M.I.A.

I wanted to apologize because I have been missing in action for the last week or so. Things have been crazy at work and my home laptop has been broken (hopefully I still have Apple Care), so I have been negligent in my writting. I hope to make up for it this week. Please bear with me.

Thanks,

Peter

ReadWriteWeb posts technical framework for building Social Media Cheat Sheet

While slightly technical in nature, it is nothing that any moderate computer user would have trouble with. ReadWriteWeb has posted instructions on how to build a news-dashboard on any topic using social media tools and technologies freely available on the web.

Brand Monitoring Is Legit

In a post last week, I provided a pretty substantial list of social media search engines and brand monitoring tools. I finished the post by challenging the companies I mentioned to see if they could find the post I had written about them. One week later, five companies had reached out letting me know they read my post. The companies that did were; SocialMention, Backtype, SamePoint, Radian6 and WhosTalkin. It is very nice to know that these companies practice what they preach. Every brand should have the same mindset. They need to find the people who are talking, understand what is being said  and then engage them in conversation. It shows that the brand is being proactive and places value on the people willing to talk.

Advertising In A Recession

Yesterday, I came across this presentation on Adverlab. It is a presentation from the UK Economist’s sales department in what seems to be an attempt to convince their advertisers not to cut their media budgets.

ESPN.com Relaunch And Redesign

ESPN.com is out of beta and re-launched this morning. It launches with a pretty cool prestitial from Ford F-150, introducing the new site. Ford also sponsored the banner ads and video units on the homepage.

The Ultimate Social Media Search Engine

Just days after I gave my list of social media search and reputation management tools, Steve Rubel of Micro Persuasion points us to the launch of the social media search aggregator, WhosTalkin. The people at WhosTalkin made the announcement on their blog on Thursday; “After 7 months of development, we are finally unveiling the WhosTalkin.com Platform to the public! Our private beta testers gave it their all and helped us shape the direction and face of WhosTalkin.com. With their guidance made the following changes below.”

My 2009 Predictions

I would be negligent as a person who consumes so much information and spends so much time engulfed in social media not to make my own predictions for 2009. So, here they are…

1. Distribution rules.
   – New media companies will establish distribution networks before they build a single destination for their content. Companies will understand the need to put their efforts to reaching an audience across the web, instead of driving them to a single destination. As I have noted in a previous post, TVLoop is a prime example of this. Instead of creating a site similar to Hulu, where all the content lives on a single destination, they first created a distribution network reaching an audience that already existed on social networking sites. Without sounding cliche, companies need to fish where the fish are instead of exerting their efforts luring them to a single trap. The most important thing is understanding how to monetize these distribution networks and create monetary value for the content. 

The Tools To Monitor Social Media and Your Online Identity

Companies need to come to the realization that their brands exist and are shaped beyond their direct influence. For as long as brands have existed, consumers have had an opinion about them. Unlike twenty years ago, when those opinions could only be shared within small face-to-face networks, they can now be shared on a constantly expanding massive scale. Services like Twitter, Facebook and blogs enable this. Below is a fairly comprehensive list of the tools needed to track your brand and your online identity. See what they are saying about you…

ABC News Launches iPhone Application

Via Mirco Persuasion: 

As the year rolls to a close, several news organizations have added iPhone applications to the iTunes App Store. These include USA Today, NPR and Accuweather. Now throw in ABC News, which launched this morning.

The ABC News iPhone application features video clips from their national news programs, stories from the web site as well as local clips from affiliates in major cities. In addition, what’s unique about the application is that they also have a tab for breaking news and local emergency alerts.

You can download the free application here (iTunes link)

While these applications are great for content distribution and reach, I think they really need to begin to monetize these new platforms. To begin, sponsorships of these platforms could be very interesting to an advertiser.

Marley and Me – The Dog Dies…Or Does It?

The Movie Blog reports on a “viral marketing” campaign around Marley and Me. They received an “email from a girl named ‘Stephanie’ with the images you see below, trying to pass herself off as just some random person sending out a news tips (clearly she’s with the studio or marketing company working for the studio). Her email ends with ‘This is going to be worse than when they shot Bambi’s mother.'”

For some reason this does not seem like a studio funded viral marketing campaign, it just doesn’t make sense to me. Yes, viral/guerrilla marketing is supposed to create buzz and stir up some sort of controversy (which I guess it has done, since I’m writing this post), but this doesn’t seem to have any relevance to the movie, to general media campaign or the target audience.

See the photos below.