Spymaster makes fun of Twitter
Posted on: 2 June, 2009
- In: internet | social networks
- 1 Comment
Spymaster
, the somewhat controversial and addictive Twitter-based game obviously doesn’t work nearly as well when Twitter is down. In fact, it doesn’t work at all. The creators have made a fun little Fail Whale graphic of their own, indicating the the game will be down until Twitter comes back up.
“The Directorate can’t assassinate the failwhale,” the message on the site reads. Funny, but this is a serious problem for a growing number of services that are built using Twitter as their backbone. Even FriendFeed looks like a ghost-town right now with no Twitter messages coming in.
Did we really get so attached to this service in our day to day lives?
I’m sick of people asking me to make things go viral. Here’s what’s next, friends and critics: a return to the desk. That’s right. A real job. Social media as a tool and not as a fancy shiny object.
What are people doing taking titles like “Social Media Manager?” To me, this is a scary thing. Why? Because it’s like being the fax manager or the email manager. You’re naming yourself after a tool.
The jobs where you might use social media tools exist in the marketing department, in the PR department, in customer service, and in several other parts of the company. Maybe this sounds wired. Maybe it is. I guess my big point is that we’ve got to shift this from “gee whiz” to “this is what we do to build business relationships.”
Push away from meaningless metrics and point your efforts towards moving the bottom line. It’s absolutely imperative that this become a “real” job instead of something cool.
What you want people to do for you
Posted on: 31 May, 2009
If you think about it, call-to-actions are really a natural result of most human interactions. You call a friend to chit-chat and before you hang up, you ask her to have lunch together tomorrow. She thinks about her schedule for a moment and says “Sure, let’s do that”.
Even in day to day interactions, people react to call to actions that are coherent with what they are currently feeling or thinking. It flows on from an initial encounter: Here is how you can get even more of the same. Here is how you can continue down the path of success. Here is how you can share your love (or hate) for this brand.
If you want someone to spread the word about your content or service, ask them directly. They will do it even if you don’t give them an incentive. This is what I believe from experience.
Modesty and pride are usually the main obstacles. You don’t want to come off as too conceited and you’re too proud to beg. So you publish free content and give away free tools without asking for anything in return. But if you’re interested in reputation or revenue, this won’t help you at all.
If you give away free content, you should not only ask why you are doing so but learn to embed call to actions in some of them. Don’t be too modest or proud to tell someone what you want them to do for you. And never underestimate the power of reciprocity.
The infamous GDrive
Posted on: 10 February, 2009
- In: future internet | google
- 3 Comments
The Google Drive, or “GDrive”, could kill off the desktop computer, which relies on a powerful hard drive. Instead a user’s personal files and operating system could be stored on Google’s own servers and accessed via the internet. Or so i have been readeing the last past weeks.
The long-rumoured GDrive is expected to be launched this year and is beeing described it as “the most anticipated Google product so far”. It is seen as a paradigm shift away from Microsoft’s Windows operating system in favour of “cloud computing”.
The GDrive would follow this logic to its conclusion by shifting the contents of a user’s hard drive to the Google servers. The PC would be a simpler, cheaper device acting as a portal to the web, perhaps via an adaptation of Google’s operating system for mobile phones, Android.
What do you think? Will we get to the point where our computer will be more likely software rather than hardware?
The psychology behind it all
Posted on: 9 February, 2009
For people that use the internet frequently it is easy to identify valuable websites from the rest. When you see a website for the first time you make an instant judgement on its quality and relevance. This first impression is then carried over to other parts of the website, like content and professionalism.
When you break it down, web design is simply the manipulation of content and images on a website to appeal to the perceptions of a target audience. The psychology community has conducted studies since the early days of the internet. Take a look at the Barack Obama website – for me, the attraction was instant! And I can’t see that website looking as good if it were in any other colour.
All humans have a psychological need to feel secure, and on the internet that need is multiplied considerably. Taking this into account, websites must incite a feeling of security within a visitor before they will take any action on your website. There are many ways to accomplish this – disclaimers, privacy policies, brand-name security logos, etc – but the best way is to simply be upfront about all aspects of your website, product or business.
Pay attention in the first few seconds of visiting a new website and take note of why you like it and what they have done that is effective. After a while you will begin to pick up smaller details which is really what online marketing and web design is all about.
Fire the Client From Hell
Posted on: 9 February, 2009
- In: internet | marketing
- 2 Comments
If you get a haircut and you don’t like it, you still pay. If you get a massage, and it was a crappy one, you still pay. If you eat at a restaurant and the food just wasn’t what you were hoping for, you still pay. Hotel rooms, car washes, concerts… The same concept applies for creative services.
I assume the client reviewed my portfolio before he/she hired you. (If they didn’t, they’re not a smart consumer, which isn’t my fault.) They should know i would produce work in the same style and of the same quality. But whay do i do in case on of the clients doesn’t like my work? How can you, somehow put in the breif a section that helps you find out more about the type of person you are dealing with?
Windows 7 has big problems
Posted on: 21 January, 2009
Nobody seems to be talking about the biggest problem of all with Windows 7. Each and every application has a different menu system: messenger, media player, paint/wordpad, calculator, picture viewer etc.
I can’t see how this could be a feautre nore a bug. 🙂 What do you think?
Buzz Marketing
Posted on: 7 January, 2009
- In: advertising | marketing
- 2 Comments
The author of the book, Mark Hughes, is the host of Buzz Factor, a radio talk show, and the CEO of Buzzmarketing, a consulting firm. He has also been an executive in Half.com and Pepsi.
The book is divided into sixteen chapters with an introduction and an afterword. Inside it are anecdotes and accounts of how some big brands and not-yet big brands have used buzz marketing, making readers feel like gossip-mongers peeping into the practices of big companies. This approach and the writer’s easy-going style turn this business book into a fun-to-read but very informative and serious work.
When I started reading the first few pages I knew, as a reader, this was a book I shouldn’t miss, since the premise of the book and its entertainment value defied convention. The book was letting its readers peak into those other avenues of marketing that worked better and possibly faster. The aim of this book is to teach its readers buzz marketing so they can “grow faster, expand further, and do it for one-tenth of what it costs by more traditional means.”
Buzz marketing needs people to use their gray matter and steer away from conventional, pushy business tactics. Traditional advertising spends more, gains less. Buzz marketing spends much less, yet gains more cash and people’s trust, because buzz marketing is creative in seeking and employing opportunities.
Apple is leaving Macworld
Posted on: 17 December, 2008
Apple has just announced that this January’s MacWorld event will be the company’s last, and that Steve Jobs won’t be giving the event’s much-anticipated keynote. I find this fascinating. First there is the opinion that Apple wants to lunch products as they are ready to sell and not wait to make a major announcement in January or July. Also rumors say that this decision has to do with Steve Job’s health.
Apple is reaching more people in more ways than ever before, so like many companies, trade shows have become a very minor part of how Apple reaches its customers.
It is because of the trade shows that blogs across the land halt EVERYTHING and dedicate that hour or so for headlining everything Apple announce. They are a major player in providing the Hype that Apple has received, most in part due to the trade shows, the “secrets”, the skepticism. On the other hand there is nothing stopping Apple hosting their own special events, as they often do. They get the same hype, and cost a lot less. So the answer can not be here, in the lack of marketing ROI.
Microsoft runs its developer conference and Apple will no doubt continue to run its WWDC event. But what can be the motive for this decision that created a lot of rumor among fans all over the internet?
Everybody is making predictions for 2009 (or not). This is always a hot trend for the end of the year. But what about 2010 and beyond? Here is what i think:
- Voice recognition and touch user-interfaces with the internet will be more prevalent and accepted by 2020.
- Tribes will be defined by social enclaves on the Internet, rather than by geography or kinship.
- Copyright will be dead in the digital world.
- Most people will have happily traded their privacy for consumer benefits such as increased convenience and lower prices.
- In a reaction to the virtual world we will establish zones (bars, clubs) where reality is not augmented.
What do you think will happen?
WordPress 2.7
Posted on: 16 December, 2008
The first thing you’ll notice about 2.7 is its new interface. From the top down, we’ve listened to your feedback and thought deeply about the design and the result is a WordPress that’s just plain faster. Nearly every task you do on your blog will take fewer clicks and be faster in 2.7 than it did in a previous version.
Next you’ll begin to notice the new features subtly sprinkled through the new interface: the new dashboard that you can arrange with drag and drop to put the things most important to you on top, QuickPress, comment threading, paging, and the ability to reply to comments from your dashboard, the ability to install any plugin directly from WordPress.org with a single click, and sticky posts.
One thing i find interesting about this version besides the all talked about auto-update feature is that every screen is customizable. Let’s say you never care about author on your post listings — just click “Screen Options” and uncheck it and it’s instantly gone from the page. The same for any module on the dashboard or write screen.
Here is the official video showing more of the options:
Soon after Tasks and SMSes, Gmail has just added a its own viewer that lets you view PDFs in your Web browser. It’s blazing fast, and it does include a search function, and lets you download or print the PDF if you really need to.
There are two other benefits to this, the first being the updated page view which lets you hop around the document a whole lot faster. The other is the built-in zoom, which scales the text to fit your monitor with a higher degree of detail than the text resizer found in your browser.
However before you try it out yourself you need to know the new PDF viewer doesn’t seem to work in Firefox, but works just fine in Chrome. Is this the beginning of a pattern of Google not playing nice with Mozilla?
How to make viral campaigns
Posted on: 8 December, 2008
- In: advertising | internet
- 4 Comments
It’s hard to make a viral campaign that works. But metromind had it figure it out quite nicely this weekend. They took an event from last week that had the potential to become viral. A movie clip feautering a famous singer swearing. They acted quickly and transformed it in clip promoting some art galleys and projects.
The initial clip has about 20.000 250.000 views on youtube and theirs has 10.000 in just 2 days. So great timing, with the right characters and the right product do make a great viral.
Later edit: As Adrian is saying in the comments the initial video had a little bit more comments. 🙂 Still great work and i am sure you will get there in the next couple of days.
Local Search Engine
Posted on: 7 December, 2008
MPI lunched last week okidoki.ro, a search engine aimed to take google’s place as the number one romanian search enigne. A great PR move by Orlando Nicoara. In Buzz Marketing, Mark Hughes describes this as being the “David and Goliath” tehnique.
And i agree, even from a business perspective it’s a great time to take on the big players. But they are a long way from getting market and mind share. Trilulilu did it about a year ago with a lame copy of youtube. But they had the entrepreneurial spirit pushing them foreword, people supported them as a start-up not as a media group.
I am sure Adrian Sarbu has the funds to support this project for a long time but without some real relevence in the search results i predict that by the end of 2009 we will see roll-over display ads on the search results or worst: tooth paste commercials behind the text.
Advertising as entertainment
Posted on: 6 December, 2008
A big discussion at Geek Meet was online advertising in 2009. Obviously, advertisers buy ads to gain exposure and improve their bottom line. Some of the big players may be primarily concerned with brand awareness and general exposure, while others are only concerned with sales of products.
Keeping the desires of advertisers in mind throughout the design process is critical if the website is going to be selling ads directly to other businesses. AdSense and affiliate ads can be placed just about anywhere on a website, although the results will vary, but direct ad revenue will depend on what advertisers feel they are getting for their money.
I personally think that in 2009 ads will pay more attention to user interaction; at what extent is the user engaged in the marketing process. So we are going to see a lot of banners that will lose the “click here” approach and tend to promote advertising as entertainment on the web.
Customize your product, interact with widgets or any other kind of interaction for the user will benefit advertisers. Also a big step will be the “cost per action” method applied on the Romanian market. This is going to work taking into consideration the big number of blogs and the influence they had in 2008.
I persoanally think that 2009 will be an interesting year and with a little mantality shift advertisers can contribute themselves to the gowth of the local internet scene.
Geek Meet Craiova #2
Posted on: 2 December, 2008
Last Friday i was in Craiova attending the local Geek Meet. Alin Mechenici did a great job organizing the event and i had a great time with the local developers there.
I had planned a 10 min speech about the trends in online marketing for 2009 which ended up being a 45 minutes question and answers spree. Most of the topics concerned display ads, advertising using blogs and the Romanian banner industry. You can see my presentation embedded (sorry i didn’t have time to translate):
One interesting thing i saw there was that leaving aside the great projects and great people working in / with online there, they lack team spirit. In my opinion they have one chance: to grow the local market and promote Internet in Craiova by any means. In stead they fought for almost 2 hours about who has the biggest / nicest/ most visited site or blog. They are very passionate but they have to learn to work together.
Also speaking were Cosmina Stefanache, Cornel Mitroi (who really needs an investor for his project 😉 ) and Chris Heilman.
Google kills Lively
Posted on: 20 November, 2008
…despite all the virtual high fives and creative rooms everyone has enjoyed in the last four and a half months, we’ve decided to shut Lively down at the end of the year. It has been a tough decision, but we want to ensure that we prioritize our resources and focus more on our core search, ads and apps business.
Google’s announcement doesn’t offer much detail about the reasons for the shutdown, noting only that Lively was an experiment, and that the time has come for Google to “focus more on our core search, ads and apps business.” Lively launched with a bang back in July with talk that it could become a Second Life killer. However limited support, poor uptake not helped by only being available to Windows users, and a general disinterest in the product has seen some speculating about its future for a while.
The world of Google – everything on which Google focuses its time and effort – is built on relevant data. With a small user based and no reason to analyze such little data the move seems logical. It could also be a business decision that sooner or later had to be made.
This is an important reminder that Google has a larger goal in mind.
The Semantic Web
Posted on: 19 November, 2008
Yesterday i went to ROCS’08 to see “Web 2.0 – technology and applications”. Laurian Gridinoc had a very nice presentation on “Semantic Web” that raised my interest on the subject.
For those of you that never heard f this the Semantic Web is an evolving extension of the World Wide Web in which the semantics of information and services on the web is defined, making it possible for the web to understand and satisfy the requests of people and machines to use the web content.
At its core, the semantic web comprises a set of design principles, collaborative working groups, and a variety of enabling technologies. Some elements of the semantic web are expressed as prospective future possibilities that are yet to be implemented or realized.
To get an idea of this watch the video below:
But all this seems a nice utopia. How can companies really benefit from this? The semantic Web puts data into semantic formats on the fly, and targets ads based on the meaning of data with a high degree of accuracy.
This is good news for the user – no more embarrassing keyword results, no more Viagra ads on sites about feminism, and an end to annoying cookies.
Do you agree that the Semantic Web will bring even more effective advertising to the Web?
Google and the recesion
Posted on: 18 November, 2008
It’s interesting that Google is rolling out cool products like this for competing mobile devices like iPhone before their own, Android, but it does make sense. When you talk about getting rapid adoption, it doesn’t make sense to target less popular devices first, even when one happens to be your own.
You can find the free Google application in the iPhone App Store. Once you’ve either installed this application for the first time, or had it updated, you are ready to start searching with your voice. Launch the application, put it to your ear, then speak your search query to give this feature a try. I expect to see a similar feature for the G1 phone.
Where is Google going with all this? Before the recent downturn of the economy, people wondered if Google would be affected negatively by such an incident. It was a valid question, since Google’s revenue is almost entirely in the hands of companies advertising spend, and it’s easy to speculate about what would happen to those budgets.
It’s conceivable that Google will see less of an impact by these hard economic times compared to some, but I’ve got a feeling that they might even thrive if these hard times persist. As Mihai Dragan was saying companies will be looking for more efficient ways of advertising and you don’t have to look further than Google pay per click services for this. I also think Google will be seeing a higher than expected adoption rate for Google Apps.
tudor.totolici 
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