30 Jul 2009
I tend to let vanity get the best of me when it comes to my social networks. This has earned me a respectable amount of Facebook friends (about 550 or so).
What do I get in return for clicking accept on those friend requests? A Facebook feed full of pure un-adulterated garbage. Every day I get annoyed with the rubbish that continues to appear in my Facebook feed. I may even venture to say I get upset.
Why? Because I have to spend 10 minutes a day blocking ridiculous quizes, un-tagging myself in chain letters, or declining invites to apps that I don’t want spamming up my feed.
So today, out of frustration, I asked myself, “what are these people doing?”
Why do they not find all of this irritating? Why must I constantly be blocking “Which Sex in the City character are you” quizes?
Then I came upon the answer: They are bored. Purely and…
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20 Jul 2009
Microsoft is making a lot of moves lately with the launch of Bing, their new “decision engine.” Personally, I was not overly impressed or excited about Bing. It was visually aethstetic, and the results seemed about the same as Google. There was not enough of a difference to make me stop “Googling” and start “Binging.”
End of discussion. Continue with normal life using Google maps, search, and documents etc.
But today, I saw this: http://www.BingTweets.com and I realized the possibilities.
Your web searches are more powerful because you are able to cross reference them with real time results from Twitter. Your Twitter searches become more powerful because you have a web search that allows you to dive deeper into the topic. Things like deciding where to eat, or finding the latest news on a Twitter topic are incredibly simplified using Bing Tweets.
Average search process to find mexican restaurant in Boulder using Google:
Search “Mexican Food in…
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14 Jul 2009
Free is the way of the internet.
Google, Pandora, Digg, and Facebook to offer their products to hundreds of millions of people without charging anything. The marginal costs of adding your millionth user and your twenty millionth user are roughly zero. That is because bandwidth, storage, and processing power are cheap, and they get cheaper every year.
Free is no longer a marketing gimmick, but a necessity for most online businesses.
When you get into the mindset of a consumer, cheap and free are completely different from one another. If Google had decided long ago to charge a single dollar for their services, consumers would have found somewhere else to search the web, manage their email, or read the news.
Free-conomics:
The old way to look at a market was to examine how supply of a product and demand for a product would change as the price shifted. Today, free has become an economy of its own as…
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10 Jul 2009
How do you make social media systematic? One way is by utilizing a comprehensive framework as part of your planning and execution. At Room 214, we are often asked about our methodology for social media, so the following post is dedicated to just that.
First, I would like to state that we are big fans of Forrester’s POST (People, Objectives, Strategy, Technology) approach to social strategy. The components represent a linear model that I’d argue holds true for any online marketing efforts. You can dig deeper into this by reading Groundswell by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff.
The Figure below illustrates Forrester’s POST approach.
How the POST approach is actually integrated from a social media planning and execution perspective is where our own PPLE (Plan, Pilot, Launch, Extend – pronounced “people”) framework becomes relevant (see figure below).
The practices behind PPLE are outlined as follows:
Plan: Addresses six core program elements (Workflow, Marketing Strategy, Content, People, Technology and Data)…
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