AdAge asks IS BUZZ MARKETING ILLEGAL?

As marketers more frequently look to recruit consumers brand agents to spread goodwill for brands, industry attorneys view buzz marketing as a likely area of regulatory involvement, especially around the issue of compensating people to participate in buzz programs when they fail to disclose their connections to marketers and agencies. While there is no legal precedent specific to word-of-mouth marketing, there are Federal Trade Commission guidelines for ads that are likely to apply.

How far can they stretch this line of thinking? Is affiliate marketing a paid endorsement? Does every affiliate link need to be identified? How the hell would they enforce that?

In the offline world when you read a billboard it does not usually say SPONSORED BY in huge red letters. Celebrities endorse products they never use. What makes one type of advertising legit and another illegal?

Sometimes big fans of a company who love their products are great people to employ, and sometimes you only find those people after they state how wonderful your products are. Proving causality will be tough.

Viral marketing might be illegal, but some of the true web gurus think it is what drives the web:

It is a truism that the greatest internet success stories don't advertise their products. Their adoption is driven by "viral marketing"--that is, recommendations propagating directly from one user to another. You can almost make the case that if a site or product relies on advertising to get the word out, it isn't Web 2.0.

Some of these same people talking up buzz marketing being illegal during the day are probably working on buzz marketing campaigns at night.

So Gmail created an autosave feature, which saves your email drafts.

What is scary about that is that sometimes you may start writing stuff that you did not want to send...you may have been blowing off steam in a random form box only to find it got cached and later winds up in court.

I think Google makes many of these features with genuinely good intent, but some of the people in positions of power may have bad intent.

Having recently read the WSJ today to find Drug Maker Under Fire for Sharing Data and DeLay was indicted again and spending many thousands of dollars on an ongoing lawsuit that I think is without merit makes me wish some of the new features were widely mentioned and easily opt outable before they were live launched.

Some of the pressures Google will feel are not internal. Just look at the maps, or think of how absurd 38,514 hours of wiretapping the wrong line sounds.

Books:
Open Content Alliance - Yahoo! fights Google on book front. Gary has commentary from the founder of Project Gutenburg. And there is Wikibooks. I have not read any of them, but it sure takes a ton of effort to write a book.

As more and more people realize how easy it is to publish Obscurity is a far greater threat to authors and creative artists than piracy.

And it was all Yellow...
Consolidation on the yellow pages front. R.H. Donnelley to buy Dex media for 4.2 billion. How does a company worth 2 billion buy another company for 4.2 billion and assume 5.3 billion of their debt as well? They have to be getting squeezed by search, and it is only going to get worse ahead.

I just wanted to use InterWeb in a title, even though some of this stuff is not from today :)

• first proposal via search

• ThreadWatch turns 1
• SEO article goes viral. surely that will help Rands rank :)
• RIAA gets sued
• Wikipedia eats Google. I think their are a few pieces missing there, but in general, as Mike Grehan long ago said the rich do get richer.
• Van Morisson - the obligated album.
• 38,514 hours of wiretapping errors. How absurd is that?
• Google to partner with Sun today. Sun is up over a billion dollars on market speculation.
• tsuji-giri: a Japanese word from samurai days meaning, "to try out a new sword on a passer-by". The Meaning of Tingo is probably a cool way to help come up with domain names.
• Wired on Tim O'Reilly. Tim also recently wrote on What is Web 2.0
  

  It is a truism that the greatest internet success stories don't advertise their products. Their adoption is driven by "viral marketing"--that is, recommendations propagating directly from one user to another. You can almost make the case that if a site or product relies on advertising to get the word out, it isn't Web 2.0.

• Anatomy of a Photograph - The sin of omission

On any social network trust can be leveraged for profit. Sounds obvious, but when you think of playing many networks as a game of margins sometimes that means working on zero or small margins until you create a profile you can leverage.

eBay:
A friend of mine buys and sells stuff on eBay, keeping the stuff he really likes, and selling back the stuff that was not as good as he would have desired. The stuff he did not like frequently sells for more than he paid for it because he posts in a clear and honest manner and leverages his reputation.

Some people go one step further and also drive traffic to third party networks for monetization. Others start opening bidding price at way more than an item is worth just to use eBay for cheap exposure to targeted traffic streams.

Other Auction Sites:
As you go on the smaller networks you go into an area of greater risk, since a seller being blackballed from a small auction site would not hurt them as much as a blackball from eBay would.

Sometimes the variety of networks create arbitrage opportunities. In the past I bought some groups of a half dozen or so exceptionally old cheap baseball cards for a few dollars and then pieced them out and resold them on eBay for a decent profit. It was not uncommon for people to pay $10 to $15 for an individual card that was part of a $2 to $4 group.

Amazon:
Amazon has a ratings and review system, just like eBay. Sometimes people will not be interested in buying from you unless you have a profile built up.

As a writer you can make a number of book sales by making sure you review every competing book on the market. After you review enough other books people will trust you more when you review friends books in exchange for friends reviewing your books.

Some people also mention their books in so you want to... lists, even if their book is not on Amazon.com. Originally unknowingly to me, someone else did this for me, and I know it caused at least one ebook sale.

Wikipedia & Spam:
Recently I created a meta search engine and mentioned it on WikiPedia. Was my mention WikiSpam? Maybe, maybe not.

If I had a long established profile with tons of submissions I am sure it would not have been considered WikiSpam. As it sits now, in spite of coverage from SEW, someone at Wikipedia thinks Myriad Search does not have any notability.

Eventually I bet some SEO companies will heavily focus on creative ways of using the Wikipedia for SEO. There may eventually be a company that exclusively works on editing the WikiPedia.

If you can't fit direct links to your site into the guide some people will go so far as to build indirect linkage data, working in articles from well known media sources. For example, I probably could not add a link to SEO Book to the WikiPedia, but I could create a linkable thesis that made linkage more likely, or link from the Wikipedia into an article from the WSJ about an SEO company suing me on some Wikipedia page covering blogging & free speech.

Websites:
Search engines trust sites more as they age. They also trust sites with more quality link popularity as it ages. That sounds like it makes sense without saying, but if you fail to give people things to talk about then slowly you will lose market share to people who do.

Off the start even if you are doing a good job few people are going to see it. As your site exists longer there are going to be more and more ways for people to randomly stumble upon your website.

Personal Branding:
A few years ago would there have been anyone interested or any reason for Andrew Johnson to interview me? Would there have been any reason for others to mention that interview? No way. In the same way algorithms learn to trust you so do people.

After people become exceptionally notable some people will even link in to their reviews of other products (or others reviewing your product).

I Was Here First, etc:
In the Navy one of the guys who was a couple years ahead of me hated me because I did not give him the respect he felt he deserved (just for coming a couple years before me). Sure enough, in spite of him trying to hold me back, I still qualified faster than anyone in my division.

Some people who are more successful are there only because they came first. If you can think of different & better ways to build trust you can quickly pass them up. Look how quickly Threadwatch has taken off. I think many of the other blogs are better because Nick's raises the bar.

Niche:
It is not to say that anyone could walk in and just become synonymous with search the way Danny Sullivan is or Google is, but within every market there are niches that are going to be much easier to do well in.