Application Software Development

6 Things: Time's a wastin'

Wednesday, August 18, 2010 by Doug Dimon

“6 Things” is a list of things I've come across that I find interesting, inspiring, adventurous, or just plain cool. I’ll be publishing these fairly regularly, so keep an eye out.

It's been a little while since my last "6 Things" post. It's not that I haven't had lots of cool stuff ooze through the interweb onto my screen, it's just that I wanted to get my CAT/Clio posts out. And besides, absence makes the heart grow fonder... or is that absinthe?

This list features 6 awesome time-sucking activities I've come across recently. They aren't all new, but if you haven't had the pleasure of using these to fill up your copious free time, then you are in for a treat. Actually, the real question is, "are these a waste of time?" If you are engaged and entertained, is that not a worthwhile activity? Who's to say, but if you get caught at work spending your time on these... you don't know me.

Most of these are tied to brands. Do they do anything for them? Much of marketing is building awareness, so in that sense, many of these are successful (but not all). Will they lead to better business? That's hard to say, but they probably aren't hurting it.

1. Who doesn't want a paper head?
Converse has posted an application on their blog that allows you to make a paper mask of yourself. Here's mine.

It took some time, but it wasn't difficult. You can print on 8 1/2 by 11 paper, but only if you are making a mask for your cat (it's very small). 11x17 will yield a nearly life-size mask (that's what I used). If you have access to a large format printer, a giant paper head would be awesome.

Does it do anything for Converse? Well, they are really a lifestyle brand, so I say yes. Their blog is all about be cool, hip, and funky... and this fits right in.

2. Rube Goldberg meets Jeopardy
To promote their Chrome browser, Google created a hybrid video/trivia game.

It uses a cool YouTube feature that lets you play multiple movies in a sequence and interleaves little trivia games between them. The object is to get through the course as quickly as possible.

It's fun, uses Google services (search and YouTube), and it gets the message out that chrome is fast (over and over, in fact). Will it make you download chrome? It might. They provide a handy download link right on the page.

3. Drink a fake beer, win a real prize.

To promote Strongbow beer, they poured a virtual pint and invited everyone to take a sip.

Every time you refresh your browser, a sip is registered. If you are lucky, your sip will reveal a prize. Better hurry, there are only about 400,000 sips and under 50 prizes left.

Does it make you want to try Strongbow? Not really, although if you are one of the lucky ones, you might win some. And it does raise awareness, but there's not a lot of information (or any, really). In fact, given the tiny "drinkaware.co.uk" link in the bottom left corner, I'm not sure it's even available in the states.

4. Do a little dance.

You, too, can be a video DJ, creating a seizure inducing video montage that you can send to all your friends.

Actually, this is pretty fun. You can choose beats and remix clips, and record your masterpiece for viewing and sharing. In the end, you are probably the only one who will be impressed with your mad cutting skills, but that's enough, isn't it?

This is meant to promote fashion photography and it does a good job at that. I felt compelled to click around just to see what the site was all about.

5. Cast you and your friends in a film trailer.

"Lost in Val Sinestra" is a horror film directed and starring you and your friends. Well, at least that's what the trailer says. If you have a Facebook account, create your own.

This is not the first Facebook connected "film" I've seen, but I think the integration in this one is awesome. The production value is great and they did an impressive job using the photos and names throughout.

It's actually a stunt to promote television services for Swisscom. But the only mention of that is a short cryptic message after the credits. There's no link. I only know about the connection because I read some blogs after mucking about looking for who was responsible. There's not even any mention of this on the Swisscom site. Experience: A+. Marketing: F-.

6. Foul mouthed cartoons are fun.

Sure Pixar is great, but have you thought that if Buzz Lightyear would just drop a few more F-bombs it would be high-larious. Well, now is your chance to script a 3D movie your way.

These are not new, but they are still fun to make and watch. Between the too-cute characters and the almost creepy vocalizations, it's hard not to love them. You can create free movies using a limited character set. "Premium" characters cost money (which I suppose is how they stay in business). But even if you only play around and never actually "publish" a movie, it can be hours of fun.

(warning: Most of these movies are rated M for mature... although clearly the people making them are not.)

Delta First to Sell Flights From Facebook

Tuesday, August 17, 2010 by Ashley Reed

Delta Airlines just launched their “Ticket Window” Facebook application, allowing users to find, book and share flights with friends without ever leaving Facebook. Powered by Alvenda, the application is the first to allow users to book a flight within Facebook without being directed to an outside site. Delta’s Ticket Window is located on Delta’s Facebook page under the “Book a Trip” tab, but Delta hopes to eventually expand it to banner ads.

Although Delta wasn’t an early adopter of social media like Southwest or JetBlue, it appears that they are beginning to realize the immense opportunities that social media presents.

Usage statistics from Delta’s Wi-Fi network show that Facebook is the most trafficked website in-flight. Through applications like the Ticket Window, Delta is hoping to take advantage of this large audience by making it easy for customers to transact and make travel adjustments in flight via Facebook.

We 'Like' this move. What do you think? Would you book a flight on Facebook?

How Brands Can Benefit from Pegshot

Tuesday, July 13, 2010 by Ashley Reed

You’ve probably heard about location-based services like Foursquare and Gowalla, but have you tried Pegshot yet? Instead of answering the question “Where are you?”, Pegshot tells your friends “What’s happening where you are?” by enabling users to quickly share videos and photos with their social networks. The application allows users to “peg” a shot from their location and post it to Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Tumblr, Digg and Posterous in real-time.

There are many ways in which brands can take advantage of Pegshot to increase awareness and engagement with their organization. Pegshot is especially well-suited for promoting events as it facilitates quick and easy sharing of photos and videos in real-time, allowing immediate visibility on the social web. This means your audience can interact with your events while they are happening even if they cannot be there.

Real-time sharing also increases pass along rates since, attendees are usually active on social networks at events and can quickly view your content and re-tweet it, “Like” or comment on it. Not only can content be published on your social media accounts, but Pegshot even allows you to post photos and videos directly to your company’s website. In most cases, companies allow only their employees to publish content to their website to ensure that all material is appropriate.

To take advantage of Pegshot at your next event, follow these easy steps:

1. Create your event.

Add your event by filling out the details of your event including the name, date, your Twitter hashtag, and location. Your event will appear on any user’s mobile device in the surrounding area.

2. Create a branded landing page for your event.

You can create a custom branded landing page for you event or choose your Twitter background.

3. Promote your event and add contributors.

Pegshot offers a custom registration page so you can collect as many contributors as possible. You can use this custom landing page to promote your event across social networks as well as your website, email and print marketing initiatives.

4. Capture your event as it’s happening.

Now you’re ready to begin pegging photos and videos of your event in real-time. Your contributors as well as any Pegshot users in the vicinity can share content of your event which will be displayed on your custom landing page in addition to social networks and your website (if permission is granted.)

Deep Thoughts From CLIO and CAT, Part Two: Artists vs. Geeks

Tuesday, July 6, 2010 by Doug Dimon

This is the second of a series on my insights from two conferences I recently attended: The Clio Awards Conference and Creativity and Technology (CAT). As I mentioned in my first post, there was a lot of crossover between them. One thing in common was Farris Yakob, Chief Innovation Officer at MDC. He was closely tied to another thing they had in common: the discussion of technology and creativity.

I didn't know who Faris was prior to the CLIO conference, but after seeing him present on several different topics through both conferences, I realized that we were nearly identical....

(I know.... it's like a mirror, right?)

...in our thinking when it comes to creative and tech. Okay, maybe not identical, but definitely adjacent. Or perhaps I just think he's really smart and I'm projecting. Whatever.

We've all heard this at some point, "Don't let technology drive your creative". And on some level I agree. You shouldn't use technology simply because you can, or because it's the hot new thing, or because your client says they "need AR right now!" even though they don't really know what AR stands for. Creative ideas need to be appropriate to the brand and their goals.

But, I think in many cases, it's easy to ignore technology in the name of creative. After all, creativity is the essence of free unfettered thinking, skipping gleefully through a field of ideas, plucking them up and making a bouquet of awesomeness. Technology is the evil lord forcing everyone to wear drab gray lab coats and march single file while they endlessly push buttons over and over again.

But innovation is a key component to creative thinking. Faris made a great point that innovation is hard because we tend to let habits take over. Innovative ideas need to be inspired by new thoughts and technology is a great way to break patterns. Hey, I'm inspired by the tech that will let blind people drive and not just because I see additional opportunities for napping. If you can get a car to recognize and interpret its surroundings, think what that means for the growth of real-time environmental recognition and all the marketing possibilities. It moves gesture recognition to a whole new level and do you know what that means? Well, neither do I, but it's got me thinking in a million directions... it's creative crack! And what about the holy grail of interfaces... controlling things with your mind! Okay... that one is seriously far away from really being useful, but I hope you see my point.

There are advances in tech every day, and though I clearly have a nerd streak, it's unlikely that I'll be exposed to all of the smaller, albeit more useful things happening in hardware and software. It's just as likely that technologists who eat and breath this stuff may not be able to look at it from outside to see what creative uses might be born of the technology. And that's what creative people do: interpret information and gain inspiration by bending, molding, and synthesizing the world around them into something new and interesting.

Don't avoid technology because it makes you uncomfortable. You may never really understand the how of a thing, but you can grasp the what and why. I know firsthand the frustration of not really understanding how something works and feeling a bit put off because of it. But just because something is neo maxi zoom dweebie (anybody?), doesn't mean that it can't lead to a fantastic new creative direction. Look past the bits and bytes, the nuts and bolts, and see the possibilities. Or perhaps it's just that we keep hearing, "it doesn't work that way". But it could. Or it might. So, tech guys, give a little. Indulge our whimsical and sometimes ridiculous thoughts. Let tech inspire the "what if?".

If you are part of a creative team, listen to your technologists, even if you only understand every fifth word and keep nodding off while they go on and on about Zeno's Paradox (are we there yet?) and divide by zero issues (why isn't that just zero?). Embrace your inner geek. And technologists, join the fun and give those of us skipping through the idea fields the tools to twist your logic into a fragrant bouquet of awesomeness.

Best Practices for Facebook Pages

Wednesday, June 2, 2010 by Ashley Reed

Major brands are increasingly turning to Facebook to reach consumers and engage them deeper. In order to get the most out of your Facebook presence, be sure to formulate a strategy. What do you hope to get out of your Facebook Page?

Facebook Pages can be used for:

Building brand awareness
Increasing consumer engagement with your brand
Generating leads
Qualifying fans and converting them to customers
Improving customer service
Establishing your company as a thought leader

Once you’ve defined your goals, keep in mind these Do’s and Don’ts for engagement:

Do:

“Listen” to what your fans are talking about on your page – do they have praise or complaints?Identify what interests them and customize your messages accordingly.
Post compelling content like pictures and videos that keep them coming back for more.
Share exclusive content that they can’t get anywhere else.
Utilize Facebook applications like surveys, quizzes and games that foster an interactive experience.
Use Facebook’s analytics tool to determine what tactics are working, and which one’s aren’t.
Promote your Fan Page everywhere: print, online and TV advertisements, email signatures, business cards and targeted Facebook ads

Don’t:

Automate your content – Facebook is about conversation!
Sound impersonal - use a casual and informal tone.
Sound like a press release.
Spam your fans – maintain a balance of promotional and conversational posts.
Neglect your Fan Page – make sure you are monitoring it on a daily basis to respond to fans and post new content

Have more tips to add? Leave a comment below!

6 Things: Doing It In Public

Thursday, May 20, 2010 by Doug Dimon

“6 Things” is a list of things I've come across that I find interesting, inspiring, adventurous, or just plain cool. I’ll be publishing these fairly regularly, so keep an eye out.

In this installment of “6 Things” I explore the joys of doing it in public. There's nothing I like better than some PDA. I'm talking about Public Displays of Art, of course. In my last blog, ("What the F...antastic!"), I made pithy and insightful remarks on the power of using unexpected experiences to engage the consumer. The following items are primarily art for art's sake, but it's not hard to draw conclusions to how similar installations can be used to grab the public's attention. It only takes three little words to demonstrate success, "Made you look!"

Antony Gormley: Event Horizon

Madison Square Park in New York City has a great program of public art. The exhibits rotate throughout the year, often with several happening simultaneously. The latest, "Event Horizon", is particularly impressive because it extends beyond the park. These figures (31 total) are placed on rooftops as far as 10 blocks away. They are all visible in and around the park, and each faces the square. Once you notice one, you begin to pick out the others. I admit to spending some time walking around trying to find them all. They have actually caused some controversy, but I think most would agree that it's an engaging and delightful exhibit.

IMPROV EVERYWHERE

Performance artists. Pranksters. Marketing geniuses? Somewhere between flashmob and sketch comedy, "Improv Everywhere" has staged some great events. As with any performance, some things hit and some miss, but they are all interesting if for no other reason than to see the public reactions. People love the unexpected. And even those not lucky enough to experience something live can get into the act through the videos posted on the web. A couple of my favorites are "Grocery Store Musical", "Frozen Grand Central", and "Where's Rob", but I encourage you to look at all their "missions". You may see some similarities to marketing stunts staged by various companies. "Improv Everywhere" has shown that people love to get involved and feel "part of the show"... and isn't the heart of marketing?

Street Art (Literally)

Julian Beever is one of several artists who create amazing pieces that are both public and transitory. If you have ever been fortunate enough to stumble upon this type of art, you know it can actually take your breath. It is so unexpected to find a something like this while walking down an otherwise unremarkable street that you can't help but stop and take some time to study it. Clearly, some brands have caught on to the idea.

Blowing Art Up

Mixed media artist, Joshua Allen Harris, creates whimsical installations that transform from a pile of what looks like trash into animated "living" creatures with the lifespan of a passing train. Brilliant.

Now you see it, now you don't.

This next piece is something I sort of stumbled upon on the web. I was drawn to it mostly because of its simplicity and the possibilities. I can see using this type of installation in an out-of-home marketing campaign to great effect. I'm writing the brief now :)

Graffiti? Art? Commentary?

And finally, I happened across this gem just the other night. While walking home, I spotted this painted on the sidewalk on Fifth Avenue north of 22nd street. This is a prime viewing area where tourists stop to take photos of the Empire State Building. Some may think this is simply a commentary on the traffic flow (and it may be), but I suspect it is the work of one the New York's many graffiti artists. True graffiti artists create works that are thought provoking, visually inspirational, or technically challenging. Some have gone on to become well known artists, others have maintained anonymity even in their fame, but most are simply inspired by the work. While it may be vandalism in the truest sense of the word, arguments that this type of art enriches society cannot be ignored. I'm not always sure which side of the fence I come down on. Perhaps I'll write my opinion on a wall on the way home. By the way, as a marketing idea, this has the appeal of authenticity, but it carries all kinds of potential problems, so go cautiously.

15 Things Less Annoying Than Facebook's Abhorrent Privacy Practices

Wednesday, May 12, 2010 by Paul Hernacki

Almost every week I continue to be shocked at some aspect of how Facebook is treating the privacy of their users. While I think Facebook has done some amazing things to redefine the landscape of connection and community in the digital age, the way they auto-opt-in users to new policies and settings that unwittingly further expose them in a manner that is beyond confusing for almost everyone is driving me crazy.

It seems to be a total disregard for privacy that leverages "confuser interface design" tactics and misleading redesign functionality alterations to extend their dominance at the unknowing expense of most of their users. They actively seek to get you to enter as much personally defining data as possible. They make it incredibly complicated to manage your assorted privacy settings, then they go and make significant changes that auto-opt in users to new options like making all of your posts available to search engines or to share your personal data with applications and sites using FaceBook tools. All of this while presenting typical users with a perception of communicating and sharing with their "Friends." Maybe FaceBook is just working towards a Nobel Peace Prize by wanting everybody on the planet and every corporation to be Friends? Ummmm.... no.

Conversely, while not exempt from scrutiny, Twitter takes a much different approach. They begin by having an established perception that what you post is public, they have one very clear and simple blanket option to make your posts private, and the information they ask you to enter for registration is extremely limited.

I'm also driven crazy by the constant changes to FaceBook API's that make the lives of developers miserable as they struggle to work with this juggernaut of social media and the fact that they employed algorithms that began to selectively decide whose posts among my friends they thought I should see (and even excluded my wife's posts from my stream until I manually added her back in)... but that's a whole other couple of blog posts to write. The following is a short list of things I actually find less annoying than FaceBook's treatment of the concept of privacy:

15. SPAM e-mail

14. People who post their every Foursquare or Gowalla check-in to Twitter

13. The mere existence of Farmville and Mafia Wars

12. The first time I saw Clippy

11. Developers that hardcode and use auto-code generators out of laziness

10. Requirements documents for a web site or app that say: "should work in every browser"

9. Web sites that dramatically over-use Flash for everything they possibly can

8. People that show up for an interview and haven't read and reviewed your company's web site or have any ability to articulate what your company does

7. People that text or use mobile devices to tweet while driving (or drive while talking on their mobile phone without using a Bluetooth or hands-free device)

6. People that call themselves "Social Media Gurus" in their bios or otherwise

5. People in busy airports that obliviously stop walking out of the blue and then wonder why everyone crashes into them

4. Every scene on the Fox TV series 24 that ever involved Kim Bauer

3. Stupid people (as one of my friends is fond of saying as he quotes his old high school football coach, "Ya can't fix stupid.")

2. The continued existence of IE6

1. The constant deluge of Top <insert number here> Lists

I could probably learn to live with all of the above. But I'm on the verge of simply shutting down my FaceBook account instead of constantly fighting to control my own information and exposure. Of course... I don't think FaceBook makes it terribly easy to truly shut down an account, they'd probably just auto-opt me in to be reactivated in a couple of weeks.

(Image Credit: Privacy by alancleaver_2000)

Inspiration or Perspiration?

Wednesday, April 28, 2010 by John Harne

I am in the business of creative communication. Ideas. Images. Shaping together thoughts, images and communications into stuff like Web applications, brands and the visual and sensual experiences that make memories and impressions. I have been at this business for a long time but that doesn't make it any easier to find the right idea. So what have I learned about creative that keeps me at my job and serving a lot of different clients? Namely, that perspiration leads to inspiration...

There have been a handful of occasions when the right concept just came to me. Like the scene in "Lust for Life" where Kirk Douglas (playing Vincent van Gogh) attacks a canvas then reveals a plein air masterpiece. But this is more movie myth than reality. If you ever read Letters to Theo, you get the other side of the story and the real struggle to come up with a style of his own. Then there was the sheer volume of work the artist actually did to get to that point of success. In other words Vincent worked his butt off.

Lucky for me, I knew from the history of visual art that creative breakthroughs are rarely instantaneous. Most artists lead a very workman-like existence like Picasso. He was know to be in his studio every day around 6am and spent the better part of his day at work in the studio. The result was a prolific career spanning over 13 thousand paintings and over 100,000 other handcrafted works.

Aside for putting the time into the work itself, one has to show up prepared to make the effort to do good creative work. You have to come in prepared and focused. I like to come in with both the schedule and my tasks up to date and the deck cleared.

Before I can contribute to good design and creative I have to know the background of the assignment or better yet, be part of the learning process for the objective. In my business this means some good investigative teamwork that will eventually live in a brief or document. It might be a persona study or even a video of real customers.

The point is time must be dedicated to understanding what the creative work is supposed to do in the context of experience. I have found more success when I am actually part of that process of intelligence gathering than when I am handed the discovery work. I think this is because the creative process takes time and my mind is working on the issues in the background while I am typically focused on something else.

Creative concepts take time. I have heard it called incubation time, described as ideation and the failure of it termed "writers' block". I think that making new connections and insights within various sets of data requires time to process and then reform the connections and filter out the obvious and most likely ideas that would not differentiate the creative work. However we describe it, it takes time and effort and filtering to get good work. Good creative is work.

Social Media and Television

Tuesday, April 27, 2010 by Jasdeep Jaitla

I recently attended the NABshow in Las Vegas and was not only impressed with how amazing football looks on a 3D TV, but also the dominant theme of the importance of social media to growing audiences and creating new ways to interact with television.

Social media sites like Facebook and Twitter have grown so quickly and unobtrusively that we often don't realize how big they really are. Becoming a part of Facebook is easy, and simple, even my mom did it without needing any help from me (for once). When we are looking at Facebook we see ourselves and our friends, and for the most part it feels like our own little community. The real eye opener is realizing there are over 400 Million other people feeling the same way.

The first step for the networks was integrating their website with their programming. NBC Universal did a great job integrating Heroes show themes with their website, and I've been impressed by that for some time. Their webisodes and tangential plotlines for Heroes was really well done, continuing alternative stories and keeping interest going.

Most of the networks are catching up and revitalizing their website presence so that it aligns with their programming. Recently HBO completely re-launched their website with an online community with forums. Simultaneously they are launching "minisodes" that are viewable online and on Sunday nights.

Every network is exploding onto social media since they realized how many people are actually participating online and how much more interesting this paradigm can be.

What about live commenting and interacting? This is the new theme within the television networks that has been growing over the last year or so, and that's integrating social media into programming live online. I remember the first time I saw Tosh.O on Comedy Central, highlighting the funniest and most random YouTube videos, and broadcasting the funniest tweet that people posted during his monologue. Oprah has live broadcasts with Facebook feeds running simultaneously so that people can contribute to the show. Look out for the new contest called Your Own Show, it's going to be a big one, with user submitted videos highlighting why they should be the next new TV Host promoted by Oprah.

Oxygen said they put an espisode of Bad Girls online, and paired it with Social Media, the result was a growth of their audience at 70% on the west coast and 90% on the east coast! That's tremendous!

Be on the lookout for a host of new ways of interacting with television networks, and the new shows that are going to result from all these ideas being submitted and shared!

Oprah Winfrey's President of Digital Media, Rob Tercek, really nailed it down succinctly when he quoted Oprah as saying, "Engagement is the new entertainment."

So what about you? Have you participated in Social Media and Television? What about checking out websites for your favorite shows? Which one do you like most?

Measuring Social Media ROI (Yes, It's Possible)

Monday, April 19, 2010 by Ashley Reed

The following is an abbreviated step-by-step guide to measuring social media ROI.

Step 1: Define Goals & Success Metrics
The first step of ROI measurement is defining your goals. What do you hope to accomplish by being active in the social space? One problem is that brands launch social campaigns without clearly identifying or understanding their goals, which makes measuring success difficult (if not impossible).

Here are a few examples of social media goals:
•   Expand brand or product awareness
•   Increase engagement with brand
•   Generate qualified leads
•   Drive sales
•   Build community
•   Create brand advocates
•   Qualify fans and convert them to customers
•   Improve customer satisfaction
•   Establish company as a thought leader
•   Attract talent

Once goals have been defined, the next step is determining the appropriate success metrics that align with these goals. For example, if a goal is to increase brand awareness, metrics might include the volume of online discussion or “buzz” about your brand, the level of audience engagement (re-tweets, comments, posts, video views), the number of fans, followers, etc. and the number of user impressions.

The following are examples of social media success metrics:
•   Volume of online “buzz” about a brand
•   Volume of positive sentiment
•   Number of fans, followers, readers (or number of high-quality/targeted fans)
•   Engagement (number of video views, duration of views, time spent on the company blog site, time spent playing a company’s branded game application, etc.)
•   Volume of user comments posted to company blog, profile or posted content
•   Retweet or peer-sharing statistics for related content and posts
•   Comment or retweet resonation (number of user comments multiplied by
   how many followers or friends each user has)
•   Media coverage
•   Media impressions (mentions on blogs or other media multiplied by the size
   of the audience)
•   Quantity of new or qualified sales leads (referred from social sites)
•   Website Referral Traffic (from social sites)
•   Advertising click-through rates
•   Volume of customer service issues handled

Step 2: Establish a Baseline
In order to effectively measure success, make sure to first establish a baseline by determining your current position within the social landscape. For instance, if your goal is to increase awareness and you will be tracking the amount of “buzz” or mentions about your brand, you must first know what the current levels are before taking actions to reach that goal. Without establishing this baseline, it’s difficult to accurately show ROI.

There are a variety of analytics tools available to help with social media measurement. I won’t go into too much detail here (there are dozens of options), but a few of these include Google Analytics, Social Mention, Viral Heat, Scout Labs, Radian6, and Listen Logic. These tools can be used to gather key social media metrics and help you identify strengths and weaknesses of your social presence.

Step 3: Measure and Track Success
After you launch your social media program, begin the measurement process to track success. Gather the success metrics from your analytics tools and start to see how (or if) they correlate to higher sales, increased customer satisfaction, website traffic, store traffic, etc. Try to identify trends where possible. Does positive consumer sentiment or an increase in chatter about your brand lead to higher website/store traffic, leads or sales? Recognizing these trends and identifying their point of origin is key in measuring social media ROI.

(Image Credit: "Basics of Social Media ROI," by Oliver Blanchard)

Location Based Services Are Here to Stay

Friday, April 16, 2010 by Gil Wolchock

While the race for ‘ownership’ of the LBS market (Location Based Services) rages on, and naysayers’ debate its viability, I am sold on the concept.

If you are not familiar, LBS are the latest craze in the ever growing social media marketing landscape. The general principle is that an end user uses their smart phone and its GPS abilities to ‘check in’ to their current location.

Like its social media older cousins Facebook and Twitter, there are many out there that think this is just a passing phenomena - a game if you will. Like Facebook and its now 400 million plus users, and Twitter and it’s large following I believe in the LBS strategy. Out of the pack has emerged two ‘major’ players in the field, FourSquare and Gowalla. Google, Facebook, Yahoo! and even Apple are also looking at entering the playing field but I believe they will have to make an acquisition to truly play.

Along with the hype of these types of services there is also a lot of criticism. Since I am a ‘fan’ and a user I might be a bit jaded but I think I can at least address the critics; here are the gripes I have heard, some legit, some just silly:

1. If you tell everyone where you are then you are leaving your house open to be robbed. I originally thought that this was a ‘non-issue’ I have to admit but after a conversation with people smarter than I over drinks I have amended my opinion. This is one that you DO have to pay attention to. Use common sense, if you are ‘checking in’ on vacation, turn off the setting that posts to Facebook and Twitter, so ONLY your friends on that LBS Tool of your choice get it. Second, and this goes whether you use and LBS or not, CHECK YOUR PRIVACY SETTINGS IN FACEBOOK! Facebook has gone through a number of changes and many people have forgotten to go into their settings and make sure they have the level of privacy that they want. For me, I only want FRIENDS seeing information; others may have different standards and that’s cool, just make sure you are comfortable with yours. As for Twitter, you can ‘protect your tweets’ as well so only your followers can see them.

2. You can get stalked by a crazy ex and have to deal with all that. True, but is that really a concern? If it was, you wouldn’t be on FB, Twitter or LinkedIn. Can it be a problem? Sure. However, you don’t have to tell EVERYONE where you are. Your standard LBS lets you self select who the information goes to. Side note – crazy ex probably knows all your haunts and when you like to be there anyway…

3. Why would you want to be doing free marketing/advertising for a place or a brand? Are we seriously talking about this one in 2010? Look down at your feet people (go ahead, I’ll wait) --- is that a ‘swoosh’? Did NIKE pay you to wear their shoes or did you drop $100+? How about that laptop I carry around? You know the really sleek, chrome looking thing with the fruit in the middle very well lit? Let’s face it people, WE have become walking billboards! Take the silly Ed Hardy T-shirts (yes, I am just over 40 and don’t get it). You have people clamoring to be seen in an Ed Hardy, and what is besides some crazy print with the biggest part of it being his SIGNATURE!!! I’ll talk more about personal brands in another blog.So there are some of the negatives, which may be legitimate, but aren’t exactly deal breakers.

What are the positives you might ask?

1. It’s fun and it’s social. One of my favorite shows as a kid was CHEERS, the bar where everyone knows your name. Basically, with a tool like FourSquare you can become your own walking CHEERS. Check in at a friendly place and the bartender says, “Welcome, how about a beer Mr. Peterson”, OR how about you get to a place that is running an amazing special, you could take the time and call or your friends, or break your fingers and text them OR check in with an LBS, type in a comment, it automatically gets to everyone through whatever social tools you are using and who knows what can happen when everyone shows up. Simply put, in its most elemental form, it’s a way to extend the party.

2. As I have heard from Social Media Guru, Gary Vaynerchuck, “why would someone check in at a bar?” Give’em a free beer and watch them check in all day! What a cool way to earn stuff and allow a small business truly establish a win-win customer loyalty program. At one of the Whole Foods in Austin, TX you get a very valuable coupon on your 5th visit. What does this do? It drives loyalty, rewards it, makes it fun and even mysterious…what will I get on my 10th check in, etc…Not enough small businesses are using these tools to see a huge uptick here but I believe by this time next year it will be off the charts.

3. That last part of #2 is part of the biggest positive from a business application and it’s the direct corollary to the third criticism. I’m not sure when MARKETING became a four letter word but when it comes to LBS that is seems to be the #1 complaint and it goes something like this, “that stuff is just one big marketing ploy to get you to go somewhere or buy something”. My response is somewhere along the famous Socrates reply of “duh!” Isn’t that the whole reason for newspapers, magazines, TV shows, etc…sure they have their entertainment and news value BUT no one is shocked to know that advertisers are paying to place their content in front of your eyeballs to get you to buy stuff! Not sure why the uproar when it comes to LBS, it seems to me like a natural fit.

4. Last but not least and this is by far where I see the big win for LBS and that is creating partnerships to pull off some really cool stuff. I was discussing the value of FourSquare with an Executive at one of the major record labels. She is responsible for new acts and we were discussing the value of LBS for her and she said; give me one way it works in my world. So I said, do you have an all girl band you want to promote? The answer was yes. How about an in store ‘tour’ across America teamed with an outlet like Express? You have all the traditional ways to support it but now add an LBS layer for very little cost. It is also a completed integrated approach across all the social media tools; from Facebook, to Twitter, blogs, Flickr and a full activation using LBS. Her eyes lit up and she said, write it up and let’s take a look at it. That’s just the tip of the iceberg.So, mock it if you want. Five years ago you never thought you’d be on Facebook.

If you can remember back to 1991, if someone asked if you wanted to be accessible 24/7 via the phone, some new thing called email and a feature called text that in our old lexicon meant a book at school you would have said, “no freaking way”…and how many of you don’t have a cell phone today?

Anticipating Key Developments in Web Design

Friday, April 9, 2010 by John Harne

It took a little over a week to get over my SXSW experiential (and literal) hangover and to sum up my thoughts on the 2010 Austin event. One word sums up my thoughts coming out of this year's festival..."Anticipation".

Remember the Heinz TV spots of the early 1990's, with Carly Simon singing for ketchup. This year it seemed like everyone was waiting for something, but it just didn't seem to show up. Since this was the venue that Twitter and FourSquare debuted in years past, I think the majority of the attendees were "anticipating" more. Instead there was a lot more marketing of Miller Lite beer, Chevy Volt and Monster energy drink, more parties, more free beer and a whole lot more people. Over 6,200 more folks in fact, all anticipating something, some next big thing at SXSW 2010.

Anticipation was also common Twitter theme and with so many birds of a feather together, the Twitter and FourSquare servers seemed to lag during certain keynotes and party hours. FourSquare had to invent a new badge for the experience called a super swarm. This designated that over 250 users checked in to a specific location, like the Frog Design party at MACC on Sunday evening. Everyone was gathering and waiting on something to happen.

Sometimes it pays to look the other way. While most of the crowd was attending keynotes given by the founders and thought leaders of social media, some big news was breaking in some smaller sessions and workshops.

This year three key developments signaled future implications for web interface design that will change the visual future of the web. CSS 3, HTML5 and Fluid Type are what I am talking about. The ability to leverage thousands of fonts will release web design from restrictions and separate creative talent from web generalists. HTML5 will do away with the use of proprietary plug-ins for basic rich media.

HTML5 adds video and audio capabilities to core markup languange with the intention of reducing the need for browser plug-in-based rich internet applications (RIA). And it is being employed now. Big entities like CBS are displaying their content video while Microsoft Silverlight and Adobe Flash are just beginning to do battle. The take-away is that open source code will have the ability to display media that the bulk of Flash and other RIA's are doing now. This spells the end for many plug-ins and the best part is HTML5 is here now and should reach W3C Recommendation by late this year.

CSS3 is still currently under development but many of the recommendations are working in existing browsers. The list of features continues to grow and the ability of designers to use these features to extend web design is exciting.

Consider what a designer might be able to do with just multiple backgrounds. This feature already works in Firefox, Chrome, Opera and Safari. Don't ask me about IE, but even IE has revealed better CSS controls are on the way.

Jason Cranford Teague might have given the most interesting presentation. I have known Jason personally for over ten years and I can testify that his vision of the future of web development has been uncanny. He was one of the very first to author a book on CSS, and in fact later served as an advisor to the CSS W3C group. Now he is an evangelist for web design and his passion is releasing the artform of typography to the web.

As any designer knows, fontography online is a shadow of what is capable in print, film and other fixed media because of browsers, usage laws and technology. But there are now alternatives to system fonts and type displayed as bitmapped images.

Jason's new book presents three approaches to using a wide variety of fonts in web design and goes into depth in his explanation of just what fontography really is. After being an interactive creative director for more than a decade, I can say with authority that most of the web has become a sea of sameness because of the lack of font variety and the ability to design with fonts.

Fluid web typography will give artists access to over 100 thousand fonts versus the less than 5 that are typically used online. So take a look at embedded open type, license font servers and web-font linking. You just might realize another wave of innovation in web design is already here.

A couple of links worth reading:

Finding and Nurturing Talent in the Digital Age

Monday, March 29, 2010 by Michael Kogon

As the U.S. recession winds down, and the recovery begins to pick up steam, talent acquisition, development and cultivation will again become important to companies that want to get ahead.

“The War for Talent” is now global and very, very digital. Finding talent might be easier than you think. I’d like to offer a high value, low cost way to find talent in the marketplace and within your organization.

In the information age and knowledge economy we’re operating in, the power of the mind is key component of success – at least for organizations able to tap into that power.

From a management perspective, managers need insight into the minds of their employees like never before. It’s not easy to figure out who is willing to go the extra mile to get the job done.

I believe the answer to the challenges can be found in the blogosphere.

Finding Talent in the Blogosphere

If you establish a companywide blogging program that is open to all employees, at all levels and job functions, it can be an excellent device for gauging the intellectual abilities of your team.

You can do it as internal blogs, public blogs, and topic specific, pre-screened or free for all. Whatever you do you will gain insight into your employees. You will find out which ones are slow to adopt new technologies, which ones have good thoughts, but poor communications skills, great writers with hollow thinking or innovators trapped in task jobs.

You’ll get far more valuable information than you can from performance reviews, meeting attendance or coaching sessions. Simply because it is self selected participation, self-expression and the opportunity to rise to the top or to fade into obscurity.

Just track who is a continuous contributor, who is a commenter and who is absent. Then read those that are intriguing, comment back and see how they conduct a digital conversation. And before you say your business is about relationships and face-to-face today, the future of face to face is digital to digital.

The ability to conduct civil discourse that is a matter of digital record is a daily requirement in business and in life today. The understanding of when to add imagery, video, graphs, links to others and medium appropriate content, is critical and the best new weapons in your arsenal.

I guarantee you that as the talent wars heat up, that your competitors will look for talent in your organization and your employee’s Facebook profiles, blogs, tweets and comments on the digital radar will be part of how they determine who to target for recruitment. You should do the same thing, start with your employees and then move to theirs. The future of your business is dependent upon the next generation of thinkers, doers and digital actors.

MIX 2010: Microsoft Steps Up Its Game With Designers and UX (and Bill Buxton Destroys Las Vegas)

Monday, March 22, 2010 by Paul Hernacki

I recently had the opportunity to attend MIX 2010, Microsoft's annual conference for web designers and developers focused on building great user experiences, in Las Vegas, along with Definition 6's two interactive Creative Directors from Atlanta and New York.

MIX 2010 is highly unlike most other Microsoft conferences where the topics frequently focus on .NET, Exchange, Office, and Windows. Instead it's chock full of design and UX goodness - a geeky love fest for all the cool tech that goes into creating great web, mobile, desktop, kiosk, and other assorted technically enabled experiences using the Microsoft platform.

It's hard to argue that this isn't an arena in which Microsoft is still playing a lot of catch-up. Adobe Creative Suite and Flash/Flex are still easily the staple of most creative and design departments. And many people definitely hug their MacBooks and frantically wave their iPhones about when asked to provide examples of great user interface design. But if there was one thing abundantly clear at MIX 2010 it is that Microsoft has no plans to cede the battle on these fronts, they are rapidly catching up in many areas, and even appear to be leading the way in a few. Seriously.

Microsoft is a marathon runner, not a sprinter. And as Steve Ballmer said at Microsoft's Worldwide Partner Conference last year regarding questions as to why Microsoft doesn't cede such battles as Search and Advertising and retreat back home to their core Windows, Office, or SQL Server business lines, "We. Don't. Go. Home." Anyone who doesn't believe him should have been at MIX. And do you really have to look further than an example like the Xbox?

Probably the hottest subject of discussion and presentations was Windows Phone 7 Series. I am, admittedly, an avid iPhone user who stood in line the first week they came out. I happily ditched my old Windows Mobile device and it's BlackBerry predecessors back then to live in Apple's world and I've never been seriously tempted to use something else until I saw WP7.

I really believe WP7 is a game changer for Microsoft and the mobile industry. Sure, it has some shortcomings. I don't know how they could decide to not include copy-and-paste as a feature in the first release. And like iPhone, they also do not have application multi-tasking and they appear to have similarly stringent plans regarding their app store.

But the interface is fantastic, I love the "hub" metaphors, streaming video and even Xbox Live over the phone looked amazing. Not sure exactly how badly those things will kill battery life, but they sure looked impressive. For heavy Outlook users, the Outlook mobile experience on WP7 may alone be enough to get you to switch. Just awesome. And there's a chance it could finally be the breakthrough that Zune has been looking for.

Silverlight 4 is definitely another big step in the right direction. They continue to slowly chip away at adoption and now claim that it's at 60% market penetration, probably mostly attributable to the Olympics and adoption and rollouts of Windows 7.

Tools like Expression Blend keep getting better, and Sketchflow may even be better than the competition, it is simply cool. IE9 beta demos also got big buzz. It appears they have surpassed Firefox on overall performance, are coming close to Chrome in many aspects, and for certain functions like handling of video and HTML5 they could end up being even faster and better (when running on a Windows platform of course) by taking better advantage of your computer's processor and using a form of background hardware-based acceleration. The head-to-head examples showing some really slick use of animation and video in HTML5 were really amazing.

The one thing that Microsoft has which no one else can offer (not Google, not Adobe, not Apple, not anyone) is an end-to-end story on tools and capabilities in this arena. The depth and breadth of their tools and services is truly staggering when you put it all together. And I'm not just talking about the typical story of Windows + Visual Studio + .NET + SQL Server. On top of that throw in Expression Studio with SketchFlow + Project "Dallas" + Azure + Silverlight + Surface + Windows Phone 7 + OpenData + IE9 + Bing Search and Maps and on and on. Sure you can poke certain holes in individual pieces versus their competitors. But the cohesive power of all that together makes for a truly impressive lineup.

There definitely were a few other good tidbits at MIX. Announcements around Orchard, freely available tools for WP7 development, great live streaming of Channel9 straight from the event, strengthening support for JQuery, and a surprising number of atypical logos on screens being talked about as friends (e.g. Wordpress, Drupal, PHP, etc.).

And the keynotes included fantastic sessions by Scott Guthrie (@scottgu), VP of Microsoft's Developer Division, and great demonstrations by consummate tech presenter Scott Hanselman (@shanselman). But for me, the highlight of MIX was the opportunity to see Bill Buxton, Principal Researcher Microsoft Research, speak live. He is simply brilliant and one of the most passionate people alive when it comes to interface design and technology.

If you've never seen him speak it is worth your time to google (or bing) for videos of his speeches and spend an entire day just watching them. As the conference organizer, Microsoft's Thomas Lewis (@TommyLee), put it in a tweet during Bill Buxton's keynote: "OMFG! Buxton's brutality has destroyed Vegas! Only zombies, mushrooms & lavender frogs have survived! DESIGN IS GOD!". I couldn't have put it better myself. Buxton's speeches are often too filled with memorable lines to count, though my favorite at MIX included "The most important thing in the system is the wetware... the human being" during a segment where he described the importance of taking into account all the users different prior experiences within the specific environmental contexts of where, when and how they will use a system that you are designing.

Side note: I still don't understand how such an amazing guy who lives and breathes design and is considered the Father of Multi-Touch can have such a horrible personal web site, but I can only assume it's a "cobbler's children" thing.

And last but not least, the overall crowd and dynamic of the attendees at MIX was fantastic if not a bit quirky. It was a great group of highly intelligent people that are all passionate about great design and truly unafraid to ask the hard questions of Microsoft and dole out praise as well as tough love in person in the sessions and in torrents over Twitter. Unlike typical creative and design conferences it's definitely rooted in a true developer core (e.g. more guys still talking about compilers as opposed to a more mixed-gender crowd talking about heuristics and having used many tools like these for years), but unlike normal Microsoft conferences it's a large group of people who love great creative design and have been dying for Microsoft to bring these kinds of things to the table.

This conference in Vegas was more WXSW for geeks than it was the concurrently running SXSW, but Twitter and Foursquare definitely reigned supreme there as well as the tools that joined everyone together digitally during the sessions, into the evening, around the bars, and throughout the event. Sunday evening even kicked off the conference with a massive tweetup at the MIX Lounge at THEhotel at Mandalay Bay. There is a real embrace of Twitter showing through by Microsoft that is really uncanny with regard to how they normally react to any tech service that they don't build and own.

At Definition 6, we do use a lot of tools and services across platforms including a very significant amount of work in the Microsoft platform. And we do use tools and design for platforms that are competitive to many of those that were showcased at MIX 2010. But there is no doubt that what we saw there has given us a lot to think about, some great ideas, and a few new weapons to put in our arsenal. We look forward to using many of these to create great solutions for our customers and to seeing them continue to evolve and improve.

Fortune 500 Companies Love Twitter

Friday, March 5, 2010 by Jeremy Porter

Social media marketing is at the forefront of integrated interactive marketing programs underway at almost every Fortune 500 company out there. Corporate blogging, online video and podcasts are among the most popular strategies used by the world's largest comapnies. But what about Twitter?

What might surprise you is how quickly Twitter is growing as the social medium of choice among Fortune 500 companies. According to recent studies like “Fortune 500 and Social Media: A Longitudinal Study of Blogging and Twitter Usage by America’s Largest Companies,” conducted by the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth and Financial Insite, a Seattle-based Research Firm, Twitter is the platform of choice for Fortune 500 social media marketers.

The study examined the 2009 Fortune 500 in an attempt to quantify their adoption of social media tools and technologies, finding that 22% of Fortune 500 companies have a public-facing corporate blog – six percent more than 2008. The study also found that 86% of these blogs link directly to a corporate Twitter account, a 300% increase over 2008. Even more corporations have Twitter accounts, but not all link to them from their blog.

It would appear that Fortune 500 marketers are moving fast to Twitter for engaging with their key audiences. Of course, upon further analysis, you’d find that only 35% of these Twitter accounts are active – described as having been updated within the past 30 days. If I’m reading the study correctly, that means 65% are not being actively used.

While Fortune 500 companies have realized they need to be on Twitter – probably as defense against username squatting – few have truly embraced Twitter as a social channel.

Of the groups that have engaged most heavily with Twitter, the insurance industry is leading the way, with 13 active Twitter accounts according to the study. Of course there are also companies like Exxon Mobil, the #1 company in the Fortune 500, that have no presence on Twitter.

A separate analysis of Fortune 500 Twitter, “The Global Social Media Check-Up” conducted by Burson-Marstellar, found that 79% of Fortune 100 Global companies are using one of four popular social media platforms, with Twitter leading Facebook, YouTube and corporate blogging as the platform of choice.

65% of Fortune Global 100 companies have active accounts on Twitter, while only 54% have Facebook accounts, 50% have YouTube channels, and 33% have a corporate blog. There is still plenty of room for improvement here.

Why Is Twitter the Preferred Platform?

Nobody knows for sure why Twitter is so popular, but there’s a good chance that it’s because it’s the easiest platform to launch. Companies can have a Twitter account up and running in a couple of hours (or less). There is a lot more work to do to launch a YouTube channel, corporate blog, or Facebook presence. It also takes considerably less resources to manage content production and audience interaction on Twitter than these other platforms. It’s a relatively low-cost and low-maintenance option for getting in the social media game.

Are Fortune 500 companies getting any value out of Twitter though? According to the Burson-Marstellar study, the answer is “yes”. Twitter accounts to the Fortune Global 100 average 1,489 followers. This doesn’t seem like much when you consider the average Facebook fan page for these companies has more than 40,000 fans, but it's progress.

A full copy of the new research report can be downloaded here: http://www.umassd.edu/cmr/studiesresearch.

Integrated Marketing Strategy: Tying It All Together

Tuesday, February 2, 2010 by Chris Thornton

I recently had an opportunity to participate in a webinar about the current trends and thinking around integrated marketing strategy, particularly in the areas of interative marketing.

The digital evolution has completely changed the way companies interact with their customers. Companies can longer push their agenda to drive business, but must find ways to add value at every single touch point. How can companies effectively create a unified message across so many disciplines to evolve the way consumers think of their brand?

A good part of my strategic discussion revolved around reinvention of the idea of brand, and what it means to be a marketer for a company in the 21st century. Some specific takeways I think I cover in this presentation include:

How to organize and integrate your marketing operation to create a cohesive message
How to identify early in the process if you are achieving your goals
How to optimize your branding efforts and align them with your sales organization

If you're thinking about integrating your marketing programs, or just looking to improve the performance of your existing integrated marketing programs, perhaps you'll find the presentation relevant to your current discussions.

To view my presentation from the webinar, please click on the presentation below:

Integrated Marketing Strategy - Tying It All Together

View more presentations from Definition 6.

Questions or comments about the proposal? Please feel free to reach out to me through Twitter.

6 THINGS

Friday, January 22, 2010 by Doug Dimon

“6 Things” is a list of things I have recently come across that I find interesting, inspiring, adventurous, or just plain cool. I’ll be publishing these fairly regularly, so keep an eye out.

Me speaking at Augmented Reality Event

I recently participated in a panel discussion on “augmented reality” at the Samsung center in NYC (more on that here). So today’s list begins with several things being done (or dreamed) in A/R.

1. Esquire Augmented Reality Issue
A/R Esquire Cover

One of my fellow panelists was the Art Director from Esquire magazine and he showcased the December A/R issue of Esquire. If you haven’t seen it, check out the demo. And if you can get your hands on a copy of the magazine, try it out yourself. As with most executions of A/R, it’s still got a way to go, but you can see the potential of bringing a new experience and added value to a publication or product.

2. AR Art for the LAYAR
ART LAYAR App

Many of you may be familiar with the LAYAR mobile application for Android and iPhones. It’s an A/R platform that lets developers “easily” create specific A/R executions for mobile devises. It uses the GPS, accelerometer, and camera to place objects and info in the environment around you. One of the those executions is “ART AR” that allows you to experience virtual art that has been placed at a specific location. If you are lucky enough to be near one of these locations, you simple view your surroundings on your phone’s display and voila… art all around you. I think this Mondrian sculpture has been placed at various locations, one of them being around the corner from where I live. Watching this video doesn’t really convey the experience. It’s pretty cool to see a virtual structure all around you. Again, it suffers from current technology limitations, but the possibilities are exciting.

3. “SixthSense”
Experimental A/R interface

Here we get a glimpse into where A/R might lead. Clearly, the goal is to make this as a passive an experience as possible. This research team has assembled some off the shelf hardware and written some new software that allows you to integrate digital information into your everyday experience. It’s rough, and not entirely developed, but even at this stage it is pretty impressive.

4. “Augmented (hyper) Reality”
The future of A/R?

This is a futuristic look at A/R. What will it be like when we really can overlay our world with a virtual world? One of the things all marketers struggle with is how to get branding in front of a consumer in a way that will not make them feel as if they are having something thrust upon them. One of the topics discussed at the panel was that if a consumer feels they are getting value (information, entertainment, etc) then they will accept a certain amount of invasive marketing. Would you be open the kind of branding seen in this video if it allowed the kind of interaction it promises?

5. Banshee Beat
Going for a drive via streetview

Stepping away from A/R, here’s clever music video that was made by using Google Map’s Streetview. It traces the artists drive to work via the freeways of LA. Simple, engaging, fun.

6. Upular
all mixed UP

And finally, here’s a new offering from video remix artist, Pogo. He creates new works of music and video by using sounds and images contained in movies. Unlike many remix artists, he only uses sounds from the film. I found this one to be particularly successful because it can stand on its own as a great song. (As an aside, I first became aware of Pogo when his video was used to demonstrate www.yooouuutuuube.com, a fun use of the Google API that has since been co-opted for on on-air HBO promo campaign… the web leads again.)

Using Facebook Connect to Build Deeper Relationships with Consumers

Friday, January 22, 2010 by Stephen Boyd

As the social media world continues to expand rapidly, brands are still trying to figure out how to utilize it. User-generated content, seeded marketing, and viral videos are only the beginning of social media. New technologies for access and interacting with social media are starting to emerge. One are that has been rising in popularity lately is Facebook Connect. The question is, how can marketers best use Facebook Connect to create more immersive brand experiences for consumers (and sell more)?

The best marketing is a conversation between you and your buyer, where getting customer interaction and feedback is the goal. Few areas do a better job at providing this feedback loop as Facebook. A great tool for getting your brand message in front of consumers is Facebook Connect.

For those of you not familiar with Facebook Connect, it is a powerful set of free APIs (programming interfaces) developers can use to enable users to bring their identity and connections anywhere on the Web – for example, to sign on to different websites without having to use separate usernames and passwords. Developers can access a user’s identity, social graph or activity stream – which can all be used to create more engaging experiences on your website.

How Are Organizations Using Facebook Connect?

There are a lot of great examples out there for how organizations are leveraging Facebook Connect. In general, Facebook Connect can be utilized as a way to get feedback from consumers on what they like to (and not like to do) in association with your brand. That is, what type of brand experiences they are most comfortable with? While some brands have a hard time hearing “dislikes” from consumers, it’s this process of interaction and feedback that helps true market leaders develop more powerful offerings.

Here are some recent examples of brands leveraging Facebook Connect in interesting ways:

RedBull Connect – This site gives users access to information and articles from several Red Bull websites. This is a nice repository for everything related to red Bull without smacking users in the face with its advertising. Consumers can comment, post, and interact with others without being forced to buy a Red Bull while, at the same time, red Bull always being part of the equation.

Citysearch – The Facebook Connect portion of this is minimal; this is a good example of utilizing FB Connect to grab user information without implementing it for advertising. The site personalizes your location when you connect with FB and automatically creates your personal profile and connects you with other Facebook friends on Citysearch - allowing you to share restaurant and other local recommendations via your Facebook feed.

Pandora – Pandora uses less of a full-blown Facebook Connect microsite, and more of an application, but it is still a nice use of Facebook technology. The application can be used to share songs or a station with your Facebook friends.

Beware of the Doghouse - I love this idea (the husband is in the doghouse with the wife, gets posted to Facebook, and needs to buy her a present to get back in her good graces). JCPenny did a great job promoting it ). I like the opening video and way they get their message out. While interaction with the site is a bit confusing, and posting and viewing content is not as intuitive as it should be, it’s a very entertaining idea.

Some other great examples from the entertainment industry include: “Watch Your Town Get Blown Up by Darth Vader” by Adidas and Discovery’s “Frenzied Waters” experience.

Facebook Connect is a great way to interact with your customers, but there are a few questions you should ask yourself before you go down this path. For starters, who are our customers and why are they likely to interact with your brands on Facebook? There’s no right or wrong answer here, but there should be some obvious reason why they would want to interact with your brand through Facebook.

Second, are you trying to entertain your customers, or are you just trying to get access to their information so you can send them stuff? You should seek first to entertain. This will make it much easier to get the access and data you’re looking for later.

Facebook Connect is a great way of interacting with your customer and getting access to user information to drill down on demographics. The jury is still out on how it might translate directly to sales but if you’re looking to talk with your customers and they are on Facebook, this is a great way to do it.

How is your organization using Facebook Connect today? How could you be making it easier for consumers to interact with your brands, while providing you with better insight into your audiences? Facebook Connect could be a good place to start. Contact Definition 6 Today!

Reaching Consumers Wherever They Are: Beyond the Three Screens

Tuesday, January 19, 2010 by Michael Kogon

Over the course of the past six months, we’ve continued to invest in technology and talent to expand our video production capabilities at Definition 6. Following the acquisition of Creative Bubble back in August, and leading up to the recent launch of the wildly popular Coca-Cola “Happiness Machine” viral video, we’ve seen increased demand across our client base for video production services as part of the integrated interactive marketing programs we provide.

We’re actively working with several long-time clients to help them develop and deliver video across broadcast, Web and mobile channels – the three screens. While there is no question delivering content across these channels drives significant ROI for our clients, we’re also seeing demand spike for channels that extend beyond the three screens.

Enter the Fourth Screen

Next time you’re out and about, keep your eyes peeled for monitors, LCDs and other screens as you go about your day. You’ll be surprised where these screens show up: airport terminals, taxis, grocery store checkouts, ATMs and even the bathroom. What you might not realize is a lot of those screens are already – or quickly becoming - part of integrated digital-out-of-home (DOOH) advertising networks. These networks enable brands to reach consumers with incredible precision, but also present new opportunities for creating immersive brand experiences.

Digital out-of-home advertising is great for targeting audiences for the obvious reasons –marketers can deliver content to specific places at specific times. The benefits of DOOH advertising go far beyond those of geographic targeting. Take for example the emerging behavioral or interactive components – being able to tap into lifestyle patterns, or to encourage consumers to interact with your advertising content through other technologies like mobile devices.

Beverage brands can penetrate the nightclub scene through displays in bars at 2am on weekend nights. Restaurants can reach tourists through the screens in the back of NYC taxi cabs. Airlines can reach business travelers in the terminal during excessive flight delays. And lotteries can post the latest jackpot value on the screen at checkout.

As far as interactivity goes, several major brands have recently started leveraging mobile devices, social networking sites and video cameras to pull consumers into an advertisement. Text a special code and see your message on the screen. Stand in front of a display and a camera puts you in the advertisement. This type of interactive content is transforming the way brands interact with consumers beyond the reach of broadcast, Internet and mobile media.

These are might seem like obvious applications of DOOH targeting, but only a handful of leading brands have begun integrating the 4th screen into their interactive marketing programs. You can expect more and more brands to take advantage of DOOH advertising, particularly as more organizations look to more integrated interactive marketing efforts.

The Age of the Developer

Tuesday, November 17, 2009 by Tom Kirszenstein

I recently read that the White House has chosen an Open Source CMS (Content Management System) to develop their government Web site. This announcement caught my attention for several reasons--not only are many agencies moving their clients to open source and praising it's virtues, I also started using Drupal this past year and found it remarkably fast and easy to setup and maintain my own Web sites with quality results. Despite some criticism of open source over the years--more and more commercial (and government) developers are choosing it.

It's hard to argue against the benefits of free software, especially when results show that the software does what we expect, often exceeds expectations, and provides more opportunities for expansion than many proprietary products. While relative newcomers Drupal and Wordpress lead the pack for CMS offerings, open source mainstays such as Linux and Perl have been around for many years--not only surviving, but thriving over time. In a study by Amit Deshpande and Dirk Riehle of SAP Labs, LLC, Total Growth of Open Source results have shown that "the total amount of source code and the total number of projects double about every 14 months." Open source enables freedom for both users and developers to move & change quickly when needed, as well as providing more flexibility with software decisions such as to upgrade or not to upgrade. It's really no surprise that businesses and individuals are moving to open source at exponential rates.

Of course, Open Source has always been very much associated with Free, although there are other solid reasons to choose it beyond its cost. The pool of development resources is not limited to a specific company or provider, but instead is seemingly unlimited. As a specific open source project becomes popular, more and more developers start contributing, growing and adding to the code. Not only do they enhance the software to make it better for everyone, but they also create markets for their own support services. The better the code is--more people will use it-- and the more support is needed. Large developer communities have evolved around each software project, contributing to its growth, and administering its support. These open source communities are continually coming up with new innovations, powerful add-ons, extensions, and effective tools.

With so many open source choices available, even the ubiquitous LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and Perl) has come to be accepted as generic term for any completely open source application stack--substituting interchangeable parts from other sources that include "PostgreSQL, SQLLite, Apache Derby," as well as "PHP, Python, Ruby, Groovy and JavaScript." Even behemoth Microsoft has entered the game with their own Open Source CMS Platform.

Additionally, interactive ad agencies are able to offer their managed computer services at lower rates when developers take advantage of Open Source technologies. This enables clients to do more within their budgets. Every size company can now take advantage of Website integration, online advertising, and interactive media development due to the emergence of open source and accumulation of knowledge brought to us by the developer community. Businesses across industries are now embracing these technologies, taking advantage of interactive media, and using a more integrated approach to marketing with the vast number of new tools that are now available from these creative, innovative communities of developers.

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