A Wider Net

If you’re unfamiliar with Twitter, consider yourself lucky. Twitter can be an incredible time sink and it’s not clear that the signal to noise ratio can be managed to the point where it’s anything but a life-logging digression. In fact, studies will one day show that reading too many posts about menial situational updates like “I’m eating a peach” will actually make you dumber. But if you’re a marketing professional (given the nature of this blog, you probably are), you probably need to stay in tune with the “tweets” of Twitter because there is a fair amount of interesting things you can do with 140 characters or less. If you need a primer on Twitter, check out their FAQ.

I started using Twitter again recently after some previously tweet-resistant coworkers fell victim to the Twitter gravitational forces. So far, I am not hooked, nor am I leaning that way, but as I occasionally skim the posts from the various people I follow, I have found a few ideas that have inspired me among the many that have completely wasted my time. Earlier today, I received one that inspired me to write this post.

An exhibition, the New Media Expo, had started “following” me (subscribing to my twitter updates). Why? Because they want me to attend their expo. By “following” me, they expect a “follow-back” where I return the favor by following their updates (Jonathan Coulton has to write a “follow-back” song to the tune of “Hollaback Girl”.) Even if the user isn’t prone to automatically following everyone who follows them, most people will check out the new follower to see who they are. The “open rate” for twitter follow announcements has got to be worthy of the marketing hall of fame. But what I really like is the fact that the response mechanism is a subscription - they tune into you by following you, automatically, on twitter.

The New Media Expo, and many other events, are targeting influencers within the twitter community, and “following” all of their followers and followees. That’s not a word… I’m pretty sure. Example - they figure Robert Scoble is a good person to connect with for a tech event. They follow him. Then they look at his list of people that he follows, and they systematically follow all of them. Of those people some will opt to follow the expo’s twitter feed. And their friends will find out. And viro-exponentially it goes. That’s also not a word, but you get my gist. Gist is a word - a strange and miserably overused word, but a word nonetheless. GIST also stands for Girls Into Science and Technology, which is really really cool, and Gastrointestinal Stromal Tumor, which is really, really not cool. My Scrabulous skills just leveled up.

Back to Twitter: So you can market your event through twitter using this viral, WOM, tap-the-sap-of-the-influencers method, and you can also do one or more of the following:

- Tweet news from the show, like Forrester.
- Automatically Tweet the RSS feed from your event blog. Don’t have an event blog? Start one now - your attendees want in on the process.
- Enlist twitterers in the same fashion that many events enlist bloggers. Give them access and privileges and ask only that they enjoy the show and post what they want.
- Incorporate mobile device features into your event offering such as mobile agendas, alerts, handle questions from text messages or tweets, and SMS polling. Using Twitter as a Q&A vehicle will naturally inspire people to tweet about the show.
- Offer free passes to influencers with many followers that align with your target demographics.

Did I miss anything?

Yup - my twitter feed

Looks like AT&T will finally deploy 12 stores worth of Microsoft Surface interactive displays. For this, we cheer and do the cha-cha. All 12 stores are located in only 4 cities. For this we put our cha-chas back in the bag.

I’m jazzed to see this cool technology in use at last. While I wish they would move faster, as we have a line of interested clients that runs right out the back door into the street, but I appreciate their slow and methodical approach to releasing it only when it’s ready. After all, Vista, Zune, and the XBOX 360 could have all used more incubation time (although some would argue that Vista stayed in the egg too long and spoiled).

According to Engadget, this in-store kiosk will allow you to place two phones on the surface, the one you’re buying and the one you currently own, then transfer contacts and stuff from one phone to the other by simply dragging and dropping. Funny - I thought having the store clerk do that was simple enough. But I think the OTHER applications of surface will make more sense - comparing features of multiple phones, playing with demo assets, exploring coverage maps, etc. (things the store clerk generally can’t wrap his head around.) I can’t say I love the pictures of the in-store display, but I love the Surface itself. As they continue to refine the application, adding drag-and-drop support for ringtones and wallpapers, for example, this will only get better and better. When people actually try it, I predict they will talk about Surface more than they talk about their new phone. Since the iPhone won’t be part of the display, this is pretty much a guarantee.

Microsoft announcement here

Thank you Engadget.

Boooooooo to Canon. They sent me this (twice today):

Click the image to zoom in. With it, I can enter to win tickets to the Super Bowl. The medium print says “next year”. The fine print says “2009″. So here I am, a relatively young male living in New England, just days before the Patriots attempt to go to 18-0 and gain an opportunity to win another Super Bowl championship in a couple of weeks. I’m the perfect demographic to attract to a promotion like this for THIS YEAR.

Booooooo - no entry for me, thanks.

Pizza Hut, the $5billion pizza giant (they are 50 times larger than Papa Ginos - who knew?), just added support for mobile phone orders. The next two largest pizza chains, Dominos and Papa Johns, had already entered that space to some extent.

Hungry football fans can order pizza using their mobile browser or text messages. Pizza Hut aims to receive half of their order via online or mobile within five years.

As a logical progression, soon we may see these pizza chains offering special code scan promotions that look like this:

Here’s how it works: Pizza Hut would print these on ads or coupons. Users simply snap a photo of the image using their phone and a free scanning widget they get from a company like NWW who makes ConnexTo. The system decodes the code and connects their phone to Pizza Hut where they can place an order and receive whatever promotion they were offered with the printed ad. These things can probably be highly personalized, so a digitally printed image on a postcard can tell the Pizza Hut system precisely who the buyer is, look up their buying history, and give them a well-targeted offer.

I guess in that last scenario you’d have to be careful not to share those coupons with your friends. They may discover your deep, dark secret passion for pizza with anchovies, pork rinds, pickled beets, and gummi worms.

Thanks to Merriam-Webster and reports like this I will never again get a bargain at woot.com .

Way to buy a domain name, woot! (Yes, they own w00t.com as well as woot.com). You hit the domain name lottery.

Dang! Someone already got pwn.com, pwned.com, and for the old-schoolers, someone even bought furshlugginer.com.

Here’s a cool widget article from Adweek featuring a quote from yours truly.
Thanks to Richard Brunelli for the mention and for the insightful article!

I apologize - I’m a little late to the party with any mention of Google Android and the Open Social initiative that seems to be smashing Facebook with a book in the face. Honestly, things have been very very busy and I’m still digesting the big news from Google this past week.

Here are some of the recent happenings that I need to write more about, and a quick idea of what they’re all about:

Surface: Last Friday we were given a private showing of Microsoft’s Surface product. WOW. This is the most natural human-computer experience I have yet to encounter. I love this and can’t wait to offer it to customers for a variety of applications.

Google Android: This is a mobile operating system (sort of) and not the Google Phone everyone was waiting for. It has tremendous potential but was honestly a bit of a let-down. We have a while to go before the potential is realized, but it does appear Google is out to fragment another industry and keep it open (and keep it hooked on search). It may be the best thing to happen to the US mobile phone market ever, but I doubt Verizon is going to let it happen casually, since they will be less able to control the sale of overpriced ringtones and wallpapers.

Open Social - probably the biggest Google announcement - has immediate application. This initiative will (in theory) allow developers to make “widgets” or “applications” that work on any social network that supports the Open Social initiative. It will also allow users to share their data across all those social networks, making it easier to maintain just one “page” and “friends list”, etc. Social Network startup and emerging juggernaut Ning has already rolled out support for the platform, and almost 20 companies are on board immediately. Except Facebook. They’re clearly left out for a reason. Google seems to want people to stop flocking to Facebook and return to an open internet (where they still need Google and their advertisers). Open Social will be very important to marketers. More to come.

Today, I’m visiting Mobile Internet World and I may have a tidbit or two to discuss regarding the future of web marketing to handhelds.

Oh, I also recently visited Communispace in Watertown, MA - they have a truly remarkeable approach to building and maintaining highly focused and vibrant social communities for market research, brainstorming, and many other applications.

Catch you later.

Michael Arrington at TechCrunch reported about a new ad model created by instant message chat aggregator Meebo. Faced with an interesting problem that their average user sits on the site for 2.5 hours without a page refresh, Meebo realized that the typical method of selling ads by impression was never going to work. Instead, ads are treated sort of like skins, where the users can add them to their backgrounds, create icons, and access related content. They can also deny the ad. They push a new ad during the session - up to five times per session.

This is similar to a promotional model in place on Microsoft’s popular video game platform XBOX Live. Through the XBOX 360, users can download free themes and gamerpics (like big buddy icons). When applied, a theme changes the background image of every page (called a blade) in the XBOX Live interface. I have seen movies, tv shows, and products promoted this way. Missing from this mode,l but present in the Meebo solution, is the path to click through to the product site or download additional content like MP3’s and videos.

This approach is intriguing to me because, unlike a traditional ad, this has the potential to give the user something in return for taking their time and attention. If they can manage to target the ad well, so a fan of hardcore punk music isn’t fed a Beonce’ ad, then the users may come to appreciate what would otherwise be considered an intrusion.

And it’s a boatload more appealing than those annoying AOL ads or AOL popups. It may explain this trend:

Wiffiti, the offspring of Somerville, MA based LocaModa creates digital signs and website objects to which anyone can send text messages for public viewing. It’s a way of creating a comment stream, a shout out board, or a stream of requests for a band or DJ to play. Seems like events can use this as a way to capture the pulse of the show, as a stream-of-consciousness brainstorming exercise, or countless other fun activities.

LocaModa has a powerful offering for mobile-phone-controlled digital signs. Rather than deploy a touch screen, which is fragile, not-very-hygienic, and typically limited to one user, signs that use mobile phones as their control mechanism open up all sorts of interesting possibilities, including two-way communications, group activities, after-hours secure applications through windows, and so on.

More B2B marketing blogs than doctors recommend. Download the OPML into your reader at your own peril. Make yourself a tickler so that a week from now you can identify this list as the source of your complete lack of productivity while you rejoice that you now know what’s going on in B2B… everywhere.