So earlier today I was eating at a local location of a restaurant chain that has become a recent lunch time favorite of mine. The chain is a small but up and coming organization, I think at the moment they only have four locations.

I don’t know how long the company has been in business. I first heard about the place about a month ago, and since then every day I walk past it during lunch, the place is packed. The food is really good and the price is not totally unreasonable. In their menu, they have managed to come up with a new twist on an old theme.

So here is what happened… I was stuffing my face, enjoying a break from work when I happened to look towards the restaurant’s front door. At that moment a cute little girl, who to me looked to be about seven years of age, walked in with a high power Minolta digital camera complete with a giant manual focus lens attached to the front.

What happened next was even more bizarre. This little girl systematically walked up to just about every menu hanging on the wall, focused her camera and then snapped a picture. After she was done with the menus, she repeated the process with the marketing posters on the wall. I don’t know if she got a shot of every single marketing piece they had, but she came close.

I noticed at least one other person in the restaurant who had noticed the strange behavior of this adorable little girl. He had a look of utter confusion on his face that seemed to say “what in the world is going on”? Most of the other patrons seemed not to notice this tiny photography enthusiast.

So what in the world does this have to do with online business? Well the business world, in all its forms, can be highly competitive. This level of competition drives people to do all sorts of things in an attempt to gain an edge. I am not suggesting that you engage in any business activities which make you feel uncomfortable.

What I am advising is for you to be aware of some of the techniques that others may use in attempt to gain information on you or your business. There will be some information that will be almost impossible to protect, like a menu on a wall. There will be other details that you will want to protect to the best of your abilities.

If a cow is purple in the middle of the woods with no one around to see it, does it really matter what color the cow is?

A lot of us have read Seth Godin’s book Purple Cow, which advocates making products remarkable so that the most powerful form of advertising, word of mouth, will naturally work in our favor. The term for such a revolutionary idea that spreads like wildfire is an “ideavirus”, as in the book Unleashing the Ideavirus by Godin and Malcolm Gladwell.

Here is the question though, are there limitations or even possibly dangers to being remarkable without a platform. When I say a platform, I mean anything which gives you a significant amount of leverage in initially promoting your company’s new offering. For instance in the world of online business your leverage could come from an email list of 100,000 members or a Facebook profile with 2000 friends.

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A story made its way around the Twitter-verse starting about two day’s ago regarding a seemingly ground breaking event had occurred. An eBay auction for the right to sponsor the Twitter feed of Ian Schafer for one month had ended with a closing bid of $1,082.01. For more complete details on the auction you can view this auction’s auction page on eBay.

At first this would seem to be a momentous event. Certainly being able to raise over a thousand dollars for the right to sponsor a Twitter feed with less than 600 followers, for one month is noteworthy, even if the purpose of the auction was not for profit. According to Mr. Schafer’s Twitter feed all proceeds from the auction are to go to the David Wright Foundation.

The winning bid for the auction came from a bid from eBay user “teammetacafe” who prior to winning this auction had zero eBay Feedback. I am assuming that the eBay user “teammetacafe” refers to the metacafe.com website, though I am not sure. It is important to note that this winning bid may well have been totally legitimate and un-engineered in any way, shape, or form.

What is particularly interesting however, about this auction is its bid history. If you look at the bid history you will see that there were 22 bids from what appears to be 5 eBay accounts. If you examine this bid history closely you will see that with the exception of the first bidder who seems to have an eBay feedback rating of 50, none of the other accounts had a feedback rating higher than 1 prior to the end of this auction.

Hmm… a bunch of eBay accounts with little or no feedback history bidding what some would consider a surprisingly high amount for the rights to sponsor a Twitter feed for a month. What could it mean?

Regardless of how the end result of this auction came about, I think that there is an important lesson in this story. The lesson here is that marketing, to a large degree, is about creating a spectacle and it is clear that Mr. Schafer here has succeeded in doing so with the sponsorship he has obtained for his Twitter feed.

As Twitter becomes more and more popular, I think it makes sense to consider the possibility that Twitter may become the new standard for providing some of the same basic functions that RSS is known for. From a marketing point of view, I think that one of the most important functions of an RSS feed is the ability to create a crowd.

In our fast paced and frantic world we require the help of others to make many of our decisions. Instead of reading all of the blogs devoted to the areas that interest us, it makes more sense for us to briefly scan over the blogs related to our niche hoping to find a few that send us the signal that says “stop and read further, you may have struck gold”. One of those signs is the existence of a crowd, any kind of group or gathering sends the signal that at least a few people with interests similar to your own think that the site is worth their attention.

As human beings we can’t help but think, if it’s worth their attention, maybe its worth mine. Displaying a feedcount of 50,000 subscribed RSS readers instantly and clearly conveys the message “I am worth your time”. It is for this reason that some internet marketers have suggested “borrowing” the code from another blogger’s stats to display on your site. In my opinion Twitter provides this ability to create a crowd, inherent to RSS with the addition of some bonus features.

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The following post about keys to social bookmarking success was submitted by Marsello Oentoro. 

Social bookmarking sites such as Digg.com or StumbleUpon.com’s browser toolbar are great sources of website traffic.  The key is to get enough Diggs or Stumbles to get your latest page of wow content a significant burst of traffic. This usually happens when enough users “vote” for you content, in a relatively short period of time, to make your content the hot story of the minute. Let’s examine some of the ways we can improve our chances of getting there:

1. Remember that Content is King
 
Readers are not stupid; you simply cannot cheat them with a poor or spammy content and expect those readers to return to your site.  If your want to submit weak content to your site, let’s say exclusively for SEO purposes, then don’t even bother bookmarking it.  Keep in mind that if any of these social bookmarking sites comes to the conclusion that you are a spammer, you run the risk of getting your account banned.

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The following post on Internet Marketing Essentials was submitted by Marsello Oentoro.

For those out there who are not yet familiar with the subject of Internet Marketing, trying to understand the subject can seem quite daunting. Recently I’ve received lots of questions about what Internet Marketing is all about and how someone without any knowledge or experience should start. I would suggest that you start by studying some of the basic elements of internet marketing.

1. Content – this could consist of an article, blog post, video, or audio which you’ve developed or paid someone to create for you.
2. Traffic – amount of visitors who frequent your site during a given time period.
3. Brand – your reputation as an expert in your field and the degree in which people trust your advice.
4. Affiliates – affiliate promote other people’s products usually on a per-sale commission bases.
5. Opt-In Email Newsletter Subscribers – if you collect emails from visitors and have a mailing list, this could be the most valuable asset you have in terms of creating a following and distributing your message.
6. Incoming links – are a major “off page” factor in determining your site’s rank in various search engines such as Google and Yahoo. These ranking effect the amount of traffic your site receives from these engines.
7. Split Testing – helps you compare alternative content or designs to determine which option is more effective. For example you might split test the placement of Google AdSense ads on your site to determine which layout produces the most income.

The above list was designed to provide a basic introduction to some of the core concepts of Internet Marketing. For more of the basics of internet marketing feel free to check out the articles available on the left hand side of this site. If you have any questions feel free to ask us here at Feedback Secrets either by leaving a comment or sending us an email.

Online entrepreneur Shea Gunther recently raised $20K in four days using Twitter and other media. Feedback Secrets caught up with Shea to ask him some questions regarding his unorthodox fundraising technique, and to get the scoop on his latest venture.

Could you tell us a little bit about your new start up venture?

I’m starting up a screen printing and t-shirt company. We’ll start with a handful of shirt designs and build out more lines focusing on green themes, social media and news, online celebrities, and pop culture.

How much money did you raise, how much equity was sold, and how long did it take you?

In four days I raised $20k and I have another person considering going in for another $5k. All told so far I’ve sliced off 30% of our equity to my investors/partners.

Can you tell us about your business background before you started using Twitter?

I’ve been starting businesses since I was 20 and founded a $16M VC funded online video dot com. I’m 30 now so I guess that means I have a decade of being an entrepreneur under my belt (that makes me feel old). My day job time spent is working on a new green web startup. I’m working with some amazing guys in Chicago on a news site targeting the college set. This is my fifth startup with $100k+ in funding and I’ve started a handful of smaller businesses in between and on the side.

How much did your business background, prior to establishing a presence on Twitter, contribute to your ability to raise capital so fast?

I think my investors and partners know that I’ve been around the entrepreneurial block. We’ve built a tight little business model and I think we’ll do good in the niches we’re going after. I’ve been friends with my lead investor for a few years now- it’s all about who you know and who knows you.

How has Twitter increased your leverage as an entrepreneur, both in terms of this fundraising effort and in general?

I’ve been able to build a network of acquaintances on Twitter that’s proven invaluable. I’ve made some very real friends out of people who started off as followers and it’s provided me a platform to promote myself, my work, and my friends work. Twitter has so far seemed to attract a high proportion of smart, high achieving people and it’s been great to be able to tap into that.

What are the different methods by which prospective investors contacted you with questions regarding potential investment?

I didn’t write a business plan for this one. I didn’t have time and frankly hate having to write them. I do a LOT of business planning, I just despise writing out the formal business plan. If I was raising $200k or $2M it’d be harder to justify not writing a plan, but because I was targeting people for $5k and $10k investments I was able to get away with it. I wrote a lot of emails outlining everything I had planned and followed it up with Q&As on the phone. It was actually a very easy process, everyone came in excited to get involved.

Someone left a reply on your Twitter profile suggesting that the SEC might not be happy about you raising funds on Twitter. What are your thoughts on this subject?

I said something to the effect of “I’m raising $20k in all, I’d welcome the links I’d get from an SEC investigation”. I’m not blasting spam out to a hundred million people asking for investments in the next hot new stock, I’m asking my big circle of friends if anyone else wants to help start a t-shirt company with me. Boing Boing would be all over any federal heat coming my way. That would almost be worth it alone. ;D

When can we expect T-Shirts to be available for purchase?

We’ll be up and running at the end of June, beginning of July. We’re in no huge rush to get up and want to make sure we have production and the whole sales and shipping cycle down before we sell shirt one.

If you have been involved in internet marketing for any length of time, you have probably experienced some form of content theft. While an exact definition of what constitutes “content theft” may be tricky to pin down, most people sense that something is not right when they feel that something has been stolen from them.

The term “symbiotic marketing” refers to a situation involving two parties where an marketing action taken by at least one party benefits both parties. This can be seen in a blog comment, where the commenter contributes to the discussion and in return receives a link back to his site, in Twitter profiles where marketers promote the content of others as well as their own, or in a host of other forms whether on social networking sites, forums, or elsewhere.

If the above mentioned examples constitute examples of symbiotic marketing what then should we call the unauthorized copying of content for the intention of profit? Perhaps we should call it Parasitic Marketing, since by design it intends to leach value from its host.

Presented in this way the battle between symbiotic marketing and parasitic marketing seems very clear cut, very black and white. This is the way that I have viewed the unauthorized use of content for quite some time. Recently however I have begun to consider that this issue might have more shades of gray then I initially considered.

Is it possible that someone could use your content in an unauthorized manner yet cause you to receive some unintended benefit?

I think that I may have come across at least one such example. Consider blogs that are made up almost exclusively of headlines and excerpts taken from other blogs in a particular niche. The owners of these blogs do little in terms of generating there own content, but instead use the content of others and reap the rewards in terms of SEO traffic.

One unintentional benefit that may occur in such a case is that the content producing blog receives and increase in its Technorati authority due to the link from the content copying blog.

I am not saying that this is a fantastic gain for the content producing blog, or that the unauthorized use of content is a good thing, and I am in no way advocating the unauthorized use of content. Obviously, in studying any possible benefits it is important to remember that there are downsides to the unauthorized use of content.

The motivation behind this post comes from my interest in studying causes, effects, and even side effects in business. Closer examination of these causes and effects give me ideas, and ideas I have learned have value.

I don’t know of many examples of this effect but if you have come across an example where the unauthorized use of content has benefited you, and you would like to share, feel free to let us know by means of email or blog comment.

Tags: Content Theft, Technorati, Internet Marketing, Symbiotic Marketing

Sometimes just reading text can be a boring way to learn. But it’s not just text, boring webinars hosted in monotone voices can put us to sleep just as quickly. So the question becomes how can we keep our audience interested and transmit information at the same time.

Enter the Internet Marketing Rap Music Video. I recently came across the YouTube video of an artist that goes by the name “Poetic Prophet”, entitled “Paid Search 101 rap”. If you check this artist’s user page, you will find 2 more Internet Marketing inspired rap music videos.

This guy has defiantly created an interesting viral marketing campaign using viral video. So far it looks like this video has received about 15,000 views so far, it will be interesting to see how much this number grows.

I must begin with a warning! The subject of Broadcasts vs. Messages as it relates to email marketing, is not nearly as interesting as the subject of Godzilla vs. Mothra, as it relates to the fate of humanity. With this in mind let us continue… emails sent to an email list or newsletter come in two flavors, broadcasts and messages. Broadcasts are single emails that are sent at the same time either to your entire list, or to a portion of your list. Messages on the other hand usually form part of a series of emails which are sent out at preset intervals. These intervals usually start from the date of opt-in.

Broadcasts lend themselves more towards recently breaking news. For example something major has just happened in your industry or a related industry, and you would like add your own point of view to the events taking place and there relevance to your industry.

Messages lend themselves better toward those pieces of information in your email campaign that will not become outdated as quickly. A group of such emails might easily be formed into a Mini-Course. Such a course can act as the “freebie” offered to entice new subscribers to sign up for your list. Another give away item, which you may consider including in your list of initial messages is a free ebook. While an ebook probably won’t fit in a single email, a link to your ebook in one of your first few messages will work just as well.

As time goes on and you have written more and more broadcasts you may decide that some of your broadcasts would fit nicely inside your messages. So as your number of broadcasts grows your number of initial messages might grow as well, effectively “killing two birds with one stone”.