Social Business: Analysis – Part 2B: Reasons To Participate In Social Business: Reach & Community

The Fundamentals series continues the analysis phase with a mini-series on assessing the value and effectiveness of social business. This mini-series will cover the following aspects:

  • Reasons to participate in social business
  • Internal considerations
  • Debunking myths
  • Social business in B2B environments

I’ve divided the reasons to participate in social business into three categories:

  1. Marketing
  2. Reach & Community
  3. Internal reasons & Reasons to avoid social business

Today, we’ll look at prevalent reasons to participate in social business related to reach and community.

[Read more...]

Social Business: Analysis – Part 2A: Reasons To Participate In Social Business: Marketing

The Fundamentals series continues the analysis phase with a mini-series on assessing the value and effectiveness of social business. This mini-series will cover the following aspects:

  • Reasons to participate in social business
  • Internal considerations
  • Debunking myths
  • Social business in B2B environments

I’ve divided the reasons to participate in social business into three categories:

  1. Marketing
  2. Reach & Community
  3. Internal reasons & Reasons to avoid social business

Today, we’ll look at prevalent marketing-related reasons to participate in social business.

[Read more...]

From SXSW: Monitoring Your Brand On TV With Livedash

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.

[Read more...]

A Flashy Future For Mobile

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.

[Read more...]

Taking Location-Based Services To A Micro-Level

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.

[Read more...]