Philip Sheldrake

Category: Digital Media Marketing (page 4 of 5)

17 April 2008 / 0 Comments

Listen. The Science of Social.

I have been invited to no less than a dozen seminars, training courses and conferences about social media in the last month or so. In case you didn't know, social media marketing is quite hot at the moment! Having presented on blogging for business since 2002, before this stuff got its own shows, and even mooted the death of market research in 2006, it's fascinating to see how quickly people cut and paste together their own position on this stuff.

One glaring betrayal of the 'social media practices' that have only recently assembled their facade is their ignorance of the power of listening. They will tell you just how they will be your voice on the social Web, but too rarely do they volunteer to proxy your ears.

Listening to one person isn't easy; active listening is a discipline. Imagine then trying to find, tap into and track one hundred conversations, a thousand, ten thousand; and interpretting this information... turning it into knowledge that informs your marketing strategy and tactics.

Social Web Analytics

This forms a large part of what we call social Web analytics. We define this as the application of search, indexing, semantic analysis and business intelligence technologies to the task of identifying, tracking (listening) and participating in the distributed conversations about a particular brand, product or issue, with emphasis on quantifying the trend in each conversation's sentiment and influence. Read more

3 April 2008 / 0 Comments

Twingly in private beta – "a next-generation blog search engine"

I've signed up and will let you know what I find when I'm allowed in! From their press release today...

Today we launch a next-generation blog search engine at Twingly.com. Participate in the invite-only beta by getting invited or signing up at beta.twingly.com. So what’s cool with the new Twingly.com?

Spam free, social search

Twingly takes a zero-spam approach to blog search using an algorithmically expanding white list instead of the traditional blacklist. Powerful moderation tools allows us to win the fight against spam by one-click removal of clusters of tens of thousands of spam blogs. Fat tail manual moderation yields quality input to long tail algorithmic filtering.

Social search features allows users to share quality content with each other and the community as a whole.

Powerful search language and tech plan Digg

Twingly provides the world’s most powerful search language for blogs, where search filters can be combined in new ways.

But we’re not done by far! Participate in voting on our tech plan by signing up for the beta. JSON api? OPML import or APML export? Help us decide what’s next!

UPDATE

Well I've got my invite and I've logged in to take a look. Read more

28 March 2008 / 0 Comments

UK Next Generation Access – what might we have to play with?

We've come a long way since 56k dial-up, and marketers have long taken advantage of the audio-visual capabilities of broadband for advertising (digital media marketing more generically) and not-paid-for influence (digital media relations). You only have to witness the furore created by the online videos seeking to influence the US primaries.

But what is broadband, and where are we going from here?

To quote Connect's excellent report "Connecting Britain's Future - the slow arrival of fast broadband":

So what do we mean then by fast broadband? There is no standard set of definitions, but commonly:

  • narrowband would mean up to 512kbit/s
  • broadband would mean up to 25mbit/s
  • fast broadband would mean anything over 25mbit/s

The common industry term for such fast broadband is NGA - Next Generation Access.

Over sixty people from the communications industry (the other communications industry... the one with the switches, wires and fibres) came together yesterday evening at the Convergence Conversation event I chair, and invested a couple of hours teasing out the complexities of delivering NGA in the UK. Read more

25 March 2008 / 0 Comments

Convergence Conversation: Prospects for next generation access in the UK

The third convergence conversation of 2008 will look at the impact that new bandwidth intensive services are placing on the UK's broadband infrastructure.

I'm delighted to be chairing the event, and we'll kick off with the following speakers:

  • Angus Flett - BT Wholesale
  • Geoffrey Spencer - Nortel
  • Antony Walker - Broadband Stakeholder Group
  • Bill Gash - Partners in TV
  • Mike Aigner - Geo Networks
  • Chris Barraclough - STL Partners

What's the topic?

Recent rumblings from ISPs have highlighted the fact that new bandwidth intensive on demand services are placing an enormous strain on ISPs' "all you can eat" business model. The BBC's iPlayer alone has already enjoyed rapid uptake with over 17 million programmes streamed or downloaded in the first seven weeks following its Christmas day launch. Read more

29 February 2008 / 0 Comments

Engagement Mapping: the what but not the how

When does advertising pay? Apparently, we're getting closer to knowing courtesy of Microsoft.

The advancement from paying for eyeballs (CPM – cost per thousand times an ad is shown) to paying for click-throughs (CPC – cost per click), appeared at the time to be the ad industry’s nirvana. And then came click-fraud and CPA.

Now if only ‘A’ stood for Acquisition, then we could all go home. Pay £1 ad cost every time you acquire a new customer for your new £50 gizmo (ie, a sale), and advertising becomes a predictable and precisely quantified cost of sale. In this instance, 2% exactly; not 1.9% nor 2.1%.

But that ‘A’ means Action, and that Action may be an acquisition, but more generally it refers to getting a prospect to fill out a form, leave their contact details, sign up for a newsletter, etc. Mmmm, still as much an art as a science then. Read more

26 February 2008 / 0 Comments

Morph

I'm obsessed with device usability, and high on that list is the graphical user interface. Marketers focused on phones and mobile Internet devices emphasise their understanding of the impacts of the user interface and everything stacked up behind it, but what about the possibilities of mobile sensory marketing?

Future mobile devices will be able to sense their surroundings: sight, sound and smell. We already have forward thinking companies like Mobile Acuity interpretting still images taken by mobile phones for consumer engagement objectives, but what would you do with smell!?

Nokia and the University of Cambridge have been collaborating on a concept they call Morph. This video accompanies this week's press release and should get us all thinking. I get the feeling we don't have to rush though :-)

14 February 2008 / 0 Comments

Readius at Mobile World Congress

Following my earlier post from the Mobile World Congress, another gadget update...

Philips spun off Polymer Vision in 2006, and February last year the company announced that their first product would be the Readius. At this year's show, the company demonstrated the final commercial product for the first time. Slated for a "mid-08" launch, it will be very interesting to observe how retail categorises the device, and its rate of uptake.

Is it a phone? No. Is it an eBook; well yes I guess, but not in the same vein as Amazon's Kindle or the Reader Digital Book from Sony.

The Readius measures just 75mm x 21mm x 15mm closed, sufficiently compact to slip in a breast pocket or a handbag's phone pocket with ease. Well, unless you store your phone there of course. But the screen (aka epaper) has to be seen to be believed. It is so un-screen like that I assumed at first I was looking at a mock-up! It's pretty damn fascinating, and considerably more akin to the pleasure and ease of reading paper than looking at a LCD. Read more

12 February 2008 / 2 Comments

Mobile World Congress: Tech news and the implications for marketers

There were no female passengers on the plane. I kid you not. It could only mean I was headed for a gadget fest.

The 2008 Mobile World Congress is buzzing. No signs of a recession here. It’s particularly buzzing about, yet without mentioning, a company that's not even here. Apple.

Mobile%20World%20Congress%202008

Whilst official company statements make no comparison between Sony Ericsson's 10 new phones and the iPhone, Samsung's 8 new phones and the iPhone, or Nokia's 4 new phones and the iPhone, the overarching message is clear. The market will not coalesce on one style of phone. Variety is the spice of life. So up yours Apple.

The mobile phone, or “device” more generically, ranks amongst people's most personal possessions. It’s up there with your wallet and keys on leaving your front door, and the variations of mobile device will continue to be as diverse as the variations in everything else we consider personal. Clothes. Cars. Furniture.

Mobile devices will never share the same hardware platform, or the same software platform, but they do universally represent the greatest and most enticing conduit to the end-customer the marketer has ever known. For both B2B and B2C, for advertising, interactive dialogue and customer engagement. Read more

31 January 2008 / 0 Comments

OnMedia Best of Broadband Advertising Awards 2007

The OnMedia event this week in New York included their Best of Broadband Advertising Awards for 2007.  I've seen more than half of these videos featured here on MarCom Professional, but I've included my favourite of the bunch below.  You can see all the winners here.

Produced by Omnicon's Cutwater (although not going to win a prize soon for accessibility of their own website) and made to look user-generated, the video went viral because, like anything and everything that "goes viral", it's interesting content.  This time the interesting comes in the form of "how did they do that?", so you pass it on to ask that questions of your friends.

Combine this with some Google SEO on the phrase "Never hide" scrawled in the dust of the car at the end of the video to point you to Ray-Ban, and you have entertainment combined with self-congratulations that you worked it out :-)

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