Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos.com and Internet folk hero, was Marketing World 2008’s Thursday keynote speaker. Hsieh became Zappos’ CEO in 2000, a year after the company’s founding. In that time, the online shoe retailer’s gross merchandise sales have grown from $1.6 million in 2000 to $840 million in 2007.

Zappos is known for its commitment to customer service, sometimes to the point of legend. In his keynote Hsieh emphasized the importance of a company’s culture and customer service in building brand. Hsieh’s four keys to this (and his accompanying quotes) are:

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After all the buying and selling, mergers and mayhem, Bank of America remains the number one online bank, according to a Quarterly Bank Benchmarker.

Despite the mergers of Chase and WaMu, and whatever the result between Citi, Wachovia, and Wells Fargo will be, Comscore expects that Bank of America will continue to be the largest online bank.

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One of the main themes at last week’s Online Market World 2008 was how businesses can best use social media. This was oft discussed, but best summed up by Bill Hanekamp, CEO of The Well Inc. Advertising. In discussing strategies for viral marketing, Hanekamp gave a succinct summary of how to “let the customers spread the word about you for free.” I’ve fleshed out his list with some ideas offered by other presenters.

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Online retailers are following under-30s shoppers to social sites like Facebook, MySpace and YouTube. “Generation Y online buyers” participate in Internet activities more than any younger generation, and this influences their online spending habits.

The Society for New Communications Research study entitled, “Exploring the Link Between Customer Care and Brand Reputation in the Age of Social Media,” confirms the importance that this demographic holds for online rating systems, discussion forums and blogs.  These sources of information seem to be divorced from traditional marketing strategies, and therefore have more credibility.

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Recent interest in People Search sites has created many options, but seldom a success. One such success is Pipl.com - its motto, “The most comprehensive people search on the web.” This holds true thanks to its unique method of using content from Facebook, Amazon, Friendster, etc. via what it refers to as the “Deep Web.” Pipl.com’s Deep Web page defines the term as “a vast repository of underlying content, such as documents in online databases that general-purpose web crawlers cannot reach. The deep web content is estimated at 500 times that of the surface web, yet has remained mostly untapped due to the limitations of traditional search engines.”

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Affinion Security Center (ASC) launched last week a new service that fights identity theft — after it happens. IdentitySecure monitors hacker market places and alerts you if your data comes up for sale.

“While breaches are often unavoidable, IdentitySecure provides the proactive searches, early detection and recovery assistance.”

ASC recognizes that our personal data is often out of our control. While we can do what we can to protect our it, there’s always the chance of it being obtained from a third party, as happened recently when a hard drive containing the personal information of over a million bank customers was sold on eBay.

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Online video content for PC viewing is the fastest growing category of consumer usage, according to a study released yesterday. Driving down usage percentage in peer-to-peer data and Web, e-mail and other data, PC online video is projected to comprise nearly one-third of Internet traffic by 2012. This is not to say that P2P and web usage will dip, but rather that the total traffic will increase, along with video percentage.

The video upsurge is not simply caused by more viewers and the increasing popularity of video Web sites such as Google’s YouTube and NBC and NBC Universal and News Corp’s Hulu. While the number of people watching is increasing, the quality of video is also improving. Simply put, this Internet usage shift is caused by both quantity and quality.

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Upon first look, Ziggs.com appears to be just another social networking site, a knockoff of Facebook or Myspace. But after a closer look, Ziggs services are unique and revolutionary.

With a free account, Ziggs will supply details about who is searching for you on virtually all major search engines. Ziggs immediately emails an alert to you at the moment someone looks you up. Additionally, the Web site provides a map location of where the search was administered, along with the search terms, the IP address and the time of the search.

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Traffic to online trading and online brokerage Web sites increased 30 percent during the week ending September 21 2008. Sites such as Online Trading Category, Fidelity.com and Sharebuilder.com found unique visitor numbers expanding as compared to the weekly average from July through early September, some by over 200 percent.

Blogs using the terms “Wall Street,” “bailout” and “401k” all saw an increase in traffic, primarily the first two terms. The highest performer, “Wall Street” blog volume increased approximately 80 times on September 29, according to a report September 30 from Nielsen Online . The Nielsen Company measures and analyzes online audiences and advertising for their business clients marketing strategies.

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Walking down to the San Francisco’s Powell Station this morning, another protest in front of the Apple Store. This time I had my camera with me.

The protesters are from the Carpenters Union Local 9144. The problem is that Apple Inc. is using Shawmut Design & Construction who is using MTD Drywall to build their new store in Modesto, CA. MTD Drywall Inc. is accused of not paying the area standard wages & benefits already established in that area by carpenters…