Techno//Marketer - Matt Dickman on Digital Marketing and Social Technology

Owning your digital identity

Do you own your corporate domain name? It sounds kind of silly in 2008 doesn't it?

Let's go a level deeper. Do you own your personal .com name (i.e. www.mattdickman.com)?

That may be a bit more of a stretch for some of you, but it's crucial from a personal branding perspective. Just ask Shel Israel who did not have www.shelisrael.com purchased and someone else put up a site devoted to poking fun at him.

Other heavyweights like Robert Scoble (www.robertscoble.com) don't own their domain names either. Re-acquiring a domain name from a cybersquatter has some legal precedent, but it can rack of legal fees or large one-time purchase amounts.

Do you own your Twitter, YouTube and Flickr usernames?

However, let me ask you this. Do you own your personal/corporate Twitter username? How about your YouTube username? How about your Flickr username? If you don't, it's probably a good idea that you do (they're mostly free anyway). I lost out personally on my YouTube name because I used my nickname instead. You may not acquire them all, but you can sure try. These usernames do come up with search result pages adding to the importance of owning your identity.

The risk to your reputation that you run when somebody does register your username is potentially huge. There is no legislation (which I am aware of) that addresses these micro level identity-squatters. It could get to a point where people/companies have to pay for their usernames ala the late 1990's domain name deals.

Once you have acquired the usernames you will need to decide how, if at all, you use the account. While I don't like the fact that accounts may sit empty in the short-term, it is advisable that you secure your ID as soon as possible.

What are you waiting for? Go get your identity!

[Update: It looks like Shel Holtz and I are on the same page today. Check out his post on the same topic with FriendFeed.]

Technorati Tags:
branding, communications, PR, social media, social networks, strategy, Techno//Marketer, identity, reputation management

The scalability of language; the role of design

In this final installment of my series on the scalability of language online, I want to take a look at the role of design. So far we've looked at the challenges of language, the problems with machine translation, and the role of video. Design, though, enables ideas to transcend language to reach a much broader audience.

One of the best (if not the best) example of someone who uses design to convey complex ideas effortlessly is David Armano. Let's look at this illustration. To convey the complex ecosystem that has been created through the birth of social media and the immense fragmentation, David used a series of ripples. Like a rock thrown into a pond, it's something everyone is familiar with. The size of the circles conveys their impact (as would the size of the rock). It's intuitive and doesn't need copy to assist it.

I asked David to give his thought on the use of design to overcome the language gap:

"We were born with two eyes. Before we could speak words, we could see the world, recognize the faces of our parents and gaze into their eyes.

Somewhere along the way, we forgot how important visual stimulus really is. We scribbled drawings before writing. Visuals help bring us back to a universal understanding where words can sometimes fail us. It's time to pick up our crayons again."

Other bloggers use design to help us think through ideas. Roger von Oech uses his offline products to inspire us all to be more creative. He taps into his wildly successful (and I can personally say very helpful) Whack Pack series to help you think differently. The imagery on each card gives you a better idea of what you can expect.

Design also manifests itself with photography and there is nobody who uses photography better and is more prolific than Thomas Hawk. Thomas is a photographer in San Francisco who covers topics that he is passionate about including photography (duh), photographer's rights and social media. Many of his posts are comprised of single photographs that convey the emotion of the time and place.

These are just a few of the examples where design helps to transcend language. It's a very powerful tool when put in the right hands. Design can just as easily confuse and bankrupt ideas of their merit.

Who have you noticed that uses design to convey ideas? Have you seen it used incorrectly? Let me know your thoughts.

[This was supposed to auto-post last Friday. Sorry for the delay.]

Technorati Tags:
communications, marketing, Matt Dickman, social networks, Techno//Marketer, design

The scalability of language; the role of video

In today's post on the scalability of language, I want to talk about video. Video (as many of you know) is a passion of mine and I've found it a great way to communicate ideas to a broad audience.

The problem with video is that the language is harder to get at. With copy, you can, at a minimum, use a translation service to get a high-level overview of the content. With video that baseline doesn't exist.

Enter dotSub. This is a service that I learned about at the WeMedia Conference in Miami earlier this year. dotSub allows anyone to upload a video to the service and then add native language subtitles to the video. This starts with a solid English translation and then people can add new languages.

The community then validates the translation, adapts it and finally accepts it as an official version of the content. This is a great use of the crowdsourcing principle to add value to a diverse group of people. I do wish that dotSub accepted videos from other services, but they are still pretty new.

Here is a video overview:

[Feed readers please click through to the post if you cannot see the video.]

Services like dotSub allow native speakers to effectively translate content and share it with people in their community.

Tomorrow I will wrap up this series taking a look at the role design plays in language and communicating ideas across networks.

---

To help you stay on top of what is happening and to filter the myriad options, you can now subscribe to the Techno//Marketer podcast on iTunes. Get updates in real time when new videos become available.

If you use another podcatcher you can grab my podcast RSS feed here.

---

You can watch this and other Techno//Marketer videos on your video channel of choice:

   
   

Technorati Tags:
communications, conversations, language, marketing, Matt Dickman, social networks, strategy, Techno//Marketer, video, dotSub

Nokia's Jan Chipchase on the evolution of mobile

I am a huge fan of the TED Conference's video library. If you're not familiar head over there and poke around (be warned, you will spend a lot of time there).

This video of Nokia's Jan Chipchase is one of those videos that I come back to over and over again. It truly changed the way I look at technology's implications on the global community.

Jan spends his time traveling the world and doing ethnographic research to figure out how the mobile phone fits (and will fit in the future) into our culture. This local, first-person research is so valuable and has very wide-reaching implications.

The coolest part is when Jan goes into the way that phones are used in Uganda as ATMs. People basically exchange airtime minutes as currency. There is a central point person in the local village who has a phone and who exchanges minutes into cash. In other parts of the world there is a whole industry created around supporting and repairing devices where those services do not exist. Other countries are using mobile phone numbers above the entrance to houses instead of house numbers. That's their identity.

Check it out:

Technorati Tags:
communications, Matt Dickman, social media, social networks, Techno//Marketer, technology, TED, mobile

The scalability of language; machine translation

The scalability of language is something that's been on my mind a lot lately. In my post yesterday, I looked at the top issues that the language hurdle presents with digital content and conversations.

Today, I want to look at the error of using machine translations. If you're not sure what I mean, let's look at an example. Let's say you wanted to go to Univision.com and get it translated into English. You would go to a site like Google Translate and enter the URL into the "translate a web page" option. Google then goes through the site and does a literal translation for you.

The problem is that the translations don't account for many factors including local dialect, slang and trendy language. As Mario Vellandi put it in his comment on my last post:

"I'm trilingual and must say that although I adore languages, especially English, there are many phrases that are culturally bound and cannot be translated without some serious human assistance to the computer. Sometimes it's metaphors and similes. Other times, humor and irony are at play. Then there's slang and trend/fad language...It's crazy, but fun."

The real test
The true test of any language translation service is the ability to translate language two ways. What I mean is take a sentence that you want to use. Translate that phrase to the other language and then take the translated version and translate it back to the original.

Here is an example:
Take the first two sentences from yesterday's post:

There is a game that every American kid plays in school at one point in time called telephone (also known as Chinese whispers). The idea is that all of the kids line up in a single-file line and then the person on one end of the line whispers a sentence to the person next to them like "Steve Jobs is the CEO of Apple, pass it on".

Now I'll translate it into Spanish using Google Translate:

No es un juego que cada chico juega en América en la escuela en un momento llama por teléfono (también conocido como chino susurra). La idea es que todos los niños de la línea en una sola línea del archivo y, a continuación, la persona en un extremo de la línea susurra una frase a la persona junto a ellos como "Steve Jobs es el CEO de Apple, dárselo".

And now let's look at it when we translate it back to English using Google Translate:

It is not a game that every kid plays in americas in school at one point called by phone (also known as Chinese whispers). The idea is that all children of the line in a single file line, and then the person at one end of the line whispers a phrase to the person next to them as "Steve Jobs is the CEO of Apple, giving it".

Pretty clear isn't it? The overall meaning is totally gone (even reversed in this case). Just imagine what would happen if you were trying to do real-time translations. Google does take steps toward humanizing the machine with their "Suggest a better translation" link which lets native speakers contribute a new, more accurate translation. Here is a screen shot of that process:

The point here is that if you automate translation, you are not going to communicate clearly to your audience. It's worth the expense and effort to make sure that your key information is translates by a native-speaking human being.

Technorati Tags:
advertising, communications, language, marketing, social media, strategy

The scalability of language and conversations

There is a game that every American kid plays in school at one point in time called telephone (also known as Chinese whispers). The idea is that all of the kids line up in a single-file line and then the person on one end of the line whispers a sentence to the person next to them like "Steve Jobs is the CEO of Apple, pass it on". What always happens though, is as the message is passed along it evolves and changes until the last person has something like "Apples are oh so good for you". (The game only works until the age when kids know what the experiment is and then they start intentionally changing it.)

Now, imagine you were playing the same game in a room where nobody spoke the same language. One of the biggest challenges for most marketers, journalists, advertisers and PR practitioners who leverage the Web to operate in the global economy is the scalability of language. This is something that I think about often as I blog, record videos and audio and I work day-to-day on global campaigns for major brands.

Machine translation is nearly useless. What I mean by machine translation is the use of automatic translation scripts (like Google Translate or Systran). This is almost 100% useless unless you only need a vague idea of what is being talked about. There is no substitute for localized translation by a native speaker.

The normal tactic for most marketers, when dealing with language, is to create multiple versions of content all translated into the local dialect under a global umbrella. This works well for written content (outside of having multiple copies of content), but you end up with divergent conversations even though the ideas overlap and each would benefit from the other's experience.

The limitations of video
One area that I feel the effects of more often than not is the limitation of video. When I create a video in English, I am almost entirely locked in to only reach English speakers. It doesn't do much good to Spanish speakers or German speakers, because so much of the value is in the spoken word.

At the same time, video is a superior tool to bridge distance and make people feel like they are together. It's also great for education purposes. So, how can we bridge the scalability of language as marketers, content creators and human beings?

The challenge of conversations
Another big challenge happens when organic customer conversations cross languages. Right now there is no real good way to combine conversations from language silos. Imagine the perspective we could have if people from around the world could have cross-language conversations. That would certainly be powerful.

Most social networks are separated as well where each language is kept separate from each other. Bi-lingual users have a very hard time crossing back and forth. The experience is certainly not fluid. Word of mouth suffers the same limitations.

Over the next couple of days I am going to feature a few of the ways that language is slowly and methodically starting to scale with content.

In the meantime, how do you deal with language? Do you ignore it for now or is it something that is always at the back of your mind? I'd love to hear your thoughts.

Technorati Tags:
Google, marketing, Matt Dickman, PR, social media, Techno//Marketer, conversations, language, social networks

links for 2008-05-16

• Facebook's Big Facelift
  Facebook is going to be rolling out some design changes to help scale with the increased volume of people and applications available. Should be interesting to see the extent of what they do.
  (tags: facebook design UI)

Brand tags

I've been a swamped this week with travel and work, but I wanted to make sure that I gave a shout out to Noah Brier's excellent new project called Brand Tags. The ideas is brilliantly simple. Noah built a system that presents users with a logo of a company and asks them to type in the first term that comes to mind. He then creates a tag cloud (where terms with more entries appear larger in size) to show all of the results for each company.

Here is an example of the output for Heineken beer

(Interestingly enough a large number of people think Heineken is a German brewed beer.)

What I love about this is the focus on one simple idea and the incredibly valuable insights that can be gained for the companies in the mix. It's a way to use the crowdsourcing concept to get a better idea of what your customers think about your company. There are quite a number of brands in the mix so check out the site and let me know your thoughts.

Noah also wrote a great post about how he created and iterated through the development of Brand Tags. It's a great read if you're interested in rapid development of a software product in nearly real time.

Technorati Tags:
branding, marketing, Matt Dickman, social media, Techno//Marketer, Noah Brier, brand tags

First//Look: BrightKite

In a world of shiny new things, BrightKite is the current top of the list. Beta invites are hard to get and new ones go quickly. So what is BrightKite all about? BrightKite is a social network that hinges on one key differentiating factor. It knows where you are. Users of the site update their locations (manually for now, but I could see GPS updates in the future) and share information with friends as well as other people in the same location.

The content on the site includes Twitter-esque messages about where you are/what you're doing and photography. One very limiting factor at this point is that BrightKite doesn't integrate with the content users are already creating on sites like Twitter and Flickr. BrightKite will push your updates to Twitter, and has a cool way of co-updating your Twitter location, but it still means that you have to create content twice. That's not going to happen in large numbers.

The idea of social, location-based networks aim to close the gap on contextual relevancy that has resulted in irrelevant information overload. I have found that proximity adds context and makes things more relevant to me. This is BrightKite's beta so I'm really looking forward to seeing how they evolve this and bring out more mobile consumption elements (iPhone app, BlackBerry app, proximity alerts, etc.). Advertisers will undoubtedly be perking up at the targeting ability that location brings. That's for another post. If you're on BrightKite make sure you add me.

[Feed readers please click through to the post if you cannot see the video.]

Key takeaways:

• Location-based social networks are growing in number and will be standard in the near future
  
• Location is manually updated, but will move to real-time, GPS-based updates when the technology catches up
  
• BrightKite has good privacy filters in place which is crucial for the promise of this level of off-line connectedness
  
• BrightKite does a good job of pushing its content out, but needs to do a better job of pulling it in
  
• Social media overlap (creating the same content more than once) is a growing problem and needs to be planned before sites get to launch stage
  
• Location-based ad targeting is a way to monetize this very quickly, but has to be in balance and aim to add value (like if I am standing in line at Wendy's it could offer me an immediate coupon)
  
• Mobile plays a large part in the success of this network and will for all social networks in the near-term
  
• Would love more consumption options on the phone (not just publishing) to get the most benefit from the service
  

If you know of a new service that you think I should take a look at drop me an email or leave a comment.

---

To help you stay on top of what is happening and to filter the myriad options, you can now subscribe to the Techno//Marketer podcast on iTunes. Get updates in real time when new videos become available.

If you use another podcatcher you can grab my podcast RSS feed here.

---

You can watch this and other Techno//Marketer videos on your video channel of choice:

   
   

Video from Startup Camp

Thanks to the multi-talented Neil Vineberg and his stealth video abilities (it's a long story) here is a set of videos from our panel discussion this past Sunday at Moscone South. Kudos again to my fellow panelists CK, Jyri Engestrom and Adam Metz.

Brand

Messaging and Positioning

Social Media

[Feed readers click through to the post for the video.]

Technorati Tags:
branding, communications, marketing, Matt Dickman, PR, social media, Startup Camp, Sun Microsystems, Techno//Marketer, video