Assignment 4 Part 1 (Understanding web marketing and devising a web marketing strategy).
For Assignment 4 i have been asked to read and summarise as many documents i am able to find in regards to web-marketing especially web 2.0.My first article will be about “Is Captcha Destroying Myspace”. Written by Levon Guiragossian.
Article 1
Captcha disallows someone from adding a mass amount of friends to their profile with a bypass robot. A Captcha is a type of challenge-response test used in computing to determine whether the user is human. “CAPTCHA” is from the acronym for “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart”, created by Carnegie Mellon University. But what it has become lately to the average myspace user is a rather annoyance an almost deterrent from adding friends and enjoying your myspace session. The captcha sometimes will prompt too frequently making the average myspace session a work-out. Recently, the myspace captcha has become so hard to read that even the most trained human eye has trouble translating the captcha’s message.
Sometimes it will take several attempts to translate the captcha. Is this what we have been reduced to – translating captchas?There would seem to be a better method to keep spammers from expanding their friend lists than a captcha. This seems like a great new area for Internet entrepreneurs to go after and seize. With the rise of users on Myspace reaching 100 Million Users worldwide this means big business opportunities and great pay-offs for those that materialize an advancement and make something in the age of web 2.0.
Article 2- “A thousand ways to widget in the in the age of web 2.0 marketing”
More recently we have been made aware of companies purposely creating widgets that in-directly push their products or services. Radio stations are offering widgets that stream a station’s broadcast live. Airline companies are offering ticket purchasing widgets that allow you to purchase a ticket through the widget without having to visit their website. Widgets have been around for years. In the past you were able to insert a snippet of code on your page to pull the latest ticker feed from your favorite stock exchange. Another old school widget is a simple page hit counter. Widgets are becoming more creative and more versatile. Political candidates have turned to widgets to promote the latest news from the campaign trail.
The great thing about widgets is that they help build awareness and promote a product or service in a new way usually through an in-direct channel (i.e. a blog or a person’s social network page).The goal is to try to create a widget for your product that promotes value in some way where a publisher will be willing to place it on their web page. The widget has to be relevant, have utility and should not blatantly try to sell something. Create a widget that creates value for the user and you will earn authority points just by being the developer behind it. The more value you create in a widget – the more people that are going to be willing to include the widget on their page.
