Physics By Momentum

Twitopocalypse

// August 14th, 2009 // No Comments » // Emerging Trends, Social Media

For those of you that do not use Twitter, it was predominantly unavailable last week due to several DoS (denial of service) attacks which resulted in a few interesting outcomes:

1. Many unfortunate users became victim to a plot by the attackers to become distributors of spam and other socially damaging things.

3. Twitter users were unable to express their frustration via… Twitter.

2. More power was given to an organization called OMB (OpenMicroBlogging) which acts as an open source platform for microblogging. In layman’s terms an alternative to Twitter where users can create their own microblogging social networks.

You can read more about the full story regarding the attacks and OMB on Wired.com’s site.

The truly interesting issue that has surfaced as a result of these findings is in how Twitter is surfacing as a pure channel of communication and is shedding its former skin of being a “Social Networking Site”.

In other words, Twitter is not a social network in the capacity that you want to add all of your friends to your list. Twitter is a two-way feed that allows you to absorb and spread all of the thoughts, trends, links, pictures and video that you provide and request access to.

When Twitter goes down we lose the ability to broadcast important news, keep peers up to date on trending habits and otherwise listen in on what’s going through each others heads on a minute by minute basis. In a sense it’s the same as losing your ability to listen to, or read, the news.

When Facebook goes down we lose the ability to view vacation pictures, receive invitations to events that we probably don’t want to go to in the first place and otherwise “browse” and/or “troll” through other profiles.

Apple Brings Social Apps to Your Next Kegger

// March 12th, 2009 // No Comments » // Social Media

Whenever I throw or attend a party, I tend to get lumped into the DJ corner to take care of tunage for the night because of one of two reasons:

1. I used to do exactly that back in the day before I started working for shops and agencies.
2. Between my Last.fm account, Songza and existing collection of music it’s probably just easier for me to keep things going.

Marketing Through the Decades by Scholz & Friends

// January 20th, 2009 // No Comments » // Social Media

Thanks to Jeremiah Owyang for posting this on his blog. Check him out.

“Hello, [first name] I Want to Sell Things to You.”

// January 15th, 2009 // No Comments » // Social Media

Josh Bernoff (co-author of Groundswell) wrote an interesting post today about his distaste for the practices of certain Email Marketing campaigns (Which you can read here). More importantly than his thoughts regarding best practices in Email Marketing etiquette is his profound and yet obvious statement about simply communicating to people as human beings.

To quote Bernoff: “All three annoyed me by treating me as a target, not a human. Influencers and journalists are human, too. We get mad at this stuff. You want us to like your products, so why do you behave like this?”

As of late, I’ve found myself getting into many debates with colleagues at the office about the usage of social media in marketing.

As a web shop with a ton of agency experience in house, many of us are marketers and have very rich experience in working with brand shops. This has made us a perfect partner for Ad agencies and clients with strong relationships with those agencies and it has also given us the ability to think about any digital strategy from a brand / marketing perspective; however, social media requires a more in-person touch than anything marketing has ever provided.

My personal stance is that the Public Relations team must to be involved in any communication strategy within social media tools as marketing and social media typically results in, dare I say it, a lack of trust from users in the brand. In the case that you don’t have a PR team, all you really need are people who believe in your brand and are willing to take the time out of their day to actually talk to people on Twitter, your blog, your forums and even venture out into the rest of the world where people are talking about you in places you probably don’t even know about yet.

Social Media tools / outlets / channels / sites / whatever you want to call them, are direct portals to specific human beings. They are key opportunities to speaking directly with a customer about their thoughts on your products and services and yet most companies are only interested in pushing brochures to them, rather than actually talking to them.

Now is the time to empathize with your customers. Their wallets are getting thinner lately, but your brand will probably be around longer than the recession (I hope). The opportunities you have today to truly connect with your audience and prove that there are real and genuine people running your company are enormous and plentiful; take advantage of them.

WSJ + MySpace = WySpace?… J

// January 9th, 2009 // No Comments » // Social Media

The Wall Street Journal and MySpace announced the merging of properties (although both are owned by Rupert Murdoch anyway) in order to hold a contest that would allow one privileged person to attend The World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

I know this blog is not exactly recognized for ever truly praising MySpace when it comes to quality of content, so we found it a tad bit odd that WSJ would be teaming up with our favourite provider of clashing colours and the Comic Sans font.

The strategy is a good one, you’re essentially crowdsourcing for somebody who can offer a different take on a typically staunch event, and we applaud both organizations for that… But couldn’t WSJ have merged with maybe Digg? Digg’s been pimping out Walt Mossberg as of late, and it would certainly fit their current agenda to bring more credibility to their space… But I digress.

This is hopefully a sign of the times where we begin to see some velvet ropes start to drop for individuals that society might not have been exposed to before, but thanks to the beauty of crowdsourcing we can now spotlight as a diamond in the rough.

If you’d like to see a great example of how YouTube is finding hidden gems in the orchestra space, check this nifty video out:

A potential Sign of Things to Come: Pownce Announces Impending Shut Down

// December 1st, 2008 // No Comments » // Social Media

A few years ago I decided to jump on to the microblogging bandwagon. No,    not Twitter… My first foray into this space was actually with “Pownce”, which not only acts as a microblogging platform, but a mish-mash of event announcement, file sharing, link sharing and a whole slew of other things. It was probably the first app I’ve ever used that leveraged the Adobe AIR platform, and was a nice introduction into the potential of things to come. However, much like the results of the Messenger wars in the late 90’s Pownce did not capture a critical mass of audience and was beaten to the punch by Twitter and Jaiku.

Where did Pownce go wrong? They had a pretty decent UI to most of their properties, offered a nice app right off the bat and certainly had a great concept.

The problem? Well… Nothing really. It did the same thing as the rest of the platforms out there. That wasn’t the issue. Maybe the issue was simplicity, maybe the issue was simply being late to the microblogging game as Twitter was already out and being leveraged for all kinds of nifty/sneaky/crafty purposes.

Whatever the reason was, we can certainly look to Pownce as an example of KISS. They built the be-all-end-all app, but early adopters aren’t looking for the swiss army knives. They’re looking for the fresh out of the factory - oops we forgot to install safety features - machete of a knife.

Twitter is still that machete. It hasn’t built out an obscene amount of added value tools, as everyone seems to have done that for them already. The entire app is basically a giant RSS feed of people’s thoughts/pitches/responses and the audience has made it their own goal to build supporting tools around it.

If you’re interested in seeing what’s been built or what kinds of tools you can use to add to Twitter, check out the following sites:

Brightkite - http://brightkite.com/

Brightkite allows you to leverage GPS data to add geographic context to your tweets, ie. “I’m at a bar located at [GPS position] at a surprise Foo Fighters show”.

Tweetscan - http://tweetscan.com/

Tweetscan allows you to see who’s saying what about “x”.

Twitpic - http://twitpic.com/

If you can’t tell from the name, Twitpic allows you to share photos through Twitter.

There are many others, but this was supposed to be a post about Pownce :P.

Dell talks about their success with Social Media usage

// November 25th, 2008 // No Comments » // Social Media

Credit to Jeremiah Owyang for another great interview

The Power of the Groundswell… Literally

// November 5th, 2008 // No Comments » // Social Media

One of the things that never surprises me but always amazes me is how we as Canadians pay more attention to US elections, particularly this time around in what seemed to be a “anything’s better than Bush” rally.

I’m going to keep politics outside of the realm of this blog because it’s not what we like to talk about here; however, we DO like to talk about influence and groundswell, so let’s do some talking.

Jeremiah Owyang, an analyst for Forrester Research was kind enough to publish some interesting figures two days ago, all related to social activity surrounding Obama v. McCain. Now that we know who won, let’s take a look at the data:

On Facebook Obama had 380% more support than McCain

On MySpace Obama… had oddly 380% more support than McCain

On YouTube Obama had 403% more support than McCain… Anybody finding these numbers weird?

The only place that didn’t reach the 400% mark (or close to it) was Twitter with 240 times more followers than McCain.

The most interesting data out of all of this is that Obama won by slightly more than the usual margin we’ve seen in the previous two elections. Could this be an indication that the force of Groundswell is one to be reckoned with? We’re talking about a force above just brand, we’re talking about an entire country!

Clients take notice… This stuff works… At least enough to help somebody get voted into office… Think about it.

Credit to Jeremiah Owyang for the stats he dug up. You can check out his blog here, which he updates at least twice a day.

Sergey Brin, Please Update Your Blog

// October 28th, 2008 // No Comments » // Social Media

I often meet with clients to discuss their options regarding social media usage, early adoption and sometimes just to chat about something they heard about and wanted to delve deeper on. Typically the conversation moves toward “Should I blog?”.

My answer is typically contingent on the brand, their consumers and more importantly; the person asking the question.

While everyone lately is touting the notion that blogging is a MUST for any brand, this is not always the case. It’s easy to say that everyone needs to get on board with social media, but the sad truth is that not everybody is ready for it. Transparency is not necessarily a weapon of choice for all brands… Particularly those without a ready and willing PR department who can help tackle all of the tough questions. There are many companies out there that just aren’t ready to answer questions like “why is your service so slow?”

All that said, blogging is an extremely important tool as part of your PR/Marketing mix but be prepared to answer your audience and more importantly, have something to say about your brand that brings your consumers closer to the core idea of what your brand is all about. Do you have a green initiative worth mentioning to the public despite a largely presumed notion that you only produce gas guzzlers? Have you recently launched a new R&D lab in house that might prove contrary to the public’s opinion that your company is stuck in the late 90’s? Blogging is an easy way to mention these kinds of events/developments without having to send out press releases or launch microsites… But I digress.

The point of this blog was actually to talk about Sergey Brin and his blog “too”. Launched in September 2008, Sergey’s blog was ambitious with three posts in 24 hours… And then nothing. This would seem somewhat pathetic, but it’s actually quite common. The notion of having a blog to talk about just about anything is pretty cool when you think about the internet’s real intent before all the bells and whistles of Flash and “AJAX” apps became the “keep up with the joneses” norm. All we really want to do is put our message out there for everyone to read, and blogs are the simplest way of doing that, in fact, it’s what I’m doing right now. I put this blog up in about an hour and I’ve pushed it through a bit of an evolutionary process over the past few months, but all in all it’s simple technology that allows me to get my message out to you.

Sergey’s lack of contribution to his own blog is fairly mainstream when compared to the general public; however, he is not the general public. I still have his blog subscribed to on my RSS aggregator and have yet to see anything pop up on it. It would be nice to know a little bit more about the way Brin thinks, but I guess I’ll just have to read Google Press Releases like I was doing before.

Forrester Research Publishes Social Technographics for 2008

// October 21st, 2008 // No Comments » // Social Media

Josh Bernoff of Forrester Research published the latest findings on Social Media usage/adoption yesterday. Most notable of the findings was the fact that there has been a significant change in activity with ‘Inactives’ moving from 44% down to 25% and ‘Spectators’ from 48% to 69%. In other words, those of you referring to Social Media as “trend”… Please stop.

Most notably of Bernoff’s updates to the data is his release of the updated Social Profiling Tool which now includes Canadian data and several other countries.