TechCrunch recently posted about a new company called HitTail, which helps webmasters discover potential post titles they should write about based on past success.

HitTail is essentially log file mining made easy with an algorithm to determine what’s most valuable in the long tail of your search driven traffic. Search queries are considered valuable based on four factors - the number of words in the search, how many pages deep into search results the site visitor dug to find your site and two factors the company won’t disclose.

It is important to cast a fairly wide and deep net before placing too much weight on the feedback or else you can corner your site by letting the feedback keep feeding into itself.

What happens when most people have access to free tools which shows them why and where they are successful? And how they should write copy?

As everything that drives toward efficiency ultimately the channels that will remain successful in saturated markets will be those which have insider information, are able to cover topics others are not covering, have well established authority, or those which evoke emotional responses.

In an attempt to be innovative on the mapping front Microsoft has created bird's eye view 3D images of numerous cities. Just like many websites that try to monetize to early, Microsoft has already placed test billboard images on top of buildings in the beta launch of their product.

By Microsoft placing the billboards in their images they change the focus of what people talk about from the quality of the product to the stupid billboards. If they have no users the billboards do not matter, and what is the point of going to that much effort to gather the data if you are going to put fake billboards on it right out of the gate?

So the web is becoming far more social in nature. Many clients insist on owning a 6 page brochure site (or maybe 100 of them) and expect the SEO to rank them for crumbs. There are a few potential outcomes of working with clients like that:

1. the client's website and marketing are so bad that you can never rank them

2. the client's website and marketing are so bad that you can just get them a bit of exposure (but will later be marginalized by improving search technologies and competing companies that better understand the web)

If your marketing is dependant on a piece of software that is publicly available and your strategy is just to replicate what is already out there, then even if you find a way to compete (temporarily perhaps)... eventually you are going to get marginalized.

If a company with greater resources that is more receptive to the web hires a person half as competent as you they are probably still going to kick your ass, in the longrun.

Why fight the algorithms and the natural trends of the web? Doesn't it make more sense to leverage the trends to your benefit?

If you accept bad SEO clients all you are doing is pushing your services toward the commodity end of the market. And that a path to unhappiness.

Not only do people select channels that appeal to them, but we all tend to read content with a bias that reinforces our worldview.

Stories mutate as they spread, and they typically mutate with a self interested bias. In response to voting for the blogging scholarship some people have stated self biased / inaccurate things like:

• x has one of the few real academic blogs, which is what this scholarship is supposed to be for anyhow

• why are there tech blogs on there, I thought this was only for science bloggers
• help me win $20,000

When I pushed the blogging scholarship on Digg it was flagged for spam when it reached the homepage. When voting opened someone else submitted it to the wrong category, pushed it, and it made Digg's homepage. If a story was spam once then why was it remarkable and homepage worthy only a couple days later? People see what they want to see.

In some cases it may make sense to leave your messages vague such that they can be more applicable to a wider audience. In other cases it may make sense to be as specific as possible to control the messaging. Story mutation is also going to largley depend on where a story is seeded.

I think if it is generally related to your main brand you want to be specific, but if what you are doing is a one off or occasional marketing event it might make more sense to let people misinterpret it to help the story spread and help them tell you what they really wanted, such that you can refine it going forward. A lack of mutation and a lack of spreading are indications of bad marketing.

So yesterday I mentioned that my friend Daniel announced our scholarship for bloggers...and the story went nowhere. It is quite humbling. The story would have likely made the Digg home page yesterday, but I think they pulled the submission from the upcoming stories for spamming, likely because some combination of the following:

• many of the votes came from a button on this site instead of the site being voted for from that site

• the domain name of our scholarship site generally sucks
• our scholarship domain could likely use a bit of work on improving its trustworthiness
• some editor may not have liked the story

Since I did absolutely no marketing outside of the Digg submission and a mention here, my marketing sucked...too risky, too stupid, and clearly not comprehensive enough.

I think I have been quite lucky and successful recently, to the point of becoming a bit lazy and arrogent...which totally showed in the lack of spreading of The Blogging Scholarship. My lack of focus on, and general apathy toward, the launch was apparent by the results. I phoned it in, thinking that my blog had enough reach to carry the story, just phoned in the idea, and failed brutally. We only got a couple applications yesterday, which is absurd considering how viral the market is, and how good the general idea is.

You know you are screwing something up quite bad if

• your site has great reach

• friends are hooking you up
• you are giving away thousands of dollars
• toward a cause many people care about
• to a viral market
• where many people share your interests
• and many students are heavily in debt
• and the story still goes nowhere

thus...we decided to change The Blogging Scholarship to make it more remarkable...

Change:
Instead of giving $1,000 quarterly we are going to give away $5,000 once a year.

Reasons:

• $5,000 sounds much more remarkable than $1,000, and will help whoever gets it much more than $1,000 will help 4 people.

• By doing it once a year it is rare enough that it is special. If we did it quarterly it is not going to be as much of an event, and would be harder to get coverage or community involvement.

Change:
Pinging a few friends to seed the story...hoping they can give it a bit of love. ;)

Reasons:

• I know many of the big dogs in the blogging space.

• Some of my friends have websites which are more relevant to the idea.

Another thing I could have done to make the story more popular would have been asking a few bloggers what they thought of the idea, or if I should change it at all BEFORE I launched it. But I was arrogant and lazy and did not listen to my own advice, thus we failed, and needed to reformat the scholarship to make it more appealing.

The good thing about really good or really bad viral marketing is that you usually have great feedback almost immediately after launch, and if you listen to it, you can change to help spread your ideas further.

We are still looking for lots of applications, so please apply yourself or nominate a friend today.