TED, as usual, has the most amazing videos on any kind of topic possible that should become a daily watch for anyone interesting in… well, everything.

The title of the video below is “Who is General Tso and why are we eating his chicken?” by Jennifer Lee. I highly recommend watching the video, but here are some snippets that should entice you to watch.

• Beef with Broccoli (西兰牛肉): The common theme of what you see with broccoli is actually from Italy–Chinese brocooli is completely different and was not combined with beef.
• Fortune Cookies (财富曲奇 [not sure this is correct]): I even knew this was not a Chinese thing, but had thought this was created within the United States. Turns out this was actually first invented in Japan!
• General Tso’s Chicken (左宗棠鸡 [not sure this is correct]): If it’s boneless, sweet, and fried–you can pretty much guarantee this was not the original dish.
• Chop Suey (杂碎 [not sure this is correct]): This one was created a very long time ago in the US.

Another one that was missing from the presentation was Mushu, but truth be told, Kung Pao Chicken (宫炮鸡丁) is a real Chinese dish, just not with cashews.

If you know of any other dishes claiming to be Chinese send them my way!

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Here’s what I’ll be doing on Christmas:

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An entrepreneur capitalizing on millions of World of Warcraft fans within and outside of China, is opening the first unofficial WoW themed restaurant in Beijing, China.

The restaurant plans to have all kinds of WoW paraphenilia and other goodies that should make any fan proud, least of all the themed dishes with a large variety of names recognizable to any basic WoW player.

CCTV International has some pictures and a video of the restaurant in Beijing with the main area called the “Hall of Snow Storms.”

Honestly enough, I am surprised it has taken this long for a thematic restaurant to open up, althoguh I am not surprised about it opening in China with a large population playing (some say “gold-mining”) the game through the many cyber cafes dotting China.

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A Happy SERPs Holiday provided by Google Search Results!

For you Christmas lovers–search “Christmas”:

Not a fan of Christmas? Me either! Let’s go get some Menorahs:

Still not your cup of tea? Celebrate Kwanzaa?

Non-religious? All-encompassing? Love Seinfeld? Go Festivus!

Okay, I allow myself to be corny once in awhile with these posts…

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In what is a yearly tradition now, the major search engines have released their top ten lists of searches, with some interesting ones coming from Google China. Now, keep in mind that the list below are from more educated and English-speaking China searchers (not counting the fact that most Chinese people use Baidu), but nonetheless provide some insight into China’s net generation.

From Sina Tech, the top ten fastest growing searches:

1. 陈冠希
2. 奥运会开幕式
3. 四川地震
4. 不合格奶粉名单
5. 艳照门
6. 画皮
7. 赤裸特工f.b.i.
8. 国足欢迎你
9. 刘翔退赛
10. 神七

The one I personally like the most is the humorous spoof on the “Beijing Welcomes You (北京欢迎你)” Youtube video shown below:

The Wall Street Journal’s China Journal also has some of the hottest new vocabulary for those who have a real interest in the current/modern net culture of China:

New vocabulary

1. Shanzhai: Originally referred to the mountain strongholds of bandits. Now, the term refers to all manner of knock-off, substandard or improvised goods, such as these makeshift vehicles.
2. 囧 : This is an ancient Chinese character, pronounced jiong, used to mean “light shining through a window” several thousand years ago (kind of what the character itself looks like), among other things. Recently it has found a new life among Chinese youth as an emoticon to express a bad mood, since it also looks like a face crying out in a pictographic version of Edvard Munch’s “The Scream.”
3. Very yellow, very violent: The year’s first Internet catchphrase came from a CCTV interview with a 13-year-old girl, part of a program on the government’s new regulations on Internet censorship. Netizens who believed the girl had been coached by CCTV into making the statement lashed out against her, launching a human flesh search engine and numerous parodies.
4. Psoas Muscle: Another musical spoof regarding the Chinese soccer, this one aimed at the women’s team. It comes from one theory about the poor showing of the Chinese team: that it was due to the players’ relatively weak lower back muscles.
5. Three push-ups: Another Internet catchphrase, this one derived from an unconvincing alibi used in the death of a high school student.
6. 槑: This character, pronounced mei, is actually a variant of the word for plum blossom. But it also happens to look like a double version of the character 呆 (dai), which means silly or stupid. Hence 槑 now means “very silly or very stupid.”
7. Getting some soy sauce: Another catchphrase that originated with a man on the street’s don’t-bother-me response to an intrusive reporter.
8. Pick-up artist subculture: Men who see themselves as modern-day Don Juans, seducing women who are often married, sometimes targeting them for their money.
9. Phoenix man: Refers to a man who grew up poor and in the countryside, but thanks to their efforts and the support of others, is able to move to a big city and become successful. Phoenix men often hope to marry city girls but often encounter problems resulting from their different cultural backgrounds and habits.
10. Don’t Be Too CNN: This phrase emerged as a viral response to foreign media coverage of the protests in Tibet, interpreted by many Chinese as biased and inaccurate. A variant of the existing phrase “don’t be too CCTV,” which meant something more along the lines of “don’t be so serious.”

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Lenovo, a Chinese computer brand that bought out IBM, seems to be a big fan of social media campaigns that has been backed up by the recent success of its Lenovo S10 that I mentioned previously.

This time around, Lenovo is embracing the sci-fi fan base of the Trekkies for the newest Star Trek movie that will be coming out in May 2009. I ran across the ads on Facebook about a week or so ago, but for whatever reason when I clicked on the link, the resulting page was blank. I tried again today on an ad that look as the following:

Ironically, I was not interested in purchasing a new laptop as much desktop provides all that I need at this point, but was more interested to see how the “Star Trek” Lenovo laptops looked. Suffice to say, it is a Thinkpad/Ideapad and that means ugly, RECTANGULAR, and no sense of StYlE.

Personally, I would have recommended using the money to build a better laptop with a sci-fi look rather than a viral campaign, but regardless, let me tell you what they did.

As you may have noticed with the Facebook Ad, it talks about the Lenovo Ideapad, but when you hit the page, the first computer they show is a Lenovo Thinkpad. It is minor, but thought I would mention that regardless. In any case, there are some sweet sweepstakes you can sign up for called the Intel Lenovo Seek New Frontiers Sweepstakes where you can win an Ideapad or a really sleek Star Trek messenger bag. There are even greater prizes later on in 2009 with going on the zero gravity flight or showing up for the premier of the Star Trek movie.

If you are not a fan of signing up to sweepstakes, feel free to play the really easy four questionaire (that gives you the answer anyway if you answer incorrectly) to get a nice Star Trek background desktop image.

Once you are done having fun there, head on over to the Intel viral Starfleet Shipyard site to trailers, desktop backgrounds, the USS Kelvin, character snapshots, and much more.

Man, how I wish I could have worked on a Star Trek buzz campaign.

Freebie–here’s a picture of a Beta Quadrant alien called a Monchezkian (I’ll let the canon concept of a Beta Quadrant alien in Star Fleet aside for now):

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There was no way I could not mention about the new Asimov movie on the Foundation Series. My childhood, game characters, and this blog has been influenced through the writings of Asimov’s many books, primarily the Foundations and Robots book series. And though oddly the plan is to make the Foundation Series movies first over the Robots and Empire Series (if at all), I actually made the same mistake and read the series in the reverse order as well.

Though Hari Seldon and Dors Venabili are the main and well-regarded characters from the whole series overall,  the one character that most fascinated me was the enigmatic humaniform robot by the name of R. Daneel Olivaw (seen in the picture to the left from the book Caves of Steel). In particular, it was in the Foundation Series with R. Daneel Olivaw as Demerzel that I empathize with from childhood and use for many of my game-playing characters around the net from playing chess on a Telnet FIC, to a mud-based text game called Sanity’s Edge, all the way up to World of Warcraft.

There are a couple of blogs out there with as much focus around the character of Demerzel (Demerzel’s Echoes), gaming profiles (Navigator Demerzel), computer names (computer Demerzel), social media profiles (Sphinn Demerzel), and art drawings (Eto Demerzel art).

I will be anxiously waiting to see who will make up the cast and of course who will be playing the role of the humanoid, R. Daneel Olivaw. I would not be surprised to see Will Smith in there somewhere as well as he seems to enjoy having roles in many of the latest science fiction movies.

SFF Media was the first on the scene with the news about having a movie on the Foundation Series and I am sure more will come as lately many sci-fi films from the major sci-fi writers have been doing well enough for sequels. Here’s the details so far:

New Line founders Bob Shaye and Michael Lynne are developing an adaptation of Isaac Asimov’s 1951 novel Foundation, the first in Asimov’s classic space opera saga. According to the Hollywood Reporter, Shaye said, “our idea is to renew the worldwide audience’s appetite for the story” but he added that it is a complex novel, “this is not a script you can knock out in six months.” Shaye and Lynne plan to adapt the first book, but if the first Foundation movie is successful, aim to create an entire new Foundation movie trilogy just as New Line did with Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings.

Good things will certainly come from this as New Line knows what it is doing.

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The debate rages on within the online marketing community over the benefits or lack thereof over a social media campaign. I had not planned to delve deep into social media marketing, but due to the growing interest around the net, I thought I would provide a social media marketing analysis after providing you some of the talk around the town.

Aaron Wall jumped into the frayed displaying his general antipathy towards the benefits of social media (with a few exceptions):

A pity, then, that social media traffic is so often worthless.

Worthless?

Let’s look at the market signals. Why is it that you pay dollars per click on Google Adwords for financial keywords, yet the same keywords on social networks are priced at five cents?

This suggests to me one of two things. Either the social networks are seriously underestimating the value of their own traffic, or most of the people on social networks aren’t interested in commercial messages. If they were, then the bid values would closely match those of Google Adwords.

I think the latter is the most likely scenario. Social media traffic isn’t priced higher, because it isn’t translating into revenue for the advertisers. This isn’t happening because the intent of the users when engaged with social media is not conducive to selling stuff.

The pro-social media side believes that social media marketing is still in the infancy of many online marketers and deserves attention for a variety of reasons.

My feelings on the matter are a bit nuanced considering my strong belief in the ability to accurately track, analyze, and optimize any kind of campaign.

Mainly, we have to understand what the goals are going to exactly be for a social media marketing campaign without which any social media marketing campaign will be an instant failure (no game plan = no strategy = no benefits). Let’s look at some examples of the types of strategies that a social media campaign may focus on:

Branding:

Also known as driving ‘awareness’ about your company or client. These are probably the most difficult kinds of campaigns for any analytics and for any marketer to track to determine success. For the most part, there are no easy ways to determine the value generated from the cost inputted by a social media marketing campaign. Many of the desired measures are calculations that are often not looked at deeply enough by online marketers. Honestly, how many of the online marketers are going to look into whether a social media marketing campaign is helping to improve the lifetime value of a customer (much less take the time to track it)? Furthermore, you would have to base an overall base lift in brand conversions as the benefit in the social media branding campaign as an early indicator of success. For major brands, this is likely to be the value they look at in order to keep up the interest and value of ‘fanatic’ customers who are brand loyal and desire to be involved with said brand. Retaining these loyal customers would be a success in my opinion (assuming the cost-benefit ratio is good).

SEO:

As a Search Strategist, I will have a strong bias here that may effect my opinion in this matter, but will comment on this anyway. To me, if there was any reason to do social media marketing, then it would be doing social media SEO marketing. Period. I believe that using social media marketing (in the right way) for SEO will likely get the best bang for the buck. However, one has to be careful as many of the social media sites have a dim view of what SEO does. Nonetheless, a successful social media SEO marketing campaign would include driving high-value backlinks into the clients’ websites all in an effort to drive up visibility for the desire keywords. Admittedly, clients that are more interesting and able to entice customers to link to odd stuff helps make my life as an search strategist far easier.

Revenue:

If you are trying to generate revenue directly from social media, stop. In fact, you have a greater chance selling those products that “protect” you from electromagnetic radiation than generating revenue directly from a social media revenue campaign. People just do not want to be disturbed or marketed directly in their niche social media club. All the analytics data continues to show that anyone coming from these sites have the greatest bounce rate and lowest time on site from any other marketing channel. The time and effort it takes to “infiltrate” a social media networking or build something for social media will rarely, if ever, be made up in revenue directly from these sites. Indirect revenue, is a whole other matter, but will often lack the analytical capacity to track (exception potentially being about my article on Nuconomy and Social Media Analytics).

Traffic:

This section is more for content-based sites that require eyeballs viewing a page to provide revenue generated through advertisements displayed on a page or in a video. These would be the areas where traffic is not a cost, but an asset, particularly if it leads into branding (eg: getting into the top X number of sites by traffic). Nonetheless, the traffic generated will be of poor quality (one page view, short time on site, with a quick bounce) that may not be worth the cost in the end. Unless the niche market targeted for a social media traffic campaign is large enough, then focusing on social media here may turn out to be Pyrrhic gold.

In the end, keep in mind what your strategy will be for a social media marketing campaign, have an analytics package that will be able to back you up (not necessarily something one has to build), and really, best of luck in getting it to work successfully. The belief in not needing to measure will lead to inaccurate assumptions about the success of a campaign or what you can learn from the campaign as well.

As a side note, if you want to understand one of the reasons for the Dot Com Boom and Bust, it truly was the belief in the following concept:

[Traditional] roi is a financial metric but social media is not traditional.

In otherwords, the online world does not follow the same rules as the “traditional” or offline world. It was a flawed concept during the 1990s and it is a flawed concept still today.

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Personalization and localization of Google’s Search Results are prompting some in the SEO community and those I have met to jump to the conclusion that the checking of SEO rankings is dead. That there is no longer a purpose of checking SEO rankings as the results from one person to another will vary.

Either they are misinforming people to generate controversy (Aaron Wall calls it pandering) about not checking rankings or they are doing a disservice for themselves and their clients. Listen closely to the response by Matt Cutts in this video interview when asked about whether rankings are dead.

What Matt Cutts actually notes that is that SEO rankings are not as important as before and not the only factor that matters (not that it ever did or should). They are a “security blanket” as he quotes from another person, which, I do agree with and is often focused heavily on by clients.

That said, I also see it as a baseline to keep in mind what is going on in your SEO campaign. Without an idea or averaging of the SEO rankings, one cannot point to a solid cause to an issue in why the traffic has dropped precipitously. If you are not checking your rankings you do not have the ability to rule out the cause of your problems. You also do not know if your SEO work is actually succeeding or if it is due to seasonal issues, other marketing campaigns, a previous SEO work not of your own that was steadily improving already, etc.

Checking your SEO rankings is only the beginning of determining your SEO success, not the be all end all of SEO work. And even though those rankings are becoming more nebulous through personalization and localization, averaging out those positions can statistically bring you accurate information for proper SEO Analytics.

Oh, and if your SEO does not believe in checking rankings, I strongly recommend replacement for someone with a stronger analytical approach (not necessarily referring to myself of course).

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If you had to narrow the difference down to some key points, what would be a simple difference between a viral campaign and a social media campaign? Actually engaging users.

In China, Lenovo was promoting its new kind of netbook, the Ideapad S10, through a social media campaign using BBS, QQ emotional icons, video, widgets, etc:

A lovely Kuku Bear is the brand image of S10, therefore Lenovo mainly promoted this bear image with some touching love story. [...] Its video on Youku was viewed for over 1.7 million times, its application on Xiaonei.com ranked No. 6 most popular apps on the platform, with about 58,000 daily active users. And its sales on Taobao shop is quite good.

Yes, the marketing campaign succeeded and in fact the viral campaign (the part of it that is) succeeded, but in terms of a social media campaign it was a complete failure (minus any comments on their application page, if any, on Xiaonei).

Hopefully the advertising agency or marketing department was not a functional team calling itself social media marketing as they do not understand the meaning of social media then.

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