Open up your mind and say, ahh...

Getting discouraged is easy. There are negative people all around us, and it’s hard to pick out which ones are being constructive and honest versus those who are being jerks. What I find interesting is just how easy it is to let their opinion scuttle my mood for a while. That’s sure a lot of power I’m giving them. It’s easy to get discouraged.

Not Rocket Surgery

One repeat criticism of my work is that I’m not telling anyone anything new, that it’s all common sense. That’s actually reasonably true. You don’t spend time with me, read a few lines, and then smack your forehead and say, “I’ve got it!” Most of my ideas are basically reminders for us to do the things we don’t do, but know we should.

I’m okay with this criticism most days, because it’s true. I’m not innovating by creating new methods. I’m innovating by holding us to the standards of treating people like they’re human beings instead of prospects or targets. It’s not rocket surgery, as my Boston friends say.

Don’t Need a Pep Talk

I didn’t write this post to get your kind words of support. To be honest, I’m pretty confident that I’m headed in the right direction. For everyone telling me that I’m not all that interesting, I’m evidently the number 1 uninteresting guy writing about marketing.

What I wrote this piece for was to tell you that it’s easy to look at what you do as uninteresting, or unimportant, or just the same old thing. And maybe there’s some truth to it. If I look out at the top social media blogs right now, a good many of them are covering all the same software applications and a lot of the same stories. Maybe we could all dig a little deeper to innovate more.

But don’t let that stop you, if you’re following a vision, and if you’ve got a sense of where you’re headed.

Michael Jordan worked on the uninteresting task of pushing a ball through a net. Eleanor Roosevelt worked on the uninteresting task of writing articles and visiting people. Mohandas Gandhi worked on the uninteresting task of sitting down and saying no.

Me? I’m a typist. I’m just typing and talking about typing. And I’m not all that discouraged any more.

By Chris Brogan: www.chrisbrogan.com

Photo credit woodleywonderworks

Social Media is often misconstrued as a medium for business-to-consumer or B2C engagement and discounted as a viable communications network for those companies focused on business-to-business transactions. However, B2B, as in any other field impacted by online activity, is faced with a prime opportunity to not only cultivate communities in social networks and other social channels, but also amplify awareness, increase lead generation, reduce sales cycles, and perhaps most importantly, learn and adapt to market dynamics in real-time.

Ignorance is Bliss Until It’s Not…

Customers and those that influence them, regardless of industry, are migrating to the social Web at varying paces. While social or digital strategies do not replace proven means that are in play today, they do however, require augmentation and shifts in resources commensurate with the distribution of attention, where it’s focused and to what extent.

In my research, programs measured in hindsight are not the only views that offer 20/20 vision. Unobstructed foresight is now attainable and in some cases, predictable, based on our investment in time, energy and creativity in how we analyze online behavior, interaction, and ultimately influence. And, our ability to study and put research to work is only limited by our process for learning and adapting to earn and increase resonance within our target markets.

Perhaps one of the most fascinating aspects of listening to focused online interaction, is the ability to breakdown the decision making process and how customers and influencers impact behavior. To say it blatantly, social media makes it possible to identify and segment the specific stages of decision making online and how to in turn, respond in ways that steer interest in your favor. The results of these interactions also lend to the importance of adaptation. As we learn more about the challenges, considerations, and sentiment of our potential stakeholders, we can introduce those insights into future designs, processes, and communication.

If we are not part of the decision making process, we are then absent from the decision.

Opportunity Clicks

To help make the case, Outsell recently published its “Annual Advertising and Marketing Study” and in the report, Outsell states that B2B advertising and marketing spending will increase by only .8% to $129 billion. Interactive spending, on the other hand, will escalate by 9.2% to $51.5 billion this year.

As Social Media becomes pervasive in workflow and influence, Outsell’s study shows that spending is following the trend. To that end, B2B marketers will increase spending in social networks by 43.3%. While it’s not necessarily as alluring as social, company websites are only receiving a boost of 7.5%.

When we study engagement in interactive media, we find that we captivate attention in a very dynamic environment, but we lose them with each click that we either intentionally or unintentionally introduce to lead their experience post engagement. Many times, the click path is aimed right at the company site, and if we were to analyze the design and effectiveness of B2B websites today, we might just find that a large number are stuck in time, representative of an era more aligned with Web 1.0 than Web 2.0.  Opportunity clicks, and without defining a rich and rewarding click path as well as an enriching experience, which most likely requires the renovation of the corporate website, all online activity associated with increased social spending, will bear the brunt of defining and capitalizing on attention, within social networks, the moment it’s captured.

As part of the study, Outsell surfaced preferences for business engagement and activity in social networks. When asked to rate the effectiveness of particular networks, more than one-half of respondents claimed that Facebook was either “extremely” or “somewhat” effective. LinkedIn ranked second with 45% surprisingly (and not so surprisingly) ahead of Twitter at 35%, which of course, ranked higher than MySpace at 25%.

As eMarketer noted, when HubSpot ran its B2B North America survey, it found that businesses ranked LinkedIn on top at 45% ahead of Facebook at 33% as most effective in lead generation.

B2B, or any business or organization, must evaluate and implement interactive strategies in order to earn relevance and hopefully resonance in order to compete for the present and the future.

By Brian Solis: www.briansolis.com

Image Credit: Shutterstock

One of the biggest surprises of 2010 in the IT industry might be Apple’s sudden inability to keep its upcoming products hidden from the public eye. A company usually well known for its secrecy, Apple has been losing the next generation iPhone left and right; this time, a slew of images (and a video) of another iPhone 4G prototype appeared on Vietnamese site taoviet.vn.

This new prototype is very similar to the one Gizmodo had bought last month, but there are some minor differences; for example, this one lacks the screws at the bottom. Furthermore, this new device has been turned on, sporting an image of an explosion and the sign “Inferno” on the screen.

As always, there’s a very slight possibility that this device is fake, but due to the number of images (including a full teardown of the device) and the video (embedded below), it’s 99% real.

*Update: a closer look on the device’s innards reveals the possibility that this iPhone prototype sports the Apple A4 microprocessor; similar to the one found in the iPad.

[via MacRumors, Engadget]

It’s laughably easy to find someone to critique a sentence, to find a missing apostrophe or worry about your noun-verb agreement.

Sometimes, you’re lucky enough to find someone who can tell you that a paragraph is dull, or out of place.

But finding people to rearrange the chapters, to criticize the very arc of what you’re building, to give you substantive feedback on your strategy–that’s insanely valuable and rare.

Perhaps one criticism in a hundred is actually a useful and generous contribution in your quest to reorganize things for the better.

[And for those in need of subtitles, this isn't a post about your next novel. It's about your business, your career and your life.]

Four people tell you that there was a typo on the third slide in your presentation. A generous and useful editor (hard to call them a consultant), though, points out that you shouldn’t be doing presentations at all, and your time would be better spent meeting in small groups with your best clients.

By Seth Godin: http://sethgodin.typepad.com

Brightcove and FreeWheel are announcing a partnership today that will bring better ad-management and tracking data to publishers that want to utilize HTML5 video. This move further blurs the lines between Flash and HTML5, at least in the context of web video.

We spoke with Doug Knopper, the co-founder and co-CEO of FreeWheel and Jeremy Allaire, the CEO of Brightcove, about this new partnership and what it means for content publishers.

However, as we saw last month when talking to mDialog, ad platforms that utilize HTML5 and HTTP Streaming are starting to appear on the market.

What Brightcove and FreeWheel Are Doing

Brightcove is a leading online video platform used by major publishers like The New York Times, the Discovery Channel, A&E and Sony Pictures. It offers publishers a way to serve content via the web, from mobile devices, or even on connected TV platforms.

FreeWheel is an ad management and monetization platform. Its clients include Turner Broadcasting (TBS, CNN, TNT), the Discovery Channel, Major League Baseball and CBS. It’s a tool that can not only manage ad inventories from multiple sources and for different types of video, but it can also track performance and other analytical data.

Starting this June, Brightcove customers who use FreeWheel for ad management will be able to serve video via HTML5 and also have optimizable and trackable advertising options. This means that publishers can be assured that they are getting the same advertising value — and tracking information — whether a user is viewing content in a web browser or on an iPad.

Why This Matters

As Mr. Allaire pointed out in our discussion, there are more factors at play in the conversation about HTML5 and Flash — in terms of video content — that go beyond just how the video is served. “It’s pretty easy to just convert or serve video as an H.264 file,” says Allaire. “But that’s just the beginning. Entire platforms and enterprise level tools have been built for web video and these tools are written for Flash.”

This is true. Although more and more video services — including Brightcove — are now serving video in HTML5, that’s only part of the picture. In addition to serving video and customizing the look and feel of the video player (which again, is something Brightcove can do), there are tracking and advertising systems in place to help monetize that content. Most of these major systems are built for Flash video.

The partnership between FreeWheel and Brightcove gives their shared customers a way to keep their ad management tools that are already in place and still serve content on more and more devices.

Something that often gets lost in the debate over Flash and HTML5 is that right now, this doesn’t have to be an either or scenario — both options can continue to exist in parallel. However, the reason that HTML5 is so compelling — and the reason so many publishers are starting to jump on the bandwagon — is that it is a working solution right now for a variety of mobile devices that are on the market today and that are coming to the market in the future.

By bringing the publisher tools from the Flash world to HTML5, more content can become usable to more people.

What This Means for the Future

The fact that these tools are being developed by FreeWheel and others means that publishers, whether they use Brightcove or another video platform, will be more willing to invest in supporting HTML5. That’s a good thing because it means that web video can come to more and more devices.

Beyond that, the fact that the bigger companies are getting on board bodes well for the future of video because as the bigger video publishers start to embrace solutions, these solutions end up trickling down to smaller or even individual publishers. Perhaps it won’t be too long before it will be easy for individuals to host their own video in Flash or HTML5, even without using a platform like YouTube or Vimeo as a base.

What do you think of how the professional video market is embracing HTML5? Let us know!

Vanity Fair’s June issue is debuting in iPad form sometime on Wednesday, The New York Times reports. The app will be available in Apple’s App Store for $4.99, the same price as the glossy newsstand edition. Future editions will be priced at $3.99.

“Magazines are actually pretty brilliant concepts the way they are,” Editor-in-Chief Graydon Carter said during today’s preview. “At the same time, we have a few bells and whistles that a magazine cannot provide.”

Those ‘bells and whistles’ include the ability to view the magazine in horizontal and vertical mode, navigate by story or by page, return to the place a user left off reading, and watch behind-the-scenes footage of photo shoots — like the one with this month’s covergirl, Emma Watson. “You’ve got to be a big Emma Watson fan to get through that,” Carter admitted.

The issue will feature the same ads as the print edition, as well as special ads from six advertisers, including Microsoft Bing, Aveeno and Clinique. The special ads contain features like how-to videos and Facebook Pages, and can be viewed in vertical mode. Additionally, advertisers were also able to add links to their regular print ads for a “nominal fee,” according to publisher Edward Menicheschi.

Besides the vertical mode and the special ads, the iPad version of Vanity Fair offers little functionality beyond its web edition. The same video footage of Emma Watson is already available for free to visitors, for instance, as are most of the articles. In fact, the app lacks several critical features that the online version has, including the ability to copy and share articles.

While the app is still clearly a work in progress, it’s going to need to offer better features to get iPad users to dish out $3.99 every month instead of accessing new issues on the magazine’s website with their devices. Conde Nast also needs to develop its own app store to get access to the subscriber data it needs, as Apple will not reveal the names and addresses of the magazine’s iPad subscribers.

Do you think the iPad app is worth the price? If not, what features need to be included to make it so?

[img credit: Media Decoder]