Frontiering Talk

Here’s a good article on how Brands can come under attack from various organised pressure groups. In this case, Kleenex by environmentalists for what they term “unsustainable forest operations” including “wiping away ancient forest”.

I love the conclusion

These pressure groups have significantly fewer resources than the brands they are trying to influence. However, when combining their cause with the nature of the online world and (typically) a better understanding of how the Internet and search engines work, they can often gain substantial influence on direct sales and long term brand value.

Because the traditional barriers of entering the debate has been removed, brand owners need a wake up and understand how they can defend their brands effectively online or suffer the loss in brand value and sales.

Myspace has surpased 25 million unique users per month!
Heavy.com is around 10 million users in a month, and now a new social network site called Vidilife is using online videos to atract consumers. Vidilife was set up by Brad Greenspan, a 32-year-old Internet entrepreneur who helped co-found Myspace, but left prior to the Newscorp buyout.

Traffic to Vidilife, has been promising so far with 220,000 unique users in October, after launching in September, according to Internet ratings agency comScore Media Metrix. That’s a long way behind Myspace who has been around almost 2 years, but it’s a pretty good result for a site with no marketing, other than word of mouth. It does a pretty good job of providing “send to friend”, “invite friend” features. Traffic growth, like Myspace comes from people wanting to showcase their own videos with their friends, then finding other consumer generated content of interest, and then sharing interesting content with their friends.

Lord of the Rings fans will delight in this video, aptly named “Lord of the Taco“.

As the social networking marketplace hots up, the ability to link Video’s stored on Vidilife to consumers Myspace sites could mean that Vidilife becomes the specialist consumer video vault.
However, Myspace is sure to be thinking about adding it’s own video capabilities. Watch this (I mean “My”) space!

Tags: Social Network, WOM