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.

The most popular matrix code is a QR Code, created by Japanese corporation Denso-Wave in 1994. The “QR” is derived from “Quick Response”, as the creator intended the code to allow its contents to be decoded at high speed. QR Codes are common in Japan, where they are currently the most popular type of two dimensional codes.

QR Codes are used in a broad context, including both commercial tracking applications and convenience-oriented applications aimed at mobile phone users (known as mobile tagging). QR Codes storing addresses and URLs may appear in magazines, on signs, buses, business cards or just about any object that users might need information about. Users with a camera phone equipped with the correct reader software can scan the image of the QR Code causing the phone’s browser to launch and redirect to the programmed URL. This act of linking from physical world objects is known as a hardlink or physical world hyperlinks. Users can also generate and print their own QR Code for others to scan and use by visiting one of several free QR Code generating sites.

I always thought that every Nike ID shoe should come with a Matrix Code for anyone to be able to scan it and launch the exact configuration to recreate it.

The latest addition to data mobility is the Audio Barcode: data embedded in sound waves that’s picked up by target devices with a microphone — mobile phones, for example –, analyzed by special software, and then extracted.

Data to be transmitted is superimposed (embedded) by Acoustic OFDM, the technology behind Audio Barcode, in such a way that it is not detected by listeners. With a transmission rate greater than 1kbps, a URL or simple text transmission takes a mere one to two seconds.

This technology has many uses… from being able to append artist urls to every song, dynamically embed DRM information, or even combine this with audio/visual such as movies to allow sending out product information on specific scenes without having to display or affect the video at all… Just think how much information can be embedded everywhere with all these techniques… I already use 2d Barcode applications on my iPhone and I can’t wait to install an Audio Bar reader.

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”

For starters ARM devices will be able to view the same Flash sites that traditional Internet users do as opposed to the Flash Mobile only sites they see now. This is somewhat like what the iPhone browser did for regular website browsing.

Smart marketers will still offer experiences that are designed for a mobile experience (i.e. smaller screens, potentially slower bandwidth) but now they won’t be limited in terms of the complexity or media richness. Flash 10 will allow rich mobile experiences that will easily stream video (HD and regular) and integrate with systems like Flash Media Server 2 for collaborative multi-user experiences.

Kevin Lynch from Adobe shows a demo on a G1 after the jump. Now I just want to see it on a iPhone!

I stumbled across an incredible story today on the Playstation gamer message boards. A young paralyzed teen had an idea for how to build a rig that would allow him to play video games. The teen worked with Mark Felling who did the physical assembly of the gear and after a couple months they had a kit that allowed the boy to use the vast majority of the controls on a PS3.

In his own words:

“The main reason I put this on the PlayStation website was to show people that even the most limited person can still enjoy console gaming just as much… anyone else. the controller was pretty easy to make except for converting the analog signals into digital signals for when I use the various switches. this took about two months to build and get working effectively. here are a couple more pictures. this time much smaller,lol.I really want the Sony people to see this as well, because many years ago when I was asking about this they had no idea worked to send me.also I can see my television clearly with no instruction whatsoever even though it really works like I would not be able to see anything at all. if anybody knows anybody who could use assistance playing video games please let me know

Also each and every jack has a predetermined function and whichever one I plug into is what’s the switch becomes. so depending on the game I generally use the left analog joystick directions and the right analog joystick using my tongue. currently I can d 20/25 possible functions all by myself. I’m currently using 16 switches plus a joystick with my tongue. saving up money to purchase three switches that are activated by the torching of a muscle. once I have those three switches I will just have to have somebody take care of something like select which is almost never used.”

Ultimately this is about a teen who didn’t let his disabilities hold him back.  He was able to do something that most of the kids his age were doing everyday. I’m sure on some deeply fundamental level that isn’t obvious to all of us this one act allowed him to feel normal for just one moment.

He’s missing a few parts to help complete his rig. I’d love to help him in someway. Does anyone know anyone at Microsoft or Sony that we might be able to pass this story on to and see if we can get him some more gear and games?

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this story, but if nothing else I hope it brightens your day. It made my day.

View The Inspiring Original Thread!

OpenSocial didn’t take off nearly as fast as I thought it would. I had always assumed that when MySpace enabled it that adoption would pick-up rapidly. LinkedIn has now finally enabled it and I believe future tech like Google Friend Connect (which also uses OpenSocial) will really push this application platform over the top.

I installed two applications immediately. An application to quickly and easily port this blog to my profile as well an application that scans twitter with references to my company. The two apps are called Wordpress and Company Buzz respectively.

The installation was easy in terms of the number of clicks, but there were some bugs. LinkedIn didn’t acknowledge that the application was complete and the apps were only working intermittently when I viewed my profile. On the basis that I got the email they were launching this at 12.21 AM and blogged about it at 1.35 AM I’m going to cut them some slack. Hopefully it will work a bit better by the time you check it out.

If you haven’t got a LinkedIn profile yet your missing out. Social networking in the business space is equally as interesting as Facebook or MySpace. It’s just harder to pick up a date on LinkedIn…

Facebook embraced what I believe builds the most successful new model businesses successes on the web. They created an open platform and let user innovation drive the direction of their business. Unfortunately, like most open platforms, it got out of control. People abused their rights in an effort to push their application to the top. The constant stream of invitations to join applications became one of the number one gripes of Facebook users as they felt they were being aggressively “spammed” (even if it was by their friends).

Facebook has been re-evaluating it’s infrastructure quite a bit these days. A new Facebook layout, for better or worse, has been released. Additionally they have been making some heavy changes to how applications were handled within the system beyond the presentation layer.

The obvious change that you would have noticed includes shifting all of your applications mini-views to a tab on your profile called “Boxes”. Really? They couldn’t name it “applications” or “apps” so it was even mildly intuitive. It’s bad enough that they’re now treating the application concept they popularized as the ugly step-child, but this is just adding insult to injury. I wish they made the tab name “don’t click here” - it would probably get more people to check it out.

Beyond the user interface changes the whole process of migrating to the new system was painful for both our team and our clients. Applications stopped functioning properly and this lead to poor experiences for our application’s users. The latest news is that once a user has opted to install an application they will have to go to a separate page to enable the mini-view for the “boxes” page and also to allow for mini-feeds that include pictures. This will effectively inhibit the experience on all new installations on existing and new applications.

This could have all been avoided with better communication and coordination.

Facebook as a company embraced working with the general public (which included bed room developers and global digital agencies like Sapient) and for this I applauded them. We all happilly contributed our time, experience, and money to create an enriched experience for Facebook’s users. Unfortunately Facebook runs their development process with complete disregard for it’s users. This was obvious in the way they handled Beacon and it became obvious again in the way they’re now handing applications.

Now Facebook application developers are having to re-design their applications to make them successful within the new rules. I’m not convinced that older applications are going to re-engineer very well, but there is almost certainly an opportunity to design a clever application that plays within the rules and focus on the incredibly mini-feed centric new layout.

Unfortunately I think this has really left a bitter taste in the application development community. As we watch diminishing returns on our applications will we be motivated to continue to develop them? I’m not concerned that irreparable damage has been done to the application platform in terms of it’s perception by users and developers. If nothing else it’s going to take sometime for it to recover and people to find a balance that allows it to return to it’s exciting beginnings.

There were so many smarter ways to handle this. Couldn’t they have taken the “like / don’t like” functionality on the mini-feed and aggregated the sentiment globally and used this information to push down all overly intrusive and annoying applications?

Silverlight 2.0 features

- .NET Framework support with a large number of libraries
- all the languages used by Visual Studio in the environment .NET (possibility of using C#, Visual Basic.NET, IronPython…)
- graphic personalization tools added
- a new Deep Zoom technology added
- improved Server Scalability and Expanded Advertiser Support
- added a DRM system based on technology PlayReady of Microsoft
- (for more, go here and here)

Flash 10 features

-  added 3D effect in order to transform and animate any display object through 3D space while retaining full interactivity.
- advanced text support: take advantage of a new, flexible text layout engine that brings print-quality publishing to the web…
- possibility to create custom filters and effects
- support the API Video4Linux 2
- added Speex Audio Codec
- more

5 G1 Pros

1. Keyboard
As proficient as we’ve become with the iPhone’s virtual keypad, tapping touchscreen keys has its limits. Physical keyboards, like those on BlackBerrys and Treos, are much easier to use. The G1’s little keyboard will become especially important as smartphone manufacturers increasingly market their devices as pocket-based PCs, and may give the G1 a clear edge when it comes to gaming.

2. Expandable and Removable Parts
The iPhone’s sealed battery is more of a metaphoric problem than a functional one. Sure, it’s a pain not being able to swap in a new battery for long jaunts off the grid (thankfully, plenty of accessories are designed to fix this problem), and nobody likes having to ship his phone back to Apple if his battery begins to lose its charge. But this problem has drawn as much fire as it has because it is symbolic of the closed, unmodifiable nature of Apple products.

3. Integrated Compass
Not only does the G1 have GPS, it has an integrated compass that can determine which way you’re facing and give you Google Maps StreetView images of the buildings around you. It’s not that useful on its own; after all, you could just look up to see what’s around you, but we’re interested in seeing what third-party developers can do with this functionality.

4. Offline Integration with Google Apps
You can access mobile versions of most Google applications on an iPhone, but with a few exceptions (such as the Google Maps application) you’ll need to do it through the Web. The Android phone’s calendar is an offline version of the much-loved Google Calendar online application. Enter dates into your phone, and they automatically show up on your online calendar. And while you can easily set an iPhone to sync up with calendars such as Google’s there is a beautiful simplicity with the way Android replicates the online programs you are used to offline, in areas where you don’t have service.

5. Multitasking and Copy and Pasting
The iPhone can do a lot, but it can’t do a lot at once. With the exception of the iPod music-playing program, which can run in the background while you do just about anything. This does not mean that the iPhone does not multitask, it does, but Apple does not want 3rd party apps killing the battery. With Android, you can easily swipe between programs. However, it must be noted that it is still to be seen what sort of effect this will have on the phone’s memory and performance (point to Apple or Google?) It must be noted that we really do appreciate that Android allows you to copy and paste text. Perhaps it will motivate Apple to finally bring that feature to the iPhone.

5 iPhone pros

1. The G1 does not have a Real Media Player
The iPhone doesn’t just play back video—it’s one of the best (and best-looking) portable media players on the market. While we’ll certainly see developers making video playback programs for the G1, there are none built into it.

2. The iPhone is Thinner
The G1’s slide-out keyboard may be useful, but it comes at a price: The G1 takes us back to the pocket-bulging smartphones of yesteryear, while the iPhone is svelte enough to fit in the front pocket of your Levis.

3. No Multitouch
The G1 uses a capacitive touchscreen. This is the same highly sensitive type of screen found on the iPhone (most touchscreen phones use mostly inferior resistive touchscreens), and should allow the G1 to compete when it comes to touch sensitivity. But the G1 does not have the iPhone’s multitouch capability. While the G1 attempts to make up for it by utilizing “long-touches” to bring up deep menus, it loses out on the huge amount of functionality (and coolness) that comes from the iPhone’s ability to sense two fingers at once.

4. Terrible Headphone Jack
The iPhone proved that people were willing to listen to music on their cellphones. Still, most manufacturers are reluctant to put a standard 3.5 mm headphone jack on their phones, forcing customers instead to use bulky adaptors or subpar bundled headphones. The 3G iPhone bucked that trend (the original had an annoying recessed headphone jack that could only take specially made headphones), but the G1 relies on an irritating proprietary plug. To make things work, early indications are that adaptors won’t even be available when the phone first hits shelves, making the bundled headphones the only choice.

5. Internal Memory
The iPhone currently comes in 8 GB and 16 GB varieties, and we’ll likely see a 32 GB version before long. The G1 has just 192 MB of onboard memory, and comes with a 1 GB micro-SD card. That’s not really enough memory for a phone that’s supposed to be full of music and downloaded applications. If you want an 8 GB G1, you’ll have to purchase an 8 GB micro-SD card, which will push the price of the phone from $179 above the iPhone’s $199 price tag. If T-Mobile, Google and HTC really expect us to use the G1 as a mobile computer, they’ll need to give us more memory. [source]

The real reason the gPhone could take off

Android is Google’s attempt to dominate the mobile advertising market, just as it has dominated the online PC advertising market, said Craig Wigginton, industry leader for Deloitte’s telecommunications practice. “Their number-one driver for pushing this is the advertising model,” he said.

The G1, the first Android phone introduced by T-Mobile, Google, and HTC on Tuesday, comes loaded with Google applications, including Gmail, Gtalk, Maps, and YouTube. The home screen includes just one item: a Google search bar. Each of those applications is an opportunity for Google to deliver advertisements to users.

There are 3.5 billion mobile-phone users worldwide; many more than computers users. Google, with their success at delivering advertising to desktop computers are looking to monetize this enormous opportunity.
Mobile advertising so far is a small market, but some analysts have high hopes for growth in the future. M:Metrics found that mobile display advertising was an approximately $200 million industry last year, a figure analysts there expect to at least double this year. Analysts at Heavy Reading predict that the mobile advertising industry will exceed $10 billion in annual revenue in 2013.

AdMob is the world’s largest mobile advertising marketplace. Founded in 2006, AdMob allows advertisers to reach their customers on the mobile Web and publishers to increase the value of their mobile sites. AdMob offers both advertisers and publishers the ability to target and personalize advertising to their customers in 150 countries. AdMob has servers over 43 trillion impressions to date, and I’ve seen quite a few on my iPhone, on my sportacular app where I follow up to the minute football games and stats.
Researchers at Strategy Analytics predict that 400,000 people will buy the G1 by the end of the year, compared to 1,000,000 people who bought the 3G iPhone on its opening weekend.

Google and T-Mobile appear to be mainly hoping that mass-market consumers will buy the phone, even though smartphones have traditionally appealed most to business users. The G1 lacks some features that business users might want. For example, it doesn’t support Exchange mail, however Android is an open platform and developers can build applications that might interest enterprise users. I think the main difference between Android and the iPhone is the application publication model, since Android developers don’t have to go through Apple Store approval hell.

Once other Android phones start appearing, the platform could gain momentum. “There will be more to come in 2009 when manufacturers such as Samsung and LG will deliver their devices. Android has the potential to become the de facto operating system for Linux, and we expect sales to reach around 10 percent of the smartphone market in 2011,” said Gartner analyst Roberta Cozza.