brand identity, social media, online marketing, mobile
marketing, website design and development, e-commerce
design and optimization, search engine optimization,
flash marketing products, e-mail marketing
from anonymous angry people
Expose yourself to art you don’t yet understand
Precisely measure the results that are important to you
Stay blind to the metrics that don’t matter
Fail often
Ship
Lead, don’t manage so much
Seek out uncomfortable situations
Make an impact on the people who matter to you
Be better at your baseline skills than anyone else
Copyedit less, invent more
Give more speeches
Ignore unsolicited advice
By Seth Godin: http://sethgodin.typepad.com/
A friend was waiting to hear about the results of a job interview. He hadn’t heard in a while and he asked me, “how long before I should start worrying?”
Of course, the answer is, “you should never start worrying.”
Worrying is not a useful output. Worrying doesn’t change outcomes. Worrying ruins your day. Worrying distracts you from the work at hand. You may have fooled yourself into thinking that it’s useful or unavoidable, but it’s not. Now you’ve got one more thing to worry about.
By Seth Godin: http://sethgodin.typepad.com/
Some gigs are process oriented: Set up a process correctly and the rest takes care of itself. It’s challenging and frightening to get it right, but after that, you merely have to do the hard work of showing up each day. Do the work and you’ll get the results.
Other jobs require a different sort of hard work: the guts to be wrong, a confrontation with the risk of being stupid.
The comedian who fears that each new joke might fail, the writer who has to say something new, the leader who must improvise, solving new problems on a regular basis. What makes this work hard is that it might not work.
More and more people now have jobs that require them to confront the risk of appearing stupid on a regular basis.
By Seth Godin: http://sethgodin.typepad.com/
Guest post by Andrew Blakeley. Follow him on Twitter (for exclusive deals and offers!)
I recently undertook a simple Facebook experiment, inspired by a brief Monday morning rant from my boss: “This morning my yoghurt told me to find it on Facebook. It didn’t tell me why, it just told me to find it. Why on Earth would I want to find a yoghurt on Facebook? It’s a yoghurt!”
He was right, of course. As social networks slowly become the default online presence for brands to drive their consumers to, adverts, marketing and packaging has started telling us where to go. However, it hasn’t yet started telling us why to go there.
For my experiment – “Find Us On Facebook” – I vowed to Like every brand that asked me to for one week. I would then blog and analyse the various offerings of each brand, in particular how they were attempting to drive people from the offline world to the online, social, world. Here are the results:
As a marketer, I found the results very disappointing. For an industry the focuses endlessly on providing consumers with “benefits” and “reasons to believe” here was a lot of marketing asking people to take an action, without telling them what they stood to gain from it. In 2011 it’s more or less a given that your brand can be found on Facebook, and consumers know that. What they don’t know is why they should bother.
What consumers want from brands in social media is a topic that has been widely written about already, and is fairly well understood by marketers. Research from advertising agency DDB Paris found that amongst the top reasons for Liking a brand were: “to take advantage of promotional benefits”,” to be informed of new products offered by the brand”,” to access exclusive information” and “to give my opinion about the brand”. Four very clear reasons to bother, which could easily be affixed or suffixed onto any “Find us on Facebook” message for greater impact.
Another key finding was the number of brand Liking requests coming from email marketing. These are brands that I had chosen to receive email marketing from directly into my inbox, and here they were asking to appear in my Facebook newsfeed too. They weren’t, however, telling me why I should open myself up to them in another channel.
Only 1 of the 16 brands provided an incentive to make the leap from email to social media. I literally had no reason to bother with the other brands, as I was already receiving their deals and offers, and they weren’t giving me another reason. Some brands have found interesting ways to incentivise people to make the jump:
• Dingo, a dog food brand from Ohio, included a promotion that would only kick-in when the Facebook page reached 5,000 fans (from a base of 300). They had an unprecedented take-up, with fans forwarding on the email to their friends and encouraging sign-ups to get the offer. They hit the 5,000 mark in just 3 days.
• Bag retailer Timbuk2 included an opportunity to win a bike, helmet and messenger bag in an email to its 100,000 newsletter subscribers. It received 6,500 clickthroughs vs. just 9 from its generic social call to action.
Consumers need these incentives, because they know that otherwise all they’re doing is agreeing to be bombarded with more marketing unrewarded.
The sad thing is that some brands are actually building really fun, engaging content in these spaces, but not making people aware of them. The Fosters beer page, for instance, is full of great exclusive Alan Partridge content, starring Steve Coogan and written by Armando Iannucci. Their TV ad, however, had nothing more than a Facebook URL. Had they said “for exclusive Alan Partridge episodes” they would’ve opened their brand Facebook page up to a whole wealth of people, who felt genuinely motivated to click Like.
My week as a social consumer left me tired and confused. It left my Facebook newsfeed so crammed with nonsense to the point that I could scroll entire pages without seeing my friends. It left me a bit sad for the digital marketers and agencies who were building great content that wasn’t getting the attention it deserved. So, if you’re reading this and you work in advertising or are a brand manager – next time you think about telling your consumers to find you on Facebook, consider telling them why.
Artist: Natalie Dee
Via Brian Solis: http://www.briansolis.com
Appcelerator and IDC just published a new survey of smartphone developers focusing on long-term platform perceptions, as well as what features are most important when developing a new app.
The results, like those from a similar study performed by Appcelerator in June, indicate that Google’s Android platform continues to be where developers see the most long-term potential, especially when powering multiple types of devices (read: beyond smartphone/tablet).
In fact, the gap between iOS and Android over “best long-term outlook” has widened an additional 10 points since June. The latest survey results indicate that 58.6% of respondents see Android as having better long-term outlook as compared to 34.9% for iOS.
I spoke with Scott Schwarzhoff, VP of Marketing at Appcelerator about the results of the survey and some of his thoughts on why trends are shaping up as they are.
Appcelerator and IDC asked developers a series of questions about how they perceived Android and iOS in terms of capabilities, openness, long-term outlook and ability to power a variety of connected devices in the future.
You can see the results in the chart below:
While Android leads iOS in all four questions, the two where Android has an overwhelming lead over the competition are variety of devices and openness. These two areas both speak to Android’s potential as an underlying framework (and one that isn’t necessarily tied into Google or the Android Market) as much as its capabilities.
We’ve already seen a barrage of Android-powered or Android-based devices of all shapes and sizes hit the market. Beyond tablets and portable music players — and keep in mind, Google hasn’t released a tablet-optimized version of its OS yet — we’ve seen Android-powered ebook readers, Android TVs, Android picture frames and more. Google’s upcoming Google TV will be based on Android.
At its base, Android is a customizable low-level operating system that is perfect for embedded devices. In this case, it’s similar to the GPL-licensed BusyBox. BusyBox is a very lightweight and portable set of Unix tools and utilities that can be used with the Linux kernel. On electronic devices that run an embedded version of the Linux kernel (read, hundreds of thousands of electronics), BusyBox provides an ultra-lightweight set of tools that can be used for diagnostics and for adding additional features.
In many ways, Android is becoming the BusyBox of the 21st century. Sure, the base hardware specifications are going to be higher, but as chip prices fall and capabilities rise — not to mention the convergence of connected devices — it makes sense to have a base platform that has built-in support for networking, userland tools and also can be hooked into a higher-level application ecosystem.
In theory, iOS could be used for these same purposes. The difference is that Android is licensed under the Apache license (Google’s own applications and the Android Market are under different licenses, which is why you don’t see the Android Market on devices without a cellular data connection), whereas Apple’s iOS is proprietary and not licensed to outside device makers.
The Android Market is tied to Google Checkout and paid apps are still not available in all countries. This limits the revenue opportunities for developers. Additionally, the app discovery system pales in comparison to iOS.
Interestingly, four of the five developers surveyed favored developing a native app over a web app — most of these developers come from a web development background.
Still, when it comes to native applications, developers want their apps to be location aware and to be able to offer push-updates. Schwarzhoff described these two indicators as an area where mobile development is unique from other types of development. Context becomes increasingly important for mobile development as apps can display or push out different information based on what time it is or where a user is located.
Schwarzhoff also noted that when it comes to the phone camera, developers increasingly want to utilize the camera as a way to capture additional information, instead of the traditional, “take photos and upload to Flickr” sense (though that is helpful too).
That’s why QR codes and barcode apps have seen a lot of traction. The camera can be used to bring back in lots of information that can then be used to inform the app of what to do next.
Likewise, it’s important that apps have hooks to social features like Facebook and Twitter.
In the area of commerce, 49% of developers responded that they needed access to the iOS-in-App purchase system. That has really been a great way for developers to offer upgrades and enhancements to their apps.
Likewise, PayPal Payments are requested by 48% of developers. PayPal has been dedicating a lot of energy into improving the mobile payment process. Earlier this year, it rolled out its PayPal iPhone SDK as a way for developers to accept PayPal payments in app. We’ve spoken to PayPal several times and they see mobile and mobile payments as a real focus going forward.
Looking at the features that developers want to be able to integrate into their apps, it’s important to note how many are platform agnostic. This actually shows that there is potential for another company — Microsoft, RIM, HP — to capture developer interest depending upon how easy they make it to hook into the types of services and types of features that developers want to bring to their apps.
What do you think of the survey results? Are you surprised with any of the findings? If you develop mobile applications, what features are most important to you?
Image courtesy of nrkbeta
By Mashable: http://www.mashable.com
Some myths for the modern age:
There are thousands more myths, aren’t there? You could add some. Or you could set about deciding what is going to matter. And then, you could do. Something.
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Chris Brogan is an eleven year veteran of social media using both web and mobile technologies to build digital relationships for businesses, organizations, and individuals. |
If you choose to manage a project, it’s pretty safe. As the manager, you report. You report on what’s happening, you chronicle the results, you are the middleman.
If you choose to run a project, on the other hand, you’re on the hook. It’s an active engagement, bending the status quo to your will, ensuring that you ship.
Running a project requires a level of commitment that’s absent from someone who is managing one. Who would you rather hire, a manager or a runner?
By Seth Godin: http://sethgodin.typepad.com/
Valve Interactive
An online marketing and design agency in Portland Oregon
