According to the 2013 BrandZ Top 100 report, tech companies hold the top three slots in this year's list of top global brands — Apple, Google and IBM leading the pack in that order. Microsoft rolls in at number 7 on the list.

There's big money in them thar brands, too. The ClickZ report pegs Apple's brand as worth $185.1 billion, up 1% from last year. Google rose more from last year, up 5% to a brand worth of $113.7 billion. IBM's brand shrank 3% to $112.5 billion and Microsoft shrank even more: 9% down to $69.8 billion.

These valuations are based on proprietary valuation methods, so take them with a grain of salt. Still, it's interesting to see how marketing views the power of the almighty brand.

Check out BrandZ's technology sector rankings to see how your favorite companies stack up against each other.

Image via Shutterstock

Guest author Justin Smith is product engagement manager for BloomReach.

Understanding what people do on different social networks is the key to effectively using those networks for marketing. Companies currently spend 8.4% of their marketing budgets on social media, and that’s expected to grow to 21.6% in the next five years. But with so many social networks competing to grab marketing dollars, determining the most effective channels can be extremely difficult. To illustrate, let’s look at how Facebook and Pinterest stack up against one another.

Different Networks For Different Reasons

While both Facebook and Pinterest offer deep customer segmentations and user engagement, it would be a mistake to target audiences in the same way across both networks. For example, you wouldn’t market your product to someone shopping at a trendy boutique the same way you would to someone walking down the street with their friends. In a store, you’d likely look to make a sale, while on the street you’d probably have more luck building brand awareness.

Similarly, BloomReach’s analysis consistently shows that Pinterest has a higher concentration of people who are in a ‘buy’ state of mind, while Facebook users are more interested in interacting with friends - and brands. (According to Paul Adams, Facebook’s global head of brand design, Facebook’s strength is relationship-building, noting that many lightweight interactions over time can help promote brands.)

Traffic Analysis Tells The Tale

That is borne out by BloomReach’s analysis of total traffic – 46,277,543 site visits – for a set of retail clients from Sept. 20 through Dec. 31, 2012. We looked at five key metrics: total traffic, revenue per visit, conversion rate, bounce rate and average pages viewed. While Facebook delivered more than 7.5 times the traffic, Pinterest handily won the remaining four areas:

• Pinterest traffic spent 60% more than did traffic coming from Facebook.
• Pinterest traffic converted to a sale 22% more than Facebook.
• Facebook traffic bounced 90% of the time, compared to 75% for Pinterest.
• Facebook users viewed an average of 1.6 pages. Pinterest users saw an average of 2.9 pages – an 81% difference.

The average revenue per visit for Pinterest traffic was more than $1.50. But while Pinterest is able to drive highly lucrative leads – and the release of Pinterest’s Analytics Tool for Businesses should help companies make use of them - it can deliver only a relatively limited set of eyeballs.

Facebook Still Rules Awareness

If a company’s goal is to simply reach a larger audience to create or maintain brand awareness, Facebook remains the best option. Its sheer volume of users – 1.06 billion active monthly users, 680 million mobile users and 618 million daily users – and the army of people ready to sell impressions make it an easy channel to leverage. But it may be difficult to realize an immediate return on marketing investments on the network.

Perhaps the best approach is to look for ways to optimize Facebook campaign while expanding Pinterest presence. Both Facebook and Pinterest should become larger parts of the media mix model as visitor referrals from these sites grow. At the end of 2012, only 2.7% of total traffic in our analysis came from the networks, demonstrating that social commerce is still in an early stage. In the meantime, though, it seems fair to say that Pinterest is a more efficient marketing channel than Facebook.

When I talk to marketing executives about the Smart Body, Smart World paradigm — how sensor-laden devices like wearables give us access to new domains of information and what we can do with that information — they always bring up the movie Minority Report.

The 2002 sci-fi crime thriller has become the reference point people imagine when they think about the future of advertising: specifically, the scene in which Jon Anderton (Tom Cruise) walks through the mall and billboards show him ads based on his mental state (stressed out) and context (on a journey).

This depiction of the future makes sense if you take the status quo of advertising in 2002 — delivering messages via screens to acquire new customers and persuade them to try your product — and bolt on new technology like biometric scanning. There are multiple examples of marketers today doing simplified versions of this, using billboards that adapt content based on gender and age.

A Dumb Vision Of The Smart Future

But this is a pretty dumb vision of the “smart” future. Smarter marketing goes far beyond advertising.

The Smart Body, Smart World paradigm requires a different approach to marketing, an approach focused on delivering services and utility rather than just advertising. Sensor devices collect data that’s intimate by nature, in contexts where marketers have never before had access. That intimacy lends itself to trust-based interactions, where trust is earned with utility.

The Nest home thermostat, for example, uses motion sensors and machine-learning algorithms to predict your schedule — but users don’t think it’s creepy because it saves them 20% on their heating and cooling bill. The Jawbone UP knows your daily commute and how well you slept — but its usefulness is quantifiable, helping wearers move, on average, 26% more per day.

Many sensor-laden devices don’t have displays; even the ones that do, like Google Glass, are better suited for “engagement marketing” or “relationship marketing” rather than advertising. For example, Glass might be an appropriate platform for a bank to show a user’s “safe to spend” balance - like financial services company Simple does on its mobile app - while the customer is out shopping. But that approach wouldn’t be well-suited to cross-selling a mortgage.

Sensors Change Everything

The Smart Body, Smart World paradigm accelerates transformations that are already occurring in marketing. In particular, sensor devices require marketers to:

Shift their priorities from acquisition to engagement. Today, marketers spend the majority of their budgets on the early stages of the customer journey, especially reaching new customers through channels like TV advertising and in-store displays. Smart Body, Smart World technologies lend themselves more toward engaging customers you already have, building on trust you’ve already earned. This shift from acquisition to engagement requires marketers to rethink their priorities and redistribute their spending accordingly.

Make better use of all the data they are collecting. Sensor devices produce an enormous amount of data — up to thousands of data points per minute per person. Making use of all this data is a new skill for marketers. Think about the Nike+ FuelBand, for example. In the past, Nike’s marketers would not have known much about their customers — they relied on what data they could get from retailers and whatever market research they commissioned. Now they know what time their customers wake up, whether they had a good day and how fit they are compared with their friends. Acting on this data in a way that benefits the user and the company requires an enormous shift from the way they used data in the past.

Reconfigure privacy practices to deliver contextually relevant services. Current privacy practices are woefully inadequate for the age of smartphones and sensors. Today, marketers routinely collect more data than they need for service delivery. In doing so, they are assuming unnecessary risk (as we see in the near-daily hacking of major enterprises), and they also make it harder to recognize business opportunities obscured by mountains of data. In Forrester’s research, we’ve found that many consumers would actually be willing to share more data if they knew it would be used to deliver genuinely useful services. But they object, with good reason, to sharing data without getting real value in return.

These shifts will transform marketing in a far deeper way than the superficial Minority Report vision. Imagine a future in which marketers influence products, pricing and branding based on deep insights of how people actually use their product. A future in which marketers anticipate customer needs before they’re expressed — while staying on the right side of the line separating useful from creepy.

A future in which marketers actually help customers change their own behavior to the benefit of the customer, not just the marketer. Marketers have this future within their grasp if they can recognize that the mall in Minority Report is not what we should be building.

I’ll be speaking more about how marketers make these transformations at Forrester’s Forum for Marketing Leaders on April 18 and 19 in Los Angeles. Join us if you can!

The Mozilla Corporation, the commercial vendor behind the popular Firefox browser, is pushing out a new policy for third-party cookies - a policy that's gotten Internet advertisers in a bit of a snit.

The new cookie policy, announced Feb. 25 on the Mozilla Privacy blog, will accept third-party cookies when a user is surfing the Web only if the user has directly interacted with the site or company trying to install the cookie on the browser's machine. Cookies from other parties served through those sites will not be accepted. 

The benefits of this policy change - for users, at least - are immediately apparent: Instead of collecting a myriad of cookies from random sites' ads as they move through the Web, users will pick up cookies only from the sites they actually visit, explained Alex Fowler, who leads privacy and public policy for Mozilla.

"In my own use of this release this morning, I followed one of my typical browsing paths, starting with a look at surfing conditions, then local news, a major national news site, and a popular site covering the tech industry," Fowler wrote.

Fowler charted out his before-and-after results after applying the patch, and came up with a startling difference: he collected 385 first- and third-party cookies with Firefox using the old default policy that allows all cookies. Using the new default policy, Fowler's browser collected just 75 first-party cookies.

IAB: Cookies Mean Freedom

Of course, not everyone is thrilled by the move. In an open letter to Mozilla, Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) president and CEO Randall Rothenberg took issue with the new policy. And understandably so from his perspective, since the default blocking of third-party cookies in a major Web browser could put a big crimp in potential ad revenue.

But that is not the argument Rothenberg makes. Instead, he somehow casts third-party cookies as user-protection issue:

"If Mozilla follows through on its plan to block all third-party cookies, the disruption will disenfranchise every single internet user," Rothenberg writes. "All of us will lose the freedom to choose our own online experiences; we will lose the opportunity to monitor and protect our privacy; and we will lose the chance to benefit from independent sites like RightWingNews.com LiberalOasis.com, MotherhoodWTF.com, and SuburbanDaddy.com because thousands of small businesses that make up the diversity of content and services online will be forced to close their doors."

One of Rothenberg's arguments, that users will lose the capability to protect their own privacy, has some legs. Referring to the opt-out policy that the Digital Advertising Alliance (which includes the IAB) promotes, Rothenberg points out a potential flaw in Mozilla's plan: once a user opts out of receiving a certain ad, it's third-party cookies that keep that ad from appearing again. Remove the capability to track such cookies, and that unwanted ad will appear again and again, the IAB executive reasons.

Is Choice Removed?

For all of Rothenberg's exhortations about Mozilla clamping down on freedom of choice, though, it is important to remember that Mozilla isn't completely banning third-party cookies in Firefox at all. If a user wants to allow such cookies to be installed on their browser again, they can easily go into Firefox's privacy settings and make the change. The choice is still in the hands of the users.

Even if third-party cookies do provide some positive benefits, there are clearly quite a few negative effects, and for now Mozilla seems to be erring on the side of caution on behalf of Firefox users. Given the track record of how security-ignorant most Web surfer is, that's probably a good approach.

Image courtesy of Wikimedia.

If you tuned into the Presidential debates this past Fall you may have caught the one moderated by CNN personality Candy Crowley. Remarkably, it was the first presidential debate moderated by a female in 20 years. Wonder how that dry spell ended? Because of a petition created at Change.org.

Debate organizers were influenced by three Montclair, N.J. high school students, who, inspired by a civics class, were able to sign up more than 180,000 supporters for their online petition.

30 Million Signatures

One of the biggest challenges of finding innovative new ways of doing things is monetization, and that's where Change.org shines. The company has in effect become a marketing machine for mostly non-profit organizations. It has also boosted its beneficial standing by becoming a certified B Corp.

Change.org is designed to make creating petitions easy, and features selected petitions on its home page.

Future Changes

The way Change.org works is simple. Anyone can start a petition for free, but qualified organizations can send sponsored petitions to specific Change.org members by paying a premium. “Every package is custom built for each sponsor,” Dulski says, adding that “we have people in house who know how to make petitions stronger.”

The future for sponsored Change.org petitioners seems bright. Dulski promises that the company is “going to develop a great analytics platform for sponsors, so we’re able to better reach the kind of people who are passionate about their causes.”

One recent victory had 200,000 Gatorade consumers using Change.org to demand the removal of the controversial ingredient BVO from its product bottles. Gatorade removed the ingredient, scoring a victory for the 15-year-old Mississippi teenager who started the petition.

International Action

While most of its biggest victories have been in the U.S., Change.org has become a global phenomenon. “We have staff in 18 countries,” notes Dulski. A perfect example of that global power was the petition calling for Malala Yyousafzai, the Pakistani girl shot for advocating female education, to be nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize. This petition, posted by Tarek Fatah of Toronto, has gained more than 287,000 supporters.

With influence comes power that translates into more galvanizing events - and that, in turn, attracts even more users. Do you have an innovation that could use the gravy train of a complementary business? Can you leverage the Time Compression Ubertrend to create a service that helps consumers save time? I’m ready to file my petition to help America become more innovative.

Guest author David Ewart heads up Marketing and Revenue for IT upstart Loggly.

The epic media battle between New York Times reporter John Broder and Tesla CEO Elon Musk began with a negative consumer review, escalated with a strong-armed public rebuttal by a powerful executive and ended with a bunch of shared log files disputing the veracity of Broder’s driving experience. So what’s the big deal? Was this just another he-said-he-said that ended with data coming to the rescue?

Oh no. It’s bigger than that, much bigger.

(See also Would You Buy A Tesla Model S?)

On first blush, the story spoke of the growing importance of data in corporate America. Log files, typically the chatter of IT managers behind the firewall, had suddenly entered the corner office and the public spotlight. It was a powerful tipping point for those of us who deal with data every day, and spoke volumes to the growing potential of log files to help companies solve problems and identify trends. But what’s the real issue… and why is it such a big deal?

Elon Musk, with all his innovative thinking has become a poster-child for the face of market disruption. Yet he forgot the age-old mantra: “The customer is always right.” By publishing “the truth” of the logs for the world to see, he may have succeeding in counteracting the claims of the reviewer, but he disrupted his own sales pipeline.

Being Right - At A High Cost

(See also Tesla And The Fallacy Of Data-Driven Decisions.)

On Bloomberg TV, Musk admitted: "We did actually get a lot of cancellations as a result of The New York Times article. It probably affected us to the tune of tens of millions, to the order of $100 million, so it's not trivial.” The stock, trading at $39 before the review was published is trading at $34 today. Elon lost customer confidence, trust and their cash.

While data is valuable, releasing it with the sole purpose of roasting the consumer - in this case, a test driver who should have succeeded regardless of any possible hidden agenda - isn’t wise. Musk missed the point: The value of vehicle log files is not to fight battles in the press, but a tool to vastly improve the product and deliver a better experience for the next customer.

Imagine the backlash if Weight Watchers CEO David Kirchhoff read a customer’s Facebook post saying that she followed the plan and still gained weight, by publicly posting the user's caloric intake and exercise log, indicating that she did not stick to the plan? The CEO might win that battle, but he would certainly lose the war.

Big Data And The Customer Experience

So, how can Tesla recover from this PR and fiscal train-wreck? Put those log files to work to improve the customer experience. The right way to create a win-win result for Tesla would be for Musk to acknowledge that as the car breaks new ground, Tesla will incorporate customer feedback and data to make a smart product even smarter and easier to use.

He could acknowledge that the car could still improve: That it should have understood that the trip and route chosen (programmed by the user), combined with the dropping temperatures (weather app) and known charging locations (geo-location data) would not end in a successful commute.

He could speak of the product roadmap and enhancements that will collect and interpret this data to alert the driver by dashboard, text, email or other method of impending failure. He could talk about how the Model S can actually get smarter with a software update. Perhaps the car could automatically initiate a battery warmer in cold weather, alert Tesla service crews of the situation – anything but allow the failure.

It’s not about proving that you’re right and the customer screwed up, but by planning for success of everyone, including the outliers.

Musk missed a remarkable opportunity. He forgot that the customer is always right, and that a bad experience is the perfect time to help existing and future customers have a better experience. Somehow, that critical human message got lost in the data.

Is the pirate dead? When did Apple become the new IBM? How did the company that once sought to destroy our restrictive computer overlords wind up becoming so buttoned-down?

How did Apple go from this:

To this:

And this:

The short answer, of course, is success. Apple now makes the world's most popular personal computing products - the iPhone and iPad - and has created the most profitable ecosystem for our new mobile world. No longer the underdog, Apple is now the company everyone else is chasing.

Needs vs. Desires

That kind of success necessarily breeds a certain amount of conservatism. As the risks involved in rocking the boat go up, the rewards seem to go down and the temptation to take the safe route becomes all encompassing.

That's why it's not surprising that Apple's new iPhone ads are exactly what we need - but not at all what we want.

The ads re-confirm that the bold revolution Apple wrought with the launch of the iPhone in 2007 has been realized. The computing world has changed forever. The PC hegemony is contracting. Smartphones and tablets are rapidly taking over the Web, invading the enterprise and challenging the once mighty defenders of the desktop, from Microsoft to HP to Dell and beyond. 

(See also: PCs Are In Free Fall, But Windows 8 Shouldn't Get All The Blame) 

That's why some six years later, Apple's latest ads are no longer revolutionary - or even exciting.

The Tables Have Turned

Soon after the original iPhone was launched, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer was asked his thoughts by USA Today (he can never take them back):

Would I trade 96% of the market for 4% of the market? (Laughter.) I want to have products that appeal to everybody.

There's no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance. It's a $500 subsidized item. They may make a lot of money. But if you actually take a look at the 1.3 billion phones that get sold, I'd prefer to have our software in 60% or 70% or 80% of them, than I would to have 2% or 3%, which is what Apple might get.

It's easy to mock Ballmer's words now, but when you are the top dog it's easy to be glib about the competition. Unfortunately, it's just as easy to misunderstand what is happening elsewhere while your focus is on maintaining your lofty status.

In that very same interview, Ballmer went on to say, albeit less famously:

It's not like we're at the end of the line of innovation that's going to come in the way people listen to music, watch videos, etc. I'll bet our ads will be less edgy. But my 85-year-old uncle probably will never own an iPod, and I hope we'll get him to own a Zune. [Emphasis mine.]

That's exactly what's happening to Apple - at least with respect to marketing. 

The latest Apple ads effectively tell the story of the iPhone's capabilities. But they most closely resemble a campaign from discount clothier Men's Wearhouse. Is that really what Apple wants to be compared to?

Is Samsung The New Apple?

Consider instead this Samsung ad. It says little about Samsung's own product and spends most of its time mocking not only Apple, but Apple users.

These are the kinds of ads that strike a chord. As ReadWrite noted yesterday:

[Samsung] wants to dethrone the iPhone in the U.S. Samsung apparently chose New York City for the launch event because it, “is nicknamed the Big Apple, which is also the symbol and heart of the United States, Samsung picked that city for the event.’’

Not very long ago, Apple fought for its very existence. Now it's one of the world's richest corporations. That's a big change. It only makes sense that Apple's advertisements reflect that evolution. 

Today's Apple execs obviously want to promote their product, excite their core base, not lend stature to the competition - all while showcasing the iPhone's universal appeal. These latest ads likely succeed at that.

I like them. I also suspect they are the kinds of ads that Steve Ballmer would have happily approved back in 2007.

Just a few years ago, social media and mobile marketing were the Wild West of business strategies. On the surface, they offered seemingly ambiguous value and, to the more old-school veterans of branding and advertising, were simply a distraction from the tried-and-true tactics of the pre-social media age.

That's all changed with the advent of successful Facebook marketing, Twitter branding presences, and the slew of other ways companies can leverage virality and connectedness to market products and communicate with customers.

According to a marketing industry report from the Software & Information Industry Association (SIIA), 98 percent of companies are now using social media, while 70 percent of marketing executives believe social media has a positive impact on their business. 

While social media for large businesses can be a tricky game in the era of prolific hacker attacks, a strong focus on any and all variety of social networks will always result in a healthy conversation no matter what the circumstance. Just ask Burger King, whose twitter account was hacked to hilarious results, and still resulted in the company making headlines for days. 

Given that companies have finally woken up to the realization that customers feel a stronger connection to a business and its services by interacting through social media - and not through targeted emails, commercials, or traditional web advertising - more are now planning to outsource around social media content creation and analytics than ever before, according to the SIIA report. In that respect, 60 percent of businesses plan to spend more on sectors like social content creation in the next year, the highest of any spending category in the SIIA survey. 

While businesses may finally be unilaterally embracing the age of Twitter, mobile marketing still has a long ways to go. According to the SIIA report, only 25 percent of companies are incorporating mobile marketing. With mobile payments still a free-for-all market, it's no surprise that businesses may have to take their time in figuring out the intricacies of targeting potential consumers through smartphones. 

Watch the SIIA's webinar that discusses the report and its findings below:

Google’s Project Glass deserves plaudits for innovation, not just for the device itself but also for the process by which Google is developing and marketing the product. Studying product strategy and marketing as a Forrester analyst for almost nine years, I have never seen a company do what Google is doing: launch an entirely new form factor in such a transparent, inclusive way.

The Google Glass Rollout

At Google I/O last June, Google demoed videos taken with Glass while skydiving and mountain biking (notably, the top comment on YouTube as I write this article is how Glass will revolutionize POV porn) and offered developers an opportunity to buy an “Explorer Edition” for $1,500.

Google Glass In The Real World

Fast forward to 2013, and real developers, reporters and consumers are using Glass and talking about their experiences. The latest development in the Glass rollout is the #ifihadglass campaign: a contest for consumers to say on Twitter or Google Plus what they’d do with Glass and win an opportunity to participate in the Explorer program.

Glass is still months or even a year away from launching as a consumer product, but its transparent product strategy — exposing the evolution of the product to developers, reporters and consumers — will help Google avoid the pitfalls of its past product launches. Google TV has been an expensive flop. Android tablets took two years to catch on. Chromebooks have not yet been a commercial success.

Google released both of those products (Android for tablets and ChromeOS) and iterated post-launch; with Glass, it is opening the kimono before launch, and that will make a world of difference.

Marketing Hardware Like Software

This is software product strategy applied to hardware. In the software world, it’s common to release a beta version internally and then externally, improving the product before general release. In hardware, some small companies like Pebble are doing this but before Glass, there was no precedent for a major hardware launch to be so transparent. Secrecy is the norm in hardware, lest competitors get wind of what you’re doing and race to Taiwan to copy you.

Apple is the best example of pre-launch product secrecy. Google’s transparent Glass strategy not only helps Google avoid the mistakes of its own past, it’s also Google’s best weapon to compete against Apple. Rather than compete on Apple’s terms, Google invents its own terms. It’s not just “Google-level design,” it’s Google-level marketing. And it’s working. Google received thousands of responses over a weeklong period to the #ifihadglass campaign; tech blogs - including ReadWrite - and mainstream media like The Today Show amplified the story.

Social Market Research

The insights Google gathers from #ifihadglass submissions can help shape product development, app development and product marketing. For example, if you read the #ifihadglass tweets, you see that most of the submissions relate to sharing a point of view literally from someone’s own eyes, whether that’s for charity or sport or shopping. That’s what’s getting people really excited — Glass is tapping into a deep human need to be understood and share experiences with other people. A smaller number of posts relate to augmented reality — having data overlaid on physical space, whether that’s for entertainment or navigation or fixing something. Google product strategists and marketers don’t have to guess what excites people about their product — they already know.

There are several important implications of Google’s transparent product strategy for Glass. First, I think the company will see unprecedented success for launching a pretty futuristic product — Glass will succeed at scale where similar products like MyVu and Looxcie have not. The success of Glass — and the marketing leading up to its launch — will have a halo effect for Google Plus, which Google is using as the hub for Glass conversation. (And I imagine, the default place to share photos and videos taken with Glass will be your Google Plus page.) The bottom line: Glass will be the next great platform to innovate for, and should be on every company’s radar. Glass will be the next Pinterest, Facebook, Amazon and iPhone all rolled into one.

I am not looking forward to Google Glass POV porn, though.

Image courtesy of Google. 

Guest author Anthony Smith is CEO of Insightly.

You may have read a lot of articles last year about why the so-called "freemium" model doesn’t work for most consumer-oriented companies. And it’s true that offering a base-level product for free to gain visibility and marketshare and then converting a subset of users to a paid, premium version is not a viable strategy for every business.

However, depending on the product you’re offering, the freemium model can work well for business-to-business (B2B) companies, and especially well for B2VSB (business-to-very-small-business) companies.

(See also Why Free Is Bad: Businesses Should Be Happy To Pay For Key Services)

Here are six questions to ask yourself if you are entertaining a freemium model for business customers:

1. How big is the target market? For a freemium model to work, you need to make sure your audience is extremely large, since typical conversion rates range from 3% to 10%. According to the Small Business Administration, in 2009 there were almost 28 million small businesses in the United States. (The SBA defines a small business as one with fewer than 500 employees). Let’s say your business captures 2% of all the small businesses as free accounts, and 3% of those convert to paying customers. That’s almost 17,000 paying customers. Based on your business model is that enough to sustain and grow a profitable business?

2. What is the value of a free customer? By offering your product for free, you run the risk of cementing that value in the minds of customers. The flip side of this is that when you’re trying to build a brand and a user base, the freemium model makes it easier to get exposure, a base of quality leads, the potential of high virality and a built-in sounding board for essential user feedback.

3. How does your product impact the daily lives of your users? Do your users recognize that your product makes their work life more productive, more efficient, more organized or more informed? If so, converting from a free version to a paid version will be a natural progression.

4. Does your product help grow your customer’s business? If your product offers some kind of analytics or metrics that can be used to measure an aspect of the health of the business (i.e., sales, efficiency, productivity savings or gains), then it’s easier to align your product with the growth of the company and easier for a small business to justify spending dollars on it.

5. What is the best conversion metric – transactions or users? Both models have pros and cons. In many cases, users like the transaction model because it’s often pay-as-you-go. However, sometimes a transaction model can be perceived as nickel-and-diming the user. A user license is another common conversion metric, and it may be easier for your customers to swallow as they try to justify the budget to convert from a free account to a paid one. If it makes sense, you can may be able to combine both models (i.e., offer X number of transactions per user license).

6. What is the difference between the free and paid versions of the product? Don’t cripple your free version to the point that it offers minimal value. Remember, your customer’s first interaction and impression will likely be with your free product, so make sure that your free offering is useful on its own terms and not just an obvious stepping stone to a higher-level paid version.

Freemium models should be based on your specific business realities. If the math of the freemium model looks like it will work for your business, your product and your audience, give it a try.

 Image courtesy of Shutterstock.

It is almost silly to think that in 2013, many enterprises are still struggling with mobile strategies. The fact of the matter is that enterprises can sometimes be just as big, slow and bureaucratic as the Federal government. That can also be true for the enterprise marketing departments that are, ostensibly, supposed to be ahead of the curve of the rest of the organization.

Research firm Forrester has identified the top 10 trends that enterprise marketers need to know in 2013, and the actionable responses they should take to prepare a multi-year mobile strategy to push their companies into the future. The key takeaway? It's time to invest resources in mobile - including time, money and people.

Among its points Forrester says that “the role of mobile marketing manager will emerge.” We are beginning see these types of roles crop up in companies across the world. Whether it is the “VP of Mobile” or the mobile-only IT guy, enterprises are starting to fraction certain parts of the workforce to specifically deal with mobile issues. Cost conscious enterprises may not like to see their workforces become even more fragmented and specialized, but the fact of the matter is that mobile is like a weevil, ingraining itself into the infrastructure of enterprise protocols. Ignore it at your peril.

“Mobile on the cheap is over. Implementing the complex technology to make the most of mobile opportunities requires a new vision of how to interact with customers, significant changes in culture and competencies across business and IT, and more investment,” wrote Forrester analyst Thomas Husson. 

What it comes down to is this: enterprises and marketers need to address multi-year use cases for smartphones and tablets, hire and organize their workforce to take advantage of the opportunities and restructure the corporate organization chart to give those people the power to make actionable decisions. Ideally, these types of changes would have started two or three years ago or before. If your enterprise is just starting to figure out how mobile is changing your processes in 2013, you are well behind the ball.

See the chart from Forrester below. What is your enterprise doing to take advantage of the Mobile Era? Let us know in the comments.

Lead image courtesy of Shutterstock.

Get ready for another blast of anti-Google propaganda from Microsoft and its PR maestro Mark Penn. Sources tell me that the Borg is about to launch another broadside against the search giant, this one aimed at Gmail, under the title, "Don't get Scroogled by Gmail."

Microsoft flacks have been briefing reporters under embargo today. (I wasn't on the list.) The news will break at 11 p.m. Pacific time Wednesday night.

The gist of the scare campaign is that Google is a scary, scary company that reads your private emails in order to send you targeted ads. Even if you don't use Gmail, if you send email to someone who does, Google goes through those emails to generate advertising revenue too," Microsoft warns in material sent to reporters. Oh, and Microsoft points out that six class-action lawsuits have been filed against Google over this issue, and asks people to sign a petition "to tell Google to stop going through your personal email messages."

This is basically an ad campaign for Outlook.com, Microsoft's new mail service. Microsoft points out that Outlook.com doesn't go through the contents of your email. (Though it's worth pointing out that Outlook.com does have advertising.)

Nothing Better To Do?

Microsoft has tried this before. Just about a year ago, the Borg launched a campaign about the "Gmail Man," featuring a video of a mailman who reads everybody's private mail:

More recently, Microsoft introduced its "Scroogled" campaign claiming that Google's search results were skewed by advertising and even created a site, Scroogled.com, to make its case.

(See also Scroogled? Microsoft Charges Google With Manipulating Search Results.)

These are all part of an ever-more-nutso obsession that Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has developed with Google over the past 10 years. As I reported recently, Microsoft has spent millions of dollars lobbying regulators in the U.S. and Europe hoping to land Google in trouble, though so far it hasn't worked.

The Hand Of Mark Penn?

The recent smear campaigns appear to be the work of political pollster Mark Penn, who ran Hillary Clinton's disastrous 2008 presidential campaign and signed on with Microsoft to bring negative political tactics to the world of tech. 

The strategy seems to be to keep hammering away on Gmail, hoping that if Microsoft just keeps repeating the same message over and over - that Google is a scary Big Brother spying on everything you do - it will finally sink in and scare people away.

That kind of stuff sometimes works in politics. Whether it will work in tech remains to be seen. So far, however, it's falling short.

Gmail has surged to 425 million users, and now has leapt ahead of Microsoft's Hotmail and Yahoo Mail. Of most concern to Microsoft must be that Gmail has been catching on inside universities and corporations. (ReadWrite and our parent company, Say Media, rely on Gmail.) 

A Microsoft spokesman confirmed that the campaign was launching tonight.

In a statement, Google said, "Advertising keeps Google and many of the websites and services Google offers free of charge. We work hard to make sure that ads are safe, unobtrusive and relevant. No humans read your email or Google Account information in order to show you advertisements or related information. An automated algorithm - similar to that used for features like Priority Inbox or spam filtering - determines which ads are shown."

As I pointed out in my recent article, the risk of what Microsoft is doing is that it could backfire and make Microsoft look nasty and desperate. Instead of whining and running smear campaigns, why not just make better products? Why not just kick Google's ass in the marketplace?

The problem with campaigns like this is that it looks like Microsoft considered that option, realized it was impossible, and went with the negative ads instead.

Images by ReadWrite.

Any illusions that marketers have gotten this whole social media thing down pat will be blown away by the latest findings from Technorati Media's 2013 Digital Influence Report, which suggests that for everything the media spends across social platforms, the most desired influencers aren't even being reached.

The new report points out a huge disconnect: only 11% of corporate social media budgets are devoted to advertising on blogs and influencer sites. But fully 86% of the influencers these corporate brands are trying to reach are using blogs as their primary publishing platform.

Brands And Advertisers: It's All About Facebook

The mismatch is pretty clear in Technorati Media's report. Typically, just 10% of the total digital marketing budget is devoted to a social ad strategy. Of that slice of the pie, 57% gets tossed at Facebook ad buys, 13% at YouTube and another 13% at Twitter's sponsored tweets. Just 6% is spent on influencers and 5% on blogs.

It's not just ad buys, either. When launching social media campaigns, earned media goals are very much stacked towards metrics like Facebook Likes and Fans; Twitter followers and retweets; and traffic on the company's own website and landing pages.

But the real success of any social campaign is not an all-out blitzkrieg of any given social media channel, but rather the conversion of prospects within a given community to your brand or product. Get someone like Robert Scoble talking up your brand and that could be worth more than a thousand random new followers on your social media accounts.

Where Influencers Really Hang

The problem, though, is this: A majority of influencers (59%) aren't producing much content on anything other than their blogs. Influencers use Twitter, Facebook and Google+, of course, but not to publish works so much as promote their works on other sites, like blogs.

What influences the bloggers? The biggest source of influence for 18% of the bloggers surveyed is... other bloggers. That's how many say blogs are "very influential," while 11% found colleagues to be very influential and Twitter was very influential for another 10% of the bloggers.

It's not that influencers are completely ignoring social media: They are using it quite extensively to promote their work and determine the popularity of their content. But are they being influenced by the content and ads on these networks? The report released this week suggests not.

It's a big miss for the brand marketers, too, since 61% of these influencers are reporting they get revenue from banner advertising, and 51% revenue from text ads.

Why The Disconnect?

So what's the reason for the disconnect? The report suggests that brand marketers are using comScore/Nielsen to identify influencers, but given their niche and size, a lot of influencers are underrepresented in such metric services.

"Furthermore, when gauging the success of campaigns, where influencers are monitoring traffic/page views, brand marketers are measuring Facebook likes," the report detailed. This schism on metric priorities has led to both sides missing each other for the time being. A realignment of priorities is definitely needed to better tap the real potential of social media as an outreach tool to customers.

Lead image courtesy of Shutterstock. Article image courtesy of Technorati Media.

(This post is sponsored by SDL-SM2, a social-media analytical tool for small- and medium-sized businesses and small agencies.)

Tracking and measuring social media is no longer just a nice-to-have for businesses – it’s now a core essential of any modern marketing plan. And that’s true for giant multinational corporations as well as small businesses, agencies, researchers and even social-data hobbyists.

Yes, They Really Are Talking About You

If you're new to social media monitoring, you might think no one's talking about your business at all. But that's probably not the case. More likely, they’re talking plenty, you just don’t know about it.

Fortunately, it’s easier than ever to listen in with SDL SM2, the entry-level, self-serve product offering from the SDL Social Intelligence Division. SDL SM2 offers automated sentiment analysis of more than 60 billion social conversations on YouTube, Facebook and Twitter as well as forums, blogs and wikis going back to 2007 - in your choice of more than 50 languages. It includes customizable and shareable real-time dashboards and the ability to segment the data with category rules. You can even export social media data into Excel or SPSS for further analysis.

Social media monitoring isn’t just an academic exercise. It’s all about helping you achieve your business goals: strengthening your brand, staying relevant to customers and driving revenue.

Monitoring social data is critical because it:

• Provides both current and historical information
• Can help predict consumers’ behavior 
• Delivers pure, customer-generated feedback
• Offers unique insight into competitor activity and perceptions
• Produces deep understanding of customers - beyond their relationship to your brand

Where Does Social Media Monitoring Start?

Typically, identifying the Who and Where of social media conversations about your brand and market is a great place to start. The next step is to drill down into word associations and sentiment analysis: What words are people using to describe your products and services, and what are the values associated with those words? And to fully understand where your brand stands in the market, you need to know what people sareaying about your competitors.

What does all this mean in practical terms for your business? SDL SM2 makes it easier to identify your most likely prospects. By understanding where they spend time online and what they like to talk about, you can tailor your marketing to be more efficient and effective. And you can get this information without running expensive, intrusive and time-consuming surveys, questionnaires and focus groups.

SDL SM2 is available at affordable prices via credit card on flexible month-by-month payment terms with no long term commitment.

For more information on Social Media Platforms for Small Businesses, check out SDL's Cheat Sheet Inforgraphic.

Creating commercials for the Super Bowl is always tough. The need to stand out, make a splash and be remembered naturally conflicts with the high-stakes nature of the event. 

This explains the yearly default to a short list of themes that always test well with consumers and clients alike: babies, animals, slapstick and iconic music, especially '70s classic rock. 

The lineup for Super Bowl XLVII was no different, but like every year, some brands found new and compelling ways to tell their stories and innovative ways to deliver them.

Here are the top five of this years ads - commercials that lived up to their presence on the world's biggest advertising stage. 

(See also: The 5 Worst Commericals Of Super Bowl 2013)

5. Pizza Hut: "Hut Hut Hut"

It's never easy to incorporate the name of the brand into the fabric of an ad; it's even tougher to tie the name to the programming. On the chain's biggest sales day of the year, this gem from Pizza Hut evokes an authentic love of football even as it delivers name repetition at astounding levels. Brilliantly executed, this spot is entertaining, rewarding and unlike many so-called "big ideas," the branding is such a large part of the execution that it works only as a Pizza Hut commercial.

4. Volkswagen: Get in. Get Happy. 

If you're not going to tell me about the product, you had better make me feel good about the company. Volkswagen has mastered this over the last few Super Bowls. This year's offering eschews the sentimentality of past efforts and goes for the smile - and a great big Rastafarian smile it is. Set against the dreary backdrop of a featureless office, you have to love the office drone from Minnesota who spreads the happiness he gets from his VW in a pitch-perfect Jamaican accent. More than any other spot this year, the accent is most likely to become part of the vernacular, with millions of people potentially doing their best Bob Marley in the coming days. "Whassup" anyone?

3.  Dodge Ram: "Farmer" 

Chrysler has done it again. After last year's quasi-political tribute to America and the previous - and wonderful - "Imported from Detroit," the Dodge Ram gets a two-minute spot whose simplicity and sheer emotional impact prove that less can indeed be more. Using a monologue from mid-20th-Century radio icon Paul Harvey and stark rural images, this tribute to America's farmers works on every level. Emotionally charged, inspirational, tinged with sadness, this spot commands your complete attention and holds it for a full two minutes. Harvey's simple words hit home and the simple images images resonate deeply. This will be the king of the water cooler.

2.  Taco Bell:  'Viva Young"

Basically a mash-up of the hundreds of lifestyle spots Taco Bell has done in the past, with a simple and delightful twist - the cast is all in their 70s and 80s. The 'kids" bust out of their nursing home for a night of partying - tattoos, wild driving, beady stares from the cops... and tacos. Kudos as well for the Spanish-language music. If you can make a 75-year-old look good eating fast-food, you're doing everything right.

1. Tide: Miracle Stain 

Hats off to Procter & Gamble's Tide for a spot that shows even packaged goods can be relevant. This smart spot had the audience involved for weeks before the game, and made great use of second-screen via social media during the blackout and immediately after the spot ran. The fact that the Miracle Stain was a likeness of 49er great Joe Montana made it even sweeter as the spot ran durng the 'Niners comeback. Kudos as well for producing two versions of the spot so the correct teams would be represented.

Which spots did you like the most? Let us know in the comments.

Sure, creating a great commercial for the Super Bowl is tough. But it may be even tougher to come up with truly awful stinkers like these five losers. 

Super Bowl XLVII had its share of great commercials, but these five hit new lows in wasted money, poor targeting, lack of imagination and sheer poor taste.

(See also: The 5 Best Super Bowl 2013 Ads)

5.  Toyota: "Wish Granted"

It's not easy creating a commercial as scattered and unappealing as this, but Toyota rose to the occasion. In this stunning show of just how easy it is to blow $2 million on production and media, we were treated to the overused and unfunny idea that if you buy a Rav 4, you may have anything you wish for. The genie misunderstands the request: hilarity ensues. Boring vehicle, boring concept, boring execution. Perhaps Toyota has actually nailed its brand essence with this one.

4. E-Trade: "Baby"

How far the mighty have fallen. A ground-breaking campaign when it debuted, this the E-Trade baby has lost his mojo, resulting in this unfunny, forced spot. The problem is that the latest version of the baby has lost his original attitude, that snide quality that made us all think of "that guy with the stock tips" we all know. Instead of showing us how easy it is to use E-Trade, this baby tells us how great E-Trade is, then takes us on a photoshopped tour of what he'd do with all the money he makes. What was once a smart-ass 25-year-old in the shape of an infant has devolved into an ordinary talking baby. Sad.  

3. Mercedes: "Soul"

Here's an example of throwing money at a problem with no idea of what you want to accomplish. Even conceding the idea that a Mercedes for the masses is the right thing for their brand, why not just tell us about the car? Instead, it takes the Rolling Stones, Willem DaFoe as the devil, about 20 locations, and Jon Hamm's voice to leave us bored, uninformed and unimpressed.

2. Oreos: "Library'

Everything Tide did right, this package-goods spot does wrong. Displaying a staggering lack of understanding of its target audience, this spot takes place in a library and attempts to trade on the age old Oreos debate - cookie or cream. The debate escalates until the entire library is involved and the police arrive. But here's the kicker: everybody whispers! Even the police bullhorn emerges as a whisper. What fun. What imagination. What a shame.

1. GoDaddy: "Kiss'

Go Daddy has a well-deserved reputation as the bad boy of Super Bowl advertising. Its use of scantily clad women in questionable situations have often been outrageous and sometimes funny. The company has worked hard to make what is essentially a dull commodity service into a sexy brand. This spot goes a long way to negate all that hard work. Featuring perhaps the most disgusting kiss ever filmed, it features supermodel Bar Rafaeli locking lips with an overweight, seemingly underage actor. The sound effects alone are almost enough to bring up your nachos. 

It will be talked about. It will be remembered. It may even be liked by a twisted few. But it does nothing to enhance Go Daddy's brand, and the only person more uncomfortable watching this debacle than the audience must have been Danica Patrick, who is inexplicably standing in racing leathers to introduce the amorous couple. Worst spot of the evening - maybe the worst spot of the year.

Which spots did you hate the most? Let us know in the comments.

BlackBerry is going to hit the Super Bowl hard on Sunday with a new advertising campaign for its new BlackBerry 10 devices. The actual commercials have yet been released, but if the BlackBerry 10 launch event in New York City earlier this week was any indication, it will be likely over the top.

Will new “global creative director” Alicia Keys make an appearance? I would lay good money on it. Will BlackBerry take pot shots at Apple and Samsung? That is a pretty good bet too.

BlackBerry sent over a still shot sneak peek of an image (above) for the commercial. Nothing like giving people a glimpse and holding the rest back to drum up al little anticipation, huh?

What is it? Looks like a rainbow smoke explosion on a city sidewalk. But what the heck would a rainbow smoke explosion be doing in a BlackBerry commercial?

This is what the company had to say:

BlackBerry will be featured in Super Bowl XLVII on Sunday for the first time ever. This unique execution will be part of a broad marketing campaign about the totally re-designed, re-engineered and re-invented BlackBerry. As part of this activity, we are sharing a still image of the Super Bowl commercial with our social channels – including 30 millions fans on Facebook and Twitter – to draw them into a conversation about BlackBerry 10 during this highly social event.

So, BlackBerry basically admits to pandering to its social audience. Not that there is anything wrong with that, but couldn't it have chosen a more revealing image?

What do you think it is? Let us know in the comments. 

While Boeing's 787 Dreamliner plans are literally going up in flames, Tesla and SpaceX chief executive Elon Musk has "put it on the line" over at Flightglobal.

A Boeing Competitor

Musk wrote the aviation media site to say that "the [battery] pack architecture supplied to Boeing is inherently unsafe." Boeing, meanwhile, has yet to even confirm the cause of the problem that has ground the planes worldwide.

The famous entrepreneur runs one of a very few Boeing competitors for such lucrative government projects as spaceships and satellites. According to the Wall Street Journal, the chief executive’s SpaceX, which he founded and chairs, stands to rake in $1.6 billion in revenue over the next 5 years. One may wonder: is there a conflict of interest here?

A Lithium-Ion Supporter

Perhaps not, posits Forbes editor David Ewalt. He says that Musk merely wants to see lithium-ion batteries succeed in the marketplace. Ewalt writes that since "both Tesla and SpaceX rely on lithium ion battery packs in their vehicles... It’s in Musk’s interest to help establish the safety and reliability of these systems before customers and investors start to look askew at his own businesses."

On the other hand, Musk's public stance distances himself from the lithium-ion batteries by marketing the differences between the two companies’ approaches. Take the description as told by Flightglobal:

Both Boeing and Tesla use batteries fueled by lithium cobalt oxide, which is among the most energy-dense and flammable chemistries of lithium-ion batteries on the market. While Boeing elected to use a battery with a grouping of eight large cells, Tesla's batteries contain thousands of smaller cells that are independently separated to prevent fire in a single cell from harming the surrounding ones.

A Boeing Helper?

In another email, Musk wrote Reuters to suggest that SpaceX battery packs might be the salve for Boeing's woes. Musk has previously tweeted his support and publicly pledged company resources.

Of course, Boeing has decades of experience in aviation engineering, so perhaps Musk’s offers might be more like the needlings of Larry Ellison into Hewlett-Packard. Who knows? Maybe Ellison and Musk shared some tips on the set of Iron Man 2?

Boeing 787 image courtesy of mirounga / Shutterstock. Elon Musk image courtesy of Phil Stafford / Shutterstock.

What do you call an organism that thrives off the misfortune or mistakes of another? 

A lawyer. 

Here's another term that works: parasite. And when it comes to the marketing and communication of Internet and Web-based security products, that is an apt metaphor. 

Think about it. If you are a security company, what is the best way to show that your product is not only needed, but absolutely necessary? The answer of course is to help create a world where bugs and cyber-vulnerabilities make headlines on a daily basis. To highlight those bugs and vulnerabilties and position your product as the best way to keep your information and your company and your equipment safe. 

Since before the advent of the Internet, security companies have used these scare tactics to drum up business for their products. It is a familiar cycle: Issue a press release highlighting research about security flaws in applications and websites and then say, “Keep yourself protected with our top-of-the-line product.” It must be a highly effective form of marketing because security companies continually rely on it. 

Zscaler Drums Up Fear About ESPN App

The latest perpetrator is San Jose-based Zscaler. Last week, two different public relations professionals bombarded my inbox with the exact same story: ESPN’s ScoreCenter app has XSS vulnerabilities and sends users’ passwords over plain text, making it simple for any malicious hacker sniffing for attainable user information easy to intercept.

Great, I thought. ScoreCenter is one of my favorite apps and one of the most popular sports apps in Google Play and Apple App Store. I should consider passing this on to our readers, many of whom no doubt use the app. But I had a few questions first.

Foremost, did Zscaler reach out to ESPN before pushing its press release? Because, you know, this is probably something that the app developers at the world’s largest sports network would probably want to know about as soon as possible. Or did Zscaler go with the “publish first, deal with the consequences later” approach?

After two attempts to reach Zscaler’s PR representatives on the question, my emails remain unanswered.

But here's the rub. It does not benefit a company like Zscaler to tell app publishers of vulnerabilities much ahead of time. If the affected company moves to fix the bug, there is essentially no bad news to drum up fear and push users to the security product that will “fix” the issue. 

Zscaler began pushing its PR campaign on January 16. It published its report on January 17 and by January 18, ESPN had fixed the app. Whether or not Zscaler told ESPN about the vulnerability before publishing the news remains unanswered. An XSS vulnerability is not a difficult fix for most developers and is usually the result of an oversight by the programmers. 

Update: Michael Sutton, VP of security research at Zscaler got in touch with ReadWrite after publication of the article to say, "I'm concerned as you suggest that we didn't inform ESPN of the vulnerabilities ahead of the release of our blog and that is absolutely not the case. We did work with ESPN and they were great to work with."

Somebody Smell A RAT?

But Zscaler is far from the worst culprit in this area. One of the most prominent scare mongering campaigns in recent memory played out in August 2011. Security firm McAfee used style magazine Vanity Fair to announce one of the largest and most persistent viruses in history, dubbed Shady RAT (Remote Access Tool). Why Vanity Fair? Because it is a trusted publication read by many people and one that many people that are not extraordinarily tech savvy read. The target is the consumer that McAfee can scare into buying its product because they do not know any better. 

This was well before McAfee's founder’s well-chronicled flight from authorities in Central America, but involved a similar level of head-scratching.

And that was not the first time that MacAfee had run a scare-tactic PR campaign. In 2011 it had Operation Night Dragon and Aurora. These were tied to varying bugs in Internet Explorer as well as spear-phishing social hacks. If anything, McAfee as a company loves to make a big splash. 

Zscaler is not quite as aggressive as McAfee, but its PR team is very active in making sure that people know of vulnerabilities that its ZAP product can fix. In the past seven months or so, it has warned that, “10% of mobile apps leak passwords and user data;” “80% of Olympic domains are scams and spam;” and “apps downloaded by 185 million are vulnerable to attackers to obtain bank info.” Each time, Zscaler conveniently had a product to combat the problem.

A Responsibility To Be Responsible

Unlike some conspiracy theorists, I am not accusing security companies of actually creating the bugs and viruses that they then sell their product to consumers to protect against. Malware happens and there are bad actors in the world who want to steal your data - and your money. Security products can help protect you from them, if you can figure out exactly which product fits your needs.

The problem is that many security companies seem more interested in frightening headlines, scaring the crap out of consumers for customer acquisition and being known as the company that found notable viruses, bugs and vulnerabilities than in actually protecting consumers from the most dangerous and widespread threats. 

For an industry that is supposedly all about Internet responsibility, too often, the marketing and communications departments of security companies are anything but. 

Top image courtesy of Shutterstock.

We all know PR reps work charm and tsotchkes to build "relationships" with journalists and analysts, but they're way less shady than, say, Black Hat scammers in the SEO biz, right?

Apparently not. A few weeks ago, I saw the following job post on Elance. The description was a remarkably up-front pay-for-play bid:

We need people who can publish news articles at news sites PR2+.
You choose the topic and weave in the subject we assign. After a review, you publish to a specified news site.
Several journalists needed.

In 2013? Seriously? Wasn't Payola over in the 60s (or at least after the J-Lo scandal of 2005?). I had to see if this had legs, so I submitted a bidless proposal.

Into The Heart of Darkness

The next day, I got a response, asking me to promote a small virtualization vendor:

Their price for selling my soul? 25 bucks. That hurt.

I contacted the vendor's PR department, ready to tear them a a new one, but instead of excuses, I got shock and horror. They claimed to be completely in the dark – and I believed them. I emailed the poster, asking if the company was a knowing client. They said yes. I replied, telling them I'd contacted the company and heard just the opposite.

Crickets.

It's been four days, and all communications have ceased.

The vendor was pissed. In fact, the Senior Product Manager with whom I spoke was angry enough to threaten legal action against the job poster, and I believe that's already begun. That action is the reason I'm not naming names, though you can probably find the job by digging on your own, if you're curious. UPDATE: After the publication of the piece, I was contacted by the vendor's actual PR firm, a boutique outfit that's worked with some very large technology brands. We've worked with them in the past. At this point, I became even more convinced that the scammers were flying solo.

I reported the job to Elance, describing its varying levels of sketchiness, but it's still up, and will probably stay there. As far as I can tell (and please correct me if I'm wrong, folks), there's no law against paying for references in a blog. Still, when I mentioned "paid placement" to the poster, they shot back a clarification right away. They were "pitching an idea." They just happened to pay money if they were allowed to review the post before publication and that "idea" made its way to a site.

Pay-For-Play Alive And Well

Semantic juggling fixes everything.

The point here is that payola is apparently alive and well in the blogosphere. If the going rate is truly only $25 for a mention in a respectable publication, it's easy to see the appeal – a dozen mentions would cost less than the airfare to send one rep on a briefing. But why would one of these shady agencies spend money to promote a non-client?

The biggest advantage is protection. When you're feeling out an ethically-icky situation, you don't want to dangle any top-shelf clients that can expose you. Once the journalist is on the take, both parties have a vested interest in keeping things quiet, so the agency can relax a bit. The other benefit is promotion. The by-product of all this fishing will be a catalog of company references in relevant publications, which could be an excellent door-opener for sales. In any case, freelancing sites provide a fantastic layer of anonymity for shady promoters. It's something Elance, Guru.com and the rest of the freelance marketplaces will have to address in the future.

Maybe all my instincts are wrong, and the vendor was actually involved. It's always possible, but it doesn't change the conclusion. There's apparently still money in buying off journalists, and from the looks of it, they aren't very expensive.