Philip Sheldrake

Category: Website/New Media (page 5 of 7)

11 June 2010 / 0 Comments

CIPR Social Summer on mobile marketing

I'm not a fan of the iPhone, or iPad come to that (more later). But it wasn't until yesterday evening at the CIPR that I learned quite how manic some marketers have become. The following conversation won't be verbatim as I wasn't party to it, but it's a good representation of the story as I heard it last night from those who are having these conversations too regularly:

_________

Marketer: We need an iPhone app?

Mobile marketing expert: Righteo. Why's that?

Marketer: Because they're really cool and cool's where it's at for our target demographic.

Mobile marketing expert: Cool, yes, and who's the target?

Marketer: Teenagers.

Mobile marketing expert: Do you know that iPhone penetration is just 4% in the UK, and that's only 0.5% amongst UK teenagers?

Marketer: Oh :-(

_________

The bring all sorts of people together under one roof for a beer and a chat about specific interesting issues. On conducting a quick straw poll of the super collection of people last night, we had roughly an equal split of Blackberrys, iPhones, Android (mostly HTC) and 'other', making for an unrepresentatively high proportion of smartphones. Read more

5 May 2010 / 0 Comments

Chairing the Internet of Things mashup

The BCS, Chartered Institute for IT, hosted the Mashup Event in London last night, an event focused on the Internet of Things. As chair I knew it was important to establish boundaries for the evening's discussion, but the problem is... there is simply no sector or discipline that is or will be left untouched by the Internet of Things.

Fortunately, I could lean on an expert panel to shoulder the burden of picking out the topics, although I was first to take a stab at defining the topic: a network of objects beyond the 'usual' including:

  • the device containing electronics in order to fulfil its primary function (eg, washing machine, car, aircon unit)
  • the electrical device traditionally absent of sophisticated electronics (eg, lighting, heating, power distribution)
  • non-electrical objects (eg, food and drink packages, animals, clothing); and
  • environmental sensors (eg, for variables such as temperature, heat and moisture).

David Orban opened the evening in ten minutes with a fast, furious, compelling and fascinating slide stack. He could have banged us over the head with ten minutes about WideTag, but preferred to situate his company's endeavours in the bigger picture. Videos from tonight will go up on the Mashup Event website, but if you can't wait, here's a video of David in action at Momo Amsterdam a month ago.

Read more

22 April 2010 / 2 Comments

The most exciting development in PR since the Cluetrain

The Semantic Web, aka Web 3.0, is here. Now. And there is, as yet, little concerted recognition of or contribution to it by the influence profession... all the converging marketing and PR disciplines.

But is about to arrive in our lives, and in a big way. For example, what if I told you that when Best Buy embraced aspects of the Semantic Web its website saw a 30% increase in traffic.

Got your attention?!

Thanks to the following for their time and attention last night:

10 June 2009 / 2 Comments

Your website and how it would change if it had an "About You" section rather than "About Us"

"Nobody cares about your products and services (except you)." I believe this deliberately polemic assertion from David Meerman Scott is spot on. OK, you could possibly exempt shareholders and fellow employees too, but the implication stands. Moreover, saying "Nobody cares about your products and services (except you and the shareholders and fellow employees)" isn't quite so catchy!

Think about it. When you bought that Philips TV, did you really care about Philips and its product range? No, you cared about the aesthetics of your living room, the sound and picture quality you'd experience, the screen size that would work with your space and furniture, and the hit to your bank balance.

When you were tendering your PR contract, you didn't care about agency X or consultancy Y per se, you were focused on your personal and organisational objectives. How could your organisation communicate and come across better than it did? How could you exert influence in your noisy marketplace? How could you get that promotion or pay rise, or both? In fact, I bet the agency you hired talked more about you in the pitch than they did about themselves.

So, on that basis, why does your website have an "About us" section, or equivalent, but not an "About you"? Not only is the latter missing entirely from most websites, it should actually take priority over the former if you think the last three paragraphs rang true. Read more

11 May 2009 / 0 Comments

Blinkx and you won't miss it – myChannel comes a step closer

I've just found out about the Blinkx and Miniweb deal from the Guardian's article "Blinkx moves into telly with new set-top box deal".

Blinkx is the rather astonishing video search engine that emerged from Cambridge University (with some confusing ties to Autonomy), and Miniweb is into "next generation TV" with their platform already powering set-top boxes in over 9 million homes according to their website.

Now you will be able to search through 35 million hours of video from your sofa. Cool, although you might be running dry as you approach your 4,000th birthday, although one would hope some more content will have been indexed by then.

But that's not the point.

Just over four years ago I posted a blog about "myChannel" which described a future without, effectively, any channels as we know them today. Or to put it another way, if there's 7 billion of us on this planet then there are 7 billion channels.  Everyone has their own.

myChannel will be created bespoke based on a customisable combination of four sources... Read more

19 September 2008 / 0 Comments

When Amazon's Mechanical Turk could be the marketers best friend

Let me show you an image and ask you some questions. Do complete the questionnaire and all will be revealed later at the end of this post!

________________________________



________________________________

You might have established that I am not a qualified automotive designer, researcher or marketer.  But what do you do when you do want to know answers to questions like these?

Enter Amazon 's Mechanical Turk service.

Their FAQs describe the service as follows:

Amazon Mechanical Turk is a marketplace for work that requires human intelligence. The Mechanical Turk service gives businesses access to a diverse, on-demand, scalable workforce and gives workers a selection of thousands of tasks to complete whenever it's convenient. Read more

1 August 2008 / 0 Comments

The power of social bookmarking and how to use it in your organisation today

The more stuff there is, the more difficult it is to find the right stuff at the right time.  Guess that's almost Google's raison d'etre, but have they got it right?  Is there a better or alternative search approach for you and your colleagues, and what would this mean for your marketing and search engine optimisation (SEO)?

by%20Vit%F3%20http%3A//www.flickr.com/photos/janeladeimagens/166051502/

Google's highly secretive approach to working out what might be more relevant to your search query is called PageRank. Fundamentally, their innovation counts a link to a website as a vote for that website's content.  And a link to your site from a higher PageRanked site is worth more than a link from a lowly site.

This approach blew the competition away (remember Alta Vista?), and Microsoft and Yahoo! have been playing catchup since.

But when was the last time you hyperlinked to a website? Read more

2 July 2008 / 0 Comments

Wordle – extending the fascination of a tag cloud

For those obsessed with tags - and what marketer wouldn't be based on the fact that you want your brand to be a tag as often as possible, and to understand how your content and products are being tagged - check out Wordle.  Bringing style to the tag cloud.

Here's one I ran for MarCom Professional just now (click on it or here to see the original), and then a description of Wordle in their own words.

"Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends."

1 July 2008 / 6 Comments

The Social Web Analytics eBook 2008

Social Web Analytics (SWA) is the application of search, indexing, semantic analysis and business intelligence technologies to the task of identifying, tracking, listening to 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.

The advent of SWA is a pivotal moment in the development of the marketing communications industry.

The%20Social%20Web%20Analytics%20eBook%202008

It's just over ten weeks since I posted about my intention to write an ebook on social Web analytics, and now it's done. The ebook is hosted at www.socialwebanalytics.com, or you can simply click here to download it.

I do hope the ebook stimulates discussion and debate about this vital and nascent field, and look forward to the ongoing "distributed conversation". Love to know what you think.

Thanks to Larry Weber, David Meerman Scott, Brian Solis and the Social Web Analytics vendors for their support and contributions.

24 June 2008 / 0 Comments

End-to-end marketing: the possibilities of a new Internet protocol

We're just about to go through a complete renumbering of the Internet, and I think some marketing issues and opportunities will emerge along the way.

The way the Internet works today means that just less than 4.3 billion different Internet devices can be addressed uniquely... an address being just that, the unique identifier stating where packets of information are sent from and where they should go. So just as my work address is Building 5, 50 Brook Green, London, W6 7BJ, UK - a unique address at which I'm sure to receive anything you send me - my current IP address at this Boston hotel is 209.190.164.35.

I know that because I just visited www.whatismyip.com and they looked at the server I was connected to, grabbed the address and stuck it on their homepage for me. Try it. Read more

« Older posts Newer posts »