Pmog.com for digital marketing

PMOG launched today. As a gamer and a digital marketer it interests me greatly.

Very briefly, PMOG is a Firefox extension that follows you around the web and gives your virtual cash for visiting new pages (yeah; it's a tracking program...)

As a user you can mine pages to leave an unwelcome surprise for the next PMOGer to visit. You can also leave a crate with a pile of loot. It is also possible to leave a portal that connects one site to another.

Due to PMOG's event stream I can be pretty certain that when I leave a crate on a site that someone will turn up sharpish to investigate (in fact, I would question whether the event stream is helping the game aspect or not) ... but right now, if I want to bring someone to a newly launched site then I can lure them in with crates.

It took less than 10 minutes for someone to turn up and raid a crate I had left on Andy Beal's twitter profile. So far people have managed to avoid the mine I left on... oh, I'm not going to say who's profile I mined!

I can also build brand association between two sites (not to mention steal a dribble of traffic) via portals. I went to The Register today and found a PMOG portal from a player suggesting I visit SlashDot too. I did. First time in ages.

It's also possible to create 'missions'. Now, missions are just visiting a bunch of sites in order and reading the creator's commentary.

My first attempt was to make one of the pages in the mission a set of Yahoo search results but the PMOG commentary layer wouldn't activate so I had to take the page out of the mission. I don't know whether PMOG have excluded Yahoo on purpose or whether it's a 'feature'. It may be a good idea as people can try and game Yahoo Search Assist by creating artificially high query rates.

PMOG clearly does have something to say about search. The badge at the top of this post is the Indie and is awarded if you avoid Google for a day.

I suspect I'm going to keep PMOG installed for a while and see how the site grows. It seems like an ideal place to launch virals and win the attention of online gamers (who are typically very savvy and often adept at ignoring advertising).