Techno//Marketer

Video week on Techno//Marketer

[Note: If you can't see the video that is right up here ^, don't worry! Just click back to the post and you will be able to see it just fine.]

I use a lot of video on this site to help educate and inform you, my community. Due to that fact I get a lot of questions about video from production to editing. Next week on this blog I am going to produce a series of posts and videos that show how I shoot, manage and publish my video content.

Top level topics include:

• Monday: Equipment and software
  
• Tuesday: How I shoot my video tutorials (the most frequently asked question that I get)
  
• Wednesday: How I edit and produce the final product
  
• Thursday: How and where I distribute the videos
  
• Friday: Reader questions
  

On Friday I will answer any questions that you have. To stay in the theme of the week it would be excellent if you provided your questions in video (either on Facebook or on YouTube) and I will stream them in and link back to your site. I will, however accept any questions you have by email or by commenting on this post.

So start thinking and let me know what's on your mind. I can't wait to hear from you!

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Technorati Tags:
conversations, marketing, Matt Dickman, Techno//Marketer, video, tips

Twitter for marketing, branding and customer service

Yesterday I had the opportunity to speak to the Cleveland Web Association on the topics of micromedia (Twitter, Pownce, FriendFeed, etc.). This was a follow up presentation to the one I gave back in February and is meant to dive a bit deeper into the subject.

I thought the audience was very receptive to the topic and the examples absolutely help out with that. David Meade of Optiem gave a bit of a more technical primer before me and is who I reference in the first few minutes.

The presentation is available below as a SlideCast (meaning I have added an voiceover audio track to it) which you can access by hitting the green middle button that looks like this .

Enjoy!

| View | Upload your own

[Feed readers click through to the post of click the "View" link above.]

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If you are interested in having me speak to your company or organization, you can check out my other SlideShare presentations here and feel free to contact me for more information.

Technorati Tags:
conversations, customer service, FriendFeed, Identi.ca, marketing, Matt Dickman, micromedia, PR, social media, strategy, Techno//Marketer, technology, trends, Twitter

Inside//Out: Identi.ca

Does the world need another Twitter clone? How about thousands of them? Identi.ca is a Twitter competitor that us running on an open source platform called Laconica. The product is open source and can be installed and rebranded anywhere including behind corporate firewalls.

The trend with these services is to become more and more distributed and eventually interconnected. I would fully expect Google to implement a common protocol for these services to become universally integrated in the future. For now we'll have to rely on tools like Ping.fm and Summize (which was purchased by Twitter today) to carry out our conversations.

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

Key Takeaways:

• More and more Twitter competitors will rise up taking niche communities with them as Twitter remains on top for the foreseeable future
  
• Open source versions of Twitter will begin appearing behind corporate fire walls acting as communications tools and helping knowledge managers compile conversations across the enterprise
  
• Oddly during Twitter's periods of sporadic downtime, sites like Identi.ca were so crushed with traffic that they also crashed limiting Twitter's exposure
  
• Core components missing here are the API, mobile integration (both of which are allegedly down the road)
  
• Twitter's own open-source software is out there and may trump all of the up and comers
  

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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.

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

   
   

Technorati Tags:
conversations, Inside//Out, marketing, Matt Dickman, micromedia, social media, Summize, Techno//Marketer, technology, trends, Twitter, Identi.ca

The single most important element of the new 3G iPhone

Undoubtedly the iPhone is a game changing device that has turned the US mobile device market on its head. How many of the new devices that are coming out from manufacturers would exist today without the competition the iPhone provided.

With all of its features and its cool interface, there is one part of the new 3G iPhone (which launches today July 11th) that is the most important for marketers. That is GPS. For the first time ever, GPS will be fully integrated on a user-frindly, consumer device. It's intuitive, unlike previous phones where you had to hack to get it to work. Not only that, but the developer SDK allows you, the marketers, to create applications that use this technology.

Ask yourself, what would you do differently if you knew exactly where your customers were? Would you create an app that links people together who are physically close? Would you offer messages that were relevant to their present location? Here are a number of options that GPS location adds to the marketing mix unlike any time in the history of marketing.

Ask yourself, what would you do differently if you knew exactly where your customers were?

Geo-tagging - Now that the device knows where you are, it can add geo-tagging information to almost any data you collect. Shoot a photo at the Grand Canyon and upload it to Flickr and Flickr will pull the geo information and place the photo on the right place on the map. Send a message to Twitter and it could update your location to the nearest city name or even the exact location you're standing (creepy I know).

Proximity Awareness - Think about the possibilities of Facebook knowing where you are and where your friends are in real time. Facebook's iPhone app could alert you when any of your contacts are within 1/2 mile of your location. You could private message them to see if they can meet up or send them an SMS message.

For marketers, you could create an application (that people opt-in to by installing it) that allows them to receive promotions and offers whenever they are within a radius of a store. If Starbucks hasn't done this already I am not sure what they're waiting for. Users could adjust their radius or disable the messages at any time.

Mobile Commerce - This goes hand-in-hand with proximity awareness and is very powerful for marketers. The iPhone will allow easier commerce transactions to happen in a more trusted environment. From the application store to mobile song purchases, if you are serving up relevant, geo-targeted messages you can now follow that through purchase with micro transactions. This takes mobile messaging to a new level of effectiveness for marketing organizations.

Localized Search Relationships - Using search on the iPhone is effortless. Now, however, add in the location where the user is standing. Instead of searching for Chipotle and having to scan for the one near you, the phone will present you the closest location, give you the phone number and offer directions (which works like a car's GPS system with turn-by-turn options). Refer back to mobile commerce and apply that to search that is local and it's another way to drive business and conversions.

So, what do you think? More and more devices will surely follow suit. Are you ready for location? What value can you add to your customers that would help them adopt your product or service? What can you do before the competition to really set yourself apart?

If you're visiting this post on an iPhone check out my iPhone version (hat tip Chris Brogan).

Geo-location applications to keep an eye on:

Loopt

Facebook

Flickr

MySpace

Where

Whrrl

Related Posts:

• Mobile social media and micromedia
  
• Mobile marketing 101: Geographic smart-targeting
  
• Mobile marketing 101: Know thy audience
  

UPDATE: Thanks to Jim Kukral's question I looked for car-based GPS info on the new iPhone and found the following video. Since this video veers away from the Apple device and into the actual AT&T service plan I want to have full disclosure in telling you that AT&T is a Fleishman-Hillard client.

Others bloggers are thinking the same thing I am:

• Mark @ Mashable
  
• Brady @ O'Reilly
  

Technorati Tags:
advertising, Facebook, marketing, Matt Dickman, micromedia, mobile, search, social media, Techno//Marketer, technology, trends, widgets, iPhone, Apple, location, geotargeting

Don't forget the rest of the digital puzzle

With all of the buzz around social media it's easy to overlook the rest of the digital marketing puzzle. Yes, it's fun to talk about Twitter and Facebook and the other new bright shiny objects, but they're just one component of a balanced online marketing strategy.

Take a look at the following chart from e-Marketer that shows how US adults prefer to have companies communicate with them. Note that email is still almost twice as requested as web sites.

That being said, social media has the opportunity to help drive business, create valuable content and serve as a landing point for various customer segments. Content is the foundation of any quality experience online, just ask anyone who's run a website.

Email - Social media (from Twitter to blogs) is centered around constant content updates. It's also a rule that very few people actually participate by commenting or adding content. Most people participate by reading and clicking (which is just as valuable in my opinion). Email is a perfect way, however, to summarize the best, most relevant conversations that are taking place.

Search - Search engines absolutely love social media content. It's categorized, updated frequently and is full of metadata. Results from blogs and other social media outlets are showing up in search result pages alongside corporate websites and official releases. The more relevant, popular, trusted sources will rise to the top...many times they'll be blogs.

Advertising - Sites like Facebook are full of user data that is being leveraged by marketers to create timely, relevant, targeted ads. Facebook made poor decisions early on with their Beacon program, but smart marketers are using the targeting to eliminate waste and only pay for the qualified clicks.

With social media as one component of digital marketing mix, keep thinking about how it can integrate with other tactics. How can you use the content generated in emails, ads, mobile messaging, search targeting, etc.? How can you extend it offline into physical items for marketing. Look at examples like Moo.com that allow you to create social artifacts that lead people back to your space online.

Social media is not an island,
it's a high-power engine on the larger marketing ship.

Social media isn't the end-all-be-all, but it offers marketers unparalleled opportunity to participate in relevant ways. It also provides a launchpad for other marketing tactics. Social media is not an island, it's a high-power engine on the larger marketing ship.

Technorati Tags:
digital, marketing, Matt Dickman, social media, Techno//Marketer

Reader poll results; what medium has the most influence?

In an ongoing bi-weekly series, here are the results of the most recent poll question "What type of media has the most influence on your decision making?". The question stemmed from the post I did about the results of the Fleishman-Hillard (my employer) Digital Influence Survey. In that survey digital was found to be twice as influential as the nearest competitor, TV.

Not too surprisingly digital ranked as your top influential medium at 74% while magazines and television tied at 12% each. You said that digital is six times more influential than the nearest competitors. Newspapers can a very distant fourth at 3% while radio didn't have one single vote.

The results:

Where the information came from:

This is about where I thought my audience would be, but I was interested to see magazines tied with TV and was also surprised to see newspapers running so far back. I was not surprised to see radio dead last honestly. Between iPods, satellite radio and the Internet who has time for radio anymore?

Did this end up the way you expected? Anything you think is under- or over-rated? Let's hear what you think! Be sure to check out the current poll and weigh in on the question "Where should conversations take place?".

Technorati Tags:
influence, marketing, Matt Dickman, Techno//Marketer, trends, digital

Visualizing interaction design

Did you know that there is a large, passionate community of digital design experts who focus on the ways that a consumer interacts online? It's a level above and beyond what a pure web designer does. Their thinking goes beyond Flash intros and shiny 2.0 graphics. These professionals think about how we consume sites visually and physically with the mouse and help brands convey their identity no matter the format.

A problem that I run in to often is that people don't get what interaction design is. I start to explain that it's a custom process that is generally design-led. Still, they look at me puzzled.

To solve this, I've started looking for great examples to show people. One of the coolest examples of this is for a site that was done for Mercedes Benz in the UK. It's called A-to-S (playing off of their A-class and S-class lines).

The site uses Flash as the technology platform, but the experience behind each letter allows you to almost touch the screen. The mouse interacts in very logical, physical ways.

Have a look and let me know what you think. These small details make the difference in the experience when used correctly. Yes, there is more to interaction design, but I'm looking at the basics here. The complete definition of interaction design (IxD) can be found here or on the IxDA website here.

Technorati Tags:
design, Matt Dickman, Techno//Marketer, trends, IxD, interaction design

Free mobile for advertising impressions; it's only a matter of time

Blyk, a free mobile service targeted at 16-24 year olds in Europe, has recently announced their expansion beyond their test markets in the UK, Germany and France. The company provides free minutes and text messages to its users, and in exchange they receive ads from marketers. The ads are targeted based on the profile of the user.

If you remember, this is the model that Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google talked about in November 2006 that got the whole world buzzing. Blyk has been so well received that they reached their initial subscriber goals of 100,000 users six months ahead of schedule.

Here is a short overview movie from Blyk that explains the whole process.

It is only a matter of time before this model comes to the US (though the way our mobile infrastructure is set up it will be much harder to gain the same level of traction). This does however, seem to be a fairly easy way for marketers to reach a targeted audience in a permission-based environment on a mobile device.

Heck, I could see the potential for a very small handful of global marketers try this on their own using this the MVNO model. MVNOs lease parts of a network from a major carrier and re-brand it as a new service. Examples of MVNOs include Virgin Mobile, mobileESPN, Firefly and Amp'd.

What are your thoughts on this model? Would you receive ads for mobile minutes? As a marketer, would you be interested in participating in something like this?

Technorati Tags:
advertising, Google, marketing, Matt Dickman, mobile, Techno//Marketer, technology, trends, MVNO

Finding the sentiment of online conversations

One of the most important aspects of online conversations is the sentiment of what the author is saying. Are they positive about you, negative or apathetic? The difference is vitally important, but very hard to determine due to the complexity of language.

Let's look at what I mean by complexity of language. Most services that are out there take a look at a post and try to identify what is being said by looking the total range words. They have lists of positive words like "great", "awesome", "l33t" (for the hacker crowd) as well as negative words like "sucks", "terrible", etc. If neither group of words is found the post is considered neutral.

I'm sure you can see the error in this. A post could be negative overall, but avoid these words. It could also use one negative word, but be positive overall. What is needed is true contextual language processing (which is expensive and requires a lot of development).

Here are a few examples of sentiment analysis.

Collective Intellect is a social media monitoring solution that we work with. Part of their analysis is of language within conversations and the sentiment that is displayed there. The sentiment is then tracked over time and can be a key metric in the success of a campaign. Their formula for extracting the sentiment is not publicly accessible so I am not sure how they calculate it.

Summize is a Twitter search engine. In their labs section is a sentiment analyzer that lets you enter a keyword and get the real time sentiment. If you play with this for a while you will see some issues as I found out when I sent this link out on Twitter.

*Note that Luke works with me here in Cleveland.

Here is a sample of the output for the term "marketing".

Another service that uses Twitter as the basis to create an engaging experience around sentiment is Twistori. Twistori takes a few key terms like "love", "hate", "feel" and "wish" and creates a dynamic timeline based on the use of the terms. It's very cool to watch the service extract the terms and after a few minutes you see how difficult it is to get sentiment right.

So, do you look at the sentiment of online conversations? There is still no better filter than to read back through a blogger's posts to get their real feeling at this point. Technology is evolving quickly, but so is language.

How are you tracking sentiment online? Is there a tool that I missed? Let me know!

Technorati Tags:
conversations, marketing, Matt Dickman, search, social media, Techno//Marketer, Twitter, sentiment

Facebook's DIY ad targeting explained

Ever time that I show somebody what is possible with Facebook's advertising system, they immediately see the future of advertising. Facebook allows marketers to create ads that are extremely targeted to a unique, specific audience. The ads are pay-per-click so you only pay when somebody is interested enough to engage with you through a click.

In the example I go through in the video (which you can see in the image below) I show you the full range of targeting capabilities within Facebook. While it is very robust, there are some missing elements including ethnicity. Though you may not be able to target the exact individual you are looking for, you can use interests and keywords to achieve the same result.

Here is an Inside//Out look at Facebook's advertising system:

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

Here is the screen capture from the video.

So what does this look like when done right? Here is a good example that I saw today when I logged in to Facebook. The ad to the right is promoting a Chris Brogan "Twebinar" that is hosted by Radian 6. The ad is targeted to my interests, the headline caught my eye and I recognized Chris' headshot immediately. I clicked through to the Twebinar in short order.

Key Takeaways:

• Micro-targeting your audience using these services is easier than ever
  
• Determine how you can target people directly with ads as well as using meta data to reach them indirectly (for example reaching people who watch Monday Night Football to target football fans)
  
• Ads that speak to the audience with the right message at the right time are highly effective
  
• The prevalence of broad, un-targeted advertising inside social networks is nearing an end
  
• Invasive ads like Facebook's social ads should be used sparingly if at all (there is too much risk at this point)
  

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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.

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

   
   

Technorati Tags:
advertising, Facebook, Inside//Out, marketing, Matt Dickman, social networks, strategy, Techno//Marketer, trends