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From SXSW: Monitoring Your Brand On TV With Livedash

March 31, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Analytics and measurement on the Web are all the rage and—from a traditional PR point of view—the number of square inches of print media coverage still matter as well. For television, this has always been a bit more complicated. You’d have to know and even then, you’ll need to acquire the tape. But what if you could monitor your brand’s mentions on TV in real-time?

While waiting in line for the Microsoft Techset party at SXSW, my buddy Jeff Mello and I met Patrick Riley and Matt Thomson from Livedash who built a great tool just for that.

What Does Livedash Do?

Livedash offers marketing analytics for televison by indexing US TV recordings to make them text-searchable. Just enter a term in the search box and it will return the mentions of the term on TV.

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From SXSW: Sharing Comments On Web Pages With Glass

March 23, 2010 By 3 Comments

While at SXSW, I received an invitation to join the private beta for Glass. Thanks to Derek Shanahan and wonderful folks from Glass for the introduction to the service and the free drinks, heh. I’ve taken it for a spin the last couple of days and wanted to share my initial thoughts in this post.

What Is Glass?

Glass is a Firefox plug-in that allows you to add and share comments about a Web page. It’s similar to Google’s Sidewiki. Using the Glass plug-in, you can add a slide in which you add comments about that page. You can then share these comments with your Glass contacts who can view your comments and reply to them.

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A Flashy Future For Mobile

March 18, 2010 By Leave a Comment

This post is inspired by a presentation by Adobe’s Anup Murarka at South by South West. He talked about the future of Adobe Flash for the mobile platform. I’ll cover some of the highlights from Anup’s presentation but will put the topic in a different perspective, namely that of the mobile network operators.

Currently, 98% of desktop computers support Flash, but not even a tenth of mobile phones has Flash support. This is expected to change dramatically over the next couple of years though.

Smartphones are getting better, not only in capabilities, but also in hardware quality. Similar to desktops, notebooks and netbooks, a growing number of smartphones will also boast multi-core processors and graphics processors that can serve up rich media.

Adobe’s new version of Flash—version 10.1—will be cross-platform. Windows, Linux, Mac OS, Symbian, BlackBerry, Android, you name it—all will be supported by Flash 10.1.

Adobe expects to get around 10% of mobile penetration for Flash this year, but expect to grow that number to over 50% by the end of 2012.

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Taking Location-Based Services To A Micro-Level

March 9, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Last Wednesday, I visited a Geomarketing congress organized by my alma mater and Geodan. In this post, I’ll discuss how geomarketing on both a macro-level and a micro-level gives you more pieces to the customer puzzle.

Geomarketing focuses on the relationship between spatial awareness and marketing. Here are some of the real-life cases that were presented:

  • Understanding customer motives for visiting certain car dealerships
  • Determining the location of a new store
  • Plotting and targeting households for effective direct mail campaigns

These are all very good and relevant examples of how location affects the marketing process and how proper geomarketing can improve the rate of success. However, they’re all examples of how to perform geomarketing on a macro-level.

Even modern mobile applications like Foursquare operate mostly on a macro-level. People check into a drug store, a restaurant, a train station, et cetera. It can be good information for your business, but it doesn’t tell you how they move about while they’re at your store for example. This is where geomarketing on a micro-level comes in.

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Marketing Pioneers 2010: Company Pitches

February 4, 2010 By 8 Comments

I’m at Marketing Pioneers, a half-day conference on marketing and sales here in Amsterdam. The event just opened with five companies pitching their business in 6+4 minutes.

Brandfighters

This is a video marketing agency that capitalizes on crowdsourced user-generated content for company marketing, i.e. users are asked to create (hopefully viral) videos for a brand. OK, where do we need the agency? Jan-Paul, interestingly enough, mentioned that Heineken was surprised that the quality of the submissions was so good. I don’t see why a big brand wouldn’t and couldn’t just bypass an agency in such cases.

Mober

This company aims at providing a SMS service with which restaurant/cafe patrons can place orders. I think this service doesn’t tie into the overall hospitality industry well. The problem is that whereas it can simplify or create an extra option for consumers, it creates more headache for restaurant/cafe holders. The logistics, technology and process changes may not be worth it. It’s a lot of trouble for fighting a symptom rather than a cause. Bad or sub-par service cannot be solved w/ an SMS ordering system.

Bureau Vijftig

This is a marketing agency specialized in reaching people over the age of 50. Interesting business projections and a growing market. However, I did find it funny that they used a cliche to break a cliche. If it’s more about behavioral properties than demographic properties, it might blur the concept.

Beemway

Social media agency that does brand campaigns with widgets, things and other stuff ;) Focus was on segmentation and targeting, but the ROI question was a bit dodged; Hans said that it should be played “smooth” and that an initial focus on sales/conversion usually fails. “Smooth”? I think value and relevancy are more important. I thought these pitches were about novelty?

31 Volts

Interesting opening, 80% of service providers thinks they’re delivering excellent services yet only 8% of clients feels the same way. This agency aims to bridge that gap. Their service consists of helping businesses make changes to their service provision to make customers more satisfied. Bit disappointed about the business model re metrics and effectiveness. I don’t really see the innovation either, the takeaways contained a lot of basic marketing stuff.

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