communities

Scam Alert! - the Evergrowth Community System by Ambatch

Marketing Fan — Thu, 19 Jul 2007 14:42:07 +0200

Just today as I finished my thesis, I got a mail, with one of those irresistible offers – today it’s Ambatch and that Mr. Kelvin Hui

Kelvin wrote:

Have you ever dreamed about achieving your financial freedom through publishing business yet you are still struggling? If yes, then congratulations! It is because

...bla bla sales copy removed…

The Game Rule Has Changed

hehe… once again

Community is the ultimate answer to your question. Community is the final solution of your problem.

hehe…

Community is the answer. Like “building” a community? or “running” a communtiy? or just “THE” community?

Anyway, long story short, they tell you that having a striving community will lead to your (financial) success and offer you a so-called “tempting” package to reach that goal

The goal of “Traffic With Loyalty”

Well, frankly my whole master thesis on Development, Maintenance and Increase of User Motivation in Virtual Communities is just about to answer this ONE question

Quote:

How can the motivation of users in virtual communities to contribute content be increased?

And I tell you, it’s not about those $99 tools that Kelvin tries to push thru to you with very shady techniques.

They offer you

Built-In Community Website Features (an area for you to put MyBlogLog script! LOL)
Built-In Web-Advertising System (another free area in the blog template – may use AdSense or other web advertising scripts by just copy & paste advertiser’s javascripts! LOL)
Revenue-Sharing switch … (you can exchange Adsense publisher IDs … WOW, fancy, eh?)
Built-In “Push-Button” Content Generation System – for a community website, it requires hundreds of new content messages every day to generate & stabilize traffic. Folks, this is pure garbage as it’s not the quantity, but the quality that attracts loyal human traffic as advertised… and besides that … we’ve seen “content spinners” (as spam content generators are called) for the past years… did any of them succeed?
Seeding Traffic (300 pre-generated users – “included in EverGrowth, they can post message & visit your website everyday; so that would make your community be more interactive!” ... even more BS)
Ready-To-Use Membership System (wow … “the ready-to-use community membership system” is like register, login, logout, my profile, forgot password, ...) did you know that you get all that for free and working A LOT BETTER and secure (captchas, etc.) in content management systems like Drupal
SEO Super Friendly Architecture (” there are around 37,000 pages get indexed in search engine within 1 month “ ... this pseudo English should say that they have clean urls… another free feature in every content management system)
Multiple & Optimized Adsense Template (once again it screams MFA – made for Adsense sites)
Human-Installation Services (“we provide human installation services for everyone who purchased EverGrowth Community System.” ... well if you need that)

SEO KickStart (“we provide a permanent PageRank 4 backlink for you to start your great web-empire!”)

End of the feature description of this scam…

Did you notice anything noticeable among those 11 features ?

Ok ok – I hear you, a PR4 link, but that’s not worth $149, is it?

Now here’s the best part… the disclaimers

Scam-Disclaimer 1 wrote:

Important Disclaimer: When you use build-in content generation system, different languages will provide different results; and there may be different risks while using English version & Simplified Chinese version.

Of course – if you get nothing for your money, you shouldn’t expect to get something out of it.

(I think that whole page was written by someone with a mother tongue that doesn’t have word articles like “the” ... usually India…)

Scam-Disclaimer 2 wrote:

Refund Policy – Sorry, there is NO refund for such amazing offer.

Check this… this is the first email marketing offer in a LONG time that has a no-refund policy… how scammy is that.

The production options

A) the whole crap above for $149

B) the whole crap above and a domain and webhosting for $199 … what a bargain… a .com domain and 5 mb webspace for $50 a year… take it now or never ... LOL

Final words from Kelvin Hui

Quote:

we truly believe this system will help website owners!’

Kelvin, I truly believe you a snake-oil seller at best, or even a scammer…

None of your promises of generating “loyal” traffic is addressed with those crappy features you deliver with your overpriced web script… an overpriced web script that has features people get for free in MANY places!

and a PR4 link is WAY cheaper than these $149

Getting People To Vote - forum post promotion experiences

Marketing Fan — Sat, 19 May 2007 13:36:26 +0200

As you might know, I’m running a survey for my master thesis on Digital Point.

Problem #1 : I was not allowed to direct email the 30,000 active users of the community, as Shawn Hogan is not even doing that for his own stuff… well

Problem #2 : despite previous talks and agreements over the course of the last year (even been talking in person to Shawn twice on this) to help promote the survey via forum post I didn’t even get a reseponse from him… he seems to be so busy, on vacation or whatever

However this required me to find ways to get people notice my posts announcement…

via nice prizes (attention incentive hunter effect!)

via crazy, but remarkable prizes (Thanks to Aaron Wall for the idea!) 1 2 3 and 4 5 or even 6 and 7

via Google CPM ads I had to buy to compete with my scientific interest against the commercial ones of PayPerPost and other companies paying Shawn good money for being on top of DP

Just yesterday I held a presentation here at my school about how hard it is to get entries to the survey if you get no support for sending out emails… and

having to get people’s attention with sig links and google ads is hard …

Attached is the presentation with some nice examples of Google ads that convert well, and others that don’t…

Interesting point. Those ads saying “Shawn Hogan – where are you?” are performing best – so I might not be the only one waiting for his response :)

You can download the presentation here in Powerpoint format and PDF

- your feedback is much appreciated!

How To Win $4,500 in text link ads and presell pages

Marketing Fan — Wed, 09 May 2007 22:02:10 +0200

Pretty catchy title, eh?

Yep, the sponsors of my master thesis survey donated $4,500 in prizes!

Among all entrants that choose to participate at the end of the survey we will give away the following 3 prizes.

1 x ONE .edu presell page for 6 months – a $3000 value – sponsored by http://www.presellpageman.com

2 x $500 voucher for text link ads – a $1000 value – sponsored by http://Text-Link-Ads.com

5 x $100 voucher for text link ads – a $500 value – sponsored by http://Text-Link-Ads.com

The winners will be randomly chosen and publicly announced. Only one entrant per name/company/IP class-C block.

So if you are a digital point member, then GO for it,

and make sure you spread the word – because the competition will be closed when I got the required 3000 entries.

Community Research thesis update - my beta test

Marketing Fan — Sat, 05 May 2007 15:47:08 +0200

So I got my master thesis’ online survey ready for the beta-test

in the first forum – Digitalpoint.

Reminder – I’m in the process of finishing my marketing master’s thesis about the the topic “Online Community Member Motivation”, aka what motivates people to contribute (more) to an online forum (like DigitalPoint).

I posted about it here and here

I am looking for beta-testers, so your help would be appreciated – just go to the beta-test post on digitalpoint

The finaly online survey will include a sweepstake with some cool prizes,

you will be able to win links from Text-Link-Ads.com as well as presell pages from PresellPageman.com

Thanks for your help!

Confidential Google Research revealed on YouTube

Marketing Fan — Thu, 26 Oct 2006 13:43:59 +0200

Just when I read across the various blogs today I found this amazing Confidential Google Research video on YouTube ...

even if you watch NO video there, do not spend too much time using YouTube,
You HAVE to see it!

Google buys Youtube to excel in People Pushing - five reasons why Google would pay ANY price

Marketing Fan — Tue, 10 Oct 2006 10:20:18 +0200

So well, it’s done – as been rumoured Google bought Youtube finally and helped rise the NASDAQ and Google’s shares once again …

As you know I’m heavy into research on consumer behaviour and user motivation in online communities … and I believe so is Google…

With their current offer of 1.65 billion $ they buy a lot …

a community with great network effects established … means: users ARE there and users go there because users are there!

a shitload of user content … 99% user-generated content means: users ARE there and users go there because users are there!

Terabytes of user behaviour data – daily… means: you have to have all those big number of users to understand their behaviour when it comes to building a community

Millions of addressable users… addressable with video ads… means: it’s crucial for Google to develop it’s video ads further, make them more relevant because currently they suck – and it’s google-video application as well

and finally cool brand established among the whole internet mainstream … everybody’s talking youtube … means: users are there and users go there because other users find youTube cool!

Mr. Peabody from Tripod wrote:

If users aren’t creating more than 50 percent of our content, we don’t think it’s a community.

Til today, people tend to understand how a striving community could have developed, but for sure nobody really knows for sure what to do to create one self-stimlating, living buzz-thing just as YouTube or MySpace… it’s still a sort of magic how to reach those masses…

and that’s why Google would even raise it’s youTube bid to 3 billion if necessary…

It’s about finding out how this people magic works…

Welcome to the era of People Pushing (versus Button Pushing, credits to Stuntdubl)....

Here is a nice message from the happy youTube (ex)owners , as well a their discussion on the eaning of this deal

Yahoo's Community buying spree

Marketing Fan — Fri, 22 Sep 2006 09:49:15 +0200

Yahoo is going to buy yet another “hype” community – facebook… for a whopping 1 billion – or more…

if not Yahoo, then MSN or Google might do…

The reason is simple… it’s not just the 7.5 million users there… it’s the try to catch on with those viral marketing success things, those buzzes that nobody can plan…

In fact facebook hit an important point in it’s development, where the network effects in the community were probably high enough to justify that price. These network effects should be strong enough to drive the community “from the inside” because enough users have enoguh motivation and benefits to got there “anyway”

It’s funny to read about the diva-like behaviour of the 22-year old owner, pissing off normal business management people for not wanting to get up to a meeting at 8am

Heck – if I would be approached as horny as Mark Zuckerberg was by the companies I would also want my sleep… he has not much to lose with a striving community… and it seems he knows that… or at least feel that

PS: note to myself: must review facebook in terms of community facts for my master thesis … and update the glossary here

network effects

Community killers at Digg - new rules, chief community leader resigns

Marketing Fan — Tue, 12 Sep 2006 01:02:48 +0200

Wired reports today that Digg, in an attempt to defend Digg from gaming and spam, founder Kevin Rose announced the site will be changing its algorithm for weighting and ranking stories.

Kevin Rose wrote:

Users that follow a gaming pattern will have less promotion weight. This doesn’t mean that the story won’t be promoted, it just means that a more diverse pool of individuals will be need to deem the story homepage-worthy.

( does this sound like link network, spam site farm, linking scheme , affiliations and trust rank ??? :-)

While announcing his resignation one of the top users, “p9” resigns and said “I will no longer no supporting Digg going forward.” ... P9 has submitted 1,334 stories. 668 of those stories have been promoted within the last 7 months.

Well – I guess there’ll be a new P9 … but question for the next days is – what pyramid effect will this leave have?

What we learn?

Once your community started to strive, develop it’s own organic life, then chaning the rules are a bad thing…

let’s wait and see…

Yahoo on Authority Signals and their Social Search Strategy

Marketing Fan — Mon, 07 Aug 2006 21:36:44 +0200

This mornings SES2006 session called “Social Search Overview” was pretty interesting as Yahoo explained their view on what authority signals are today and in the future.

I listened especially to Tim Mayer from Yahoo who is the global search director for them. Others on the board were a guy from a blog building company and Nils Pohlmann from Microsoft, leading the Windows Live QnA development.

Tim sees the massive amounts of human generated metadata as the future basis of search results. This metadata is user generated data as on del.icio.us, digg, flickr and other social tagging and classification tools, like e.g. also the Google COOP that I wrote about some time ago. Unfortunately there was no Google guy on the board, but they’ll have a special session dedicated to Coop after lunch.

Tim Mayer talked about the issue of identifying authorities for ranking search results and funnelling traffic to the right places – and clearly pointed out that the meta data creating tagging services available are the future of search.

The historical development of authority signals for websites as seen from Yahoo is

hand edited yahoo directory – some 90’s job and Yahoo editors only edited their directory
later Google introduced the PageRank and built an automated algorithm to rank pages based on the links and anchors set by webmasters

Then there came Social Tagging – tools like del.icio.us delivering metadata in an even more formal way, not only created by webmasters, but by users – therefore an exponentially bigger amount of signals for search engines and other systems once they mine that data a) urls are listed just like the HREFs in normal text links and b) the tags assigned perform a directory-like classification – just from so many editors more (people using the tagging service) – and ANYONE can use a tagging service, or?

So down to earth – getting cited in social metadata like Google answers, yahoo answers, myweb, del.icio.us will give an authority boost – either today or tomorrow! So Prepare!

Yahoo’s social search strategy points out clear goals to

reach critical mass of human generated classification data

use and extend those social tools like Yahoo Answers, Yahoo myWeb, Del.icio.us, Flickr

Additionally, also just today Yahoo announced the new product at builder.search.yahoo.com that let’s you build customized searches…

Actually that tool reminds me very much like the Google custom search that’s out there for some time already, but Yahoo’S tool is so much nicer, very AJAXed and also allows you to narrow your search to some news channels and a time span.

Technorati Tags: ses, ses san jose 2006, yahoo, google, askjeeves, search engine strategies san jose 2006

Online Community Member Motivation research update

Marketing Fan — Sat, 08 Jul 2006 13:05:49 +0200

As I wrote in How to Motivate Online Community Members I am going to conduct a couple of scientific research surveys on online community user motivation

Some questions that were raised from various webmasters shall be answered here for all:

Q: I think I would do it on the thesis of being totally open with it and letting the members see the research etc.

A: yes – that’s what I planed… everything open… scientifc… and I’m doing this just for scientifc reasons and for my master’s thesis

Q: How will the survey be implemented?

A: it will be done one using opensource software (PHPSurveyor) and results will then have to be statistically processed with SPSS, SAS or similar tools before I can conclude results (not a simple do you like A or B poll but at least 15-20 questions…)

Q: I would need it to be a known 100% guaranteed priority that it would be in english for me to participate

A: YES

Note that I am required to write my full thesis in german, and those full 100+ pages including all theories (like “what is motivation”) will be finished and available in german around Apr 2007

But it’s a 100% guaranteed priority to have everything around the survey and results in english ! I want to publish the results of course for the bigger audience here on marketingfan.com.

that is

the surveys – of course in english

the whole empiric part (survey) – that is

* who and what was researched
* what theories and hyptheses will be tested
* what questions were asked

the interpretation of the empiric part (the survey)

* what are the results and implications of this study???

(that’s a mere 40-50 pages already that I might boil down to a better readable 20pager for english)

I’m not yet sure if I can manage to translate for all the theories part (50+ pages alone) ... these theories that a master thesis (at least in Austria) needs is a lot of generic stuff like “what is motivation?” ... I will probably just provide a set of good references and links to established online resources for the english parts (including a ton of english research papers I’m basing on anyway)

So here’s a guarantee to translate everything related to the survey as outlined above as soon as it’s finished… and VERY probably big parts of it on e the way as we proceed in the research.