THE Conference on Marketing — Naples, FL
If you want the “secret sauce” to rocketing past your competitors in the search results, this session is for you.
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Shop.org Strategy and Innovation Forum — Orlando, FL
iGoogle, Facebook, MySpace, Bebo - social networks are the hottest topic of Web 2.0. Recent developments such as Google’s OpenSocial platform may further accelerate the explosive growth in widget and gadget application users. So what do widgets really mean to your customers and to your bottom line? What monetization strategies should you focus on to ensure widgets are more than just a buzzword to your organization? And how to you prevent your widget from becoming another lost or unused orphan among thousands of other apps? Misty Locke, co-founder and president of Range Online Media, has been working with numerous retailers to determine the most innovative, engaging and measurable approach to web applications. Misty will lead a discussion with other industry experts to answer these questions and to tackle how to succeed with widgets and gadgets today, pitfalls to avoid and emerging opportunities beyond 2008.
Speakers:
Misty Locke, Co-Founder and President, Range Online Media
Stephan Spencer, Founder and President, NetConcepts
Pinny Gniwisch, Founder and EVP Marketing, ice.com
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The introduction of satellite images into map search interfaces has excited both virtual sightseers and local app developers. Further innovations like Google’s Street View have caused consternation from privacy advocates while further pumping up the buzz about online mapping. In 2008, we can expect further innovations that stretch the envelope while dynamic map interfaces solidify as basic table-stakes for all local sites. In gearing up for this year in local search, I thought I’d give you a pure entertainment piece—here’s a guide to the top coolest things to see in Google Maps.
Yum! Brands, Inc.’s subsidiary, KFC, built this brilliant ad back in 2006, geared to be viewable by space aliens. It was purposefully built just off Extraterrestrial Highway, near Area 51:
I pointed out the swastika-shaped building below back in 2006, along with a few other map enthusiasts. In September of 2007, the U.S. Navy bowed to pressure from radio commentators and the Anti-Defamation League and agreed to change the building’s profile at a cost of $600k. In the media feeding-frenzy, I got accused of "costing the taxpayers $600k" on a few blogs and forums, and one or two flamewars broke out in the comments on my Flickr page.
Giant thumbprint in a park in Great Britain. This thumbprint is actually a large maze designed by Chris Drury.
Evidence of drunken parking? This building in the Netherlands sports a Morris Mini parked on its side. The lights on the car turn on at night.
Yet more Minis parked on a building—this time the Minis are parked on top of a pub in Great Britain.
When all the satellite pics are stitched together to allow users to pan continuously in mapping programs, there are frequently some funky effects which can happen at transition edges. One common phenomenon is when two pics taken at different angles are spliced together, causing tall buildings and other structures to appear to be leaning sharply. This is called the "Escher Effect," and this sample comes from downtown Dallas:
This is purportedly the largest Coca-Cola logo in the world, created near Arica, Chile, out of something like 70,000 coke bottles to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the company:
Back in January of 2007, Google publicly announced they were planning to send a plane over locations in Australia to update Google Maps images. Quite a few people attempted to communicate messages by displaying large text on the ground for the "Australia Day Flyover" as it was called, but very few actually accomplished it due to a miscommunication over the date of the flight. However, the Tourism Australia ministry managed it by paying a sand sculptor to form the letters of their domain name on Bondi Beach near Sydney:
“Giant pink bunny,” killed in a drive-by in Italy.
People are increasingly trying to get their messages seen in Google Maps satellite view, but most aerial messages already appearing in the pics were originally intended for people viewing from airplanes. For instance, this message written in a field adjacent to Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska:
Some of the best-documented messages found in Google Maps have been marriage proposals like this one:
Another patriotic-themed image is this American flag found on a river bank in Pennsylvania:
Street View has raised all sorts of privacy concerns and people have taken great glee at pointing out people captured going into strip clubs, peeing in public, or doing various private activities. In this example, one of the traditionally photo-shy superheroes, the Green Lantern, is the one caught by the roving camera eye, looking out a shop window in Boston:
There are quite a few pictorial mazes that show up in Google Maps, particularly corn mazes and such in the US. This UK maze was built to celebrate the 200th birthday of Brunel, a famous British engineer:
There’s a whole subgenre of art called "Crop Art" that’s rendered in growing plants in patterns to form pictures when viewed from above. This example is a rendering of Da Vinci’s famous Vitruvian Man, located in Italy:
Similar to Crop Art, "Earth Art" or "Land Art" is created by moving or scraping soil and rocks to create images. This huge image from a hillside in Mongolia celebrates Ghenghis Khan:
When the early Greek inventor Daedalus’s son, Icarus, plummeted from the sky after his wax-and-feathers wings experiment failed, his body’s impact left this deep indentation crater which subsequently filled with water, leaving this man-shaped lake in Brazil:
A man with the surname of "Luecke" in Texas decided to write his name big by leaving these trees when he was clear-cutting the land. According to reports, astronauts are able to see these letters from space:
Quite a few companies promote themselves by painting their logos onto their building rooftops. This example is particularly clever, since the Salvation Army apparently realized they could leverage their building’s close proximity to the Seattle Seahawks Stadium and they’ll forever after enjoy free promotion whenever news organizations fly over when covering sporting events.
One thing that some people spend a whole lot of time doing is looking for UFOs and Crop Circles. Here’s a really great crop circle of the Mozilla Firefox logo - a brilliant piece of promotion and linkbait if there ever was one:
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Many local companies depend upon their information’s presence in various directories in order to advertise themselves, and the basic instrument of these marketing efforts is the Business Profile. The majority of businesses out there pay little attention to these beyond wanting their name, address, and phone numbers to be correct. However, there are far more components of business profiles beyond the bare basics, and this article will outline many of them and how they should be handled for best effect. Optimizing business listings and profiles can make all the difference in enabling potential customers to find you and in selecting you from your pack of competitors.
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PubCon 2007 — Las Vegas, NV
Learn the best tips, tools, and techniques for non-traditional optimization for both indexing as well as ranking support. This includes files such as PDFs, docs, podcasts and RSS feeds.
Panelists:
Rick Klau, Strategic Partner Development Content Acquisition, Google
Stephan Spencer, Founder & President, Netconcepts
George Aspland, Founder & President, eVision
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Search Engine Strategies — Chicago, IL
Regular search engines can’t understand text trapped within images, and this session looks at strategies to combat this problem for the image-intensive site. It also examines how to generate traffic using your images via image-specific search engines.
Speakers:
Liana Evans, Director of Internet Marketing, KeyRelevance
Chris Smith, Lead Search Strategist, Netconcepts
Shari Thurow, Founder & SEO, Omni Marketing Interactive
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UW Wisconsin Madison, Executive Education, Interactive Marketing — Madison, WI
Search engine marketing
Creating a buzz — viral marketing
Web analytics
Speakers:
Stephan Spencer, Founder and President, Netconcepts
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Blog World Expo — Las Vegas, NV
Panelists:
Andy Beal, Marketing Pilgrim
Vanessa Fox, Zillow.com
Aaron Wall, SEOBook.com
Stephan Spencer, Netconcepts
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AMA Hot Topic: Search Engine Marketing — Chicago, IL
It’s critical to understand search engine visitors if you want to market to them. Which search engines do they prefer? What words are they using? Where do they look on the screen and where do they click? What stage in the buying process are they in? How does all this differ for B2B versus B2C?
This session will provide a critical overview of…
Speaker:
Stephan Spencer, Founder and President, Netconcepts
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SMX Social Media — New York, NY
Wikipedia is powerful. Concerned about how your company or service is portrayed? Wikipedia experts answer your questions and take you live to the site for advice on how to interact with the service.
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HEADQUARTERS
2820 Walton Commons West, Suite 123
Madison, WI 53718 USA
Phone: (608) 285-6600
Toll-free: 888 207-1109
REGIONAL OFFICE
36 Anzac Rd., Browns Bay
Auckland, New Zealand
Phone: (+64) 9 476-4601
infodesk@netconcepts.com
