Monthly Archives: March 2011
SXSWi – it’s the birth of a proto-city: a hive of integrated people experimenting with the tools in the market that, without mass local adoption, would not have any poignancy. It’s where the early adopters can temporarily form a society of mutually founded infrastructure.
Obviously I like to consider myself a fairly early adopter. I am generally picking up the newest thing in beta and giving it a try. The proto-city certainly is a unique experience where these services just work and I’m not at the mercy of my family and friends to adopt the numerous new things I throw at them every week.
This week’s post is all about these services and how they work, a kind of preview to how they would work if a mainstream audience were to pick them up. There are some old and some new, but all based around the ever growing social–mobile & desktop–sector.
The prevailing theme this year was group messaging and location based services. Typically when you look back at SXSW there is one clear launch that will take hold and change the landscape of digital: Twitter, Foursquare, Gowalla, etc. I would say that this year there was no clear winner. This may be perhaps due to development becoming easier and faster than it was a couple years ago, which would correlate to SXSW being fettered with startup after startup, creating so much noise that no single one stood out.
There’s four services that I looked at primarily while down in Austin: Convore, Beluga, Hashable, & Yobongo.
With the advent of social media, it has never been easier for consumers to interact with companies. An Experience Matters post a few weeks ago by Jeana Anderson showed how a couple simple tweets turned into an extraordinary experience. However, companies must be careful when using social media, because while good personal interactions can become extraordinary, bad personal interactions can become disastrous.
Curious’ recent research using our online community ShopTalk touched on why people choose to boycott companies. We found that boycotts which stem from bad personal interactions with companies are far more powerful than boycotts that arise from social or political scandals, as the case with BP or Nike.
About half of our members boycotted a company based on the company’s social practices or political views. Members talked about boycotting companies like Wal-Mart, based on their employment practices or Citgo-gas because of its ownership by “enemy of America” Venezuela. The other half boycotted a company based on a bad personal experience, such as terrible customer service. It was the first time I’d heard of Denny’s, Barnes and Noble, and Suave being boycotted.
Communities
What A #MarchMadness Bracket Would Look Like If It Were Decided By Twitter
With March Madness well underway, most of our attentions have been turned to the TVs, and away from twitter for a little bit. But Empire Avenue, a social media exchange service, has dared to keep on tweeting and ask one very important question: Who would take home the National Champion of Twitter. Empire Avenue has set up a full bracket of which university would take home the top prize when it comes to twitter activity. The Final Four has been narrowed down to North Carolina, Michigan, Wisconsin and UNLV. Just in case your brackets are not doing as well as you had hoped, maybe you will have a little more luck with this one.
Tools & Technologies
Augmented Reality Industry Aims to Get Beyond the Hype
Augmented reality is a phenomenon that has really been a theory more than a reality. With all of the hype however, consumers are getting excited about all of the potential possibilities. But now, Laurent Gil, founder of Viewdle, is ready to make all this hype a reality. With plenty of other developers and augmented reality coinsures behind him, the technology may not be as far into the future as we thought before. For example, gaming company Ogmento is working on finding ways to encourage natural behavior while playing these games, discouraging awkward motions and movements. Steps like these, Gil believes, are what will help bring augmented reality, into reality.
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COMMUNITIES
While the World Watches, Japan Tweets Its Way Out of Disaster
Devastation and heartbreak hit Japan late last week with both the earthquake and the tsunami. Now, in the aftermath, social media is playing a bigger and more important role than ever. Many loved ones have been able to reconnect due to tools like Twitter and Facebook, and many tourists in Japan have been able to alert their families across seas that they are, in fact, safe. People Finder, powered by Google, is in use once again after its creation for the Haiti earthquake in 2010, and helping people locate lost victims. Social media is even helping in the fight to raise monetary donations for the cause. Within an hour of the disaster, tweets from Japan were flying out at a speed of 1,200 per minute. Fundraising efforts have also been set up through social media, so to find out how to donate and help, check out the rest of this article.
TOOLS & TECHNOLOGIES
Twitter Adds Permanent HTTPS Setting to Improve Security
Twitter is looking to improve their security, and many think that their most recent development will most certainly help in this area. Twitter has added a setting that will permanently enable your HTTPS (Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure) setting. Basically, this setting creates a more secure network, decreasing the chance that someone will be able to access users account information. This Yahoo! article does a wonderful job explaining the mechanics behind it. While this feature is now available, Twitter notes that it is not possible for its mobile website to enforce HTTPS settings permanently, but they are working on a solution.
Image credit: www.jonessnowboards.com
It started with 2,600 people packed into a Salt Lake City hotel ballroom eagerly awaiting the show to begin. This was my first year attending, so I didn’t know what to expect. The room looked like it has been set up for rock concert rather than a business conference. As a voice came over the loud speaker letting us know that the show was about to begin, Daft Punk started playing, the lights dimmed and the opening keynote for Adobe’s Omniture Summit began.
The annual event is a three day marathon of training, keynotes, breakout sessions, networking and, of course, partying with some of the best web analysts, advertisers, developers and digital marketers in the world.
The theme for this year’s summit was that digital marketing was the new extreme sport. If you think about it, the concept makes a lot of sense. Digital marketing, similar to extreme sports, is a combination of art and science. Whether you are analyzing a snowpack or spinning 180s over 120 foot gaps in the back country, you can’t (and shouldn’t) do one without the other. Summit takes all that is awesome about digital measurement and crams it into a very short time period. This makes for some very late nights and a lot of early morning coffee. But it is all worth it to spend some time with some of the world’s best and brightest marketers.
So what did I learn from the experience? Lots more than I care to write, but below are my four biggest takeaways.
