A new generation of traffic exchanges was launched last week, called Thumbvu from a long term veteran John Guanzon, which allows you to surf sites you’d like to see based on a thumbnailed screenshot of the website.

Thumbvu also takes a leading position in merging social media with traffic exchanges, integrating Facebook, Twitter, and even Youtube into an exchange. This leaves Thumbvu with a lot of room to grow.

This is a new breed of exchange that this industry has been waiting for. So today, I finally got a chance to try it out and surf a few sites and I must say it is an excellent concept. But I see a lot of the members falling into the same old website promoting rut that they’ve used for the past ten years. I see rotators and splash pages galore.

It’s too early to tell whether splash pages will be effective in Thumbvu, but I’m inclined to think not. What people want, in this type of exchange, is content. There is a very old saying online, and I’m sorry for such a horrible cliche, but ‘content is king.’ In this case you are using a social media platform to promote your business, and nothing would work better in Thumbvu than a purely kickass website.

This site uses a fairly large thumbnail, but it is still only a small window into what you are promoting and you must use it as effectively as possible. Since the thumbnail is a screenshot of the website you are promoting, you must have a decent offering and a splash of style.

Splash pages aside, the main problem I’m seeing here is rotators. Rotators will not work for this site, period. End of story. Your results will be significantly less for a rotator than with a static website.

I see so many thumbnails with the tag at the bottom saying rotator, and that’s an immediate turnoff. Do I want to take a girl on a blind date? Why hell, I don’t even know her name. Who’s gonna answer that door when I go clicking.

In older exchanges, it didn’t really matter. Every click was a blind date, but now we have options, and there are two other girls to choose from. I even know their names, they’re written at the bottom.

Rotators fail on Thumbvu because the website you are clicking to see is probably not the site you will find.

There are three things I would recommend right off the bat for promoting in any traffic exchange, Thumbvu included.

• A good concept website

  This could be as simple as your blog. In fact, put your blog in there. Do that. If you don’t have a blog, then what are you doing? It’s 2010 now. At the very least a decent offering would be social media profiles like your twitter page, your facebook profile, and anything that promotes you, your business, or your website long term.

• A hook

  You want to provide something users will be interested in, so if your site is a photography site with lots of pictures, you’d want to promote your most interesting pictures. In this way, other surfers would be inclined to view more of your gallery. In the case of a blog, promote your most interesting posts and thoughts. You need a hook to grab them with.

• A good design on said website

  This will be key when surfers are provided the thumbnail options. You want that thumbnail to stand out as much as possible to get more hits. So it’s important, absolutely important, that your thumbnail provide the bait for your hook.

Thumbvu is the new gen and long waited for, and I congratulate John on what I expect to be a successful website, but I hope he can overcome many of the old habits of traffic exchanges to bring Thumbvu to it’s fullest potential. My advice, John, would be to ban rotators immediately. When it comes to Thumbvu, they will only hurt you and the people who are using them.

Google, like the link is even necessary, has apparently changed their favicon suddenly and shockingly, and it’s a rather interesting look into the power of branding.

A favicon is a 16×16 pixel image saved in a special icon format with the extension .ico. When uploaded to a site, typically the main directory, it will be shown in browser address bars and tabs and becomes a brandable mark for that site. Typically a company would use their logo, or part of it, to reinforce the logo brand such as what Google has done. For ages, Google’s favicon has been nearly as iconic as their logo. The trademark uppercase G from their logo with a colored border.

As Ionut Alex Chitu notes on the GoogleSystem Blog (not affiliated with Google):

Google’s new favicon is less cheerful and comforting, but it makes a lot of sense: the small g is a symbol for infinity (∞). A googol (10¹⁰⁰) is just a poor approximation for the huge amount of information that needs to be indexed, organized and made useful by Google.

Will this hurt Google? No, probably not.

In fact it will probably be some great publicity for a time as people sit up and take notice, writing blog posts such as this one to reinforce the Google brand. It goes to show that there is a power to branding beyond the subliminal reinforcement. When you’re as big as Google, you can mess with it, and by doing so you tug on that reinforcement of the brand and get into peoples heads – as well as getting some great, cheap advertising out of the deal.

Yes, when you are as big as Google you can nonchalantly mess with people’s heads. That is the power of a good brand.

Just don’t make the mistake Coca Cola did and change your formula. That, definately, is a recipe for disaster.

Update: Google has finally posted a public message about their new favicon on their official Blog. The includes a nice sampling of the designs they considered for the new favicon as well as an allusion to Dr. Suess.

Article:One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish

Technorati Tags: Google, Favicon, Marketing, Branding