Panelist |   Jeannette Kocsis, SVP Digital Marketing, Harte-Hanks, Inc.
Panelist |   Ujjal Kohli, CEO, Rhythm  Media
Panelist |    Kyle Outlaw, UX lead, Razorfish
Panelist |    Ken Willner, CEO of Zumobi
Panelist |    Jamie Wells, Director, Global Trade Marketing, Microsoft  Mobile Advertising
Moderator |   Rob Gonda, Director of Digital Strategy & Innovation, Sapient

Topic was Mobile Web Vs. Mobile Applications; it was pretty interesting, Ken and Jamie as more vocal and Ujjal with some nice comments for debates. Jamie plugged Microsoft so much that it almost became a game, and I had to get back at him towards the end; he said he wanted to pick up a fight, crowd always loves that.

Please check it out, it’s long, but hopefully you’ll find it useful and entretaining.

Simply put, I’m excited about the potential of mobile marketing and particularly the convergence of social networking and mobile. New capabilities on phones are opening doors to limitless new marketing innovations and, simultaneously, developing countries are having entirely new segments of their population enter the digital world. I spend a lot of time in the day dreaming about how to bring entirely new digital experiences to people, but I think we need to proceed with caution. Marketers, the frequently reckless group of individuals we are, are in danger of screwing it up (again).

Consider the lessons from social media. One of the factors that caused so many marketers to fail in this space is they forgot basic web etiquette and lost sight that all successful marketing (on the modern web) is some form of value exchange. Consumers must be approached in a way that is not disruptive or disrespectful of their time. Social media was never free — the buzz created around your brand or people’s willingness to come together as a community was earned. They would tolerate a certain amount of advertising if it was a reasonable value exchange.

Mobile, the ever-present digital touch point, is for many of us not only an essential daily tool, but also a place of great privacy and perceived intimacy. We’re far more sensitive about the “value exchange” in the mobile world. In addition we don’t click ads as often because, in my opinion, we’re frequently trying to get quick digital or social experiences on the mobile device in between other events. We have frequent interaction with our mobile devices, but the sessions might be shorter.

Sometimes I like to talk about the “paradox of marketing.” As marketers we feel obligated to get our clients/brands where the eyeballs are. We then descend on that thing like vultures and in most cases we destroy that thing we originally loved and saw as an opportunity to reach consumers. (Think George from “Of Mice and Men” with the rabbit.) We’re currently in the process of killing Twitter as well.

The next great mobile revolution will be focused on the culmination of social networks, geo-location services, content creation/sharing, augmented reality and the functions that come with rapidly increased bandwidth, such as live streaming video. My fear is that marketers will be irresponsible and will use these technologies to pound consumers with horrible interruptive ads that make consumers revolt against mobile marketing. We’ve already had epic failures with some marketers’ mass SMS broadcasting and then the totally idiotic idea of connecting to discoverable Bluetooth phones when they’re in proximity of a broadcast point.

There’s so much new technology that has the potential to redefine interaction between brands and consumers, but unfortunately too many of us are still using advertising techniques that we’ve used for the last century — and they are primarily disruptive in nature.

The “techies” have done a great job of continuing to innovate and evolve the medium. Now it’s time for marketers to show the same passion for innovation and evolve with the medium, rethink our approaches and be respectful of the most intimate of digital touch points. We’re marching into holy ground with mobile marketing and if we’re not careful a select few of us will ruin it for the rest of us and this time, I don’t think consumers will be as forgiving.

Move over “Beatles: Rock Band.” Step aside “Max Payne 3.” Look out “Resident Evil 5.” Twitter and Facebook are coming to Xbox. That’s right, on June 1, the people of Xbox 360 announced they are integrating these leading social networks to Xbox Live, the company’s online multiplayer gaming and digital media delivery service.

When pitted against the likes of a motion controlled system, Twitter and Facebook are fighting an uphill battle for buzz. In fact, from what I can see the news that these social networking giants are coming to Xbox has been met with virtual silence. But if you take a few minutes to glance over the official company statements concerning these integrations you will quickly discover why this move is one of pure genius. In fact, I would go so far as to say that Microsoft might have just have just announced what could be the real deathblow to the competition.

Says Microsoft: “By bringing Twitter, Facebook and Last.fm to Xbox 360, we’re not only extending the walls of your living room beyond your home to your friends all over the world, we’re creating the definitive social network, uniting more than 300 million people to share thoughts on music, play games and tweet.”

By incorporating these social-networking tools into their gaming device, Microsoft is uniting a passionate community that comprises hundreds of millions of people and, in large part, revolves around its brand. Just think about all the possibilities this creates.

First Microsoft’s Xbox team will be able to more efficiently interact with their audience, alerting them to new games and features, unveiling unknown secrets and hints and rolling out the red carpet to upcoming gaming events, all directly to the gamer’s couch. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

More interesting is the ability for Xbox gamers to easily and effectively communicate with friends (both gamers and non-gamers), advocating both the Xbox gaming platform and new games via Facebook mini-feeds and Twitter. The new Xbox additions will allow gamers to easily comment on games they’re actively playing and share in-game screen shots with ease.

Now thousands of new messages and game images will enter these services daily and in doing so will forever change the way games are marketed. But how will it impact the in-game advertising market when the likelihood of in-game ads getting more and more media exposure thanks to these shared screenshots? The fact is these ads are going to become a hotter weapon.

Even the most dedicated gamers have interests and passions outside of the games and Microsoft has made strides towards establishing the Xbox as the definitive media hub of your home. That’s where services such as Last.fm come into play. Now gamers can turn their Xbox into a music center that has access to millions of songs that can be streamed through their device, which undoubtedly is connected the best speakers in the house. Another soon-to-be-released feature includes the ability to watch movies as a group via Xbox Live and communicate via microphone and your avatars. Combine this with the recent addition of the Netflix moving streaming service and you have one very powerful device that is finally leveraging the power of a social, tech-savvy community.

Frankly, I’m sick of talking about social media. I’ve had a long-standing view that eventually everything online would have social functionality and that it would become a commodity function of the web. For me, this is a clear indication of how much I may have underestimated how far this could go. As more and more electronic devices become internet enabled and the concept of sharing our lives via the social web becomes more commonplace, how many other devices in the near future will take on similar functionality to what Xbox is pioneering? For example, adding this functionality to a DVR could change the broadcast or movie industry profoundly as it would allow them to use social media far more effectively as a marketing channel.

I was hoping that I wouldn’t be talking about social media in the next couple of years, but as this evolves from device to device maybe this is not the end but just the beginning. Stay tuned.

There’s been a common misconception for quite sometime that social networks were only filled with teens and young adults, and although this still applies for some very youth focused networks like Habbo, the reality is social network use is now mainstream.

Inside Facebook ‘s latest data reveals some fascinating details about the Facebook’s user base. For example the number of US users over the age of 35 has double in the last 60 days, women over 55 years of age are the fastest growing demographic in the last 90 days, and the 26-44 year old age group now account for 41% of Facebook’s audience.

Facebook is just one of many social networks undergoing comparable demographic shifts. We’re living in an age where social networking and social media destinations site are big business and are easily as recognizable as major portals of five years ago. The concept of “social functionality” is being built or has already been built into most major sites and this trend will only continue as social networks de-centralize through tools like Facebook Connect.

What does all of this mean for marketers?

 
In a nut shell over 25’s are now open game on Facebook and not only are they are there in numbers but there substantially more comfortable with living in a socially networked online world.
 
I don’t think the marketing world has caught up and there’s a huge opportunity for brands to leapfrog their competition in this space.

If you look at the types of applications, groups, and friend pages that are being created in the social networking space they have a tendency to be focused on youth.  There’s a fairly wide gap in quality apps, groups or destinations that have been created by brands, as opposed to user generated, that are focused on subjects, needs, or desires that the over 25 age group have.

A quick word to the wise – if you represent an adult focused brand either internally or as an agency – you might want to look for user generated success stories first and participate in their success as opposed to starting from scratch. I think Coca-Cola hit the nail on the head recently. They leveraged the success of their existing fan base. They brought some of their best advocates and brought them even closer to their cause and inevitably made them fanatical advocates.

These kinds of shifts are not without repercussions. Our teenage kids and young adult children probably don’t want their parents watching witch boys or girls leave messages on their page, show up in photos with them, or even seeing if they’re answers on some kind of “booze” app.  Facebook has made some admirable attempts to allow us to isolate our friends into different groups to stop attrition and allow people to decide which information they share with which friends, but I don’t think this is going to be enough to stop youth from seeking out a new place to hang out in the virtual space.

The important thing to note though is that unlike a couple of years ago I don’t think youth leaving a social network is a sign of the end. Social networks are now mainstream enough to survive without being the next exciting thing (at least for a while).

Brand Overviews

• HowSociable? – A simple, free, tool that can measure the visibility of your brand on the web across 22 metrics
• Addict-o-matic – A nice search engine that aggregates rss feeds, allowing you to quickly see the areas where a brand is lacking in presence
• socialmention – A social media search engine offering searches across individual platforms (eg blogs, microblogs) or all, together with a ’social rank’ score. Whether or not the score is transparent enough to be meaningful is open to debate.

Blog Search Tools

• TECHNORATI Search – Technorati’s new search interface. Use it to find top blogs based upon inbound links only.
• TECHNORATI Advanced – Technorati’s advanced search page allows you to search for blogs (rather than posts) based on tags.
• Google Blog Search – Google’s index of blog posts. The advanced search tab allows you to search based on additional criteria. Very good for searching between specific dates.
• IceRocket – Blog search tool that also graph-ifies!
• BlogPulse – Search for blog posts by keyword. Developed by Nielsen BuzzMetrics.

Buzz Tracking

• Serph – Track buzz in real time
• Google Trends – shows amount of searches and google news stories
• Trendpedia – Create charts showing the volume of discussion around multiple topics. Generates cool graphs.
• BlogPulse Trends – Compare the mentions of specific keywords and phrases in blog posts (LEFT vs. RIGHT)
• Omgili Charts – Omgili Buzz Graphs let you measure and compare the Buzz of any term. Mostly from review sites/forums.
• eKstreme – blog data is obtained from Technorati and the social bookmarks come from del.icio.us.

Message Board Search Tools

• BoardTracker – tracks words in forums
• BoardReader – Search multiple message boards and forums.
• Omgili – Omgili is a specialized search engine that focuses on “many to many” user generated content platforms, such as, forums, discussion groups, mailing lists, answer boards and others. Omgili finds consumer opinions, debates, discussions, personal experiences, answers and solutions.
• Google Groups – Searches usenet groups.
• Yahoo! Groups – Searches all Yahoo! Groups.

Twitter Search Tools

• Twitter Search – Search keywords on Twitter which “self-refreshes”. See what’s happening — ‘right now’.
• Twitstat – Twitter Tweitgeist – Tag cloud for last 500 Tweets
• TweetScan – search for words on Twitter
• Twit(url)y – see what people are talking about on Twitter
• Hashtags – Realtime Tracking of Twitter Hashtags
• TweetBeep – Track mentions of your brand on Twitter in real time.
• Twitrratr – Rates mentions of your search term on Twitter as positive/neutral/negative
• TweetMeme – View the most popular Twitter threads occurring now.
• TwitScoop – Through an automated algorithm, twitscoop crawls hundreds of tweets every minute and extracts the words which are mentioned more often than usual and creates a tag cloud.
• Twilert – Twitter application that lets you receive regular email updates of tweets containing your brand, product, service.

Web Site Traffic

• Compete – Competitor site traffic reports. Estimates only of monthly visitor data. Best used on large high-traffic Web sites.
• Quantcast – Use this on large high-traffic Websites. It allows you to compare multiple web sites in one handy chart. Estimates only of monthly visitor data.
• Alexa – Comparative site traffic reports. Includes estimated reach, rank and page views.
• BlogFlux Page Rank – Tells you Google Page Rank for a web page. Use this to compare different websites.

Search Data

• Google Trends – Search trends and see search volume by country and region.
• Google Insights – Compare search volume patterns across specific regions, categories, and time frames.
• Wordtracker Keywords – Displays average daily search volume of a given keyword or phrase.
• Yahoo! Keyword Tool – Displays search volumes for specific keywords and phrases for previous month’s search data.
• FACEBOOK LEXICON – Displays volume of wall postings for specific term(s). Similar to Google Trends. Not great with obscure terms.
• Google Keyword Tool – Generate keyword ideas for related keywords and search volumes.

Multimedia Search

• YouTube – Search for videos and channels by keyword.
• MetaCafe – High-traffic video search engine.
• Google Advanced Video Search – Search for videos, what else?
• Flickr – Search Flickr for photos, groups or people/users.
• Truveo – Aggregate video search engine. Search videos from YouTube, MySpace, and AOL.
• Viral Video Chart – Displays top 20 most-viewed video (1, 7, 365 days). Includes view counts and charting.
• Guardian’s Viral Video Chart – Weekly roundup of what’s excellent on the web

Social Bookmarking

• Digg – Social Bookmarking, mainly for news, images and videos
• StumbleUpon – Social bookmarking – general cool stuff
• Delicious – Social bookmarking

Feed Aggregator

• Yahoo Pipes – Feed aggregator and manipulator. Set up pipes for news alerts and overviews. Generally Awesome.

URL cruncher

• Bit.ly – URL cruncher with dashboard metrics enabling measurement of number of clicks, countries clicked from, conversations around url etc

Specific Social Network Tracking

• Adonomics – Facebook analytics and developer application tracking and graphing.

Search Engine rankings

• PageRank Checker – Shows Google page ranking

Advertising and Event Tracking

• MediaHound – Competitive tracking and analysis; focus on technology B2B space

We’ve previously posted why social media analysis tools are important, and ever since I’ve been trying a bunch on them and our shortlist includes Visible Technologies, Techrigy SM2, Converseon, and Collective Intellect on the high end, and trackur and BrandsEye on the mid/low end ..  I will post a nice comparisson later this week.

However, those are very expensive tools for personal use and small businesses, so what I usually do as a free easy to use solution is set up a bunch of free services and aggregate them using Google Reader.

Start by setting up a folder for the brand you want to monitor, this of course could be yourself.

Next create 7 folders: Must Reads, Blogs, Comments, Message Boards, Social Bookmarkting, Microblogging, and General …

Folder 1 – Must Reads: this folder contains services that I feel pick up a good overview of where your name is being mentioned on the web. This is the one folder that I know if I only have a couple of minutes to spend looking that I have to hit. For this I use Google Alerts and Yahoo Alerts.

Folder 2 – Blogs: consist of most user generated content that doesn’t get picked up as news or alert. Use Google Blog Search, Blog Pulse and Technorati

Folder 3 – Comments: pick up comments and opinions of all those users who don’t write full blogs. use Backtype.

Folder 4 – Message Boards: interesting topics here; Board Reader does a good job at following conversations where people often forget to look.

Folder 5 – Social Bookmarking: follow services such as Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, and Delicious.

Folder 6 – Microblogging: I used to have twitter search and a few other things in here but I have really been impressed by the Twingly microblog search… or of course, use any of the tools from my Twitter Tools post.

Folder 7 – General: So thus far I’ve been just teasing, I like all those tools but 9 out of 10 times I don’t set any of them up … The quick solution is to use some mass social media search engine such as Serph, Keotag, and my favorite, Social Mention.

I have all this set up and it allowed me to find every tweet, every blog post, every comment about my panel at SXSW the same day they were posted. So try it for yourself, you’ll see how addicting is to find everything that everyone says about you or your brand …

And you thought my giant robot prediction was crazy....

Earlier this month I was able to visit CeBIT, the world’s largest technology show case, in Hannover, Germany. The exhibition space is absolutely enormous totally over 5,000,000 square feet. Imagine the biggest convention center building you’ve ever seen then imagine at least 20 buildings of that size and you’ll have an idea of how big CeBIT is.

I was able to meet some brilliant people from around the world, speak on a panel about social media, and be exposed to some great bleeding edge technology. All in all it was a great couple of days (even though I missed my flight on the way back).

Most buildings were focused on one subject that included green technologies, security, enterprise network technology, mobile, GPS, computers, gaming, or my personal favorite “the future parc”. The future parc was focused on innovative new technologies whether they had been productised or not. You could look at technologies at an early stage with the potential that you might see a new opportunity for it’s use.

I’ve highlighted some of my favorite items below that I saw during the conference. Some are really far out and some are fairly simple – I hope you enjoy the quick summary.

AIPTEK – This German company has produced a very small lightweight project that fits into the palm of your hand. It’s got no where near the kind of power you’d need to do a full blow presentation at good quality, but it would be great for projecting movies from an portable device like an iPod or iPhone onto the wall. Another nifty feature includes an oboard memory card so you can just store movies in the device and avoid the third party portable device all together. It’s still early days, but very cool none the less.

Global Emotion – This wasn’t actually a piece of technology, but it stood out to me for two reasons. One, I have full intentions of living in Asia this year and two I just thought it addressed a very interesting issue for westerners trying to do business in China. iWays is offering a course that allows you to learn to understand the body language and facial expressions of the Chinese people in comparision to some western body language that might cause you to mis-understand a business situation. I could see how this could be invaluable in today’s world.

GestureTek – These guys are doing some amazing interactive displays. They’re doing everything from massive table top displays that allow you to drag content around with your finger and close and expand additional content at will to touchless screens that react just based on the movement of your hands. It’s starting to feel really futuristic.

Another cool product they had on display was called “The Cube”. It was a self contained and portable system for doing projected interactive displays that react to gesture control. Imagine for example projecting a bunch of lilly pads onto the floor that when you moved near them with your feet bounced and rippled in reaction to your motion. This is definitely eye catching stuff. I still think they haven’t unleashed some top level creative talent onto it yet, so they’re still a lot of room to do some amazing things.

Fraunhofer Institute – The Fraunhofer Institute booth took the cake for me for most mind blowing innovations (with actual working prototypes). Some of the highlights included:

• Flat panel TVs that displayed near perfect 3D imagery without the need for 3D glasses.
• 3D digital dashboards for automobiles that also reacted and tracked your eye movement.
• Real-time facial expression analysis that could identify your gender and mood.
• A digital wardrobe where you could change the color and design on your clothes by just standing in front of  a special mirror.
• A bathroom designed to help manage the elderly (for example) in terms of making sure they’ve been doing their bathroom routine and taking the appropriate medications. It then reports back to any caregivers to alert them of abnormalities.
• An image search that allowed you to dynamically search for “simliar images”. The system was smart enough to identify properties like number of people in the image, consistent colors, a positioning of objects in the frame.

I’ve included some of the photos I did manage to take. I should probably also do a quick shout out to the people that invented the massage chair with matching audio and light stimulation. I couldn’t relax as well as I would have liked while testing their product because I kept thinking about how much I wanted to buy one…

Photos after the jump…

We live in a marketing world fascinated with talk of Facebook, YouTube, and MySpace. They’re the first thing that jump to mind when you discuss social media or social networks with perhaps a distant 4th being the omni-present “blogosphere“. As we descend on each network voraciously it’s easy to forget to step back sometimes and really evaluate who you’re reaching through each network.

I stumbled across a useful blog post at Ignite’s social media blog. You can download the social network demographic document I’m referencing here.

It brings together demographic data like the gender, age, education, and household income of it’s user base in conjunction with a google trends graph indicating search volume for the domain over time by country. Obviously the google trends data isn’t a clear indicator of site traffic, but it should be able to give you a good idea of the traffic a site might get in relation to another by using sites like Facebook and MySpace as a benchmark. Facebook receives about 4 million unique visitors a day these days and MySpace comes in at about 3.5 million.

Here were the data points that I found really interesting and stood out to me, but I encourage you to dig in yourself and see what you notice.

• It seemed like there was a trend for there to be a skew towards female users on social networks, but towards men on social news sites.
• I was surprised to see how heavily used business social networks are by users over 45. In most cases it seems like almost 45% of LinkedIn and Plaxo were over 45 years old.
• MySpace skews younger and towards a less educated lower income group in comparison to Facebook. It also has a disproportionately higher number of female users. (Ironically I met my girlfriend of almost three years on MySpace.)
• Across almost all instances I found the indication of usage in different countries in Africa, South America, and Asia particularly interesting particularly for networks founded in the west.
• Bebo, Lambored, and Habbo are some of the few social networks that seem to be a great place to reach youth in an environment that seems more focused on their culture.
• Anyone who reads this and doesn‘t believe social networks have gone mainstream and that it’s without question no longer skewed to youth is insane.

Google is not going anywhere … People have been predicting that Google will go down for years, but they’re still the best company out there, in terms of financial stability, innovation, culture, and business strategy … Google has 81.5% of search engine market share:

Granted, and this could take an entire post by itself, the web is getting too crowded: social media, user generated content, web 2.0, read write web, call it whatever you like, it’s generating such an huge amount of content that it’s impossible to find anything with traditional keyword based search anymore. The ideal search should be totally personalized (and again, Google has been working on this for a while and I’ve been a beta tester for some personalization features), but it should also take into account search history, relevance, social bookmarking, micro-blogging, and contextual relevance … Web 3.0 or semantic web will allow search engines to tell you what you’re looking for before you try to find it …

I digress, the point I was trying to make is that as the web grows, utilities and tools get created daily, content is generated everywhere, search will have to adapt as well. So back to Borthwick; he says that real time search will kill traditional search … How does a 140 character opinion relates to a full lenght article on Wikipedia, or to a 30 seconds video, or to a corporate site, or to financial or stock info … I mean, really Borthwick, we know you are a twitter and tweetdeck shareholder, but do you really have to make sure an absurd comment?

One of the ideas behind web 2.0 is openness… Everything has open APIs nowadays, and there are many companies using them to monitor social media … So if you really want a real time search engine, it wouldn’t be just twitter … twitter is gaining huge momentum, but they only have half a dozen million users… a real time search engine would monitor twitter, joost, brightkite, facebook, linkedin, myspace, just to name a few:

There are companies already doing this; granted, they charge some good money for these services, but it’s only a matter of time until someone (Google) taps into this and make it freely available… That said, how would Twitter kill Google again?

I’ve seen some nice analytics powered by Twitter, like the chatter during the Super Bowl mapped by state over time to match the exact events on the 4h period … I love it, don’t get me wrong, but how is that really relevant to search? Imagine pulling up search.twitter.com and all you get back is: “cardinals, steelers” … What am I supposed to do with that data? Completely irrelevant … Data was king, but now we have too much data … Context is king now …. Twitter search provides no context whatsoever, and thus is completely useless…

I almost forgot to mention, Google actually is trying to enter the micro-blogging space bundled with their really strong initiative to penetrate the mobile space … Google launched latitude last week, that combines geolocation, micro-blogging, and tap into their existing gmail user base, the Android platform, and their deal with Apple / iPhone …

Micro-blogging, mobile, open social …. Innovation is the key to success, real time search is not ready for prime time, and whoever figures out how to combine all social data with some context will have an opportunity on the search engine landscape.