With the Olympic Games just a month off, some brands are looking to extend their sponsorships with social media programs. Lenovo has created 100 athletes’ blogs in an attempt to align itself with some less mainstream sports, such as field hockey and modern pentathlon. It gave the athletes laptops and video cameras to chronicle their preparation for the games.

“We wanted to do something that shows our tech prowess, not something that uses the Web as billboard,” said David Churbuck, vp of global Web marketing at Lenovo.

Lenovo turned to Google for help with the program. Google is providing blogging software via Blogger and video hosting through YouTube.

In keeping with the ethos of the social Web, Lenovo is not hosting the blogs on its own site. Most athletes either had their own sites or established them for this project. Lenovo is adding distribution by highlighting the blogs on its Web site at www.lenovo.com/voices.

Lenovo has asked the participating athletes to show a “Lenovo 2008 Olympics Blogger” badge on their sites. Most have done so, said Churbuck. It isn’t asking for any mention of Lenovo products, he added.

“I don’t want to be in the position of telling them what to write,” he said. “It’s their blog, they can do what they want.”

The blogging program is complemented with a Facebook effort that lets users virtually identify themselves with their country’s teams. Federated Media and Citizen Sports created country applications users can add to their profiles. So far, more than 100,000 have been downloaded.

” A brand like Lenovo working within Facebook is interesting because that’s the nut that a bunch of people are trying to crack,” said Jeff Ma, CEO of Citizen Sports. “Most brands and agencies don’t even know how to advertise on Facebook. There’s still a lot of education.”

Lenovo’s not alone in expanding its Olympics marketing socially. McDonald’s has also expanded on its traditional Olympics advertising with a social strategy centered around its first alternate-reality game. Called “The Lost Ring,” the AKQA-created game has been operational since April. In that time, McDonald’s boasts more than 2 million visitors in 100 countries have played it at some level. “The Lost Ring” challenges players to solve mysteries surrounding the Olympics.

“It’s an opportunity to engage with the youth culture around the world in a very meaningful and creative experience — one I’d say they can’t get anywhere else,” said Mary Dillon, McDonald’s chief marketing officer. “We want to be on the cutting edge of innovations.”

Dillon said the by-product of taking a plunge into a new area like an ARG is the rub-off effect it might give the McDonald’s brand among young consumers.

“We would hope the same community would be a little surprised McDonald’s is bringing this to them,” she said.

McDonald’s is pleased with participation rates for the game, Dillon said, though she admitted some of the extra benefits, like positive buzz, were more difficult to quantify than traditional ad metrics.

Those intangibles were the lure of the Lenovo athlete-blogging program, said Churbuck.

“The old model of blunt impressions, the billboard model, is not going to do it for me,” he said. “I’m far more interested in how many comments we drove, the traffic to athletes’ blogs, downloads of the applications. Those are more tangible expressions of engagement with the brand than clicks.”

Source: adweek.com

UK Internet visits to www.twitter.com have increased by 631% over the last 12 months, with 485% of that growth coming this year. Twitter is more popular with Brits than Americans: last week the site’s share of UK Internet visits was 70% higher its share of visits in America.

Twitter’s size is notoriously difficult to measure, as there are so many access points (mobile phones in particular), so if anything our measurement of internet visits under-estimates platform’s popularity. In her post Heather Hopkins argues that Twitter cannot yet be considered mainstream in the USA, but in the UK it’s getting there. Last week Twitter entered our rankings of the top 50 Social Networking and Forums websites for the first time, and the demographics are also pointing towards more wide-spread adoption. Overr the last 4 weeks, visitors were split 50/50 male/female, while only 15% were from London. 25-34 year olds are still the most over represented age group visiting the site, but 37% of visitors to the site are now 45 and over.

Looking at the Experian Mosaic lifestyle data for Twitter over the same period also paints an interesting picture. The two most over represented types are still both typical early adopters: City Adventurers (High-salaried, twenty-something singles in smart flats in inner urban areas) and Town Gown Transition (Students and academics mix with young professionals in terraces relatively close to universities). However, there are a number of other over-represented types that would imply a more mainstream appeal, in particular Settled Minorities (Young families and singles of varied ethnic decent, in high density, pleasant urban terraces) and White Van Culture (Younger owners, many in good quality ex-council properties, take advantage of local economic opportunities).

Another sign of maturity is that mainstream media organizations are starting to pick up traffic from Twitter. For example, BBC News accounts for 1.46% of the site’s upstream traffic but 1.73% of its downstream traffic - i.e. the Beeb is receiving more traffic from Twitter than it sends there. Other BBC properties in Twitter’s top 20 downstream sites include BBC Sport (1.34%) and the BBC Homepage (0.71%). The BBC Sport feed is very popular: over the last 4 weeks ‘bbc sport’ was the second most popular search term sending traffic to Twitter. As the table below illustrates, it accounted for 5.92% of search traffic to the site, and was joined in the top 10 by two other BBC-related search terms, ‘bbc news’ and ‘bbcsport’.

The other interesting thing that the table above highlights is the growing tail of people search terms sending traffic to Twitter, something that we’ve highlighted before with regards to another social network, Linkedin. This most recent top 10 includes Kevin Rose (founder of Digg, drinker of tea), the blogger Los Havros, and Molly Wood (executive editor of CNET’s Buzz Report).

Google recently commented that social media will become a “big part” of Internet marketing strategies in the future. New research from Deloitte suggests that before businesses implement such strategies they need to fully understand what drives social media to gain maximum benefit.

In partnership with Beeline Labs, Deloitte’s Ed Moran researched businesses that have started to use social media and build online communities. He found that many social media sites were failing to realize the full potential of their communities. For some, said Moran, it was the inability to reach the critical mass of involvement required and for others it was focusing on the bottom line instead of what their community needed.

Social media requires time, great community managers and providing what the community wants, yet many businesses start off by throwing money at online social technologies. Of the 140 or so businesses that Moran studied, 6% spent over $1 million on building social communities yet “a disturbingly high number of these sites fail,” said Moran (via WSJ ).

To maximize social media activity it’s imperative to build up a strong community both in numbers and commitment. The use of dedicated staff that have time to be involved in the community instead of tacking it onto their other marketing responsibilities will also ensure consistency and engagement and businesses should look to measure success not by the number of visits, but by increased loyalty and word of mouth impact.

A few key findings from the report, “2008 Tribalization of Business”, include:

- 37% of the communities have been running for 6 months or less

- 27% of the communities have 101-500 members (37% have less than 100)

- 13% of the communities are run by 2-5 full-time managers

- 52% of the companies surveyed plan to increase spending on community

E-commerce in Brazil, like many other Internet activities in that country, is maturing quickly. Between the first half of 2005 and 2008, e-commerce revenues as reported in e-bit’s “Web Shoppers” study nearly quadrupled to reach BRL3.8 billion ($2.2 billion). According to Valor Economico, in 2007 alone the market expanded by 43%. In terms of the number of individuals buying online, the figures are almost as dramatic, with 2.6 million buyers in 2003 rising to 9.5 million in 2007.

More likely than not, adult Internet users in Brazil have purchased something online, according to a December 2007 study by Symantec.

Brazil’s 79% of users who have purchased online is in the upper reaches of worldwide rates, comparable to such advanced Internet players as Japan (82%), the UK (79%) and Germany (78%). In contrast, only 63% of US Internet users have made an online purchase. Simply put, Brazilians who use the Internet tend to use it for everything, including e-commerce.

Online buyers in Brazil are huge media consumers. Books, magazines and newspapers ranked as the top e-commerce categories with a 17% market share in 2007, according to e-bit.

Almost one-half (49.47%) of Brazil’s online buyers use a credit card to make their purchases, versus 39.06% who use a banking ticket to buy online. Other payment methods, including debit or electronic transfer, and payment on delivery, were each favored by less than 10% of respondents to an Ipsos Public Affairs survey.

Females, who make up almost one-half of Internet users in Brazil, are a key factor driving the explosion of e-commerce. A study from e-bit reported in Business News Americas found that online transactions by females increased nearly 10% since 2000.

From the developer’s blog: “I’m happy to announce that version 2.6 of WordPress.org is now available, almost a month ahead schedule. Version 2.6 “Tyner,” named for jazz pianist McCoy Tyner, contains a number of new features that make WordPress a more powerful CMS: you can now track changes to every post and page and easily post from wherever you are on the web, plus there are dozens of incremental improvements to the features introduced in version 2.5.”

Here are some of the smaller features and improvements in 2.6:

Word count! Never guess how many words are in your post anymore.

Image captions, so you can add sweet captions like Political Ticker does under your images.

Bulk management of plugins.

A completely revamped image control to allow for easier inserting, floating, and resizing. It’s now fully integrated with the WYSIWYG.

Drag-and-drop reordering of Galleries.

Plugin update notification bubble.

Customizable default avatars.

You can now upload media when in full-screen mode.

Remote publishing via XML-RPC and APP is now secure (off) by default, but you can turn it on easily through the options screen.

Full SSL support in the core, and the ability to force SSL for security.

You can now have many thousands of pages or categories with no interface issues.

Ability to move your wp-config file and wp-content directories to a custom location, for “clean” SVN checkouts.

Select a range of checkboxes with “shift-click.”

You can toggle between the Flash uploader and the classic one.

A number of proactive security enhancements, including cookies and database interactions.

Stronger better faster versions of TinyMCE, jQuery, and jQuery UI.

Version 2.6 fixes approximately 194 bugs.

According to industry reports, in five years, more than 30% of mobile phone subscribers in China will be reading books and newspapers through their phones. The combination of greater 3G adoption and a marked increase in made-for-mobile content will drive mobile entertainment revenues to almost $48 billion by 2010.

Reports additionally forecast that 90% of Chinese newspapers would have digital editions by 2013. Perhaps it’s not an exaggeration to say that print media will move to mobile phones, especially when every other type of digital content already has.

With an estimated 600 million mobile users, according to iResearch - China has seen its mobile search users grow to 61 million at the end of 2007 and will hit 117 million by 2008 and pass 200 million by 2010.

The world of 3G connectivity is expected to change the way how interaction-technology functions, how we shop, how we share information, and in general how we use handheld devices. The how(s) remaining to get explored seem at this point, almost infinite.

It’s been one of the most volatile stocks in the last 12 months, and has kept even the savviest traders guessing as to its direction. Could that volatility that confounds even the best and the brightest be the key to understanding Google ’s (ticker: GOOG) future?

The market volatility indexes listed at the Chicago Board Options Exchange (CBOE) provide market participants with a real-time consensus forecast of overall stock-market volatility. Specifically, VXO, the CBOE’s volatility index for the Standard & Poor’s 100 stock index, and VXN, the CBOE’s volatility index for the Nasdaq-100, provide us a forward implied volatility view for these critical equity-market segments.

Since these market volatility indexes provide short-term volatility pictures based upon the expected short-term future price action of their option series, their use is paramount to the trading community as it fills their need to properly asset allocate; and to provide them with volatility benchmarks to accurately price derivative contracts.

CBOE’s VXO and VXN are based upon implied volatilities of several near-the-money OEX and NDX index options, respectively.

Originally conceived by Prof. Robert E. Whaley and designed for CBOE, this form of volatility index is constructed so that, in real-time, provides an implied volatility of a hypothetical at-the-money OEX or NDX option with a constant 30 calendar days to expiration. These two distinct features provide volatility estimates, in real-time, based on the most liquid options series and balance out the differential in volatility between short-term and longer-term options, aiding portfolio managers in creating effective and consistent portfolio hedging.

Hamzei Analytics took this concept a step further. Our quest was to construct a VXO-compliant time series for each component of our favorite indexes and exchange-traded funds (ETFs) and measure their individual volatility in the same way — a process that Hamzei Analytics labels as Uniform Volatility (UniVol).

Our reasoning was based on a very simple idea. Volatility cycles precede price cycles and provide a far more uniform picture. If one trades a high volatility stock, say, Google, Apple (AAPL), Baidu.com (BIDU) or Research in Motion (RIMM), it is useful to monitor that equity’s Uniform Volatility. Hamzei Analytics has been tracking this on 500 stocks, ETFs, and indexes since Oct 2000, and we keep a historical record of these observations.

Upon further research, we noticed that a trader can anticipate stock reversals if standard deviation levels (”sigma channels”) are overlaid on a graph of uniform volatility.

As an example, let’s examine the price action of Google:

The stock sold viciously for three and a half months starting Jan. 1, 2008, evaporating at least $78.5 billion in market capitalization into the thin air with two huge volume spikes in late February and then two days before its earnings report came out.

Then, let’s examine Google’s UniVol:

Google’s UniVol had a big spike down in mid-April, which came after the company’s out-of-the-ballpark earnings report on April 17. Immediately preceding that infamous day, Google’s UniVol was sideways (its 20-day moving average was flat). The day before the announcement, it spiked to its plus 3 standard deviation level (or plus 3 sigma).

There was bearishness as evidenced by the stock ticking down and the nervousness expressed about the upcoming earnings announcement in the broadcast media and other outlets. But the UniVol had maxed at plus 3 sigma which gave the reason to expect that most of the potential bad news had been priced into the stock and that good news could have a positive result.

After the earnings and the update in the company’s earnings guidance, it was jubilation — evidenced by the massive drop in Google’s UniVol next day and gap-up on the stock chart.

That was then. The $64,000 question is, what to expect next? Google is scheduled to release 2008 second-quarter earnings after the bell on July 17. The UniVol of Google is ticking up in between plus 1 standard deviation and plus 2 standard deviation.

We fully expect that it will completely spike up to its then plus 3 standard deviation (sigma level) at or near the earnings date.

As far as the price is concerned, we should see Google as low as $487 which was the low price reached on Feb 25 and the high price traded on April 7. Technically speaking this is the new support price that has to be tested.

In the first quarter of 2008, the growth in spending on Internet display advertising slowed to 8.5 percent from 16.7 percent growth last year, according to estimates put out today by TNS Media Intelligence. Even with the slowdown Internet ad spending still grew faster than that for TV (1.7 percent), magazines (0.8 percent), newspapers (-5.2 percent), radio (-4.5 percent), and outdoor (2.5 percent). The overall growth of all advertising spending that TNS measures was flat at 0.6 percent growth over the first quarter of 2007.

TNS’s Internet numbers do not include search advertising, only display ads. The quarterly total for all Internet advertising is closer to $6 billion. But this data point is evidence that the Web may not be immune to weakness in advertising spending overall. If the industry dives into a full-blown advertising recession, many Web companies could feel the impact.

The Justice Department’s antitrust division has begun issuing civil subpoenas as it probes further into whether a planned Google-Yahoo partnership in search advertising is anticompetitive, a person close to a company that received a subpoena confirmed on Wednesday.

The subpoenas are being issued not only to Google and Yahoo, but also to Microsoft, an Internet search rival, and other companies including advertisers and media companies, said the person, who asked not to be identified because he was not authorized to speak.

News of the subpoenas, known as Civil Investigative Demands, or CIDs, was first reported Wednesday in The Washington Post.

Google and Yahoo have been talking to Justice officials since they announced the search ad partnership in May, and voluntarily agreed to delay starting the partnership for three and half months to give the government time to review the deal. Under the pact, Yahoo, the No. 2 in Internet search, would farm out some of its search advertising to Google, the dominant No.1 in search.

A Google spokesman said the company is “confident that the arrangement is beneficial to competition.” He declined to say whether Google had recently received a subpoena, but observed that the “review process is continuing exactly as we expected.”

It has long been assumed by many investors that acquiring Valueclick (VCLK) would be the first step in “plan B” for Microsoft (MSFT) if its bid to take over Yahoo (YHOO) was unsuccessful. When MSFT’s Steve Ballmer recently ruled out a slew of acquisitions of smaller internet players after pulling its bid for Yahoo, ValueClick’s stock seemed to lose some of its “takeover bait” premium over the next couple of trading sessions. Since that time, the sell off in ValueClick shares has intensified and the stock has set new 52 week lows three times over the last week as rumors swirl that it is now hunting for some strategic acquisitions of its own. As might be expected, investors appear to be pricing in 1) concerns over dilution that might accompany any acquisition 2) typical “sell the buyer, buy the seller” arbitrage or 3) that an acquisition is signaling the switch of management efforts to acquiring instead of being acquired.

Much of the chatter regarding ValueClick acquisitions has focused on the possibility of their acquiring a company that would gain them entrance to the “Pay Per Click” [PPC] advertising space, the very high margin business that the Google empire was built upon where advertisers bid for placement in search results that are offered when consumers seek information on specific keyword search terms. This business was invented by Goto.com, which became Overture.com and was acquired by Yahoo and is now Yahoo Search Marketing. This space has been dominated by Yahoo and Google (GOOG), with Microsoft making a late run to gain a foothold in this space and round out “the big three” in the PPC space. While there has always been a “second tier” of companies trying to gain traction in the pay per click space, none have been able to come close to challenging “the big three” for various reasons.

While we are not in a position to know if there is any substance to the rumors, it does seem that the recent upheaval at Yahoo might make a historic opportunity for the right company to make waves in the pay per click space. If a Yahoo/MSFT deal were to reemerge or if Yahoo moves forward with its plans to outsource much of its premium PPC business to Google, the combination of the #2 and #3 players or the #1 and #2 players in this space would leave the door open for another company to slip into the #3 position. While we don’t think there is any magic associated with being the #3 player in PPC search, we do think that there are quite a few deep pocketed advertisers out there who view both Microsoft and Google as their most feared competitors and would like to see their advertising dollars flow to someone else, particularly newspaper publishers, magazine publishers, TV, radio and other legacy media companies.

Another factor that could make for a historic opportunity to enter the PPC search fray is the current market valuations of the second tier players. Just over a year ago, all companies in the online advertising space (but particularly the owners of ad networks) were being bid up to new trading highs after the frenzied buying of many of the other players ((ie.Aquantive, Doubliclick, 24/7 Media, Linkshare, Digitas) in this space for large premiums to their trading prices. As the deal volume dried up, much of the money flowed out of these names and many are now trading at historic lows.

The two names we have seen tossed around most often as a ValueClick acquisition targets fit neatly into this category - Miva (MIVA) and Think Partnership (THK).

Miva Media Solutions, previously known as Findwhat.com, is the largest of the second tier networks. With over $100 million in annual click revenue flowing through the company’s North American and European networks, Miva stands out as the quickest option for an acquiror looking to gain heft quickly. Miva also owns a number of valuable content sites including the rapidly growing Spill.com, Screensavers.com and WeatherStudio.com in addition to a growing toolbar segment that currently boasts of over 6 million active users.

In addition to offering the possibility of instantly becoming the next largest player in PPC behind MSFT, adding highly regarded content sites and leveraging the possibilities inherent in having an installed base of over 6 million toolbars, ValueClick and others have to look at the current market valuation of MIVA as extremely attractive. With a current market cap of $32.5 million (closing price July 1), no debt and over $22 million in the bank, the same marketplace that one year ago placed a valuation on these operations of just over $225 million is currently placing a value on this same business of less than $10 million. While the $250 million+ valuation achieved during the height of the ad network buying frenzy of a year ago might be on the high side, its hard to imagine that there are not buyers out there willing to pay three or four times the current trading price to take down such a large piece of pay per click market share. ValueClick in particular does seem like a company with the complementary assets, existing clientele and market cache’ necessary to take a business like Miva’s that is struggling to be profitable and significantly expand the margins by reaching the critical mass of advertisers necessary to ramp profitability quickly. With an existing CPA (Cost Per Action) network and display advertising business that reaches 74% of US internet users, its quite likely that ValueClick’s reach and brand name would bring many more advertisers into the fold quickly and also that existing advertisers would be more likely to bid higher and spend more through a ValueClick ad network than they would through Miva owned network.

The company whose name seems to be most frequently mentioned as a takeover candidate for ValueClick is called Think Partnership, (THK). Think Partnership (hereinafter THK) is in many respects similar to ValueClick, albeit a smaller version as it is most widely known for the affiliate marketing platform (Kowabunga) within its “network” segment and the lead generation operations within its “Direct” segment.

THK’s Kowabunga is a highly regarded player in the affiliate marketing space that has long been a thorn in the side of ValueClick, whose “Commission Junction” is the largest player in the affiliate marketing space. While Kowabunga is much smaller than Commission Junction, many high profile corporate names have either chosen Kowabunga over ValueClick’s Commission Junction when they started their affiliate program (like Microsoft and Yahoo Search Marketing’s affiliate programs ) or migrated to Kowabunga after testing the Commission Junction platform (like Intuit). Taking ownership of Kowabunga would make ValueClick’s Commission Junction not only the largest affiliate program provider, but also the “go to” provider for the largest names in technology, not to mention that the removal of a competitor like Kowabunga from the playing field might allow them to raise their percentage take on affiliate transactions.

While the lead generation operations within THK’s “Direct” segment are much smaller than ValueClick’s lead generation ops from a revenue standpoint, THK has actually had more success at maintaining strong margins while steering clear of Federal Trade Commission sanctions. Additionally, the specific niche’s served by THK’s direct segment (home based business owners and life stage niche marketing) would be complementary to ValueClick’s lead generation offerings.

Despite the obvious synergies of the THK businesses above with ValueClick, it is a third aspect that makes it most attractive to ValueClick. THK’s ValidClick AdExchange offers ValueClick an entry into the Pay Per Click space with what is arguably the most differentiated offering in the PPC space and also what is likely the fastest growing ad exchange. The ValidClick AdExchange platform combines a unique patent pending technology for eliminating click fraud combined with an exclusive technology alliance with Fair Isaac Corporation (FIC) that uses analytics based on artificial intelligence and patented profiling technologies that adapt to each click and conversion, scoring publishers on their ability to drive conversions for advertisers. This new exclusive partnership with the company whose FICO score has become the standard in the lending industry makes the ValidClick Ad Exchange that much more attractive to a company wanting to differentiate themselves from the pack in the PPC space. It has also caused many of the second tier networks to run their own ads through ValidClick’s Ad Exchange to take advantage of its Click Fraud protection.

Recent comments by THK management and our own channel checks in several verticals suggest that the ValidClick exchange is experiencing exponential growth in clicks, searches and revenues generated. In the verticals we tested, we saw more than 100% growth in Q2 over the record clicks and revenue achieved by the network during Q1 2008. This Google-like growth stands in stark contrast to the declines in revenue experienced by most of the other Pay Per Click search networks (including Miva) over the last few quarters as Click Fraud concerns seem to have scared more and more advertisers away from second tier PPC networks. These concerns appear to be making the ValidClick’s click fraud prevention technology and alliance with Fair Isaac that much more appealing.

Despite the success of the ValidClick network, THK’s stock has recently traded down to a historical low, with a market cap settling in the $27 million range. With its existing business pieced together by acquisitions totaling nearly $90 million over the last three years, several business segments that appear to be flourishing and a company campaign to divest non core assets that could raise cash greater than its existing market cap, we believe that THK might look like a tremendous bargain to ValueClick and more importantly, a quick entry into the PPC space with a unique offering whose technology solves the biggest problem (Click Fraud) plaguing the second tier PPC networks.

We believe that ValueClick is uniquely positioned to make waves in the Pay Per Click space if it should make an attempt to enter the fray. We also believe that the timing is perfect for such an entry. The current Yahoo conundrum that will likely result in only two of the big three Per Per Click networks surviving combined with the capitulation among investors in the small cap online advertising names makes the “perfect storm” and possibly a historic opportunity for a well financed player with a good name to stake a claim to be the new “first tier” player in this highly profitable space. ValueClick’s sterling balance sheet (over $160 million with no debt) and scale would likely be attractive to MIVA and/or THK’s management team if they are in fact entertaining offers. We believe that they are and note that both have recently announced steps to divest of assets that would not be appealing to a ValueClick or other similarly situated suitor.

We also note that timing is of the essence as there may be some increase in the valuations accorded many of the online advertising assets when Interactive’s (IACI) spin off is complete next month and they begin shopping with their $1.5 billion cash war chest and a stock currency whose valuation will be based on the prospects of Ask.com rather than many of the slower growth businesses that plagued IACI’s valuation for so long. It will likely take just one deal by IACI, CBS’s (CBS) recently acquired CNET or one of the other media players who would benefit from owning an ad network to make the valuations move back to historical norms - much higher than where the currently reside.