We’ve said often that western companies and properties will find it difficult to exist on the other side of the pond, if those making the decisions were not willing to flex on their at home rules and regulations.  This is why eBay pulled out of the Japanese market in 2002 and instead formed an agreement with Yahoo! to have its users purchase eBay products through Yahoo! Japan.    This prophetic reality comes due again as we see that Yahoos! Overture has lost its contract with NHN, the operators of the largest search engine (Naver) in Korea.  “The search advertising business in Korea is changing fast,” said Kim Sang-hun, NHN’s chief executive officer. “[Unlike Overture], our search advertising service will allow advertisers more freedom in choosing how they want exposure, and that will let them enjoy the maximum advertising effects possible.”

NHN has decided to take their search marketing business in house and it will be handled by a sister division.  This move will undoubtedly help the search engine save a few dollars as the rev share agreements with Overture will be no longer.

What Yahoo! must be asking itself is; are the other two (Daum and SK Communications- [Nate]), large search engines in Korea, which Overture coincidentally currently serves, planning a similar exodus.

If you have ever had a hard time describing the benefits to social media integration to one of your business clients, the FlowTown concept and model may just be able to help you.  See, they’ve been in the news recently, given their recent injection of funds from investors and it was because of this that I decided to dig deeper into their core offerings.

While not being fond of the name FlowTown (it reminds me of the name of a dance group on Americas Got Talent), their suite of business tools are impressive.  FlowTown enables a business owner to take their client email list and search for matches on social media sites. Once the business owner has found their client(s) across the various mediums, they are able to communicate special interest, marketing, sales or product specific messages, using these social tools.  Business owners have the ability to choose between Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, LinkedIn, MySpace  (may not find too many of your clients there anymore), and StumbleUpon, thus taking the clients email campaign one step further.  In addition to the obvious of sending quick communications to clients via a ‘current’ platform, once businesses gain their clients as followers or fans, they will be able to gain additional insight on their customers — more than any blanket survey could ever do.

FlowTown also does enable for more than the simple targeted channel messaging, as business owners can also get information on their clients Klout or influence levels, further allowing them to see which of their clients have a higher propensity to elevate their business via social media.  It may sound overwhelming to a first-timer, but don’t worry, all of the above is made easier to decipher with FlowTown’s reporting suit

Many underestimate the power of being able to communicate on a personal, candid and informal way with clients via social media tools, but this is where trust is often gained, and truths about your band perception come out.   FlowTown’s application and tools undoubtedly place a lot of intelligence into a business owners hands, in an easy, tactile, fashion.  This is a must discover if you are a business owner.

FlowTown does have a free introductory offer that allows businesses to try their tool, at no charge, using 50 contacts – see more here.  Longer term packages do range in price from $17 per month to $197.

According to KingFishMedia, social media sites are becoming an ever important marketing tool for businesses, to the tune of mass adoption.

It is exciting to see the business adoption and transfer to using media that allows companies to express themselves, in a personalized manner, to their incumbent clients and potentials.  However, deeper analysis of the data provided by KingFish shows that the large majority of businesses are using social media platforms to provide brand related messages that unless you’ve made a believer of a user, brand motivated messaging really does you no good.  Instead we encourage businesses to:

• the areas of their business they wish to extend to social platforms
• Ensure the areas chosen have the appropriate fit and can encourage excitement and a sense of pushed voluntary consumption from online users
• Understand the social goals of each of the desired segments
• Have your goals drive your messaging strategy (yes you need one of those)
• Lastly, have clear guidelines of how your key employees represent your brand on social networks, if using their own handle and mentioning brand or brand related assets or initiatives.

Fascinating.  We just learned today that the Newspaper Association of America has to date spent over $800k in lobbying the US Senate on behalf of its members, related to ‘The Free Flow Information Act’.  The definition of the Act on government sites is as follows “A bill to maintain the free flow of information to the public by providing conditions for the federally compelled disclosure of information by certain persons connected with the news media.”.

Coming from the sales and new media side of a publishers business, the Act itself doesn’t fascinate me, but the representation that newspapers are receiving from the NAA does.

The NAA charges newspapers a decent sum in annual membership dues, which varies depending on newspaper circulation and size, so it’s good to see the dollars put forth to champion a newspaper publishers cause.

The NAA was formed on June 1, 1992, by the merger of seven newspaper associations. The associations included in the NAA merger were, the American Newspaper Publishers Association (founded in 1887), the Newspaper Advertising Bureau, the Association of Newspaper Classified Advertising Managers, the International Circulation Managers Association, the International Newspapers Advertising and Marketing Executives, the Newspaper Advertising Co-op Network, and the Newspaper Research Council.

If you have been following our posts, you will know by now that we are not huge fans of the Associated Press folk, but today, we do give them credit for at least attempting to think out of the box, no matter how failed the attempt may have been.

It turns out that the AP had been in lengthy talks with Pet Holdings Inc., an owner of several network blogs designed to allow cat lovers to post silly feline pictures, or dare devils to post silly and yet painful stunts that they’ve done.  The deal was to use Pet Holdings and its blogs to syndicate AP content.  Given the nature of the content on the Pet Holdings’ site, whose true company URL is cheezburger.com by the way,  the move seems a bit of desperation, unless, and this was very unlikely to happen, the AP created a new content stream that aligned itself with the themes of these sites – something the AP would think beneath them.  We obviously do not agree, what would have been so wrong with the AP creating a spin off division that focused on lighter-fare news content that could be used for this type of syndication partnership.  In our minds they would have opened up another revenue and audience stream. — Again not a bad thing.

See a sample video from the Fail Blog, one of the Pet Holdings properties:

In June, the University of Tennessee received $356k in grant money to work on digitizing Tennessee newspapers and the project is now full steam ahead.

The digitizing of newspapers now seen in Tennessee is not the first initiative of its kind.  Tennessee is actually the 15th  US state to undergo a newspaper digitizing project and is behind the British Library digital project that we reported on, back in May.

The project underway by UT is a part of the National Endowment for the Humanities “Chronicling America” Internet project and is available for viewing here.  The UT group is still actively chronicling newspaper content, but the data made public thus far is quite impressive.

Although there are times where individuals question the place of newspapers in our ever growing and demanding digital world, projects, such as this, remind Web aficionados of the wealth and depth of information that newspapers contain.  Historically, they are irreplaceable and today, their historical content provide even more clarity on past events and adventurous escape for it’s readers.