If You Build It...They Still Won't Come

Ready for this? Its 3:39am my time (EST) and I'm just lucid enough to type yet tired enough to quite possibly run myself into a hole here. I have to say, there is something trepidatious about straddling the edges of both the marketing and the tech 2.0 digirati sets: one is always behind the other. David Armano of Logic+Emotion, one of my favorite blogs, recently posted on how "micro sites are so 2007" and to "look for distributed content experiences in 2008." While I agree with our man Armano here, I feel a little cheeky in saying so-- but hello, aren't micro sites soooo like early 2006? (This is where I run into trouble as I know how attached NYC interactive ad agencies are to their micro sites). But back to Armano's post, which has some great suggestions for brands delving into the interactive community space-- but the issues I have always taken with brand publishing digital content, or trying to establish their own branded social network is that they do all tend to be, well, crappy no? I still think that at this point, it is still in a brand's best interest to leverage existing content platforms and to widgetize content instead of building a whole new container that must be populated with registrants and daily active users. Go to where your audience is-- don't make us lazy internet users come to you.

Has there been, thus far, a successful effort by a large brand to establish its own content/networking/distribution platform (ie: "branded social networking site")? If so, I would be interested in who and what the success metrics were.

Now, excuse the typos and I'm off to bed. This shall perhaps be revisited in the morning. Until then, widgetize!

Never Never Post at 3am

Well, I'm not about to, only to say that this may turn into a vlog. Yes, me talking about all the things I wish I had the patience to write after I've already verbally downloaded them in the conference room to David Weller. Some topics I've recently mused:

Coming soon, perhaps in video

Twitter/adoption curve
Technographics
The Open Movement and what it means for SMM
Viral vs. Vital Content
Best Pracitces/Case Study: Facebook
Best Practices/Case Study: Twitter
SMM Spend 2008/2009
Future of SMM (My Flash Freaks + PHP Geeks + SMM Maven Post)
Beyond Beacon/OpenSocial:The Giant Global Graph
2006: Year of the "Social Network," 2007: Year of the Widget, 2008: Year of...
Internet Memes
Web 2.0 is a Four Letter Word
The New Nu Marketer

MashMeet NYC

MashMeet was down at the PourHouse in the East Village Tuesday night. It was a lot of fun to go down with the girls from work, Jackie & Naomi, and to meet up with blogga friends. I managed to dodge the elevator pitches whilst engaged in conversation with bloja (thats blogga + ninja) friend Nicholas. Did get to meet Allen Stern which was great-- "I follow your Twitter" was the opener. Allen had pictures and a follow up of the shindig. Rounded out the night with a late sushi dinner...Jackie and Naomi are hilarious and had the whole table rolling. Good times!


Nicholas Carlson

Allen Stern, Adam Hirsch

musings: all under one roof

from a chat with nicholas:

alisamleo: and whats happening, what i think will happen, is
a gathering of flash creative interactive agencies, SEO, and social media strategists/evengelists/pr whatevsky, be housed under one roof.
interdisciplinary services with lots of crossover finally coming together...
evidence: google bought razorfish
etc..

Eddie Izzard has "Techno Joy!"

LOL...I LOVE this man, and glad I found this gem from one of his older shows circa 1996...

here goes another video post...happy holidays, enjoy!

social media infographics

[via infosthetics]

The Twitter Post

As I mentioned a month ago, there is indeed rich conversation in Twitter, and that its come close to replacing my Google reader somewhat. Now that Jeremiah has catapulted Twitter onto Techmeme, I find myself with the following thoughts on the matter: Twitter is awesome for nitty gritty conversation and chatter and, its rich with insight specific to the marketing, social media, and tech 2.0 communities. But Jeremiah is not the freaking god of Twitter! Scoble touted is as the new conversation space months ago. Anyway, this it not a rant on Jeremiah...but rather a look at the technographic and cultural shift that Twitter is experiencing right now. From launch until what seems like only a few months ago, Twitter was entirely the domain of the Early Adopter (and their friends). The "conversation," as it were, was primarily a smattering of randomnocity by kids out in Silicon Valley (OH @ Wb 2.0 Expo 2006: "Twitter is stupid, only SV people use it and its going to die on the vine").

About a month ago Scoble noted that the conversation had moved off blog comments and onto Twitter. Again, this would be primarily for the Early Adopter tech 2.0 set. After resurrecting my dormant feed from last April, I began noticing faces from the marketing 2.0 set...Lee Odden, Brian Solis, and of course, Jeremiah. Whats happened in the past month is a swell in numbers of this new kind of marketing pioneer and "social media strategists." The masturbatory chatter has shifted and Twitter has become my finger-to-the-pulse monitoring tool for this community specifically.

I predict (ah, the ever-doomed predictions) a continued swell over the next few months as Twitter enters the Early Majority adoption phase. We'll begin to see more Twitter status' popping up on Facebook profiles of the marketing set, there'll be a flourish of (even more) 3rd party apps, new "best practices" and blog posts..oh yes! the blog posts and panels and presentations of "how to leverage Twitter"...and critical mass will loom in the horizon as Early Majority turns to Late Majority...and as Pownce becomes the new drug of choice for the Early Adopter...hrm.

Oh, but what am I saying...I am getting oh so far ahead of myself. I suppose I'm torn. On the one hand, yes, Twitter has become a wonderful tool for marketers and web strategists and social media gurus to communicate with each other-- on the other hand, I don't want to see the beauty of Twitter, the fragmented monologues, to be lost in the agenda-pushing.

Collective Intellect Tracking Brands in the Social Graph

We all know my obsession with "the graph," and lately I have been using Collective Intellect's social media monitoring and analytics app, Media Intellect and seriously, it rocks. Every morning I get emails reporting the topics I am tracking with blog posts and blog authority. The dashboard allows me to track maven identification within a specific topic as well as frequency, share of voice, trends over time, and tonal sentiment. I'll be posting some data I find in the next week as I am tracking.

Collective Intellects clients include: Chrysler, Fleishman, Old Mutual, the American Diabetes Association, the US Chamber of Commerce, as well as extracting tonal sentiment intelligence for Yahoo! Finance (widget on the Finance homepage)

Coke Side of Nothing

Cokes latest foray into social media has led them to create an island in the virtual world There.com. Two things to say about that-- how well did that Coke Pavillion in SecondLife turn out for you guys? and second, virtual worlds are useless (right now) because, well, no one's in virtual worlds (although MTV desperately wants you to think otherwise).

My questions to Coke: What is the objective here other than getting coverage in the NYTimes? Cutting edge branding? I think this will go down as well as New Coke.



Frankly, I don't understand the big companies and why they embark on such money and time-wasting schemes. And this latest one from Coke is mind-boggling given all the data around virtual worlds-- they don't have traction with the market at large; they have significant drop-off rates; their previous SecondLife bust..... Who the hell do they have on their global online marketing team?

Ok, I'm a Sucker for It

Yes, yes, totally puddy in their viral scheming hands...but come on, I did chuckle, especially during the "blog it all" and "you'll blog this" parts...touche!





And, more on Born in the Graph to come...

Born Into The Graph Part I: Preface Continued

So in continuing with the aforementioned history of the social web, lets start a little further back before you made your first dial-up phone call to Prodigy. I've had the privilege of hearing from Ed Yourdon, who is widely known as the lead developer of the Structured Systems Analysis and Design Method (SSADM), as well as co-developer of the Yourdon/Whitehead method of object-oriented analysis/design and the Coad/Yourdon OO methodology of the late 1980s and 1990s. He shared some of his personal experience with early, rudimentary "emailing". Below is a portion of his email to me:


Love In The Time of PDP-6

"When I graduated from MIT in 1965, there were a couple of computer projects (e.g., Marvin Minsky's AI lab, which had a PDP-6 computer) where a small number of people could communicate via e-mail within the same computing environment. I don't know when the first "remote" email communications took place, but you can probably find that somewhere in the "official" lore of Internet history.

I worked at DEC during my undergraduate years, and then afterwards; we, too, had a PDP-6 that allowed us to intercommunicate. And at one point, we hooked our machine up to MIT's AI-lab PDP-6, and got two copies of the "Eliza" AI program (click here for the Wikipedia article) communicating with one another via email. Unfortunately, it degenerated fairly quickly, as each copy of Eliza wanted the other one to do all the talking -- just like a psychiatrist.

A couple years after I worked at DEC, my future-wife and I were working for a NYC-based consulting firm that assigned us to work for a client called ComShare; they had one of the first nationwide time-sharing service bureaus at the time. Toni worked at the Comshare data center somewhere in godawful New Jersey, and I worked in their data center in Ann Arbor, MI; we figured out how to connect the two machines remotely, so that we could communicate inexpensively (i.e., free) via email rather than expensive phone calls.

Several years after that, we started our own NYC-based consulting firm; and through the urgings of a Bell Labs wizard that we had hired (P.J. Plauger, who has written lots of books about UNIX and C, etc.), we became the first non-academic licensee of UNIX in the country ... and, of course, began sprinkling terminals around the office so that everyone could communicate. Then we gave people (including secretaries, salespeople, and anyone else who wanted one) terminals to take home, so they could log in and get their work done at home when miserable weather made commuting impossible.

All of this seems very mundane today, and the technical people on our staff certainly understood what we were doing. But the admin, secretarial, and accounting people had a heck of a time explaining to their friends and family at home why they wanted to connect a big, clumsy teletype or CRT to a big, clunky 300-baud modem in order to dial up the office computer ..."


A Note about Ed and his wife Toni:

"We went to high school together, then went to different colleges. I got her a job programming (with an English degree) after DEC"

I think that is more than awesome...and hey! I have an English degree too...

Born Into The Graph Part I: Preface

So I have been pondering writing a "born into the graph" post for a while...a sort of wandering pondering of what its like to be part of the first generation to grow up with and in the internet starting with child "early adopters" who chatted and emailed on Prodigy and played around CompuServe's global village...

I tweeted this morning about the idea and computer hall of famer Ed Yourdon responded with some amazing info! I am thrilled first to hear from him, and it will also provide some background for this piece which may very well turn into a researched social history of internet usage...we'll see...

So this is part I: the Tidbits from Twitter

(If you're unfamiliar with Twitter's usage, when placing and "@" before someone's username, it is like addressing them directly and shows up as a "reply" to the user)..the following are Ed's responses to me:


yourdon @alisamleo re "born into the graph": does carrying on a relationship via email, circa 1968, count? (Yes, we did have email back then ...)

yourdon @alisamleo MIT had email when I graduated in '65, as did DEC. My wife & I worked @ Comshare in '68, emailing from 2 different datacenters...

yourdon @alisamleo Wife&I provided UNIX email to employees when we started our consulting firm in '74. Employees unable to explain to their friends

Current Geekerati Status: Daily Routine 2.0

Networks:

Facebook
MySpace
imeem
LinkdIn
Virb
Curbly

Utilities:

YouTube
Vimeo
TubeMogul
Flickr

Micro-apps & widgets:

Twitter and Twitterific
Pownce
Techmeme widget
Echo widget
Flickr widget
3 blidgets
DoSomething app
Mahalo Daily


Blogs: 4
Active blogs: 3

Blogs in Google Reader: 10 (not many)

Daily reads:

Mashable
TechCrunch
Scoblizer
ReadWriteWeb
GigaOm
Twitter feeds

Awesome moment of the week: Dave Winer (who invented RSS) started following my Twitter feed!

Geek joke of the week: "I fee so very trapped by the social graph"-- Miss Rogue, aka Tara Hunt

I'll include links later...I'm too lazy and I need to unplug...

Peter Rojas on RCRD LBL

RCRD LBL founder, Pete Rojas discusses his new venture which is potentially the win-win solution to the music industry's internet woes...a sponsor-based model for distributing and monetizing music in digital format.