There’s a great piece over on Adage this morning about a recent situation involving Discovery Channel’s purchase of the Promoted Trend – the sponsored slot that appears at the top of the trending topics list on Twitter – for Shark Week. Those who use Twitter regularly know that the list of organically occurring trends is wildly unpredictable and can range from the benign (#bieberfever) to the not-so.
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The folks over at Econsultancy have released the Internet Marketing Strategy Briefing, a free report covering online trends in digital marketing. Yesterday they posted an excerpt about measuring social media. While much has been written about this topic what I liked about the Econsultancy piece is that it’s balanced, doesn’t place undue emphasis on any one “metric” and seems to provide a richer understanding of how a variety of data sources should be considered in measuring the value of social media practices.
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So I’ve received one of the coveted early invites to join Google+, the search behemoth’s full force foray into social media. Does it live up to the hype? Some have described it as Facebook for Grownups. Others say it’s fun but “empty” due to the current dearth of users, due in equal measures to the current invite-only membership as well as the fact that Facebook currently holds so many users who may not want to add yet another social media site to their daily roster. After my brief examination of the site and its features – because, to the emptiness point, I currently have only 4 friends – I think both assessments carry some weight. As someone who is a bit of a Facebook junkie, I can actually see myself migrating to Google+ over time – provided that more of the people I want to connect with do, as well.
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As we head into the holiday weekend, the folks over at NetBase have put up a graphic that shows a 12-month trend in social media sentiment for 5 major grocery retailers – Safeway, Costco, Walmart, Kroger, and Whole Foods. The data feeding the graphic comes by way of their Brand Passion Index, which analyzes consumer passion for vertically-based brands. I don’t find the results very surprising.
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It was announced this week that Tesco, the world’s third largest retail chain, has paid $60 million to acquire BzzAgent, a Boston based startup. BzzAgent has amassed a database of nearly 1 million people to try new products and “buzz” about them to others in their on- and offline personal networks.
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Friskies finds a powerful and unexpected way to use the iPad by creating games not for their direct customer (people) but for their ultimate end user, cats.
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For me, one of the best parts of the web is also one of the most overwhelming aspects of it: how to manage and track all of the information I find. Although I haven’t found an application that extends a 24 hour day into 48 hours – which would go a long way in helping me keep up with everything I want and need to know – I can tell you about some tools that get me 50% of the way there.
What it is: A web based aggregator that pulls together content from all kinds of sites that you can subscribe to and collects them in one customized web page.
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I attended OMMA Global this week, one of the many conferences happening up in NY for Advertising Week. I was able to capture some nuggets of information that made the two days worthwhile. You can find out what other people thought through the twitter stream.
I’ve been in the interactive space for 16 years (wow that makes me feel old!). What really struck me over the course of the two days is how much more there is to know and how much more specialization there is at this juncture. It’s not just about content for the web – it’s about optimizing content across PC, Mac, Mobile, HD screens at conferences, etc. It’s not just about Social Media – it’s about social networks, blogs, micro-blogging, crowdsourcing, bookmarking, video, etc. It’s not just about mobile – it’s about iPhone, iPad (and iPad wanna-be’s), Android, Blackberry, Windows. You get the idea – digital has become a much more layered and complicated industry – and what’s amazing is the short amount of time that all of these new areas of expertise have developed.
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