing a few key elements. For example, they should have an RSS feed to notify us when new videos are viewable. This would encourage more return visits that they will otherwise be missing out on.

Will we continue see more stuff like this? Absolutely, I think it’s a fantastic idea and we will definitely continue to see more viral videos like this. It’s an extremely inexpensive form of branding. However, these marketing techniques won’t work if they’re directly tied to ad revenue, you can’t just slap something like this up with some ads and expect it to work. Those that try will fail miserably.

There’s been some discussion lately on how a lot of the new Web 2.0 sites are relying on page views as a business model. Richard Macmanus says…

the fundamental reason why ‘Web 2.0′ is (dare I say it) in bubble phase right now. It’s the exact same reason the Dot Com bubble occured – Page Views

Only this time around it’s much easier to effectively track ROI. Most companies won’t waste ad dollars if they aren’t producing results, so the bubble (which I’d argue there isn’t one) is going to be harder to pop this time around. We learned our lessons.

As long as the ads continue to work there’s going to be a place for this business model. I say bring on the page views. My only concern is that some of these new companies are banking on a unrealistic CPM range.

I wrote earlier today about creating hype and how 37Signals builds hype before launching new products. Apple on the other hand is just the opposite. They don’t saying anything about new products until the very last second.

Apple does everything they can to keep new product launches under wraps. However, information usually still leaks out through a few sources. Apple’s even gone as far as taking this issue to court to try and reveal these sources. I can understand the logic behind this. Apple knows consumers would hold off buying new products if new models were just around the corner.

So which is better, building hype or not?