The mash-up is called TheMugMap.com and it’s pretty fun (I think). Check it out and let me know what you think in the comments below.

Why haven’t we seen an infusion of behavioral and video yet? What greater database of consumer behavior could there be than a database of channel surfing behavior? Viewers that behave similarly during channel surfing probably would respond to similar (or identical) advertisements.

I recently put together a mash up to show how such a platform might look. It’s called Watchamos (spanglish for ‘let’s watch’) and it allows viewers to make shared video jukeboxes they can watch at the same time.

Check out Watchamos, use it to heckle videos and friends, and think about behavioral data mining.

There certainly is an increased emphasis on real monetization, scalable volumes of eyeballs, and real clients with real money to spend on digital, but is that enough? I recently took a gander at a diagram of all the start-ups in the display advertising space and I was struck by how fragmented the industry is. The sad truth is that not EVERY start-up can succeed. Investors should be concerned about being on the right side of the inevitable industry consolidation that will happen and about over valuation attracting too many competitors to maintain real margins.

There is an old adage about knowing it’s time to sell your stocks when a cab driver tells you he’s a day trader. A similar rule applies here I’m afraid. When you encounter a cab driver that’s a CEO of a geo social mobile behavioral re-targeting start-up shut off your computer and find a new space to play in. At least until the next go around.

Over the past semester, I have hated on every new gadgety social networking tool that has come out, and in the case of Google Buzz I was absolutely right when I said it would fail kinda miserably.

The ubiquity of social net feedback, as outlined by Facebook, however, I don’t hate. In fact, I think this is the most brilliant development in how we use the internet maybe ever. Yeah I said it. Ever.

My vision of how social networking info  should be used has always been that one would be able to log into their browser (through a simple Firefox plugin) as an ‘identity’ that would allow them to see socially augmented content anywhere they visited on the internet. The new architecture unveiled by Facebook this week is a push in that very direction (minus the plugin for Firefox)

Good game guys.

Reborrowing of French  entrepreneur ‘one who undertakes or manages.’
From the french entreprendre or ‘undertake.’

So secretly being an “entrepreneur”  translates to being an “undertaker” (and not the professional wrestler ‘The Undertaker’ ). Is this why most small businesses die so quickly?

According to an article from SmallBusinessTrends.com, failure rates amongst new businesses are highest within the first two years. The chart below shows the survival rates for new businesses by industry:

How does this relate to marketing? Well, there are an unprecedented number of start-ups in the advertising and marketing space right now, especially in digital. Many of them have yet to hit the two year mark. I imagine that by this time next year the start-up landscape in this industry will look very different – possibly unrecognizable two years from now.

An article I recently read for class, however, has given a new hope that there is a future for whole-brained people. It’s called the ‘semantic web’ and just about everyone agrees that it’s where the internet is headed. Information in the future wont simply be indexed as text by a search engine, but put in to larger frameworks that make it easier to find in context. In the article on semantic web, the author, writing for a site called chiefmartec.com, asserts that when the semantic web becomes the new paradigm, marketers will need to understand machine structures. Brand marketers will not be able to escape the technical under-pinning of the internet when communicating with customers, prospects, and the world at large. This is all welcome news, being that I’m an arts and crafts kid, turned music geek, turned software engineer, turned marketer. Finally a way to use my entire [nerdy] brain. Can’t wait.

The station I was listening to was my Mozart/Bach classical music station, which is hardly ever interrupted by commercials presumably because no one listens to that stuff (what can I say?… I’m high minded).

The mis-match in context made me wonder, though, if there isn’t something to ‘out-of-context’ advertising. Google has built a castle on the idea that ads related to the content on a page are more effective, but are they?

I would be willing to wager that an advertisement you identify with (my girlfriend makes me watch, I swear) encountered unexpectedly has higher recall than advertising directly related to whatever else you are doing.

Not all that revolutionary a concept. It stands to reason that the person is the target, not what they are looking at, or in my case what I was listening to.

Conventional wisdom on internet content tells us that 1% of people are active, 9% of people are responsive, and the remaining 90% are passive. The overwhelming majority of nodes on a social graph are therefore on the outermost branches of the social network – ie people who are neither hubs nor sources of social behavior – the wall flowers.

Enter antisocial targeting. That is, the ability to  find and effectively market to people who are on the outer edges of collective behavior. Any firm that wishes to effectively leverage a social graph will not be able to stop at identifying ‘influencers’ and social hubs, but MUST be able to stitch together audience segments that are likely similar in purchase intent without being directly connected to each other socially. This silent majority of internet and media users represents a volume of eyeballs for targeted advertisers that would allow them to compete with Superbowl ads every day of the year.

Looks like baby is growin’ up! This past week Twitter announced it’s plan monetize it’s limitless stream of “twits” in a New York Times article. The concept, which is rather blandly called “Promoted Tweets,” (I guess “Preets” was asking too much of advertisers) will feature promoted text within popular Tweets.

Clients lined up to put their branding and advertising messaging in twitter streams include the likes of Best Buy, Virgin America, Starbucks, and Bravo. Special deals and promotions will be inserted into popular Twitter content, prioritized by the level of engagement.

The engagement prioritization is what really stands out to me. I’ve been hating on Twitter since the beginning but this type of advertising seems to have the advantage of generating qualified leads across the broadest possible long tail of content.

Well done Twitter, for now…. I’m predicting they’ll have to resort to MySpace-style advertising everything everywhere within 6 – 12 months if they are serious about turning a profit on advertising alone.

In the episode, friendships on Facebook are indexed and monitored like stock prices as people friend and un-friend each other continually. In reality, however, people hardly ever un-friend anyone on Facebook so you may not know how.

I recently had to resort to un-friending because someone I hardly knew from middle school wouldn’t stop recommending the same band to me. I’m kind of a sentimental person so I let my inbox get filled with months of spam from this guy before finally letting him go. You may find some day you have to make the same tough decision so linked here, in case of emergency, is an instruction set for un-friending someone on Facebook.