SEO Seeding – Electronic Arts Website

What a fascinating (and logical) way to gain higher volume traffic to your newly designed website – Electronic Arts www.ea.com – jumped right onto the Ashton Kucher vs CNN battle, publishing this press release on 16th April 2009:

In supporting Ashton in his efforts, EA is offering Kutcher’s 1,000,000th follower on Twitter a copy of every game EA makes in 2009 for the gaming system of their choice and, to have a character based on them that can be played in The Sims 3 if Ashton wins.  The Sims 3 will also donate 5,000 mosquito nets in the name of the 1 millionth person who follows Ashton on Twitter (REGARDLESS of a win).

Earlier this week, actor Ashton Kutcher announced via YouTube that the number of his Twitter account followers rivaled that of the CNN Breaking News Twitter feed, and that upon beating them to the 1 million member milestone, he would punk CNN founder Ted Turner if the Internet made it happen.  (Click here to watch the video that started it all.)

Specifically, he said he would ding-dong ditch Ted Turner’s house and post the video of it if he won the showdown.  To sweeten the deal, Ashton also promised to donate 10,000 mosquito bed nets to charity for World Malaria Day on April 24.

Check out this update on EA’s offer by Ashton: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ma8AcfKGaEI

Follow EA on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/EA
Follow EA on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/ea
Follow EA on FaceBook: http://www.facebook.com/pages/EA/68678914189
Follow The Sims 3 on Twitter: http://twitter.com/thesims3
Join the race to be Ashton Kutcher’s millionth follower: http://twitter.com/aplusk

The above content, whilst short and succinct, hits every hallmark of good SEO & wider marketing/public relations:

• Keywords – Ashton Kutcher, CNN, Twitter, were some of the hottest search words around at that point in time. Relevance.
• Cross linking to high volume, highly spidered sites like www.wikipedia.org and www.youtube.com and linking to the cross promotion points on Twitter & Facebook and EA’s own Twitter pages
• Inserting the title [Sims 3] of a game which in itself is under high search keyword scrutiny and offering the coveted position of having an avatar of yourself created in one of the most popular games of of ALL time – the modern day equivalent of immortality personified – i.e. the 100 story skyscraper, with your name on the plaque at the bottom.
• EA throwing in themselves and donating 5,000 mosquito nets in the name of the millionth follower to the www.malarianomore.org campaign. Another chance of immortality and celebrity.
• The incidental prize of all 2009 EA Titles, is really just appeasing the products division – on the weight of the other PR & promotional activity, this pales in significance.

Full coverage and the new EA site here:

EA Supports Ashton Kutcher in Twitter Showdown - http://www.ea.com/news/ea-supports-ashton-kutcher-in-twitter-showdown
Malaria No More - http://www.malarianomore.org/news/features/twitter_aplusk.php

And for the record, I personally prefer the look of the older EA site…. the new white background is a sorry trade off for the cool black of the preceding site, although funtionality wise, the execution of the new site is outstanding. Maybe it’s because I spend alot of time looking at MS Word doco on the screen today, my poor eyes prefer the soft tones of black….

Cosmic Motors

Cosmic Motors – The Spaceships, Cars and Pilots of Another Galaxy: Long being a fan of automotive in all its guises, I was suitably impressed by the concept art put forward by Daniel Simon in his book “Cosmic Motors – The Spaceships, Cars and Pilots of Another Galaxy”. Simon’s design philosphy strikes a visual chord of synchrony as he details vehicles of deep intersteller ability as well as more mundane land based conveyances. Spread across 176 pages, he has 130 illustrations and over 200 sketches of conceptual vehicles which lean upon design principles from the 1940′s onwards, albeit coupled with in the Astrocon Taooa’s case a “Astrocon Mobulpium propulsion Jet 4000″. That’s apparently the future of the venerated internal combustion engine. Adding to the realism and authenticity, Simon’s has also created a whole team of pilots who are tasked with steering these fantastical machines. It’s a nice touch they happen to be easy on the eye.

Simon’s credential’s include an internship early in his career at Seat & Lamborghini, moving  onto Volkswagen & Bugatti.

In my mind though, the coolest appointment is being commissioned to work on the Tron 2 Feature Film by Walt Disney. Really. And to add to that,  it’s recently been announced that Daft Punk are doing the soundtrack.

Look for an upgrade to the family station wagon here: http://www.cosmic-motors.com

Daniel Simon’s own website: http://www.danielsimon.net & Blog http://cosmic-motors.blogspot.com/

Swine Flu – Google View

Google Maps has been used in recent days for tracking the spread of the H1N1 Swineflu which is sweeping the planet. This reminds me of a number of Small World Network theory articles and tracking programs which postulate that our global airport network is effectively in a macro fashion a representation of basic chaos theory (Small world network) in action with the major international airports like Heathrow, Van Nuys, LAX, Tokyo, Atlanta, JFK, Chicago O’Hare, Sydney, Frankfurt and Stockholm the key nodes. Little wonder the virus has spread so quickly with people sneezing everywhere, in a recirculated air environment and manual handling of luggage touching multiple other people along the way.

If you click through to the main map within Google maps, you can see on the left hand side an updated dashboard which details the location and general specifics of each of the cases as they arise. Fascinating.

View H1N1 Swine Flu in a larger map
View H1N1 Swine Flu in a larger map

Suzuki eBay Auction Opens!

Following on from my post on April 6th 2009  about Suzuki Australia’s ebay auction putting up for grabs a plethoria of Suzuki Motorbike original and authentic factory, this is an update of the Auction which started last night on eBay.

http://shop.ebay.com.au/merchant/suzukiaustralia

All net proceeds to the Australian Red Cross Victoria 2009 Bushfire Appeal

Start Bidding!

www.twanalyst.com

My first reaction was to laugh. The second was to frown. The third response was: “Damn it! Since when have I been described as bloody UNREMARKABLE?!”

My excuse is that I’ve been onboard for only 2 weeks. So there.

Once I was over my fit of apoplexy, I went back and Twanalysed a few other well known peeps, celebrities, friends and random. I don’t feel so bad now considering some of the descriptions that @aplusk, @oprah and others have got and most importantly the recommendations which were offered are actually relevent, useful and pertinent.

	PERSONAL INFORMATION:
	Name:	TheCultureMind (Colin Yeung)
	Location:	Melbourne, Australia (Time zone: Melbourne)
	Description:	Active – mountain biking, digital at www.areeba.com.au, house renovating + family: wife / baby son.
	URL:	http://www.theculturemind.com
	STATISTICS:
	Account Created:	09 Apr 09
	Status Updates:	38
	Followers:	19
	Following:	39
	ANALYSIS:
	Tweets per day:	2.7
	Readability index: (?)	10
	% conversations:	24
	% links:	14
	% content:	62

(This page for theculturemind has been viewed 7 times)
Your Twitter personality (click to tweet it!)
Personality: ordinary sociable unremarkable Style: chatty coherent VOYEUR

Tips for your tweeting…

• Work on making your tweets more interesting to attract more followers
• If you retweet others, hopefully they’ll retweet you back
• Use hashtags to join in popular discussions or online events

Google shows analytics API

I can see this announcement by Google in recent days about releasing the Analytics API to developers creating a whole new cottage industry overnight:

• Custom tailored and tracked analytics targetted, triggered and monitored at discretion by customers directly.

The dev team at the Areeba offices think this is very cool, as it opens up whole new ways to metric user behaviour and monitor site statistics in meaningful ways which have business relevence. Watch this space, we’ll have it connected to RedDot errr Open Text Web Solutions Suite, Umbraco & Drupal in a flash.

• Desktop widgets will start appearing that are designed to communicate when pre-determined benchmarks have been met i.e. number of visitors post a campaign period; number of transactions in a period; average period of time for the website as a snapshot. A refinement of this could include a summary of the most visited pages of a particular type i.e. latest product, product support, legacy products; service type; location.
• tailored search result presentation will come to the fore, based on prior user data influencing the representation of search results and its relevence.
• Connecting to the cloud inversely, you could run a search of the terms in your particular industry and then compare it against your own website to see if your competitors have the jump on you for particular marketing drives, campaigns etc. In effect, it would be RSS on steroids because you could set up alerts which actively scan for terms you yourself are marketing for and be much more intertwined with the data being fed back to you, which would allow immediate response to market conditions…..

http://analytics.blogspot.com/2009/04/attention-developers-google-analytics.html

How cool are Google for allowing direct access to the API? Heh – 50 years from now, there will be churches and a religion for Google, in tribute to their data mining philosophy. They own it all. Or will. Soon.