For the Love of Gmail

Showing the Gmail love Russian style, and according to the official Gmail blog the magic happened using nothin but:

- 162 meters of gray tape
- 45 lego pieces
- 32 sticks of plasticine
- 18 brushes
- 18 square meters of batten
- 12 cans of spray paint
- 10 liters of white paint
- 4 reams of paper
- 2 kilograms of millet porridge
- 1 printer
- 1 hair dryer
- 1 mop
- 1 saw
....and of course the totally awesome soundtrack

Microsite: I Am an Island

The microsite is dead. There. I said it. Really, it boggles my mind how companies can continue to churn out microsites--the gloryhorse of all digital marketing campaigns (it seems)-- to waste away in solitude amidst the sea of hyper-connectivity that is the condition of today's aggregated social web.

In a culture of crowd aggregation, microsites seem lonely, disconnected...floating islands of Flash desperately crossing its fingers for visitors. Silly microsite, I don't have time for you! What with my social networks and blogs and feeds and media utilities, my attention online is spent. Spent I tell you!

And tell me, when is the last time you purused or spent time on a branded microsite...and do you ever repeatedly visit one for that matter? And why would you?

The microsite brings up two catch-phrase points for me:

Build vs. Join

Viral vs. Vital

Join: In an age of infotainment portability (online and off), aggregated crowds around niche pyschographic preferences, and scarce attention-- what utility does a microsite serve in my online life? And more importantly, how does it enhance my offline life?

Vital: Its cool you could make the chicken dance or make cats rap, but really...does it make me a more engaged or simply more entertained consumer? Again, its not about episodic hype & push messaging...its about the slow boil of useful, vital information that integrates into my online and offline life for sustained brand engagement.

Measuring Social Influence

Measuring social influence is going to be increasingly more important as we begin to quantify & measure social media campaigns (can you hear those whispers..."ROI, ROI..."). The other day in my office I scribbled all over the whiteboard a terrible looking graph which I labeled "Network Influence Potential," which, in theory, would be a predictive value for determining best targets within a social network. Two of the most obvious markers of NIP were Direct Influence (#of "friends"), Connectivity (number of friends to number of networks). An obvious lacking piece is exponential value of the direct influence and connectivity (the whole beauty of the marketing multiplicity effect that makes social technologies so appealing to marketers). While I've been hammering at some of these pieces from a marketing perspective, I came across 20bits Graph Theory Part III (Facebook) and just about died. First and foremost 20bits is for computer science and mathematics folks, but I love that in this particular post they say at the beginning "lets look at the graph and think like a marketer would" (yes!). So, being that these guys are total quants and much smarter than I--I'll let these guys take over from here. Below is a an excerpt from the Graph Theory III post:


What Can Be Done With a Social Graph

Let's step back and think like a marketer for a second. Facebook, thanks to the newsfeed, is essentially a word-of-mouth engine. Everything I do, from installing applications to commenting on photos, is broadcast to all my friends via the newsfeed. Intuitively, however, we know that some people are just more influential than others.

If my cool friend writes a note about an awesome new shop he found in the Lower Haight I'm probably going to pay more attention. People like this, who are influential and highly connected, are a marketers dream. If I can identify and target these people, "infecting" them with my marketing, I'll get ten times my return than I would going after random people in my target demographic.

Facebook is almost certainly doing something like this already with respect to the newsfeed. They process billions of newsfeed items per day. How do they know which messages are most important to me? Well, it stands to reason that the messages that are most important to me are the ones from the people who are most important to me. So, as Facebook, I want to be able to calculate the relative level of importance of a person's friends and use that measurement to weight whether their newsfeed items get displayed for their friends.

There are several problems. Can we come up with a good measure of social importance or influence? Are there multiple measures, and if so, what are their relative merits?

Measurements of Social Influence
Let's start simple. One way to measure influence is connectivity. People who have lots of friends tend to have more influence (indeed, it's possible they have more friends precisely because they are influential). Recall from the first part that the degree of a node in a graph is the number of other nodes to which it is connected. For a graph where "is friends with" is the edge relationship then the degree corresponds to the number of friends.

Degree Centrality
Let's call this influence function Id ("d" for degree). Thus, if p is a person then Id(p) is the measure of their influence. Mathematically we get:




The main advantage of this is that it's dead-simple to calculate. If you represent your graph as an adjacency matrix, as in the second part of this series, then the influence of a node is just the row-sum of the corresponding row — an operation which is very fast and easily paralleizable.

The downside of this is that its naive. Consider the following graphs.


Single person with high degree


Single person low degree but high connectivity


Using Id as a measure of influence the first person, p1, has a higher measure of influence because they are directly connected to eight people. The second person, p2, however, has the potential to influence up to 9 people. This happens in the real world, too. Consider a corporate hierarchy in a large company. The CEO only has direct relationships with his board, the VPs, and maybe a few other employees. He is undeniably more influential than an administrative assistant to the deputy regional director of sales for Southern Montana and yet might have fewer direct connections.

and there's more...

Always love David Armano's graphics on Logic + Emotion, and this one is a great visualization of what should be the foundational elements of any social media "advertising" strategy.

notes to self: because i'm lazy & i ramble

sometimes i ramble...the following is the word-vomit result of walking from the office to the subway and getting agitated that i no longer carry my moleskine with me (damned technology age!) so in lieu of writing notes i v-noted myself. so if you have some desire to watch me ramble for 10 minutes (YES I KNOW!) go ahead. but at some point some of this will be put down neatly into some posts.


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I Wanna Get My Hands On...

Social graph data. Not just keyword & demographic data...I want to see behavioral and networked/relational data of users within specific platforms and the cross-platform relational data of users to themselves and each other. Yes!

The Only Banner Ad I've Clicked

ever on Facebook was this:




shiney shiney

Plucked from Noise

another gem of useless noise from Twitter. But dammit, I like this kind of consumption.

Forrester: Agencies Need to Reboot

The new Forrester report profiling the current structure and status of the agency world delivers findings that perhaps many of us in the social media space have known for a long time: "agencies need to reboot."

"I can't say there's an agency now that's the agency of the future," said Peter Kim, a Forrester Research analyst and co-author of the report.

Basically, they have discovered that indeed, consumers are increasingly tuning out messaging, thus marketing will become a practice of community/conversation integration:

In Forrester's view, a simple fact is driving the need for wrenching change in how advertising agencies are structured: consumers increasingly do not trust marketing messages. Instead, they rely on advice from friends and others in their various communities to make product decisions, while using tech tools to tune out ad messages they deem irrelevant. On top of that, consumer media choice has made the notion of a "captive audience," other than during some sporting events, a thing of the past. [via]




Key findings by Forrester:

Agencies need digial integration

Shift the focus from mass to niche

Agencies must be organized around communities, not disciplines

Agencies will begin to integrate community members into their companies

Advertising agencies will "get geekier"








Read the report synopsis here via AdWeek

lol: "How to Negotiate- Tips for Yahoo!"

lol...this is hilarious...



"98 billion dollars...not including Flickr"

next thing:

integrated: Socical graph data + CRM apps...

Conversationalists

I love my Twitter community of Marketing 2.0/Conversatlionists...not only do I often find help and support and GREAT ideas there-- but for the most part, people are sharing and operating in spirit of collaboration. Just this morning, I noticed a tweet by Joseph Jaffe, of top marketing & ad blog, JaffeJuice and new marketing company, Crayon about one of his clients, ooVoo. The tweet directed me to one of his recent blog posts.

What I found so interesting about the post, is not so much the strategy for involving ooVoo in the conversation itself, but that he so openly posted what their strategy is (at least partially).

Besides the usual getting-the-product-in-the-influencers-hands, I love that they're donating $1500 in the name of each host to the charity of their choice! See his full post here, and sign up for My ooVoo Day With...

Checkin the Archives, 2003: The Original EPIC 2014

...and the updated follow-up: EPIC 2015




Created by Matt Thompson and Robin Sloan while at the Poynter Institute together in 2003.

Googlezon! Newsbotster! Google Grid! (=OpenSocial?)...the Evolving Personalized Information Construct. Lovin' this archival dig.

Checkin the Archives, 2005: Tim Berners-Lee on the Semantic Web

Old podcast of an interview with Sr. Berners-Lee on semantic web and the future of the web.