As counterintuitive as it might sound, if you’re doing a web search for “cupcake” in the next few weeks, one of the paid search results you may direct you to Honda’s new micro site.

From what I’ve read, Honda’s ad agency has bought thousands of search terms, such as cupcake, chocolate and other non-automotive terms, to direct consumers to a micro site for its CR-V sport utility vehicle which they’ve spun into “Crave”.

Tom Peyton, the senior manager-national advertising for the Honda brand, mentioned that he wants it to become as popular as Burger King’s Subservient Chicken push. “We are very much hoping to catch the same buzz,” he said, but among “cool moms in their 30s.”

I personally think that they missed the mark on this one. The Subservient Chicken campaign, which I am a big fan of, was based around Burger King’s theme, “Have it your way” and the launch of their new chicken sandwich. Makes sense. (check out the site if you don’t know what I mean. Now what cookies and cravings have to do with a small SUV is what I need Honda to help me figure out.

I’ve been noticing and reading about alot of changes that Myspace is using in an attempt to thwart abuse of its platform by phishing sites, spammers and other evil-doers. I recently posted about what seemed like a test with inactive links (just text) in bulletin posts - automatically adding an extra period before the .com to make cut and paste users hit a “page not found” error. I believe that this was just a test, as it is not currently being employed to my knowledge. 

A more obvious tactic that Myspace has been systematically employing over the past few months shows that they are taking their outgoing links seriously…and using it to keep users session times through the roof. 

All new active outbound hyperlinks on any MySpace page are converted to filter through the domain msplinks.com. Each link is then redirected to the original destination. 

The masked links now look like this: 

http://www.msplinks.com/MDFodHRwOi8vd3d3LndpbGZlcmGH1Jj 

I saw it initially applied to comments that I was leaving, suggesting that they were aiming to crack down on comment SPAM in particular. Over the past month, I’ve seen it applied to every outgoing link. Even 3rd party hosted photos, using services such as photobucket, do not link directly to Photobucket.com, but instead link indirectly through the Myspace-controlled URL. 

The danger that I see in this brings up an interesting debate. Prior to employing this tactic, users could simply hover their cursor over a link and read the URL in the browser. I feel that most users are savvy enough to know this and use this method for checking out where their “friend” is linking them before clicking on the link. With this new system in place, users don’t have the information to make that choice. They have to trust that Myspace is monitoring outgoing links and if Myspace deems it inappropriate or harmful, then the link will not resolve to the site. Less Web 2.0 and more 1984. 

Aside from attempting to prevent SPAM and harmful links on other sites, there are alot of pro’s for Myspace in controlling outbound links. Obviously they can better track their outgoing traffic and possibly even keep users on the site longer by not giving them the information about the destination URL that I mentioned in the previous paragraph. From this they can discover which 3rd party services (widgets, skins…) are most popular and integrate their own versions. If they wanted to take it even further, they could block access to these 3rd party sites…and in that case they could even block links to potentially threatening (competing) niche social networks which are emerging. 

Is this the strategic decision that seems so right to marketers but actually causes users to ultimately abandon it? 

Ok, I know that it SEEMS like I have been slacking these past few months since I arrived in Southern California, but really, the wonderful, consistent weather hasn’t distracted me a bit. Seriously though, getting settled over the past 3 months while returning to the east coast a handful of times was a busy time for me. I’m ready to get back to blogging about my experiences in interactive marketing.

The thing that triggered this blog post was a sneaky little move that I discovered Myspace had made in an effort to further discourage abuse of their messaging platforms. Over the past few months, they have been battling with spammers by implementing stricter CAPTCHA strategies, imposing daily communication limits and attempting to control outgoing links posted in messages. After getting to the point of banning active links within private messages*, spammers still seemed to continue their quest for free ipod giveaway registrants, strong as ever.

As I got an myspace message back from a friend, telling me that the site I sent him a link to was down, I noticed something interesting. The domain that I referred to in the message body was inthebrick.com, but the message was reformatted automatically and the domain was stated as inthebrick..com to my friend. This was obviously the cause of his inability to get to the site that I sent him to, since he cut-and-pasted the domain directly out of the message. I played around with it a bit and there is no way to create a message that the recipient can simply cut-and-paste the URL, so I was forced to do the “I feel like I am doing something wrong but I am not…am I?” - inthebrick com. Will it be effective? I don’t know; but I do know that it is an inconvienence to the regular users that just want to tell their freinds about other sites on the interweb.

*not allowing active links greatly decreases the chances of a user typing in a full URL string (www.domain.com/uniqueID) and therefore hurt affiliates/referral partners who are in some cases where spamming on behalf of other sites in echange for per-sale or per-lead basis. From what I saw most savvy affiliate spammers proceeded to register domains (www.freeipod.com) and redirect them to their own affiliate links (which actually gives them the ablility to change the affilite partner/offer on the fly while campaigns are still live. In fact, they could even split test offers by randomizing the affiliate URL that the domain pointed to….ok, I’m done with this thought…lol…)