This past Sunday evening I was able to sit in on with The TechMonks Podcast and recap the Triangle AMA Digital Marketing Camp. The show hosts Damond Nollan @damondnollan and Tim Arthur @timarthurattended the event as well as interviewed several of the speakers.
Digital Media
How Social Is Your TV?
4 comments Written on February 26th, 2012 by Brian McDonald
Categories: Digital Media, Events, Marketing, Social Media
Categories: Digital Media, Events, Marketing, Social Media
At the February Triangle Social Media Club event I had my eyes opened to the world of “social TV.” The speakers were Gregory Ng (@gregoryng), Tim Arthur (@timarthur), Damond Nollan (@damondnollan) and the MC was Ryan Boyles (@therab). The panel showed what their entertainment centers consisted of, their top 5 shows and one guilty pleasure as well as shared insights, wants and desires of social TV.
The rise of digital enabled devices has allowed for greater integration of social networks and websites with our TVs. All four on the panel had a gaming device such as Wii or Xbox to stream video but the setups were different in other areas. For instance Damond’s strategy was to reduce his monthly entertainment expense while allowing everyone in his household to have their own streaming device. While Greg preferred to subscribe to Direct TV for sports as well as the ability to watch live events as they happen.
The presentation embedded at the end of this post gives a great view into the different setups. The panel also listed their favorite shows and guilty pleasures. All four panelists picked “The Walking Dead” as one of their top 5 shows. While I’m not a fan of Zombie genre, I was interested to learn why they were enthusiastic. The show had a big following and even the largest cable debut of the season. Combined with fan chats, celebrity after show appearances; The Walking Dead created a community of fans and a forum.
That’s where social TV has real potential. It’s one thing to check in to a show and share that on Twitter and Facebook. This can lead to shared interests among your social circle. But where it takes off is creating a true fan community that works similar to bulletin board forums of the early 90s. Ryan explained how super fans create private blogs on Tumblr with their own language and rely heavily on aliases. Most best practices posts will tell you to be authentic, but in the world of social TV DISQUS did research that showed that alias communities had greater interaction and participation.
What does all of this mean to marketing and advertising folk like me? It represents a new opportunity to build relationships with fans in a new way. While Ryan recanted GaryVee’s mantra of “marketing ruins everything” it does not have to. The panel discussed how media companies can build respect and report with users versus just selling to them. For instance, what if a social TV app could provide live channel notifications and share that among friends? The idea that sharing old school living room experience allows for more intimate content and engagement with a global audience is truly unique.
Tonight the Oscars is being broadcast and I’ve already seen hype around the fact that this will be the most social and interactive award show to date. That’s an easy claim if the majority of last year’s activity was Twitter and Facebook chatter. But as social TV develops there is opportunity to engage fans and talent in real time.
I want to thank Ryan for hosting the panel and sharing the presentation on his SlideShare space as well as the other panelists for sharing their frank and honest views on the tools, technology and changing landscape of social TV! Plus Greg’s guilty pleasure of “I Didn’t Know I was Pregnant” was classic! Also I was finally able to meet Tim Arthur in person after several months of chatting on Twitter and blogs and found out that we have many similar interests including Breaking Bad and Californication, two of my favorite shows! Also thanks to WNCN NBC 17 for hosting the event and studio tour from Kim Green @producingk.
Social TV – Our New Watercooler Conversation
View more presentations from Ryan Boyles
6 Content Curation Tools For Your Daily Digital Diet
2 comments Written on January 11th, 2012 by Brian McDonald
Categories: Digital Media, Marketing, Mobile, SEO, Social Media, Strategy
Categories: Digital Media, Marketing, Mobile, SEO, Social Media, Strategy
You hear that content is king and the latest curations applications and tools allow you to take advantage of the content kings to manage your daily diet of news and information. With the large volumes of content being produced today by everyone from the major networks, businesses and local bloggers and enthusiasts, individuals have a huge amount of content to curate and share with others. RSS readers where the early innovators in curating the constant firehouse of information into our shotglass attention span but they were cumbersome and text heavy.
A few years ago I wrote about how aggregators like NetVibes and Pageflakes were allowing us to create mash up pages in minutes. These tools are great for listening stations and but lack the intelligence that the new generation of curation tools offer. These tools are also driving clicks like never before. These curation tools are helping us fill Facebook and Twitter streams, driving significant traffic volume, making corporate brands take notice. I’ve even noticed how Delicious has updated their interface since the last update a few months ago with the release of stacks.
Scoop.it
Scoop.it is a nice tool to gather and distribute content from around the Web based on your interests and passions. Scoop.it creates a page with previews and links to content you “scoop”and has good community tools for following other curators. Most of these sites have the ability to “Re” post content another user has already flagged. Scoop.it has some great B2B curators in specific vertical markets and found it to be good resource to gather industry-specific content.
Marty Smith's "Business Intelligence Revolution" on Scoop.it
Paper.li
Paper.li seems to be the most used of the content curation tools among people I follow on Twitter and probably has the most traffic of any This site has really done the best job of attracting uses and generating links. The aspect of publishing a daily paper based off your articles of interest and giving recognition for the source as a key contributors via Twitter is both annoying and brilliant. Even though I don’t want a daily paper for myself I find myself clicking through to friends papers and enjoying the clean interface. And if you use Paper.li change your title to differentiate the daily tweets other than the typical tweets of “The YOUR NAME HERE Daily is out…”
Phil Buckley's "The 1918 Daily Amalgamation" on Paper.ly
Pinterest is the latest media story as it started popping into the list of sites driving the most traffic on the internet last month. For the most part the initial growth was driven by women using it as a virtual scrapbook for visual items of interest such as clothes, interior design and food. Pintrest is one part bookmarking and one part image gallery with a clean interface that allows you to create a more engaging curation. You can only “pin” images to a board, but the link is preserved to allow for the click thereby driving traffic to the source site. Also other community members can post comments similar to Facebook wall posts threads. Pinterest is different from traditional bookmarking sites like Delicious, Digg and StumbleUpon in that it pins an image, movie or other media object with link to page. However the ability to visually scan designs and rich media content is very nice.
Zite
My wife @MCDezigns showed Zite to me and we both love it. Zite not only has the best content for what I’m interested in reading it also has great one-click bookmarking, easy social sharing with flexibility using multiple accounts. I recently downloaded the iPhone app and use it everyday to quickly scan articles of interest and either read or bookmark them to read later in the day. Zite has simple thumbs up/down approval tool similar to Pandora to customize your content. The stream will even draw from your social stream with lesser presence than Flipboard. Zite has a large library of Sections to choose from and they have groomed their content well in terms of quality and frequency.
Flipboard definetly captured everyones attention when iPads first came out. Using simple swipe navigation it offers a great magazine of news and social media content. For social media content I like how photos are previewed in larger sizes and it’s easier to view photos than on your Facebook wall or Twitter stream as well as photos sites like Instagram. The latest release allows for multiple accounts so that you can share on iPad for multiple users as well as new iPhone version.
Google Currents
The latest entry tinto the curation space is Google Currents. Matching the new Google interface design it works best with Google+ but has sharing and bookmarking integration. No doubt that curation and clicks resulting from Google Current users are are going to factor into how the Google ranking juice is made. Currents has a library of major content sites as well as the ability to pull from any RSS feed in your Google Reader. There is also a trending list of links that you can browse that is similar to search results you would see in the “News” result of a Google Search. The clean interface and design is similar to Flipboard and Zite with the ability to simply swipe between pages and topics. What I think Google should have done was skip the redesign of Google Reader and instead migrated it into Currents with a website interface.
The last three tools listed here are only avaiable as a tablet or smartphone app. Scoop.it, Paper.ly and Pinterest all offer websites to create your pages and manage your account. These tools have bookmarklets and other simple tools to tag a page and categorize the content.
What’s your content curation tool of choice?
How Online Marketing Drives Offline Success Infographic
No Comments » Written on November 3rd, 2011 by Brian McDonald
Categories: Digital Media, Marketing, Social Media
Categories: Digital Media, Marketing, Social Media
This infographic from KISSmetrics shows and provides case studies on how online marketing can drive offline sales. It’s a great starting point when working with all types of business, large and small to determine where to start your digital and social media planning to meet business goals.
Click on the graphic below for an enlarged view:
About The Author: Sean Work is the marketing coordinator at KISSmetrics. Follow him on twitter (@seanvwork) and ask him for a free cup of coffee :)
Mobile Site, App or Both?
No Comments » Written on October 28th, 2011 by Brian McDonald
Categories: Digital Media, Marketing, Mobile, Strategy
Categories: Digital Media, Marketing, Mobile, Strategy
With mobile usage and traffic growing by huge numbers recently there is a rush to create mobile friendly versions of your website. But it does not end there, what about a iPhone or iPad app? What about other smartphones: Droid, Blackberry, etc? Just thinking about it can make your head spin!
I’ve had many discussions with my peers and others about what the best choice is and always come back to the same answer. It’s contingent on your customers both current and present. Here are the questions I find myself asking those seeking advice on mobile marketing.
- Should you have a mobile website? The answer to this one is easy, yes! At the very least having a mobile site gives your brand a presence that can be viewed on mobile devices. With the continued growth of smarthphones and our demand for information, having a mobile website just makes sense. What you should do with your mobile site plan is determine what information is necessary to have on it. You don’t need everything your main website has. Two key items I find are a must are easy to find contact information including your phone number and your location addresses so people can call and find you on the road.
- Does your company or brand need an iPhone app? An app is different from a mobile website in that it does more. An app should have some functionality that mobile users need and provide value for mobile users. Creating an app because everyone else is doing it is a waste of money. Plus people will download it, use it once that’s it. Do some creative brainstorming around your product and service and ask what simple tasks would I use on a smartphone.
- What about an iPad app? If your website is good then it can be viewed in Safari or Opera browsers on an iPad and you don’t need an app. But if you can come up with creative uses mentioned in the previous point above, then maybe you have the basis for creating an iPad app.
- Should you design for Apple iPhone, Droid or Blackberry? The answer to this question depends on your customers. Are they iPhone or Droid users? Or even the last of the BlackBerry die hards? Google Analytics has a Mobile report that shows how many visitors are viewing your site and the device they are using. Another way to find out is put a survey on your website or create an email campaign and ask them.
As with any interactive project flesh out what your requirements are after brainstorming. Don’t just tell your agency you want a mobile app or site, tell them why it’s important to your business. They will appreciate it and most likely you’ll get a better end product. Also if you’re seeking proposals from several vendors a good requirements doc makes it much easier to get accurate price quotes and a finished product that makes you and your customers happy!
Google Analytics Webinar
No Comments » Written on September 30th, 2011 by Brian McDonald
Categories: Digital Media, Events, Marketing
Categories: Digital Media, Events, Marketing
This week I had the opportunity to sit in with JT Moore @j_t_moore of ASPE ROI @ASPE_ROI for an hour long webinar on Google Analytics. We discussed how to get started with Google Analytics and explained some of its basic features including:
- How to set up Google Analytics on your site.
- What Bounce Rate means and how to lower it.
- Analyzing and drilling down the data.
- Tracking keywords.
You can listen to the archived webcast online. Drop me a comment if you do and let me know what you liked or thought was missing.
Thanks to JT and everyone as ASPE for inviting me to do the webcast I had a great time.
The Johnny Cash Project | Crowdsourcing an Epitaph
Last week during the first Monday Night Football game I watched the ad for The Johnny Cash Project on ESPN. I was blown away for two reasons.
- I’m a huge Johnny Cash fan.
- It’s the best use of crowdsourcing I’ve seen to date.
Now I will admit that I have not been a big fan of crowdsourcing for marketing purposes. But I don’t want to bash crowdsourcing for marketing and communications (that will come in a later post!).
What I want to do is focus on why The Johnny Cash Project is such a great use of crowdsourcing. It allows users to contribute to a single finished project that is a work of art. Not a shoe or a video download service, but one of the greatest songwriters and legends of country and Americana music. The Johnny Cash Project allows users to draw a single frame of what will be a music video for Cash’s final song, “Ain’t No Grave.” There is already music and archival footage that has been assembled for the project.
There are several drawing tools available to draw your frame. No fancy Photoshop tools here. There are brush shapes and sizes and the the choice of colors are white, black and shades of gray. You have to be very creative and several submissions demonstrate that. Once you feel comfortable with your drawing you can submit it for consideration in the finished video.
Another interesting part of the project is the documentary footage consisting of interviews with different artists and regular users that were moved by Cash and submitted frames. It’s simple and shows the emotion that Cash created in his fans, the feeling of despair, hope and life that comes through Cash’s baritone voice and life experiences. My favorite quote about Johnny was that he could read a matchbook cover and make it sound interesting.
The end result is that all the portrait frames are strung together and played in sequence over the song. The portraits will create a moving, ever evolving homage to Johnny. The other cool factor is that as new people discover and contribute to the project, their submissions will update the video playback, so it’s never the same video twice.
