If you know me, I am obsessed with analytics … So I noticed today a massive spike in mobile traffic:

Interesting … I did change something this week, I finally added tracking to the iPhone template … but that was not it.

I checked top content people are browsing through mobile and I found a couple of curious facts …

1) iPad users had much longer sessions than web users … apparently their exploring the site and discovering new content, as opposed to web users who found the site through a link, read the article, and leave.

2) 90% of the iPad traffic went to post I wrote Wednesday about Adobe trying to get into the iPad. In fact, more people visited that post from an iPad than any other OS:

Wow, iPad at 37.81%, very impressive. What’s also impressive is that iPad + iPhone + Android = 46% and Mac + Windows = 52% … Mobile is almost surpassing all desktop traffic on this one.

So now I’m totally curious to see where is this traffic coming from. Is it that iPad users search to iPad content? Are they such Mac-heads? Or is it that Google has special algorithms based on device, and return iPad related content in iPad based searches? Or is it a community thing where someone found it and posted into an iPad blog or forum that’s only browser through iPads? I’m not making any sense, am I?

Let’s see, analytics should tell us:

The answer is: I have no idea … all this spike in traffic is coming from an iPad with direct traffic … and I also checked if it was a bot, but apparently they’re all unique users …

So question to you: do you see iPad traffic on iPad content? Is this a cult or a coincidence?

Adobe released a video showcasing the new capabilities, available to watch at Adobe TV and embedded below. You will noticed they added tons of capabilities around content … such switching images, embedding video and rich content … but it’s all about content? What about gesture navigation? what about the experience? For how long will Adobe keep missing the experience aspect that makes Apple, Apple.

The new magazine experience in a tablet is not based on technical capabilities of the tablet, it’s all about providing a richer experience to the user… making it more natural, seamless, human per-se.

Adobe definitely in the right direction … there’s a huge market of publications trying to reinvent themselves and salvage their business, and the tablet is one of the elements that’s a must … Perhaps Adobe is thinking of all these usability issues, but they should really makes a point to let us know… can change orientation? instead of clicking, can you flick those images? can contextually zoom in? Drag and drop bookmarks?

It’s all about the details. Would really love to see Adobe understand it as their produce some of the best design and publishing software in the market … Adobe,  you’ve for the tools, content, lifecycle … once you add usability and experience to it, it could be a home-run.

Inevitably and as expected, the videos got views, but following rapidly increased across all channels.

According to Visible Measures, “Old Spice Responses” — a.k.a the string of custom-made vids — is one of the fastest-growing online video campaigns of all time. The company compares the endeavor to some of the most popular viral videos to date below, and how they’ve grown over the course of 24 hours (to be fair, “Old Spice Responses” had a time limit attached, so there was more urgency to participate with this particular string of videos than there was to get in on, say, the Susan Boyle craze).

Now let’s compare the numbers to Friday’s post.

The Return of The Man Your Man Could Smell Like kept getting hits and grew from 3MM views to 6.4MM views, and from 21k likes to 33k likes. This video was autoplayed in the Youtube.com/OldSprice channel — destination where people were going to explore all the new videos being posts, over 180 videos in two days.

Some numbers:

• Total videos uploaded: 183
  • 12 July, 2010: 29 videos uploaded
  • 13 July, 2010: 89 videos uploaded
  • 14 July, 2010: 65 videos uploaded
• Combined viewing figures: 10,954,096
• Most watched video: 698,205 views

15 Most Popular Videos

What’s even more impressive, is that Old Spice has by far the most popular channel, and 8 out of the top 15 videos!

YouTube’s top Channels this week. OldSpice shows 13,500,000 views, almost tripling the 2nd best.

Top videos for today (July 16, 2010, just updated the post to add this): Old Spice with the number 1, 2, 4, and a total of 8 out of the top 15 … now that’s impressive.

Now let’s look at Facebook:

Old Spice Facebook fans increased from 563k to 592k, so about a 29k bump since the launch of the social campaign.

Referring Site	Click(s)
www.youtube.com	9,585
www.oldspice.com	968
Email Clients, IM, AIR Apps, and Direct	537
www.swaggerizeme.com	2
3.hidemyass.com	1
bit.ly	1
oldspicemobile.com	1
translate.googleusercontent.com	1
www.facebook.com	1
www.oldspice.com	1

Bit.ly link tracking from the YouTube channel header tracked 10k Facebook referrals from YouTube, compare to 1k last week.

Old Spice Twitter followers increased from 8k to 66k in 2 days.

Conclusion:

So, 58k new Twitter followers, 29k new Facebook fans, 6.4MM views of the campaign video + 5MM views of all responses in 48h.

Amazing campaign by W+K, simplicity = power. They carefully chose social influences that will promote their personalized viral video, and the true power was speed, amazing copywriting, and a great actor… hats off, I was truly impressed.

[Updated 07/16]: Added Youtube’s top channels and videos.

The latest one, called Old Spice | Questions got 3 million views in less than 1 week.

Interesting to see too how favorable reviews are … 21k positive vs 240 negative …

Other things to notice are the increasing number of call to actions to follow them on Facebook …

The video has links to Facebook in the description as well as an annotation. I actually like the watermark annotation in the video, very well executed, except the message, which should prompt to be best friends but simply land on the Facebook wall … not a good transition. FYI, Youtube does not allow annotations with external links unless it’s an ad buy, so Old Spice must see value on it to be paying per click.

The Old Spice YouTube Channel also has Facebook and Twitter links in the header … These links actually don’t link directly, but use a Bit.ly url to track click-troughs … Wonder why it’s inconsistent … they should have tracked the video annotation links the same way.

Anyways, even with the amazing success of the video in term of views, people have not been clicking much to Facebook from it … Bit.ly shows the following number of the past week, on which the video has had 3 million views

Referring Site	Click(s)
www.youtube.com	1,049
www.oldspice.com	383
Email Clients, IM, AIR Apps, and Direct	52
www.facebook.com	3
oldspicemobile.com	1
swaggerizeme.com	1
translate.googleusercontent.com	1
webcache.googleusercontent.com	1
www.oldspicefathersday.com	1

1000 clicks from Youtube … not impressive.

Also notice they have only 500k Facebook fans … small number had they tried to push traffic from the 50 million youtube views… but I don’t know for how long they’ve been trying. Would be great to have a tool to see historic growth of Facebook following for any public page / brand.

This video came out the same day the iPhone4 was released, immediately rocked the charts, and keep going strong.

The creator of the video worked at Best Buy, who immediately suspended him — creating some negative PR which shows you that even though Twelp won the Grand Prix at Cannes this  year, Best Buy is still learning how to best leverage social media.

The video in its two weeks have short of 4 million YouTube views

and 100,000 Facebook Shares

With talent like this, Best Buy should have done the total opposite and empowered the creator to build a follow up, embrace creativity to produce positive traction …

Freddie sent this email internally, but no reason we shouldn’t share.

Prequel: I noticed that some pages were taking too long to load … I heard good things about WP Super Cache and I had tried it before, but it was messing up when toggling between web view and mobile view … randomly providing web users the mobile view, and mobile users the web view … I decided to give it another chance, tested, and it works … speeded up the site drastically.

Chapter 1: A week goes by and I notice a drop in site traffic … I analyze why and it’s mainly organic traffic from Google

More specifically, % Change -42.81% … ok, now I’m pissed… why all the sudden my search ranking dropped so much?!

Chapter 2: I perform a search for some of my main articles, such as Free Social Media Monitoring Tools. Result?

Buy Meridia Pill? Reliable Online Drugstore? WTF?! Where did this come from? I obviously never put that there … So I click through and it’s my regular content … but if I open the cached Google version, this is what I see:

My title, metatags, categories, links, headlines, all replaced with Meridia copy … And the only change I’ve made in months is to activate the WP Super Cache plugin.

Hell, if I search buy meridia pill my site is #5 … I hate this hack!

if you search Google for wp meridia, you’ll find other blogs suffering the same problem.

Chapter 3: I just disabled the WP Super Cache and I really hope this cloaking goes away soon and my site goes back to normal … If  you’re using the WP Super Cache plugin I suggest you check your ranking. If you know anything else about this hack, please let me know.

I’ll keep you guys posted on what comes out of this.

Thanks for listening.

[Update 1]: Just did some digging around and it appears it wasn’t WP Super Cache, it’s actually WordPress being hacked right at the same time I activated it … Some reading here, and here. Anyone running WP suffered this hack? How did you solve it?

[Update 2]: WP recommends you install the WP Secure plugin

[Update 3]: You can use Google Webmaster tools (https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/labs-googlebot-fetch-2) to fetch the site as Google. Still messed up!

[Update 4]: After some heavy database digging and following carefully instructions from this blog, I was able to get rid of the cloaking. I had to search within my WP_Options for a bunch of keys and delete them all … really scary cuz I had no backup case I messed up … but it turned out good … Ran a few tests with the Google Webmaster tools googlebot fetch and it’s finally returning the correct results.

Sorry WP Super Cache for not trusting you, but you really came at the wrong moment. I will enable the plugin again tomorrow once Google re-fetches all the new cleaned up content and keep checking for problems within the next few days. I corrected the hack, but did not close the door for it to happen again … let’s hope it stays like that.

[Update 5]: I cleaned it, but did not patch it. The problem keeps coming back. How do you block this thing?!

[Update 6]: Changed all passwords; hack persists. Installed WP Secure and WordPress exploit scanner … run them, found nothing.

[Update 7]: I was hesitant to upgrade WP to 3.0 and all plugins in fear of something breaking and I was not going to have time to take care of it … but @Brandon gave me that confidence as he had upgraded all his blogs … status: running 3.0, upgraded all plugins, uninstalled all unused plugins … so far so good. Everything is working great, no traces on hacks. Re-enabled WP Super Cache and it’s working great. Thanks @Brandon for your time to help solve this issue.

[Update 8]: good morning, it’s still happening! Can’t get rid of this thing. So I installed WP Secure and locked down the entire installation … no more access to wp-content or wp-includes … wp-content broke my header rotator and my favico, but I added rewrite rules to work around it. The wp-includes broke the TinyMCE WYSIWYG editor in the backend, so I had to edit the htaccess file to allow access to wp-tinymce.php.

TechCrunch confirmed today that it’s not a rumor, it’s real.

D’Angelo, who was Facebook’s CTO for years, shared his thoughts as an answer to one of the questions on Quora. Here’s his response:

• This is not a rumor. This is a real project. There are a large number of people working on it. I am completely confident about this.
• They realized that Buzz wasn’t enough and that they need to build out a full, first-class social network. They are modeling it off of Facebook.
• Unlike previous attempts (before Buzz at least), this is a high-priority project within Google.
• They had assumed that Facebook’s growth would slow as it grew, and that Facebook wouldn’t be able to have too much leverage over them, but then it just didn’t stop, and now they are really scared.

Google has failed over and over again in providing any service that’s user friendly, i.e. Buzz, Latitude, Social Search, Google Friend Connect, Wave, Wave again, especially Wave … Though mark my words, Latitude will take off and will be base of amazing LBS services … Anyways, Google usually lacks of good design and usability, which makes it hard to believe they can compete with Facebook.

But the funny bit is that while Google is going after social networking, Facebook is making the move towards search. Shiv shared some thoughts on Facebook Search, and although I have some different thoughts, [Facebook] Open Graph is the beginning of a new semantic search that goes deep as opposed to broad and finds relevant content based on profile, location, and human recommendations.

So my predictions:

1. Google Me will have amazing technology, platform, have geo-social-mobile as a core, leverage elements from Latitude, Buzz, Open Social, and will be native to all new releases of the Android platform, including Google TV. Their success will rely on Google making a massive effort in making it usable, friendly, and having a good design.

2. Facebook will enter the search war, but not before they enter the display advertising arena. Search is a low priority as it provides less direct revenue opportunity for Facebook, whereas serving relevant context / social aware ads on 3rd party websites using the Facebook Open Graph provides a massive immediate revenue opportunity.

Really well done Sony. This projection was again created by NuFormer in the Netherlands and I must say these guys would have to be one of the top mapping agencies out there. The creative concept, mapping precision and execution are simply stunning! I will say that I think the Samsung 3D Projection was still more innovative in it’s concept and execution, but it’s good to see with just 3 concepts out there how different they can be. Now where is the US one? There’s a massive white building in Lincoln road with great exposure that would be ideal for it! Really, I’m sure Sapient will help negotiate and get all approvals to do it