Lindsay Lohan Sues E-Trade; Next Movie Called “The Streisand Effect?”
Have you heard of the Streisand effect?
Long story short, in 2003 Barbra Streisand sued a photographer for $50 million because he took photos of her home. She said the photographs invaded her privacy. Unfortunately for her, the rest of the world had no clue of the existence of these photographs until after she filed the lawsuit. Filing the lawsuit created a greater issue than if she had just kept quiet.
Enter Lindsay Lohan.
The almost popular, but now notsomuch, actress is suing E-Trade for, get this, $100 million for naming one of its TV babies “Lindsay.” Apparently, Miss Lohan believes that she has obtained “single name” status–like Madonna or Oprah–and that everyone that sees the milkaholic manboy-stealer will instantly think of her–and that will ruin her stellar reputation.
Says Lohan’s lawyer:
“They used the name Lindsay,” Ovadia said. “They’re using her name as a parody of her life. Why didn’t they use the name Susan? This is a subliminal message. Everybody’s talking about it and saying it’s Lindsay Lohan.” Ovadia wants an injunction to force the spot off the air, and the Lindsay camp wants every last copy of the commercial
Actually, no one was talking about Lindsay Lohan, until this lawsuit. Oh wait, maybe that’s the point. No one was talking about you, so file a $100M lawsuit and get everyone talking about you again!
Alternatively, why not actually make a movie that we think is good? 
50 Million Tweets Per Day? We’re Going to Need a Bigger Boat!
It appears Twitter is finally had enough of third-party analytics companies getting all of the publicity over tweet counts–so it’s spilling the official beans.
Folks were tweeting 5,000 times a day in 2007. By 2008, that number was 300,000, and by 2009 it had grown to 2.5 million per day. Tweets grew 1,400% last year to 35 million per day. Today, we are seeing 50 million tweets per day—that’s an average of 600 tweets per second.
I may have to admit to contributing maybe half that number on some days. 
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The Sky Is Falling! (And So Is Google’s Market Share)
Neilsen has reported their search market share numbers for January—and Google seems to have forgotten which way is up. While the search giant is still #1 and in no danger, they lost a percentage point of the search query market from December, falling from 67.3% to 66.3% of all queries.
If Google’s, losing, who’s gaining? Just about everyone else, actually. The other major search engines either held steady or gained slightly—Yahoo was up 0.1 percentage points (to 14.5%), Bing gained 1 percentage point (to 10.9%) and nearly all the smaller search engines in the top ten increased their share month over month.
The overall search query market increased by over 300 million searches. About a third of those queries were run through Google. Yahoo saw over 50 million more queries in January, while Bing fielded 130 million more queries than it did in December.
Is this a significant trend? Of course not. Most likely, other search engine monitoring services won’t see the same change. And it doesn’t seem like a percentage point is going to hurt Google much in the long run, since their overall number of search queries is still growing anyway.
Or maybe Google bought that Super Bowl ad just in time.
What do you think?
Google Pays $50M for an Anteater
Remember when I asked if social search engine Aardvark might suffer from "participation fatigue" as its members grow tired of answering the questions of others.
Yeah, you can forget about that, because Aardvark was just acquired by Google for a cool $50 million.
< I can hear CEO Max Ventilla now: "I’ve got your participation fatigue, right here, Andy!" 
>
Anyway, I thought Google was out of the "using humans to answer questions" business? I thought all of our search problems were going to be solved by robots and algorithms?
I have no insider knowledge on why Google made the buy, so I’ll just wildly speculate as normal.
Perhaps, it’s because Aardvark was gaining ground in the mobile search space. Something I speculated a couple of weeks back:
Combined with the revelation that more people use Aardvark on their cell phones than their desktops–which some predict is the future hot area for search–and you could easily surmise that Aardvark is poised to kick Google’s butt.
Not that Google had anything to fear now, but it was probably a shrewd move to pay $50M now and get one competitor out of the game. Hmm, I wonder if they’ll acquire KGB next?
Now we just have to see what will happen to Aardvark. Will it become the next Dodgeball or GrandCentral?
Aardvark Acquired By Google
TechCrunch reports Google has acquired Aardvark, a help engine, for $50 million.
Aardvark allows you to ask questions, which then pushed the question out to a network of people who may be able to answer them. The answers are then sent back to you via instant message, email or even Twitter.
Aardvark was created [...]
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The CMO Club Lets You In On Their Social Media Thinking
It is often pointed out that the disconnect from those in the social media trenches to those in the C-level corner offices is significant and often damaging to the marketing efforts of many companies. While it can be fun to generalize and then make those at the top of the marketing food chain the culprits in the “Great Social Media Under-utilization Caper” it is starting to become much less accurate.
One way to see that CMO’s are taking a real interest in social media and user generated media as part of their overall marketing efforts is to see the results of a recent study done by the CMO Club. That’s right. CMO’s hang out in a club while you slave away at your community building efforts. It’s all cigars and mahogany furniture around the fireplace for the CMO set. Just kidding. In fact, The CMO Club and Bazaarvoice surveyed 133 active CMO’s to get their real world take on social media. Here’s how the respondents were broken out
Of these, 42% focus on business-to-consumer marketing, 41% focus on business-to-business marketing, and 17% market to both consumers and businesses.
Leading participating industries include software/hardware (17%), finance/insurance (9%), travel/hospitality (9%), media/publishing (9%), consumer goods (8%), and retail (7.5%), among others. Annual revenues ranged from $6 to $50 million (25%), $51 to $999 million (42%), and over $1 billion (23%).
So what did they find? This chart is pretty telling as they attack the three letters that keep most CMO’s up at night: ROI.
ROI is certainly the Holy Grail of the C-suite with regard to every facet of marketing. What makes it difficult for social media is that there are not real clearly defined measurements or metrics that create a line to what is termed social commerce.
Whether you are a C-level marketer or a day-to-day social media practitioner what are your thoughts on measurement in the social media space? What do you use for tools? Where are you having success and where are you having trouble?
Feel free to download a white paper synopsis of some of the findings of the survey. Maybe the more that C-level marketers and the ‘rank and file’ of marketing work together there can be more advancement in this emerging field. Is that a reality at your work or is that just a fantasy?
Ask: The Most Burning Questions Of 2009
In true Ask fashion, we’ve got the answers (well…not complete answers) to what the most popular questions were on Ask.com during the year. According to Ask.com, visitors are three times more likely to type search queries in the form of a question. Holding steady at 50 million visits per month (October 2009, ComScore), question based [...]
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Twitter About to Get Mo’ Money
The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Twitter is on the edge of raising another $100 million in VC from around seven investors. Just last week the scuttlebutt was that this round was going to be in the range of $50 million but hey, what’s an extra $50 million amongst friends, right?
Twitter, the messaging web site that has become an Internet sensation, is nearing a deal to close as much as $100 million of new funding from as many as seven investors, according to people familiar with the deal.
The investor group includes mutual fund giant T. Rowe Price and private-equity firm Insight Venture Partners, which are new investors to Twitter. The $100 million investment is about twice as much as Twitter was reportedly expected to haul in this latest round of fund-raising.
Other investors in this round include venture-capital firms Spark Capital and Institutional Venture Partners, which have previously invested in Twitter.
Of course, the valuation is what everyone is interested in and it looks like the $1 billion mark is the one that has stuck for now. All of this activity once again will stir the “How will Twitter make money?” pot but that probably needs to be answered sooner than later, don’t ya think?
They must have something planned because one would hope that the days of investing in a great idea without any real revenue potential are long gone. I guess stranger things have happened but there must be something that is compelling enough to generate that kind of investment.
So go ahead, Pilgrims, give us your Twitter will or will not make money scenarios. What can they do to merit the $1 b valuation? In five years will Twitter be a rockstar or a footnote in the evolving Internet industry?
A Billion Reasons for Twitter to be Happy
So it looks like Twitter has entered some rarefied air for sure. According to ReadWriteWeb and TechCrunch the micro-blogging juggernaut is moving into an exclusive club by securing a new round of funding ($50 million) based on a valuation of $1 billion (yup, it’s a b). No doubt, this will begin to stir the supporters and detractors alike. Unless we have ridiculously short memories or just think that this time will be different one has to wonder how a company that no one can figure out revenue wise can be valued at that much.
While I am not an analyst I did think about staying at a Holiday Inn Express over the past year so I qualify for jumping into the fray, right? Let’s hear what the RWW folks had to say first though.
While it’s unlikely that Twitter CEO Evan Williams was wearing a Dr. Evil costume when he delivered the news, he had the pleasure of announcing his company’s $1 billion dollar valuation today at an all hands meeting. According to TechCrunch, the company has raised a $50 million dollar funding round and the money will be in the bank shortly. Given the fact that Twitter turned down an offer to be purchased by Facebook earlier in the year, it appears the two are about to tango.
So of course, this conversation wouldn’t be nearly as much fun without bringing Facebook into the mix. Facebook is starting to look almost like IBM compared to Twitter. What with actual revenue generation plans and actually having the audacity to be cash flow positive one begins to wonder if Facebook is going to actually merit its own valuation. As we mentioned yesterday, Master of the Universe, Mark Zuckerberg, has something to say in the Facebook blog.
We’re also succeeding at building Facebook in a sustainable way. Earlier this year, we said we expected to be cash flow positive sometime in 2010, and I’m pleased to share that we achieved this milestone last quarter. This is important to us because it sets Facebook up to be a strong independent service for the long term.
So is Twitter in for the long term? They certainly still have the buzz going and now there appears to be a a real Facebook faceoff looming for the foreseeable future.
In the past, ReadWriteWeb has looked at Twitter’s platform potential. The service has already been used to create meme trackers, emergency alert services, news feeds and brand monitoring tools. As the infrastructure and search have improved, Twitter has become the go-to site for real time media. But can the company make a Facebook-like leap?
Facebook has added Twitter like features so why not? So what’s your take? I bet there at least a billion opinions on this one.
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Breaking: Facebook Acquires FriendFeed
This is one of those posts that we’d rather bring to you quickly and fill in the blanks later–Facebook has just announced that it has agreed to acquire social network aggregator FriendFeed.
Facebook today announced that it has agreed to acquire FriendFeed, the innovative service for sharing online. As part of the agreement, all FriendFeed employees will join Facebook and FriendFeed’s four founders will hold senior roles on Facebook’s engineering and product teams.
The full release is here.
It’s interesting that Facebook has intentions to become an aggregator of the social web. It’s already testing the integration of Twitter feeds, and this acquisition confirms its intentions. The big question for me is how will FriendFeed’s loyal users react? Many of them–Robert Scoble included–flocked to FriendFeed’s apparent bipartisan approach to social networking. Will that disappear now that it’s part of Facebook?
What are your thoughts on the deal?
UPDATE: The WSJ says the deal is worth $50 million.
