When I came back from Singapore I had the pleasure of finally flying an Airbus A380 - the largest commercial airliner in the world.

I was deeply impressed with the aircraft. It flew gracefully. It was incredibly quiet. The cabin was amazing and spacious.

All these things withstanding, probably because I’m a massive nerd, I was most impressed with the in-flight entertainment system.

I have taken a series of (bad) photos of the system below. Some highlights include:

• A USB port to allow you insert a thumb drive. Most spreadsheet, presentation, or word-processing documents can be opened on the screen and modified using a full QWERTY keypad on the back of the system controller!
• An ethernet port to allow for limited Internet access (when it’s available).
• A video input jack to allow you to play video on the screen from a third party device like an iPod, iPhone, portable DVD player, or video camera.
• Language tutorials. I believe there were 19 languages available. Not a bad thing to learn on your way to Asia!
• Loads of a games with a controller that reminds me of a Nintendo NES controller. They’re some 3d games in there, a bit laggy, but not a bad way to pass the time.

A different kind of digital ecosystem....

Even though in most regions of the world, half of the top 20 websites are social media sites, companies rely primarily on web statistics and click-through rates on media campaigns to judge the health of their brands in the online world.

People are discussing your company, brands, products and services, and potentially even talking about YOU or your top people all over the digital ecosystem in places far outside of your control. Doesn’t it make sense that there are many more conversations, probably in high exponential multiples, about these subjects on sites that you have nothing to do with your business?

We’ve seen all the blunders big companies make by not monitoring and — more importantly — not reacting intelligently and expeditiously on social upheaval in the digital space. Can you business reputation afford that kind of negativity in today’s market???

The solution lies in using proper social media analysis tools. Social media analysis tools will literally scour the internet for references to certain keywords you define (your company, key people, products, services, competitors products and services, industry specific keywords, new trends you want to watch, etc) and then provide you with links to the conversations. The best solutions also allow you to define or automatically analyze sentiment around those keywords. For example, you can see if someone uses positive or negative words in conjunction with each keyword.

There are literally 50+ social media analysis vendors in the world today. Some are obviously better then others - so how do you pick the right one?

Here’s my two cents – take it or leave it.

First, evaluate the sources that the service provider reviews. The sources will include:

• Blog posts / Blog comments – Some providers only search posts. The feedback that people leave is just as important. A great tool is going to evaluate the complete “conversation” around any blog post.
• Discussion Boards / Usenet – This includes the ability to search a pre-defined set of message boards and in some cases they previously popular Usenet platform that was much popular in the earlier days of the internet.
• Product Reviews – People are providing invaluable feedback on commerce sites and general product review sites all over the web. Why not get their insight as well?
• Photo / Video Sharing Sites – YouTube and Flickr are too of the most popular sites on the web. There are enormous amounts of conversations taking place around the media being shared. Obviously there are many more media sharing sites then Flickr and YouTube to analyze, but you get the idea.
• Social Networks – Evaluating social networks can be challenging. It really depends on the system. For example, Facebook’s closed friend architecture makes it difficult to do broad searches, but systems like MySpace are far more open.
• Social News – Digg and Reddit, for example, are hugely popular sites for submitting news stories whose popularity and placement on the site are ultimately driven by user votes. People discuss their thoughts and feelings in these forums as well.
• Micro-Blogging – Even though Pounce has been declared dead. Twitter is still growing rapidly. It seems like the blogging community is particularly big on Twitter which makes monitoring the platform even more important.
• Offline Media – Some systems will even monitor print, TV, and radio for mentions of your brands and display it in the same centralized tool. This is particularly interesting, but not very common yet.

There are companies out there that generally take a couple different stances to analyzing all of this information. It’s important to note the distinctions.

Some companies research these sources, some monitor them, and some do both. The difference is that researching sources will look at what’s out there currently — while monitoring them will allow you to setup ongoing watch lists that constantly look for feedback on terms.

Some companies provide web tools that allow you to access your data in real time; others provide reports on certain dates that include their consultative thoughts, and some do both.

I strongly recommend using a firm that has research, monitoring, AND web tools. In this fast paced market, it’s important to be able to review things in near real time. Having a provider that also has consultation and analysts on staff can also be very helpful. It really depends on the nature of your business. For example, we do all of the analysis in house, but if you’re a brand and not an agency, you may not have those resources in house.

Another important feature is language. If you manage a US or UK brand, then you should be fine with only monitoring the English language. The vast majority of providers monitor English, but if you’re doing work globally as US or UK company or you’re specifically working on a non-English speaking region, then this starts to become very important.

For example, Sapient needed a platform that could not only monitor Spanish, French, German and some of the more obvious languages, but we also wanted to monitor Hindi due to our large presence in India.

Why is this all so important?

All of this rich consumer opinion can:

• Create a new series of metrics that tracks your brand’s performance. For example, so what if your banner campaign flopped? You might be the most discussed brand on Twitter or YouTube.
• Unprompted opinions tend to be more sincere. New truths will emerge from this raw data and hopefully new opportunities as well.
• Instant feedback on marketing campaigns. Does before and after testing get any faster? (Motrin staff – take notes….)
• Monitor people’s thoughts on your competitors.
• Watch what your investors might be discovering about your brand so you can fix problems before they become an issue.

I’ve become increasingly more passionate about this subject as I’ve been able to “play” with more and more platforms.  It just makes normal web analytics seem so yesterday…

If you’ve had good or bad experiences with social media analysis tools, I would love to hear your thoughts!   I also welcome any questions you may have.

Akamai has access to anonymous traffic from all over the world on all type of sites, and has access to track user paths and determine behavior. For example, they can know that a user has been looking at specific cars across multiple sites and suggest a targeted ad on a totally different publisher. The best of all, is that Akamai has access to this data without requiring any integration from publishers, no pixel images, no scripts, just raw data from their content networks.

In addition to their own data, Akamai buys Acerno, who’s specialty is its analytics software which uses anonymous consumer data to find out who’s buying what, who will most probably be interested in a certain product and - most importantly - why.

Combining user traffic, clickthroughs, views, and e-commerce analytical data, Akamai can build a model to serve extremely targeted ads and provide such service to publishers, ad networks and advertisers, and charge a share of the increased revenue or return that the service helps deliver.

Akamai made a point of stating how concerned the company is with protecting consumer privacy, stating that “all of Akamai’s Advertising Decision Solutions, as well as Acerno’s services, rely solely on anonymous and non-personally identifiable end user information”

* The TV ad was shot using 200 Toshiba Gigashot Cameras: the highest number of moving image cameras ever used in a film sequence
* This particular technique, viewing looping action in 360 degrees, has never been done before
*The time spent processing footage from 200 cameras was over four weeks - 24 hours a day seven days a week!
* In terms of data, this is one of the biggest jobs a post-production house has ever taken on - 20TB of data
* New offline and online editing software had to be specifically built for the job
* Soundtrack is provided by Crystal Castles
* Integrated campaign to promote Toshiba’s new range of upscaling products - TV, DVD and laptops - that convert standard definition TV and DVD images to near high-definition quality  [Cinematical]

It’s free and definitely worth checking out. It’s particularly cool how it works with the GPS feature.

The weighted phrases are then used to determine each candidate’s attacks. Theoretically every fight is different as it’s based on the tweets that are happening at that moment.

Check it out!

The Obama's latest campaign initiative: an iPhone Application

I’m consistently impressed with the Obama campaign’s innovative marketing campaigns. They’re not doing anything particularly revoutionary by the marketing world’s standards, but in the world of politics they might have well been transported here from the ninth dimension.

Let’s compare the campaigns.

Facebook:
Obama has over 1,000,000 members across multiple groups while McCain has around 230,000 members across multiple groups. Each campaign has multiple Facebook applications that cover everything from pridge badges for your page to tools that help you do voter outreach, but Obama has over twice the number of available applications and over 120,000 monthly users on his lead application compared to McCain’s 25,000.

MySpace:

Obama has over 687,000 “friends” on MySpace. McCain has over 162,000.

Here’s an unexpected and interesting discovery. Obama’s biggest group on MySpace has just under 7,000 users and McCain is only a couple hundred user behind that. There are multiple groups for each candidate, but nothing signficicant of any form. I’m truly suprised by the lack on initiative here. MySpace isn’t that dead…

There are multiple applications for both candidates as there were in Facebook. The big difference is that both of the most popular apps had around 10,500 users. Amusingly they were both designed by the same application designer (three cheers for capitalism) and none of the applications appeared to be officially sponsored by either party.

I was suprised to see how little the groups function was in MySpace in comparison to Facebook. Although the gap in application adoption is not quite as suprising.

Blog Exposure:

There are 40 links backs, courtesy of Technorati, to Obama’s official blog. Now here’s a stat you wouldn’t have expected. There are 1484 link backs to McCain’s official blog. I was suprised to note that neither campaign appears to be “claimed” within Technorait so I was unable to gauge either blogs authority level or ranking globally using their system. These huge shift in terms of links back to the original blog was consistent when tested within Google by searching the URL.

Both candidates are getting notable exposure in the blogosphere in terms of being discussed.

The numbers split on these two campaign blogs is quite suprising. If I’m misreading it in some way please send me an email or leave a comment and I’ll do more research and update my post.

Mobile:
Both campaigns have been doing their traditional (and annoying) automated calling services sending out notifications and theoretically positive messages.

The biggest change since previous years has been an attention to the mobile space in terms of mobile sites and text messaging services. Obama’s campaign showed a particular streak of brilliance this year when they publically announced that the running mate would be announced via text message. This generated some media buzz and drove the subscription to their SMS service up substantially. After the running mate was announced subscribers were invited to send in their zip code which would obviously prove very valuable in the coming months.

The latest addition to their mobile strategy has been the iPhone application shown above. It’s very useful in terms of the information it provides, but from a developer standpoint I can state that it appears to have been designed and developed very well. The quick facts function is probably the most interesting as it allows politically opinionated people to win most of arguments (which I tend to avoid at all costs).

Search Engine Marketing:
Obama’s campaign has spent almost $3.5M up to the end of August on just paid search campaigns ($5.5M if you include display ads) according to the Federal Exchange Commission. Unfortunately McCain has not broken out their media spend so I can report exact figures.

I searched a myriad of search terms and wasn’t able to find a broad reaching keyword strategy for either candidate on a lot of hot subjects. Although their organic rankings were both very strong they could have shown a greater level of foresight in terms of monitoring hot subjects in the press.

Online Tool Set:
Both campaigns have a fairly impressive toolset to help supporters reach out to their friends, but the level of  training that is available in both text and video formats to Obama supporters takes the cake.

And Let’s Not Forget:
The first truly brilliant move of either of the campaigns was releasing the video “Yes We Can” on YouTube. Although not officially part of Obama’s campaign it’s important not to forget the amount of press Obama Girl had on the campaign. You can view an interesting interview of Obama Girl on YouTube here.

Obama’s also the number one person on Twitter with over 95,000 “followers” compared to John McCain’s 2100+. I’ve noticed around a 3,000 person increase on Obama since my last post on the subject.

Summary:

Obama has really been levering social media far more successfully than McCain. The quality of their digital marketing work in both design and technological prowess is superior and they appear to be demonstrating well planned and executed strategy on par with today’s top marketing campaigns.

Sadly, I realized after I dug into this subject that I could have wrote about 30 pages with ease. I hope you found this top level analysis helpful.

My gut tells me they were not able to run it like this on many sites, but I thought you’d enjoy it anyway. As always BannerBlog had it first…

http://www.bannerblog.com.au/2008/07/bk_banner_of_doom.php

Social media has played a massive role in recent US politics and its influence will continue to increase over time. Although this trend permeates social networking, blogger outreach programs, and even more traditional banner ads across both of these mediums, the use of Twitter is particularly fascinating. For example, the number one position on Twitterholic.com, which tracks the most popular Twitter profiles, has belonged to Barack Obama for the past month and half.

In terms of demographic, social media is no longer something that is skewed towards the younger demographic who have traditionally had lower voter turn-outs. It now extends to the many layers of the voting demographic and even has an influence on mainstream media, which proves that it is targeting people outside of social media’s traditional reach. Indeed, social media has the capability of seeding public sentiment in real time into web properties that people visit on a daily basis, and these are typically sites that people visit more often than news sites. Personally, I believe there will be a growing and consistent trend between successful politicians and those that focus on strong internet and social media strategies.

The UK’s use of social media sites runs in parallel to the US so unique cultural differences will rarely make a difference. Indeed, it would be foolish of UK politicians not to adopt similar strategies or what’s more, create ambitious strategies that could set the trend for future US campaigns.

Great YouTube Ad

I’ve seen two really first class uses of YouTube as a marketing tool recently and I thought you might enjoy seeing them as well. The first ad is for the new “Wario Land: Shake It” title on the Wii. The video which shows game play and the associated Wii hand motions also slowly starts to shake the entire YouTube page to pieces sending text and content flying. I’ve seen concepts like this before, but by being the first on YouTube it came on as totally unexpected which made it memorable and interesting.

http://www.youtube.com/experiencewii

The second ad for Samsung Instinct telephone. It uses some of the new functionality in YouTube to link between multiple videos. The series of videos are presented in a “Choose Your Own Adventure” style with amusing and racy content that is not only entertaining but demonstrates functionality on the phone successfully. Make sure you watch the video to the end to view the additional functionality.

http://br.youtube.com/watch?v=HoOCiaxIZF4

My congrats to the agencies behind both ads. In fact if you see this blog post and you worked on one of these send me an email. I’d love to take you out for a drink in recognition of your original thinking.