Monthly Archives: October 2011
It’s conference season (when isn’t it?) and as the leaves turn to brown and travel budgets get squeezed we all have to carefully consider where we’re going and what we hope to get out of the experience. It’s not all trays of banana bread and drink tickets, so what makes for a good conference experience? For me it’s a focus on emerging trends and creative problem solving shared with your peers.
I was lucky enough to sit on a panel titled Managing, Measuring and Evaluating Distributed Content: Video, Webinars, White Papers and More, where we discussed the challenges and opportunities that distributed content models offer. Joining me was my partner on the client side, Kelly Turner, who is the content strategy lead at AT&T and provided perspective on what a large organization faces when it comes to distributed content and maintaining a strategic vision.
Kelly and I recently discussed what we brought home from the Internet Marketing Conference in Vancouver.
Derek Phillips: So, what did you think of the IMC? Was it what you expected?
Kelly Turner: Let’s see, I expected a big conference room, people with name tags, aroma of coffee and cologne, weird haircuts, hipster glasses…and on that front I certainly wasn’t disappointed. Other than that I had absolutely no idea what to expect. But I will say that overall it was definitely one of the cooler things I’ve gotten to do in my professional career. And remember, in my life as a journalist I saw open heart surgeries and interviewed criminals, many of whom were not elected officials, so I know what I’m talking about.
Derek: Were there any “ah-ha!” moments? Did you learn anything?
We had a great turnout here at Critical Mass for our Social Media Week presentation on measuring Social Media ROI. As the standing room only crowd attested, this is a topic that many people are grappling with right now.
Social Media Week’s blogger Kerry Sugrue developed a good summary of the presentation, and we’ve made the slides available as well.
ROI Is Not Always the Right Fit
Perhaps the most well-received point of our presentation was the observation that the measurement of ROI is not always the best way to evaluate the value of social media engagement to an organization.
ROI has a clear definition; the measure of financial results against a defined investment. It is also unfortunately a management catch phrase.
Often, when management asks for the ROI on social media, what they are really asking for is the value of social media engagement to the business. Some value can be measured financially, and thus be converted to ROI, but with social media, much value must be measured in other terms.
Anyone who is asked to evaluate the ROI of their social media effort should ask back in return if ROI is really the right measure, or if management is really seeking the most relevant measures of value available. If the true interest is around understanding the effectiveness of engagement, then many alternative measures can be used.
Tweeting and gaming to save a tech entrepreneur’s life
I’ve come across a lot of cool social stories while writing Social Six, but this is potentially one of my favorites.
Amit Gupta, a tech entrepreneur, has recently been diagnosed with leukemia. Having to undergo chemotherapy, Gupta also found out he will need a bone marrow transplant. But being a minority, finding a match isn’t easy. So Gupta, and all of his coworkers and friends, took to social media to encourage people to “Swab for Amit” to see if they are a bone marrow match. Gupta posted on his Tumblr blog, Twitter campaigns were launched, bone-marrow donor drives popped up, and Facebook pulsed with Gupta’s name.
Mobile Payments: What’s the freakin’ hold-up?
For the last couple of years, mobile payments have been a holy grail for tech companies, financial service providers, and marketers. Yet, do you know anyone who’s actually making them? I use my phone for a lot of things—watching videos, extending car rentals, tweeting minutiae—but paying for my convenience store purchases is not one of them. And I am a noted smartphone addict (well, “noted” among friends and family, at least). Most people aren’t even excited about the idea. Even among 18 to 34 year-olds, 74% are not at all or not very interested in mobile wallet technology. So what’s the barrier?
Last month, eMarketer published “Mobile Payments: Moving Closer to a World without Wallets”, which surveyed the mobile payment landscape and gave us some interesting insights into why consumers aren’t yet chomping at the bit for a wallet-phone and how they think marketers and technologists will overcome that. eMarketer pinpointed a major fear inhibiting widespread mobile payment adoption: consumer concern about data privacy and fraud. Read More
In this third and final installment, Senior Developer Kevin Malone shares his thoughts on Facebook’s workflow improvements from a tech perspective.
What are they going to break this time? That’s probably the question most Facebook application developers were thinking at the start of the f8 2011 conference. When it comes to Facebook, change can be scary. While users of Facebook get all worked up over interface changes, those of us who build applications on top of the Facebook platform have legitimate concerns. Namely, did the changes break our applications? Unfortunately, it happens more often than anyone cares to think about.
Thankfully, this post isn’t about what Facebook broke. It’s about what they have made better. Facebook has introduced a number of changes that will make the lives of developers a bit easier.
Adobe Acquires TypeKit and PhoneGap to Broaden its HTML5 Toolset
Adobe made some big announcements yesterday at their Adobe MAX conference. Adobe announced two new acquisitions: Nitobi (creators of PhoneGap) and Typekit. PhoneGap is an impressive platform for developing native mobile applications using web technologies such as HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript. TypeKit is a popular service used for enabling developers and designers to embed custom font faces on websites – enabling web content to be beautiful as well as accessible and search engine-friendly.
With these acquisitions, Adobe’s clearly proclaiming their support for web standards and sees standards as playing a large role in their future. There’s been an obvious controversy around Adobe’s position on standards-based web technologies like HTML5 when they’re also promoting the use of their Flash product. But today, it’s even more clear that Adobe is vying to maintain their position as a leader in publishing for the web.
After watching the responses around the web regarding these two acquisitions, it’s clear there is some hesitation and doubt that Adobe will be able to maintain the integrity of these two companies. There are some questions around whether or not Adobe will simply just introduce more corporate bureaucracy and ultimately be the demise of these acquisitions.
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