The Pepsi lounge at SXSW has a bar where you can try Pepsi products and a series of tents where you can go an create content. It’s a cool place to hang out and meet people, shoot video, charge your phone or talk to the folks who made it all happen. What did they make happen?

Pepsi Built a SXSW Information Command Center

Jumping right into the zeitgest stream gives you a a real-time summary of SXSW conversations. The current trend is towards eating [as it's lunch-time]. Other trending topics are arriving, drinking, connecting and partying. Messages that flow through the stream are color coded to their topic.

The “popular” feature shows the most popular words and assumes that those are also topics. Trending topics right now include Facebook, Austin and work. I would love it if this feature let me drill to the tweets so I could see what people are saying. Bigger points if I could follow the people on the fly.

The “swarm” is a geolocator that shows where tweets are coming from and who is tweeting. It’s a real-time maplication. It’s kind of cool to see people migrating to and from the convention center.

My favorite feature [and perhaps the most useful and innovative] is the party watch! Not only is it a good way to find out what is going on, you can find out how people feel about the party good/neutral/bad. I was tracking the Burlesque/Cupcakes party last night and found out that not only was there a long line, but that generally people thought it was a bust.

If we take some of the learnings from Jamie Monberg’s panel this morning which basically says that your application should be more like a pencil than a helicopter when it comes to usability. I think Pepsi has struck the right balance here. Good job Pepsi. I hope you do not let this die and figure out cool ways to use it beyond SXSW.

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.
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Is David Armano the first person to use his power of influence on the twitter community to raise money for a cause or the first one to do it really well?
Here’s how much they’ve raised to date:

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!

According to Volkswagen’s RoutanBabymaker3000, powered by Oddcast, this is what Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama’s daughter would look like. She’s a cutie!

And here’s their son. He’s a dashing young lad.

This thing is brilliant. I don’t know if it will sell minivans, but it will get people talking and making babies. Impressions Impressions Impressions!

11/27/2008 – Thanksgiving Day and my baby girl’s first birthday.

The family woke up at 8:00AM highly anticipating: Jaye’s pumpkin muffins, turkey, cranberries, Nana’s gourmet mashed potatoes with squash (and cream!), Nana’s traditional yam casserole with oatmeal and cranberries and marshmallows, (which let’s face it is a richer version of apple crisp that we pass off as a side dish) string beans, creamed onions (which never got made this year), two kinds of cranberry sauce which the kids dubbed cranberry relish and cranberry jel-ish, pumpkin, pecan and apple pie, and birthday cake.

Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade

We attempt to watch the parade with the kids, but they are too wound up. The baby goes down for a nap and Jaye takes the other 2 for a walk in the double jogger. I work on belching monkey while the baby zomps. Wife gets back from the walk, the baby wakes up from her nap and we furiously get ready (at the last minute) for overnight at Nana’s which is 45 minutes away.

The Call

Just as we are about to leave, Jaye’s phone rings. Why do we even say that phones ring anymore? Almost nobody’s phone rings. They usually sing or play a song to let us know that someone is calling. My tone for Gregory Ng is a digital sound. Jaye’s is boing-boing-boing. Anyway, I’m still popping a squat on the couch geeking away when I hear from the kitchen: “THE TURKEY IS ROTTEN!”.
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The Motrin product marketing team sat; focused and determined, around the boardroom and pondered new positions that would put them top-of-mind for every(wo)man’s pain relief.  They wanted to let consumers know that their product is the most convenient way to consistently relieve any kind of physical pain for long periods of time.

The question was: “How could this young swat team of Hugo Boss wearing, martini drinking, Wii-playing, Mazerati driving, coed-chasing, millionaire playboys and playgirls get themselves into a state-of-mind that would allow them to truly feel the pain of the consumer?” More Martinis? No. They’ve already discovered Intoxidote. More Late Night Partying? No. They’d been getting by with 4-6 hours of sleep since university.

How would they get into character so that they truly understood the problem? And then it came to them. In order to have their own headaches, they needed to take their cushy, Madison Avenue lifestyles and flip-turn them into massive migraines. Since Pete had been working a lot with Flash of late and since they had been looking for a way to test that social media thing out, they came up with this (below) in an effort to get them into trouble with the top brass and threaten their very way of life:

With Twitter moms enraged and every Google search coming up with scorching disapproval (even it is largely from one small segment of the net), the Chiefs are sure to have their thinkers working round-the-clock thinking of a new spin. Genius! The young guns had done it again. Motrin anyone?

On November 4th, Barack Obama was elected the 44th president of the United States of America.

And at least one person wanted me to let my network know that they were unhappy about it.

Let’s back up. During the election, 1,745,754 people set 4,896,031 statuses that reminded people to vote for either Barack Obama or John McCain.  Given that more than 90% of the people in my network had donated their statuses, I deemed this a good opportunity to buck the trend and set my own status to [STATUS FOR RENT].  the Michael Schneider is a charitable guy, but when it comes to my personal brand, I am a marketer and only willing to whore my status out to a candidate (or anyone else) if they are willing to trade goods, services or currency.

I set my rate to $200 for one hour or $1500 for 24 hours.  Once it became clear that Obama would be elected, one of the McCain supporters in my network told me that they wanted to rent my status and that they wanted me to set it to OBAMA BITES IT.

Given the cut rate negotiated (I wanted to be a pioneer!), I set the rule that I would be able to indicate that I had, indeed, rented my status in the message.

Has anyone else done this? How about being paid to tweet/plurk a message?