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.

Here’s an example of what I got when I searched for “toyota” (click to enlarge):

Immediately you see how detailed the indexing is. Not only are the mentions displayed in a neat timeline, it allows you to filter per TV channel or per day. Per result, you can drill down to see a show’s transcript or find results from similar shows. In Google Alerts-esque fashion, you can also sign up to receive updates whenever there’s a mention of your search term(s).

If all that wasn’t enough, Livedash offers a video archive and API services to business users.

Impressions

I was intrigued when they told me about Livedash, but now I’m blown away. This is a wonderful piece of technology that’s going to give us more marketing intelligence on media mentions.

The service is still “basic” in terms of the analytics, but the guys are definitely working hard on extending and improving the service.

If you haven’t tried out Livedash, give it a shot. Let me hear it in the comments what you think!

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.

How Does Glass Work?

After installing the plug-in, you can pull up the Glass control on any Web page. To add a comment, click on the New Slide button.

A message box appears on the screen in which you can type your comment. You can also select your Glass contact(s) or contact lists to share the comments with in this box. Click “Create” to save the comment.

Once you save the comment, it will be visible every time you visit that page. To hide the slides, you can pull up the Glass control again and select the option “Hide Slides”. To make them reappear, select “Show Slides”.

Impressions

It’s an interesting tool although I don’t think it offers that much more added value over Sidewiki. I’m currently using it to share comments with my coworkers on our corporate website (what needs to be changed, what we need to add, et cetera). Using Glass for collaboration allows for quick on-screen reference and instant updates once changes have been made.

These are a couple of downsides I’ve experienced so far:

1. Glass is a closed system, i.e. other people need to be on Glass too (and have the plug-in installed) to view comments and/or reply.
2. I can’t add people after creating a slide, which is annoying if I forget someone or another person needs to see the backlog of comments and replies.

This is my quick first take on Glass. I’m curious to follow the developments and new features. If you’ve also worked with Glass, let me hear your thoughts. If you’re interested in trying out Glass, let me know (I have literally some invites).

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.

This outlook is great for web development as it becomes possible to create and distribute rich media consistently across multiple operating systems on both mobile and desktop platforms.

Hardware manufacturers and consumers are looking to warm up to a richer mobile experience, but are network providers? With cable and telephony providers, there are many content providers (like Hulu and Netflix) that piggy-back on the infrastructure and services that are delivered by the network providers (ISPs).

Once these and other content providers expand to the mobile arena, mobile network operators will be in a similar situation. The traditional business model is already being disrupted by VoIP (applications) and WiMAX. Rich media and its content/service providers pose a threat to mobile network operators in the sense that (1) they cut into the mobile network operators’ value proposition and (2) widespread consumption of rich media could overload the network.

At the same time, the rise of rich media also presents opportunities for mobile network operators to add value to their service offering. On the one hand, mobile network operators can learn a lot from what is happening to the television landscape. On the other hand, I’d also like to see them proactively seek out partnerships that eventually add value to customers.

What do you say?

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.

The presentation I found most interesting was by Prof. Dr. Jaap Boter who was also my thesis supervisor back when I was graduating. Prof. Boter performed research at a bookstore where customers were asked to wear RFID tags while they were shopping for books. When leaving the store, these customers filled in a questionnaire, and—if they had made a purchase—the receipt was included as well.

Using this information, it became possible to track customer movements inside the store, which revealed interesting insights such as:

• The behaviors of various customer segments
• The differences in customer behavior on different days (e.g. Saturday versus Monday)
• The effectiveness of the store’s layout

These are all very interesting and important bits of data that help you understand the consumption process. Loyalty programs, CRM systems and macro-level geomarketing can help you understand (some of) the causes and effects of a purchase, for example:

• A cause like someone lives near the store so s/he was inclined to visit it
• An effect like someone makes large or frequent purchases
• A cause and effect like a man making a purchase because it’s his son’s birthday

This is also very valuable information, but it doesn’t reveal much about the process. Was this man looking very long for his son’s birthday gift or was he helped out quickly by a store clerk? The combination of customer data, both on a macro-level and a micro-level, help you understand your customer better.

How closely are you stalking your customers?

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.

Verdict

The audience will get the chance to vote on the best pitch. Here’s what I looked at:

• The problem and the solution
• Market (customers, suppliers, competitors, etc.)
• Business model

All things considered, here’s how I’d rank them based on only the information they provided today:

1. Bureau Vijftig
2. 31Volts
3. Beemway
4. Brandfighters
5. Mober