Google Me?
(* Source:
July 27, 2010
July 07, 2010
LeBron James Surpasses 150,000 Twitter Followers in 7 Hours
(* Source: Ben Parr *)
His Majesty cannot be stopped, at least on Twitter. In just six hours, NBA superstar LeBron James’ Twitter account has surpassed 150,000 followers, outpacing the growth of other famous figures on Twitter, including Microsoft founder Bill Gates.
This morning, New Orleans Hornets’ point guard Chris Paul tweeted that James had joined Twitter under the username @KingJames. Since then, James has been amassing followers, and there have been countless stories and tweets about the arrival of the NBA’s biggest star to the Twitterverse.
James has been the center of the sports universe for the last week due to NBA free agency: any day now, he will decide where he will play next season. Some even speculated that he joined Twitter just so he could announce his decision through the microblogging network, but his publicist has shot down that possibility.
It took just eight hours for Bill Gates to reach 100,000 followers, but James has already blown past that mark. If his rapid rise on Twitter is any indication, LeBron James could soon become one of Twitter’s most popular users.
July 05, 2010
The Hipster Fashion Cycle
(* Source: PSFK *)
From Flavorwire, and designed by Emily Miethner, this colorful illustration charts what companies like Urban Outfitters have known for awhile: today’s painfully lame trends are tomorrows cutting edge fashion. For example, in the platform-ridden mid 90’s, nothing seemed more outdated than a pair of white keds- but more then 10 years later — voila, the hottest item for spring/summer. However, one item we can be almost certain will never come back in style? The wide legged JNCO’s and Kikwears of 96,97, and 98- for some reason those seem to exist in a seperate sphere of their own- sure to never be touched by either hipster anthropologists nor fashion enthusiasts for years to come. So what items do you think are do back for a comeback some time soon?
April 27, 2010
10 Killer Tips for Creating a Branded YouTube Channel
Catherine says...
There was a time when YouTube was considered a wild-wild west of content — a place where marketers shied away from uploading their commercials, let alone building a branded channel. But these days, YouTube has become more mini-van than stagecoach. From Toyota Sienna’s high-profile television commercials urging consumers to visit their YouTube channel, to (what might be considered the anti-minivan) Harley Davidson’s fan-centric YouTube universe, there has been a noticeable shift in corporate adoption of the platform.
There are many companies now that are hopping on the bandwagon. Just about every corporation and small business is creating a branded channel on YouTube, but there are still relatively few marketers who have managed to harvest the full potential of the platform.
Whether your brand already has a YouTube channel that’s in need of a facelift, or if you’re interested in developing one from scratch, this article will provide some practical tips and valuable tricks to help you kick-start the process.
1. The Test Tube on YouTube
Look at your YouTube channel as a new, exciting learning lab. Be malleable in your approach to both the content and design of the channel. Don’t be concerned with acquiring thousands of friends and subscribers right away. Use this time to test, gather insights, and see what works for your brand and what doesn’t. Unlike your company’s website and traditional marketing collateral, the look and feel of the channel can be changed, tweaked and optimized without a huge investment of time and money.
2. Plotting Global Domination? Check Your Swagger
Ideally, you’ll want to be goal-oriented during the launch (or re-launch) of your channel. Before your itchy little finger goes to hit that “upload” button, consider the needs and goals of your various target audiences, and keep reminding yourself that web video is distinct medium.
Next, think about your marketing objectives and overall brand strategy. Are you using the channel to attract prospects, provide customer support, or build a list of subscribers? Understand that there might not be “one size fits all” content if you are trying to accomplish all three.
Let your strategic goals drive the tactics you use to create and promote videos, and consider whether a paid sponsorship would offer an advantage. If you check out YouTube’s advertising channel, you can get a basic overview of what brands can do with the platform, but be forewarned — the information is a bit heavy-handed on the sales side.
The United States Navy Channel has a wide variety of videos aimed to attract potential recruits. The Navy’s recruitment-focused channel is organized into playlists that target specific groups of recruits with military precision.
3. Avoid Over-commitment Issues
Strongly consider outsourcing. I’ve never met a marketer who wasn’t time-starved. Let’s face it: You probably don’t have time to be uploading content, let alone coming up with titles, descriptions and tags, friending, rating, commenting and optimizing. And I’m giving you fair warning: Entrust this project to a summer intern at your own peril.
While you should allow yourself the flexibility to experiment, YouTube can be a high-profile place to make gaffes, so don’t say I didn’t warn you. If you’re going to outsource, you might consider looking for a specialist who is already set up and can implement your strategy. Creating web videos and knowing how to market them on YouTube requires a whole different skill set than web development — just because it’s online doesn’t mean that it’s a job for the company that builds your website.
4. Be a Social Media Butterfly
Think of your YouTube channel as an extension of your brand that lives and breathes. You’ll need someone who is dedicated to tending to that page, building your audience by reaching out to fans, and managing your profile online.
Start by searching your brand on YouTube and see what the existing conversation looks like. Then try reaching out to people who already have an affinity for your product or service by commenting on their videos and/or “friending” them. Remember that YouTube is an online community, and if you’re not participating in the dialogue, then you are missing the opportunity for true engagement.
5. Don’t Just Re-purpose Old Content
You should post your television commercials online, but don’t let that be the only content on the channel. Remember that television commercials are designed for a one-way medium, and that while audiences may want the ability to see your commercials on-demand, if that’s all you have to offer, they will never visit your channel again.
And don’t just post your commercial and 15 derivative videos about the making of it, or “director’s cuts” of the same, unless they have legitimate value as content in their own right. YouTube is an opportunity for your brand to go beyond traditional “push” marketing tactics and to create videos that address multiple audiences and a variety of consumer needs.
Intel uses their popular television campaigns as the feature reel on their channel, but they also offer a wide variety of other content, including a look at what it’s like to work at Intel, and video from a game developers conference.
6. Broadcast Your Best Self
Make the feature reel on the channel the most entertaining or best piece of content that you have. If that means that it’s a cleverly written and witty commercial that was originally destined for TV, so be it. If a viewer visits your channel, you’ll only have one chance to impress them with your content, so if you don’t entertain them or offer some overwhelmingly valuable information, you’ll lose an opportunity.
7. Make a Menu of Content to Feed Everyone
Understand that YouTube is a search engine for video. Create tailored content that considers what consumers are searching for or need to know about your products and services. If you play your cards right, when consumers are searching for information about your competitor, they’ll come to your videos first. Instructional and how-to videos that show consumers how to use your product are always a good place to start, but also consider the value of integrating your product into existing YouTube shows and then favoriting those videos on your channel.
8. Juice Your Marketing: Extract Extra Value
YouTube does not exist in a vacuum. Try to integrate your YouTube channel into the rest of your marketing programs and cross reference/promote your content. You can extract more value out of your event marketing if you think about ways to co-produce video content. Remember, integrating marketing channels and initiatives is well known for producing a campaign “multiplier effect.” Whether it’s video shot at a trade show or a promo for an upcoming event, just make sure that the video is well produced and edited for length.
Harley-Davidson took advantage of it’s photo shoot with popular model Marisa Miller for the V-Rod Muscle as an opportunity to get some behind the scenes footage and put together a video for YouTube. Harley definitely got extra value from the photo shoot as the video is one of the most-watched on their YouTube channel.
9. Be Homegrown
Grow your channel instead of “launching” it. If there is any medium that pays attention to grassroots movement, web video is it. And be patient — it takes time to spread the word about your channel, and it takes care and nurturing for it to catch on. Keep releasing content on a regular basis, integrate your YouTube channel into your other marketing efforts, bring your customers extra value, and your presence will grow.
10. Keep the Future in Mind
YouTube was started in early 2005 — look how much has changed in a five-year time span, and how fast web video has progressed. As new technology and distribution channels emerge (like the iPad), try to think about how you can create web video content that will serve your brand into the future. During the production process, you should keep user-experience in mind and plan for the audience to be watching your videos on screens the size of a TV, as well as on their mobile phones.
March 25, 2010
Global Lineup @ Music Matters 2010
(* Source: b-side *)
In its fifth year, Music Matters present a global line-up of some of the world’s most innovative and dynamic figures from across the music, media, entertainment and technology industries...
- Daniel Ek, Spotify
- Neil Warnock, The Agency Group Ltd
- Norman Cheng, Gold Typhoon Entertainment Ltd
- Vijay Lazarus, Indian Music Industry & Phonographic Performance Ltd
- Daniel DiCicco, Sony Music Entertainment Asia
- Rob Wells, Universal Music Group International
- Tony Yapp, Qun Yin Culture & Entertainment Ltd
- Neeraj Roy, Hungama Mobile
- Scarlett Li, Zebra Media
- John Kennedy, IFPI
- Joe Belliotti, The Coca-Cola Company
- Bernie Cho, DFSB Kollective
- Terry McBride, Nettwerk Music Group
- Yu Sasamoto, Microsoft - Japan
- Rob Lewis, Omnifone Group Ltd
- Vince Bannon, Getty Images
View latest programme here.
March 22, 2010
Content Distribution: The Social Media Effect
(* Source: three billion *)
Content is king. Actually, content is the king, queen and all the heirs apparent.
But it’s no use if no one gets to see it.
I love this handy little chart from Social Reflexion. So simple, but so good.
November 13, 2009
How to create Advocacy & Conversation
(* Source: Frank Striefler *)
A great presentation by Frank...
View more documents from Frank Striefler.
August 20, 2009
Focusing on Social Networks
(* Source: eMarketer *)
They do it all
Universal McCann’s “Power to the People: Social Media Tracker” study, now in its fourth year, indicates that social networks continue to climb in popularity around the world. But the research firm believes a change is happening in social media: Internet users are “starting to focus their digital life” around single networks, rather than around many specialized tools with social features.
The study found a major increase in the percentage of US Internet users with a social network profile between 2008 and 2009. This year, 59% of active Web users—those with access at least every other day—reported having a profile, up 16 percentage points. Previous gains were in the single digits.
eMarketer estimates that 44.2% of all Internet users in the US are social network users, meaning they log on to such sites at least monthly. Logically, Universal McCann’s figure is higher, since its respondents may have created a profile but use social networks less often.
According to the “Power to the People” report, the US is far from tops in social networking activity. Seven other countries polled had higher percentages of Internet users with a social network profile. Russia, which came in first at 85.3%, also had one of the fastest growth trajectories—just 23.1% of Internet users in the country had a social network profile in 2006, the first year of polling.
Worldwide, 62.5% of active Internet users ages 16 to 54 have a social network profile in 2009. In addition, 71.1% have visited a friend’s profile page.
Universal McCann also sees a “decline or stasis” in the use of separate sites for activities such as blogging and photo-sharing. Instead, users are looking to social networks that consolidate multiple social media in a single place.
“These platforms—and there are different dominant players depending on the market—continue to grow even as other elements of the social media universe stagnate or decline,” wrote the report’s authors.
Evidence of this consolidation can be found in the top social networking site activities reported in 2009. Messaging friends was most popular, with 81.5% of users, but the No. 2 activity was uploading photos (76.3%). About one-third of users installed “useful” widgets on their profile, and another one-third have uploaded videos on their social networks. Almost three in 10 respondents used their social network as a blogging platform.
As noted above, despite consolidation social media is not a one-stop shop. Universal McCann advises marketers to give consumers options when engaging them through social media. Allowing individuals to share and discuss on their platform of choice remains important.
June 29, 2009
Apple App Store vs. Nokia Ovi Store - A Quick And Dirty Comparison
(* Source: Robin Wauters *)
Here is another comparison between the war happening on the mobile content space. The list of applications that are listed as popular are an interesting measure to what people look at in terms of content on their mobiles.
Robin says...
When Nokia
launched its Ovi Store for mobile applications a month ago, it was clear that - despite its less than stellar launch - it would be a mistake to simply dismiss the Finnish mobile juggernaut’s efforts as meaningless. The company may be struggling to stay relevant on the software and services side, but with a reach like Nokia’s on the handset distribution level I think it goes without saying that a lot of eyes are firmly fixed on Nokia’s initiatives in the field.
There was some criticism about the lack of content on the Ovi Store at launch day, particularly because of the fact that a lot of big names were lacking, but I figured I should give it at least a month to see if and how many developers would flock to the platform. Now, I think it’s time to take a look at where they stand after that month, and I thought I’d start by comparing the content offering to that of Apple’s App Store, the central application marketplace for iPhone and iPod Touch devices.
This is evidently not really a fair comparison, since Apple’s App Store has been around for almost a year now, while Nokia is still getting started. Still, it’s worth noting that a lot of the big names on the Internet - whether we’re talking about social networks, search companies or game developers - are still missing on the Ovi Store.
A quick and dirty comparison (note that my top lists for the App Store may differ from yours depending on your location, mine being Belgium, Europe):
Social networks
Ten popular apps in the App Store (free and paid mixed together):
- Facebook
- Skype
- TweetDeck
- Nimbuzz
- fring
- LinkedIn
- Truphone
- AIM
- Tweetie
- BeejiveIM
Ten popular apps in the Ovi Store (free and paid mixed together):
- Gravity (a Twitter client)
- Insy
- Friendster
- ThumbDive
- Hi5
- GyPSii
- IM+ For Skype
- See-Fi
- Twittix (another Twitter client)
- Facebook for Nokia
News and information
Ten popular apps in the App Store (free and paid mixed together):
- BBC World News Live
- NY Times
- AP Mobile
- France24
- Thomson Reuters News Pro
- CNN
- Wall Street Journal
- L.A. Times
- The Telegraph
- USA Today
Ten popular apps in the Ovi Store (free and paid mixed together):
- Daily Star
- Daily Express UK
- France24
- AP News
- Reuters
- The Straits Times (daily newspaper, popular in Singapore)
- The Star (Malaysian newspaper)
- The Guardian
- CNBC
- Breaking News
Music
Ten popular apps in the App Store (free and paid mixed together):
- Sirius XM
- Pandora Radio
- Shazam
- Y! Music
- imeem Mobile
- PocketGuitar
- AOL Radio
- Last.fm
- KCRW Radio
- Ocarina
Ten popular apps in the Ovi Store (free and paid mixed together):
- Mundu Radio
- NME
- MusAic
- Midomi
- Nokia Internet Radio
- Tunerific
- Bandfan
- MixPack
- Mozart Killer
- MyRMX
I could go on with a number of other categories, but I think you’ll agree the trend is clear: Nokia so far hasn’t attracted many familiar names on the Internet to develop and/or submit applications to the Ovi Store.
Michael Jackson... A Twitter Tribute
(* Source: MG Siegler *)
A smart piece of production using the community tweets as content... karaoke anyone?
MG says... The web is still inundated with Michael Jackson news, but just in case you haven’t had your fill, I highly recommend the site Billie Tweets. The concept is simple: Take Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean” and pull in tweets that sync words to the music.
The site was made by 9Astronauts, the development house that also made the Blame Drew’s Cancer site a few weeks back. Another solid creation by them.
Considering that Jackson’s music is utterly dominating all of the online sales charts right now, this site is also a smart play to pull in some affiliate fees for sales from Amazon. You’ll notice the links at the bottom of the site.
May 28, 2009
Gazing into the Twitterverse
(* Source: Brian Solis *)
Twitter connects people through a rich and active exchange of ideas, thoughts, observations, and interests in one, highly collaborative and promising ecosystem. The Twitterverse advances micro interaction and connections through an expanding network of applications, engendering the potential for macro reach and resonance online and IRL (in real life).
Following the recent debut of The Conversation Prism v2.0, Jesse Thomas (@jess3) and I proudly introduce an alpha version of The Twitterverse. While the landscape for Twitter approaches 1,000 different applications, this map visually charts the important tools to help communications, service, marketing, and community professionals more effectively navigate, engage, analyze and measure participation on Twitter.
May 13, 2009
Generation C
(* Source: Kumegirl *)
Kumegirl says...
Several years ago a lot of pundits were discussing generation C. Jake Pearce wrote in idealog in 2006;
View more presentations from Alexandra B.
How that shift has panned out has been best expressed by Nick Gadsby of the blog Dark London in a cluetrain related post
This is the dynamic that now lies behind what is being referred to as The 4 C’s. Here the 4 c’s include converation, collaboration, crowdsourcing, co-creation, or here or here content, context, continuity and connectivity. Either way, c words are current in web 2.0 discussions.
April 14, 2009
The 10 Commandments of Community Management
(* Source: Amy Muller *)
Some nice examples here...
February 16, 2009
Mining The Thought Stream
(* Source: Erik Schonfeld *)
Erik reports...
What if you could peer into the thoughts of millions of people as they were thinking those thoughts or shortly thereafter? And what if all of these thoughts were immediately available in a database that could be mined easily to tell you what people both individually and in aggregate are thinking right nowabout any imaginable subject or event? Well, then you’d have a different kind of search engine altogether. A real-time search engine. A what’s-happening-right-now search engine.
In fact, the crude beginnings of this “now” search engine already exists. It is called Twitter, and it is a big reason why new investors poured another $35 million into the two-year-old startup on Friday. Twitter is not the only company trying to solve this problem. Facebook, FriendFeed, and even Google are trying to crack it, but Twitter has a decided advantage in that it is capturing the vast majority of the real-time thought stream on the Web (because more people enter their thoughts directly into Twitter’s database than any other, and are doing so at an increasing rate).
What makes Google and other search engines so valuable is that they capture people’s intent
—what they are looking for, what they desire, what they want to learn about. But they don’t do a great job at capturing what people are doing or what they are thinking about. For thoughts and events that are happening right now, searching Twitter increasingly brings up better results than searching Google.
Whether you want to know how people are mentally gearing up for this week’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona or what they are thinking about today’s Ireland vs. Italy rugby match, searching Twitter will give you a pretty good smattering of sentiment and opinion. It is also a lot faster at getting out the essential details about breaking news, such as the Mumbai attacks or the plane that landed on the Hudson.
Twitter’s search engine is powered by Summize, a startup it acquired last July. But it also developed a feature called Track, currently disabled but coming back soon, that allowed people to follow the mention of specified keywords. John Borthwick, an investor in Summize (and thus now an investor in Twitter), explained in a blog post earlier this month ago why he thinks that “Twitter search changes everything.” Excerpt:
Imagine you are in line waiting for coffee and you hear people chattering about a plane landing on the Hudson. You go back to your desk and search Google for plane on the Hudson — today — weeks after the event, Google is replete with results — but the DAY of the incident there was nothing on the topic to be found on Google. Yet at http://search.twitter.com
. . . How is real time search different? History isn’t that relevant — relevancy is driven mostly by time. . . . This reformulation of search as navigation is, I think, a step into a very new and different future. Google.com has suddenly become the source for pages — not conversations, not the real time web. What comes next? I think context is the next hurdle. Social context and page based context. . . . Twitter search today is crude — but so was Google.com once upon a not so long time ago.
Twitter may just be a collection of inane thoughts, but in aggregate that is a valuable thing. In aggregate, what you get is a direct view into consumer sentiment, political sentiment, any kind of sentiment. For companies trying to figure out what people are thinking about their brands, searching Twitter is a good place to start. To get a sense of what I’m talking about, try searching for “iPhone,” “Zune,” or “Volvo wagon”.
Why can’t Google simply index Twitter? It does, but its search results give more weight to links than to time. It could create a new search product along the lines of Blog Search or News search that is geared more towards Micro-messaging services such as Twitter, FriendFeed, and the rest. But what it really needs to go beyond simply indexing Twitter after the fact. IVP partner, and Twitter investor, Todd Chaffee, suggests:
If they were really smart they could partner with Twitter and make Twitter their real-time feed.
Doing that would require Google to “affirm Twitter’s dominance in this category and the importance of the Twitter data stream,” contends Borthwick. But so far, Google has pretty much flubbed this opportunity to open up real-time search. It bought Twitter competitor Jaiku, only to shut it down. And now it is hoping to create a counterweight to Twitter’s growing strength in real-time data by open-sourcing Jaiku. Good luck with that one.
Listening to Twitter’s investors gives a good sense of how they think Twitter can become a game-changer in real-time search. While it is instructive, it is also important to note that much of this vision has yet to materialize. Twitter’s current search is extremely crude, as Borthwick readily admits. It simply brings up the most recent Tweets with the keyword you are looking for. There is no ranking or clustering beyond that.
An undifferentiated thought stream of the masses at some point becomes unwieldy. In order to truly mine that data, Twitter needs to figure out how to extract the common sentiments from the noise (something which Summize was originally designed to do, by the way, but it was putting the cart before the horse—you need to be able to do simple searches before you start looking for patterns). But what is the best way to rank real-time search results—by number of followers, retweets, some other variable? It is not exactly clear. But if Twitter doesn’t solve this problem, someone else will and they will make a lot of money if they do it right.
The Death Of “Web 2.0″
(* Source: Robin Wauters *)
Robin says...
I’m not going to discuss the economic meltdown and its devastating effect on technology companies and internet startups in this post, but rather something that crossed my mind earlier this morning: “Web 2.0″ seems to become more and more a void (and an avoided) term. Of course, that’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it is definitely apparent.
So why do I say it’s fading? For one, because the number of startups that contact us and include the term Web 2.0 in the subject line or message is visibly dropping (and that’s a good thing), and I hardly ever see it mentioned anymore on other technology blogs and news sites either. That’s not really tangible, so I took a look at the number of mentions of the phrase across the web, and they seem to be decreasing significantly, reflecting my feeling on this.
Judging by Google Trends, which shows how often a particular search term is entered relative to the total search volume across various regions of the world (and in various languages), the term started being used at the end of 2004 when Tim O’Reilly organized the first edition of the Web 2.0 Conference. Search queries for the term started picking up in the middle of 2005, when TechCrunch was started - with the tagline “Tracking Web 2.0″ by the way - and the number kept increasing until the end of 2007. After that, the trend is clearly downwards, falling back to the level it reached in early 2006 today. If the trend continues, there should only be a handful of people left who scour search engines for “Web 2.0″ by 2011.
Also noteworthy: take a look at the geographic regions that have generated the highest volumes of worldwide search traffic for the term over the years - it’s Asia, with the top 5 regions being India, Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Malaysia (in that order). Furthermore, Google Trends pegs the number one language in which people search for stuff related to the topic of Web 2.0 to be Russian before English.
And just in case you’re curious: “Web 3.0″ doesn’t seem to picking up much.
Let’s all rejoice.
Google’s “Insights for Search”, a beta service that analyzes a portion of worldwide Google web searches from all Google domains to compute how many searches have been done for the terms you’ve entered - relative to the total number of searches done on Google over time - gives an even better overview:
January 12, 2009
Britney Spears Is Hiring An Online Media Manager
(* Source: Mike Arrington *)
Great article from Mike... with so many social networks out there today. Keep up with all of them requires more people. Digital P.As anyone?
Want to manage Britney Spears’ online persona? She’s on YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and other sites, and somebody (not her of course) has to do all the hard work of posting and responding to content.
That’s where you come in. If you went to Harvard, that is. Brandcasting Unlimited, Britney’s online manager, posted the job listing below for “Britney Spears 2.0 Media Manager” yesterday on a Harvard-only private job board. Among the not-so-tough job requirements: you must be “addicted to social networks such as MySpace and Facebook.”
The full job listing is below:
Delta Needs a Lesson on Online Reputation Management
(* Source: Matt O'Hern *)
You won't love the way they fly.
That's the point of an angry customer's rant about Delta.
A video by Phil Defranco, AKA, sxephil and phillyd, was one of the most popular on Youtube this week. Defranco is a blogger and self-proclaimed former fan of Delta. He shared his nightmare story about the airline,and 313,000 people have viewed the video since Monday.
Among Phil's top complaints::
- The flight was delayed four hours, because they had the WRONG plane, with too much fuel.
- Delta ran out of food after they served just 10 people.
- When his luggage arrived at baggage claim it was soaked, and the water ruined his MacBook.
- Customer service's reply to his luggage complaint was: "Well sir, how do we know you didn't have a water bottle in your suitcase?"
My favorite quote::
I apparently paid them a $15 fee to destroy my luggage.
Phil ends his rant by asking viewers to share their worst airplane story.
If you search" Delta on Youtube, you'll find sxephil's video is in the top ten, followed by a video titled: Delta Flight 6499, SEVEN HOURS on the tarmac.After 313,000 people watch bad press about your company in a matter of days, you have a lot of PR work ahead.
British Airways' took a PR hit when a few disgrunitled employees vented their frustrations on Facebook. Delta has learned the hard way that web-savvy customers have the power to become a corporations worst nightmare.