I was very excited to hear about the ustream.tv iPhone app. I love the site and use it as my go-to application for live streaming. Yesterday, I downloaded their iPhone application.
I was wicked excited as it gave me a couple of things that I have been wanting: The ability to stream live and to do video without jail-breaking my phone. I downloaded it, logged in as BelchingMonkey and began to stream. I clicked on go live, I got one viewer and when I was finished, I selected the option to not save the video.
Luckily, I talked to Gregory Ng yesterday. I told him I downloaded the application and he said “Yeah, I saw your videos. You have 4 on the site”.
Three were videos that I did told the application not to save. The fourth was a video that I took last night, but did not even mean to take. I clicked on the app and it started recording on its own. It also HORRIFIED me when I saw this at the end of the video:
So the moral of the story here is that you can use the ustream.tv iPhone app, but be prepared for it to potentially stream your activity after you shut down the application. You could end up giving away your email addresses unwittingly or worse, allowing people a window into your personal or business email accounts.
I hope we hear a response from ustream.tv soon and plan to be very vocal about this until we hear from them. I happen to think their technology is amazing, but that they have been irresponsible in putting extremely buggy software into play. I am all for constant-beta, but these seem like problems that should be sorted out in alpha code.
Feature after wonderful feature, Friendfeed‘s web interface is beautifully elegant. Control the flow of your content stream from raging amazon river to gentle backyard creek with easy-to-create groups. Beautifully done is the find / invite friends feature which not only allows you to subscribe to friends from other social networks, but lets you create a group on-the-fly.
If you’re a marketer, social media pirate, brand, celebrity or super hero, you probably have a friendfeed account, but are you using it? We know that content is king and friendfeed allows you to bring it all together for show – while also allowing you access to ALL of your friends’ content. Seriously. The Friendfeed team was tied to a chair, eyelids glued open and force fed Barney and Sesame Street until they fully understood that EVERYTHING must be shared.
Share Your Content
And share you can! Not only does it have real-time, native integration with 58 (at post time) blogging, bookmarking, video, status, music, books and news tools, it allows you to integrate anything else with an RSS feed. I currently share content from 18 different sites on friendfeed.
Share Your Thoughts
Friendfeed’s Like | Comment | Share features allow you not only to add your own thoughts to a stream, but post them to link prediction markets like digg and stumbleupon or other micromedia sites like facebook and twitter.
Friendfeed has support for comments on any content, but also allows you to pass it through to other social properties with the Share link. Want to follow a conversation for the ages? Like it. The My Discussions feature will pull up everything you like or comment on so it does not get lost in a raging stream.
Share Other Content
Want to share content on Friendfeed? Use the tool bar bookmarklet, or email it to share@friendfeed.com. Friendfeed even has ways to notify you when you receive new content- via text messages and instant messenger. It’s borderline sick.
So, how serious are you about sharing? Probably not as serious as Friendfeed.
The 2009 Boston Gravity Summit was held, surprisingly, in the home of traditional ideals, the Harvard University Alumni Club. The dark woodwork, winding staircases, private dining rooms and original artwork on the walls seemed an unlikely place for new media content delivery. But the hosts allowed the Boston social media scene to descend upon it, some of us in jeans, to tell our collective story to the public. And – this Gravity Summit was broadcast on CNN.
Hammertime
MC Hammer told a story of eyeballs and sales. His “social media” story was a story of authenticity. Ghosting, when someone else updates your social profile on your behalf, he shunned. He likened his experiences in the space to his experiences as a preacher (great question Gradon Tripp). His was the story of an entrepreneur- one who is convinced that he can sell the 250,000,000 Facebook users SOMETHING.
Shenanigans
Disaster Management
Surprisingly awesome was Wendy Harman of the American Red Cross. She told a story of a platform that is critical for disaster management communication. The American Red Cross has 150 twitter personas that they manage. She noted that the Santa Barbara Red Cross was more than likely furiously tweeting about the current forest fire situation in California. The Red Cross is also an excellent case for distributed brand persona management.
Worst Practices
Josh Levine of Rebel Industries gave a great talk on Social Media Worst Practices. He likened social media to a Bill Cosby joke about drug use.
I said to a guy, “Tell me, what is it about cocaine that makes it so wonderful?” And the guy said, “Well, it intensifies your personality.” And I said, “Yes, but what if you’re an asshole?”
He also talked about authenticity and using social media to go underground. When complimented on his use of up-and-coming “what’s next” hip-hop artists in a Toyota Scion campaign, he said it was part passion play on his organizations part, but part going to the experts in the crowd to find out who is on the bleeding edge.
THUNDER
Gary Vay Ner Chuk brought the thunder as usual. Although his presentation was shorter than I would have liked, he got across a few key themes. First: people who are buying bus signs and billboards in places like Harvard Square are obviously not watching the crowd. Everyone is looking down at their phone and not looking the ads. Ad spend? Wasted. You think Gary’s a wine guy? He’s a new media guy – THE new media guy.
Firmly grasping that content is king, he also talked more on the topic of content ownership and creation. In true Gary Vaynerchuk fashion, he told us like it is. He said: If you’re truly passionate about the content, you should give it forever. Do it forever, bleed out the eyes, you will be happy because you are doing what you love. In other words: #crushit.
photos by (and of) Gradon Tripp
I saw a lack of data-driven content in last year’s SXSW and hope these ideas will fill some of that void. I don’t have a free pony or even a case of Red Bull to give to you if you vote for these panels, but I do havesome themes that should spark passionate debate about quantifying the value of Social Media and relationships.
Uncovering Social Media Data You Can Count On
With stakeholders throughout the enterprise taking a role in the ownership of conversations in social spaces, each wants to know the impact of a relationship on demand creation, customer retention and support efficiency. This panel addresses how to make the numbers meaningful for sales, marketing, customer service and product teams.
Click here to vote for Uncovering Social Media Data You Can Count On
Extending B2B Acquisition Strategies Using Micromedia
Let’s discuss the importance of proper brand personification in micromedia spaces. We will talk integration of micromedia as a channel in a communications plan and alignment of messaging with strategic objectives. We will cover clear statement of objectives, managing multiple objectives, integration with CRM and community initiatives and attribution of a sale to micromedia. The overlay will be the balancing act of how much sales vs. thought leadership vs. customer service vs. your laundry list of others.
Click here to vote for Extending B2B Acquisition Strategies Using Micromedia
DataRock
What would this post be without a little DataRock?
An Epic Event / Themes of Social CRM
I attended Radian 6 and Chris Brogan’s the Rockstars of Social CRM event last night. The panel had some of the heavy hitters of Social Media and CRM. Marcel LeBrun, CEO of Radian 6, Frank Eliason who you know better as @comcastcares, Paul Greenberg, Author of CRM at the Speed of Light, President of The 56 Group, LLC, Brent Leary, Co-author of Barack 2.0 and Co-founder of CRM Essentials and Michael Thomas, National President, CRM Association. The key themes really resonated with me and I agreed with them.
- Social CRM gets back to basics
- a return to Helpful 1.0 not Sales 2.0
- Good relationships = good sales
- You must earn your right to sell.
The Land Grab
Then something weird happened. The panel made a comment about Social Media ownership. They poked fun at PR and Marketing trying to get their clutches on Social Media and suggested that the only real home for Social Media is with Sales, specifically Customer Service. Suddenly, all of the IT people in the room fainted because they were left out of the land grab! Marketers wept openly. PR folk made some calls.
People complain about #FollowFriday because people just throw out a bunch of names without giving any reason to follow the people on the list. My solution has been to provide a reason or theme with each person I recommend. For instance,
#followfriday @agrahamwilcox <- Must follow for NBA fans
Today, Brad Ward decided to take it all up a notch.
The story begins at SXSW. SXSW is the conference that keeps on giving. In the past I have equated it to cramming a whole semester of college into 2 weeks. The people that you meet are the people you want to meet, the experiences that you share are meaningful both in the “classroom” and in the bars and social events.
On the night of the mashable party, Not only did I sing Ziggy Stardust with a live band, meet Seth Rogen and Joseph “Cobra Commander” Gordan-Levitt, I met Brad J. Ward.
I was heading to the bar to pick up my 4th (or so) and I was in queue to sing with the band. Well, the video tells the story
Did I think he was going to gank my charger? No. But my own phone was low on juice and I couldn’t hear the bartender. The band was RIGHT in front of us and Brad was looking to disappear. What good is a business card if I can’t charge my phone later? I decided to chill out about it, sing my song and have fun at the party instead of worrying about whether I would be connected later. Glad I did. Brad is an amazing person that I met at the conference and I am having a good time getting to know him better through twitter. Follow him!
Julia Roy Schools the Michael Schneider on Tweety from the Michael Schneider on Vimeo.
I’ve tried all of the free twitter iPhone applications only to come to the conclusion “you get what you pay for”. I left Twitteriffic for Twittelator and then for Twitterfon, but simple features like following people and tweeting from more than one account were still missing from my experience. I met Julia Roy of Undercurrents after day 1 of SXSW. She had just the thing for my iPhone twitter woes!
A good digital analyst is also part detective and while an advanced degree in forensic science from the University of Mississippi isn’t necessary, they need to go beyond the obvious metrics to tell the story. I know what you’re thinking. The digital story is direct- so it tells itself! This is not really the case. When dealing with situations where the call to action is not directly related to the bottom line, analysts have to be willing to dig. And, to make matters more complicated, they will need to understand the disciplines of their colleagues.
Campaign planning, with variables like competitive spend, weather, seasonality, trade volume, economic conditions, fashion trends, health fads, hairstyles, income levels, pets etc can be chaotic. It’s important that planners, interaction designers and analysts are aligned in their objectives. Planners use their audience intelligence insight and negotiation prowess to get the message in front of the right person at the right time. UX Jedis use the Force to create high quality experiences that make a user want to convert. How do they know if they have been successful? Enter the analyst!
Analyzing click-through, view-through and even residual data is a lot like looking at page impressions. They do not tell you what to do, only that you got someone to do something. They are however, clues that can be used to build more effective metrics. Analysts must not only create actionable metrics that are based on campaign goals, but need to tell a story to planners, interaction designers and their clients. Measurement of a digital media plan does not happen by accident, it requires collaboration, planning, testing, learning and repeating.
Start by defining campaign success. Next, build a page tagging recommendation and agree on success metrics.
Incorporate the model into reports and dashboards. Socialize metrics with marketing strategists, user experience gurus, digital media planners and client marketing analysts. Most importantly, dig into the data and your model to tell the story. The elementary metrics are not enough.
When talking to marketing managers, the subject of segmentation often comes up. The conversation can seem forced and usually takes a turn from casual talk about business to a certain bitter formality, probably because now we’re talking about data. These marketing managers have never tasted our variety of data, theirs is like the grubs on Fear Factor .
Expensive : Complicated : Useless
These are words they have used to describe segmentation! Further investigation usually reveals that their segmentation study was conducted so long ago that no one really remembers why. In one case, some muckety-muck told a group of analysts to do it and so they did exactly what he told them to do. No one really knew why it was being done.
Of course then nosy consultants like me come along and ask the question. Why did you do this segmentation? What does it all mean? It used to shock me when they would say that “it’s just the way we have always done it”.
Segmentation is not about grouping data for the sake of grouping data. Segmentation should have purpose. It should be used to solve a particular problem. It is useful for determining sales regions/territories, marketing message and campaign optimization, risk management, web visitor behavior classification etc etc etc.
December 17, 2008, K&L Gates’ gorgeous, white, marble offices played host to MITX: Planning Your Online Video Strategy 2009. I sat in on an amazing session that was well worth far more than the price of admission. There was a perfect blend of technologists, analysts and practitioners. The session was unselfishly and actually was beautifully moderated by Will Richmond of VideoNuze. He masterfully kept the conversation flowing.
The session confirmed what I suspected; 2009 is the year of video. Nimble companies like Hubspot.com spent 2008 paving the way, showing people the power of communication through “under-produced” content. Mike Volpe of Hubspot contended that he would rather do 100 (under produced) videos for $10,000 than 1. And this is what 2009 is about.
Companies are going to try to figure out ways to act more like people. One to one marketing has traditionally been about customization of message for a particular audience using matrices and models. Social Media technologies make actual human contact and conversations practical and scalable and inexpensive. Sure, a commitment is necessary and I did not say it would be easy, but the relatively low cost of technology, combined with creativity and dedication to the scene will allow companies to adopt strategies based on a range of video content: under-produced content, produced and a percentage will even delve into non-linear video.
James McQuivey of Forrester agrees, asking: How do corporations act more like individuals? Can they be more comfortable with the personal, lower quality approach? Corporations need to do do this. He also reminds that this is not a put-all-your-eggs-in-one-basket strategy, but an approach to one marketing channel.
It’s measurable. It’s consumable. It’s understandable. It’s doable!
