Trend – Data Science, Data Analytics and Machine Learning Consulting in Koblenz Germany

Wikipedia to Blackout for 24 hours to fight SOPA and PIPA – Copy of the user discussion and poll on my blog

Rene — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 11:31:49 +0000

I am one of the web pioneers but this is about the most amazing thing that I will be witnessing on the web as long as I can remember. Tomorrow on January 18th the english version of Wikipedia will shut down for 24 hours to protest two upcoming (?) american laws (SOPA and PIPA) that set the legal foundations to censor the web. This is happening in the country that is so proud of it’s freedom of speech.

Press release: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Press_releases/English_Wikipedia_to_go_dark
Letter to Users: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/English_Wikipedia_anti-SOPA_blackout
User discussion: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:SOPA_initiative/Action see below for a saved copy!

This is such an important move of democracy that I was standing still for a couple of minutes after I heard of this! 1’800 active wikipedia authors moderators and administrators collectively agreed to make this move in order to show a protest! I am very excited to see where this will be going and what impact this has. Freedom of the internet is what makes this such a beautiful space. Everyone spread this word! discuss this! Don’t let anyone take the freedom of speech and information sharing from you!
Since the user discussion and poll won’t be available tomorrow I attached them to my blogpost.
http://www.rene-pickhardt.de/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/Wikipedia-SOPA-initiative-Action-Wikipedia-the-free-encyclopedia.html
I will not comment on this any further. Please everyone Have your own oppinion and act with responsability.

Facebook is overrated for bands and musicians

Rene — Wed, 25 May 2011 19:23:07 +0000

Since I will hold a session at this years future music camp about search engine optimization of band websites and the importance of the homepage for a bands online marketing I was preparing everything and looking up some statistics. With my band In Legend we have been right away very active on Facebook but also created a great video for Youtube and especially in the beginning we used myspace a lot to introduce our music to a new audience. So I was curious where most of our traffic came from during the last year. Our main focus for sure is Facebook but I was surprised to see that we received twice as much traffic from myspace and Facebook only ranked number 5!

Remember that 40% of our search engine traffic comes from lyric search and search for downloads of our music. this means 20% of our overall traffic comes from this souce. Compared to 6% traffic from facebook we see that doing search engine optimization correctly for our band page drives three times more attention than our activities on facebook!

I have to admit that in the last couple month we received more traffic from facebook than myspace. But we stopped to be active on myspace which could explain the recent decrease in traffic from myspace.
Since we really put a lot of effort in Facebook marketing I wanted to see how well we bring our fans to the store. So The following statistic shows you on which channels we have been able to drive our fans to amazon (by tracking every link we spread)

Where the traffic to our amazon sales comes from

Again facebook is very poor! With direct mail and our homepage we have been able to send 4 times as many people to amazon than via facebook. Well the interesting part would be the conversionrate. Maybe for some miracle the conversionrate on Facebook was much higher than the other channels. Unfortunately I can’t present detailed statistics on that (Amazon doesn’t share them!) but from the daily sales figures and my knowledge from when we used which channel to promote our album I have the feeling that the conversionrate on facebook is about the same as on our Website and direct mail!

Conclusion

To me facebook seems to be highly overrated and overvalued. Our sales would have been much less If we did not have a great customer relation management / Newsletter and homepage. Maybe I should call this thing the facebook bubble! What is your experience?

Power of Google Homepage

Rene — Sun, 20 Mar 2011 11:54:09 +0000

Google has put information about the Youtube Symphony Orchestra on its homepage! Whatch yourself:

After Thomas recommended reading a paper about trending topics in twitter where it was discovered that trends can be strongly influenced by external factors (media, news) I went right away to twitter looking for the #ysto. Of course I was not surprised that it was already trending on the twitter homepage. After searching for the hashtag an leaving the result page as it was for about 15 minutes Twitter told me that there where 1754 new tweets since my last search!

If I find the time I will later look a little deeper into the wave Google created by putting something on the homepage. But for now I will enjoy the concert!