SEO Werkt!

The equivalent of a football field of forest is clear-cut every 4 minutes in Brazil. Not a lot of people care about it, and for most of the people it is even quite difficult to relate to this horrible fact. But football is a powerful mean to get people’s attention (in Brazil and not only) and WWF played the card with an incredibly smart and attention grabbing idea. They digitally “hijacked” an international match of the Brazilian Women’s National team, executing a progressive visual transformation of the pitch from green to brown, and paying off the message at the end of the game with an explanation of the take-over and the link back to the WWF website.

The visits to the WWF website increased by 73% after the game, and even if the case-study video doesn’t mention it, I’m sure the social media effect has also been quite impressive (btw, why the heck don’t they talk about it???)

The agency is Grey 141 Brasil.

via Osocio

“What the heck is a micro app,” you might ask? It’s the thing that Delicious founder Joshua Schachter (pictured) wants you to develop for smartphones.

It’s not a full application; rather, it runs on an app (Human.io for iOS and Android), and it allows you to quickly roll out a feature (conducting a poll, posting a photo, etc.) to users. You use the Human.io API; you adhere to simple design principles; and you gather whatever data you like from Human.io users, who are basically data-whore volunteers.

And since it’s a smartphone micro-app, you can take advantage of smartphone features and hardware, such as cameras, GPS, etc. You can also choose to keep the micro-app a micro-secret, only giving access to users who have a special code.

It sounds easy and fast, and Schachter emphasizes that it doesn’t take too many lines of code to get up and running.

“The framework is entirely API-based,” we read in the documentation. “In a few dozen lines of code, you can render UI, upload items to the human.io server, and retrieve responses from users as they complete activities.”

Suggested activities include collecting wait times in lines at restaurants, amusement parks, etc.; photo-sharing around a theme or product (blatant brand pandering alert!); collecting ratings (think Instagram meets Hot or Not — really humanitarian stuff); or something as practical as a survey.

From the end user’s POV, the Human.io app is a way to participate in crowdsourced tasks, either for the common good or for a kickback from brands. From the app’s description in the Google Play store:

Human.io connects you to organizations that need your help with all kinds of tasks, such as completing surveys, taking opinion polls, rating the quality of different images, and more. You can choose to browse only tasks near you (e.g., helping out a local restaurant or charity), or you can lend you help to tasks anywhere. Every day you’ll find new tasks to complete.

“The code runs on your server, but the UI runs on the device. The events are gatewayed back and forth,” Schachter explained to the army of nerds over on Hacker News. “The ultimate vision is to make a way for passive audiences into active participants. We combined things we love: mobile, Mechanical Turk, MapReduce, and Twilio.”

Here are some sample screenshots:

“We need a lot of polish still,” Schachter admitted on Twitter.

Human.io is a product of Tasty Labs, Schachter’s software shop, which is fleshed out by staffers formerly of Google, Dreamworks, and Mozilla.

Filed under: dev

Even if you’ve been living under a rock, you should have at least heard of Pinterest. Heck, if it’s a halfway decent-looking rock, somebody has probably pinned it by now. But knowing about Pinterest isn’t the same thing as knowing what your brand can do with Pinterest. And while the platform is still a somewhat new addition to the web, brands have been rather quick to embrace Pinterest — probably because it’s so darn popular they just can’t afford to ignore it.

But for many brands — even those that have set up Pinterest accounts — the platform is still very much in the early stages. So to help you develop a plan to make the most of Pinterest, we reached out to some leading social media agencies and asked them to weigh in on the topic. Here are the questions you should be asking when it comes to Pinterest, as well as some hurdles you are likely to encounter when pitching a presence on the platform.

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Millions of seals all over the world are literally being clubbed, trapped, shot and whatever the heck else’d to death for their fat and flesh. It’s sad and it has to stop, so to help, Jung Von Matt in Germany created an innovative, interactive billboard to raise awareness.

Essentially passerbys were encouraged to throw coins at a magnetized billboard to cover up the image of the seal killer. Coins were collected and the process starts again.

Just another example of outdoor stepping up a notch!

Dear Catalog CEOs:


Has this ever happened to you?  Business is down 13%.  You bring a group of leaders together to discuss what went wrong.  And here’s what is presented to you:

• Catalog, catalog, CATALOG, catalog, c-a-t-a-l-o-g.

Earlier this month, scientists at CERN observed what was most likely the elusive Higgs boson particle. But unless you’re a physics geek, it can be hard to understand just what made the discovery so significant.

Thankfully, the good folks of the Minute Physics YouTube channel have created a three-part video series that does a great job explaining the Higgs boson, mass, and particle discovery. While Minute Physics doesn’t dumb down the science, it does make the discovery a bit easier to understand with clever diagrams and metaphors. Heck, even if you’re science fan, you’ll probably get a laugh or two.

Check out the three-part series below:

Part 1: The Higgs Boson explained

Part 2: What is Mass?

Part 3: How to Discover a Particle

Filed under: offBeat, science

I have a question. Why are so many journalists and bloggers writing with advice for Marissa Mayer?

Risking the fact that you might be tired of the “women rule” trip I’m on lately, I really want to know what the heck is going on.

If this were a 37-year-old man whose wife was pregnant, we wouldn’t be talking about this. In fact, it would be a non-story, other than the fifth CEO in five years has joined Yahoo! and Wall Street is paying attention.

They might wonder why he hadn’t attended the earnings call on his first day. That could have been a story. And, certainly, coming from Google is a story.

But it wouldn’t be about his gender, his age, the fact that he and his wife are expecting, or even how he feels about burnout and whether or not it’s naive.

No one would give him advice, as it compares to Carly Fiorina’s “failure” at HP. No one would be talking about the “glass cliff” he’s on (do you know this term? It’s going to make you angry). No one would be giving him advice about taking leave after the baby arrives. And certainly no one would be putting the work/life balance discussion squarely on his shoulders by saying,

Women and girls the world over are looking to you to inspire, set trends in the workplace, and establish what it means to be a young working mom helming a Fortune 500 company.

Is this really 2012? Or have we stepped into a time warp?

Yahoo!, the once Internet darling, isn’t faring so well, and it may take longer than five years to undo what her predecessors have left in their wake. There may be some sour apples that interim CEO, Ross Levinsohn, didn’t get the job. And, according to reports, the culture is in dire need of fixing.

All of these things would be there no matter who took over the helm.

I wish her the best of luck in her new job. I hope she’s not on a glass cliff, but has success at Yahoo!.

That’s the conversation we should be having in a year – what she’s doing to turn around the company; not her age, her new baby, or her gender.

Virtuata, we hardly knew ye. Ye never publicly launched, and now ye have been folded into the megalithic monster that is Cisco.

Here’s what we did know about ye: Virtuata was a Silicon Valley startup based way the heck down in Milpitas, Calif., and founded in the fall of 2010. The company kept a relatively low profile, but it did state its goal was “to change the way computers are trusted and secured.” We’re not aware that the company ever took any institutional funding.

Virtuata co-founder Joe Epstein previously co-founded Meru Networks, a wireless infrastructure company that took a total of $152 million from venture firms between 2005 and 2009, then exited via IPO in early 2010 with a $66 million valuation.

The other Virtuana co-founder is Peter Danzig, a PhD and visiting Stanford lecturer who also led Wirama to its 2008 exit via acquisition to Checkpoint Systems. He also worked on web security products for Ironport, and he was doing so when Cisco bought that company in 2007. So, the two had some ties to Cisco prior to the deal.

“Virtuata provides innovative capabilities for securing virtual machine level information in data centers and cloud environments,” writes Cisco biz dev chief Hilton Romanski on the company blog. “Together, Cisco and Virtuata will enable consistent and enhanced security for virtual machines allowing customers to accelerate the deployment of multi-tenant, multi-hypervisor cloud infrastructures.”

The deal was officially sealed on July 13, 2012. The Virtuata team will join Cisco’s data center group and will report to David Yen, said group’s senior vice president.

Image courtesy of Ramain, Shutterstock

Filed under: cloud, deals

Honestly — haven’t you felt that way more than once when you’ve dealt with a business?

Either their marketing materials are so full of corporate speak that you can’t figure out what the heck they’re talking about or the service you get is lackluster at best and that’s being kind.

As consumers continue to get more jaded coupled with the fact that every business has plenty of competition out there — what consumers want and need from us is to know that we’re human.  They don’t expect perfection.  They just want to know that you’re real, that you care and that you’re not blowing smoke up their skirt.  That’s how they are going to choose.  They’re going to pick the company they like the best and they can’t like you if you are invisible to them.

So the question becomes — how do you show your human side?  How do you give your customers and prospects a sense of who you are and what matters to you?  If you and your brand are playful — how do you reveal that?  If you have a deep passion for what you do, where does that show up?

I don’t think too many businesses ask themselves those kinds of questions.  But we need to.  We need to actually make a connection long before the cash register rings.  Depending on your business — you might be able to do that in a one-to-one way.  But for most organizations, that won’t cover it.  They need to find a mass produced way of being real.

Yup — a mass produced way of being real.  How?

Here are two great examples.  One is the note from the company CEO that comes inside every package of Cold-EEZE.  The second is a grocery bag from Capital Market. (Hat tip to Tom Narak for sharing the grocery bag photo with me)

Can’t you just hear their voices?  Can’t you feel their spirit and don’t you have a sense of what it would be like to interact with them?  I don’t know about you, but I want go to that grocery store.  I’d expect to be completely delighted by the experience.

I can hear you now.  ”But Drew, those are consumer products.  In the B-to-B world, we can’t do things like that.”  I call bull on that.  Yes, you can.  Every company has a spirit.  We can call it your brand or your true north or your core reason for being.  But it’s there.  And it’s your job, no… your responsibility to show it to us.

All of us, every consumer on the planet, desperately wants to know if there’s a human inside.

Show us.

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1. Sometimes the toughest sell is inside

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   What if you just talked like a real human being?

Google announced you can now block AdSense ads within the Google Publisher Toolbar but warns that you should not block ads simply because you think you will earn more money doing so.

Google said:

Please be assured that clicking the ad overlays generated by the toolbar is permitted, and wonât generate any invalid clicks. Also, keep in mind that blocking any ad will lower your potential earnings, as it reduces competition for your ad space by removing advertiser bids from the auction. Itâs a myth that filtering ads can prevent âlow-paying adsâ from appearing, so as always, we recommend blocking only those ads that you feel are unsuitable for your users.

Google has told us before that blocking types of ads do not help you earn more.

But publishers have been blocking ads since the feature came out as a way to try to earn money from better earning ads.

A WebmasterWorld thread has publishers that simply do not believe Google that this method doesn’t work when trying to earn more money.

MartniBuster, an old time AdSense publisher responded, “What the heck?” Another senior member said, “If my site was flooded with one of those fat belly adverts, no-one will click on it. By removing it allows other adverts to appear, and more likely to be clicked on.”

What do you think?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.