Monday, June 23, 2008

Living in a Web 2.0 World

This is one of those things that's just really cool. Take 1,001 logos from so-called Web 2.0 companies, use AndreaMosaic, a photo mosaic tool, and you've got a Web 2.0 version of Google Earth.

The full interactive version is available here.

Labels: 2.0, fun

Posted by Scott Monty at 7:54 PM

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Friday, November 02, 2007

Verizon Gets It; Others May Too

Recently, Verizon launched a promotion in Pennsylvania where they're giving five families a chance to win a FiOS home makeover. And before you mention it, no not those Five Families; I know I'm the Consiglieri at crayon, but Verizon has a reputation to keep.

This is all part of a show called My Home 2.0 and it's part of Verizon's effort to give families' homes an amazing technology update, including Verizon's FiOS service. What an amazing opportunity! All you have to do if you live in the area is submit an audition video on the My Home 2.0 site.

My friends and former colleagues C.C. Chapman and Steve Coulson of The Advance Guard are in charge of this campaign and you can tell it's got their creativity behind it. The social media news release page is nicely done, plus there are all sorts of social media sites attached to it. My favorite has to be the Facebook group, as it centralizes the experiences, photos and videos.

Ugh. What I wouldn't give for FiOS TV and Internet service. But my area isn't even wired yet, and this contest is only for the Pittsburgh & Philadelphia areas. Best of luck to all who audition!

Labels: 2.0, news, outreach, social media

Posted by Scott Monty at 1:15 AM

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Saturday, October 27, 2007

My PodCamp Boston 2 Presentation

This morning, I had the opportunity to give a presentation at PodCamp Boston 2. It was a full house, despite being the first session of the morning on a foggy, damp and grey morning in Boston.

Thank you to everyone who attended, asked questions - and most importantly, contributed to the conversation. I admitted that I clearly don't know everything about this field and that I rely on my communities to fill in my knowledge gaps. That's the beauty of the social media space.

My talk, Web 2.0 Tools You Can Use, focused on four web apps that can help you be more productive and get your life in order. I recommended four basic tools - certainly not a comprehensive list, but a basic set of productivity-enhancing apps that can help you keep sane amidst the clutter.

And the Web is cluttered. Some basic facts:

Facebook gets over 54 billion page views a month
Facebook accounts for 1% of all Web traffic
25% of people's free time is spent online
Technorati tracks 70 million blogs
Not to mention that every day, I have to check email, Twitter, Skype, and a boatload of RSS feeds

The question is, how productive can you possibly be amidst all of this? There has to be a way.

| View | Upload your own

My suggestions:

And crayon's latest client, the groundbreaking video chat client, ooVoo - which you can see at the end of the deck, embedded above and hosted on SlideShare.

And then I opened it up to the audience. Some of their suggestions included:

If you'd like a comprehensive list of the tools that I track, you can see it at: http://del.icio.us/socialmediamarketing/tools

Special thanks to Mark Blevis for taking notes during the session and forwarding on the audience suggestions.

Labels: 2.0, podcamp, podcampboston, tools

Posted by Scott Monty at 2:39 PM

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Friday, October 26, 2007

I'll Be Seeing You

This weekend, I'll be participating in PodCamp Boston 2. If you're there, please be sure to stop me and say hello if you see me.

I'll be giving the first presentation in the 2.0 track after Mitch Joel's keynote on Saturday morning. My session is titled Web 2.0 Tools That Are Actually Useful. I plan to post the links from the presentation here on the blog next week.

And if everything goes according to plan, I'll have a set of community-suggested links that my audience is going to recommend as well.

Happy PodCamping!

Labels: 2.0, news, podcamp

Posted by Scott Monty at 12:55 AM

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Friday, August 24, 2007

Web Two-Point Whoa!

Is it just me or are there like a billion Web 2.0 sites out there that flash by me via email, RSS feeds, newsletters, web sites, etc.? It's hard to keep track of all of them.

I could go to my del.icio.us page, but that's limited only to what I've been scanning & bookmarking. What I like about it is that I can throw in a likely tag and be given a range of sites that are foggy in my memory, so I can narrow the search.

But now it looks like there's a site out there that can do that, but on a much larger scale. With over 5,000 Web applications in their database, the folks at Simple Spark provide a place to share and search for cool stuff online. And to prove that they're providing a useful service, they've given us this handy video:

Via Karl Long.

Labels: 2.0, Friday Fun, innovation, tools, Video

Posted by Scott Monty at 12:07 AM

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Wednesday, August 01, 2007

Second Generation iPhone Is Here

While the iPhone has been hyped by the digerati and blogosphere, recently the actual sales numbers didn't quite live up to expectations. Only 146,000 phones were activated on June 29 & 30.

Of course, this may have had more to do with crappy customer service from AT&T - excuse me, at&t - but it reflects on Apple's poor choice of carrier. But the bottom line is, fewer phones were online than expected.

Why? I think it may have something to do with the tech-savvy folks who are waiting for the second generation of iPhones. They're waiting to see if there are any bugs to be worked out, if Apple adds Flash support, a speedier network, a better battery, etc. Can't say that I blame them. I know a former member of the executive team at Apple and he said the same thing. It's helpful having an inside line on goings-on at Apple.

So, you might be wondering just what the 2nd generation iPhone will be like? I have the answer below...

David Letterman iPhone Nano
Uploaded by PeteRock

Labels: 2.0, Apple, customer relations, iPhone

Posted by Scott Monty at 1:58 AM

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Thursday, March 29, 2007

Schwag for Your Next Unconference

I was flipping through the Wall Street Journal today (Heaven forfend! I'm still reading print!), ready to fold it up and toss it in the recycling bin, when a 4C full page ad on the back of the Marketplace section caught my eye.

It was an ad for Titleist featuring 20 golf balls with different logos sitting on newsprint. The headline was "Excellence is the best investment" and the golf balls had logos from a wide variety of well-known brands such as Fidelity, Marriott, Lexus, EMC, Ocean Spray, Timberland and FedEx. In an effort to entice readers to associate their own brands with Titleist, the ad encouraged readers to go to titleist.com/customball to create logoed golf balls of their own.

It may be an old cliche, but there's still a ring of truth to it: a good deal of the business world uses golf as part of deepening relationships. Prospects, customers, employees, board members - essentially any constituency that matters - can be drawn into the conversation and engaged on a more personal and human level while on the golf course. But what does that have to do with the Titleist ad and social media?

This is a great example of an old-school company adapting to the world of new marketing and new technology as part of its branding efforts. Titleist gets the benefit of being able to run an ad with 20 well known brands that have created custom logos, thus strengthening their own, and they get wider exposure by encouraging what is essentially consumer-generated content (i.e. your own logo on a golf ball).

Here's my take on how their service delivers.

The Good
I had never before thought of or desired to visit the Titleist Web site. Golf balls are very nearly a commodity (or should be, the way I golf!) and in my mind don't offer much in the way of differentiation. Even though they aren't marketed this way, I think all golf balls are pretty much equivalent. For my money, the clubs (and the lessons) make the difference.

So I give Titleist full credit for getting me to visit their site based on a nice piece of creative with a compelling call to action.

Once there, you can select from event-related balls (birthdays, launches, etc.) or simply design your own ball. The interface is very smooth with - its Flash-enabled - and it allows you do quickly navigate through the steps.

Choose the type of cusomtomization - name, logo, name & logo, etc.
One, two or three lines of text in your choice of 4 colors
Your logo
Type of Titleist ball you'd like
Standard or customized packaging

It's as easy as drag & drop, and you can resize and crop your logo so it fits on the face of the ball.

Room for Improvement
Here's where Titleist falls down on this otherwise cool site:

Logo balls require a minimum order of 12 boxes (144 balls). That may be fine if you're going to a lot of shows, have a lot of customers, or you lose a lot of balls. But if you're looking to do something on the small end, it's not really an option. An example of a company that does it right with small orders of highly customized material is Moo.
There's no pricing information.
Once you're done with your design and are ready to place your order, it's not as simple as clicking "order now." You need to physically print out your order, gather a high-res file of your logo and track down your nearest "authorized Titleist golf shop or promotional products distributor." At least you can go back to the main site and click on their Golf Shop Locator to find one near you.

All in all, this is not a bad service. And like Moo, it's an interesting and unique way to brand yourself at smaller events like unconferences.

Note: I am in no way affiliated with Titleist nor was I paid or approached by Titleist to write this post. I'm simply a social media expert with golf on the brain as spring rolls around.

Labels: 2.0, Advertising, brand, fun, Moo, schwag, social media, unconference

Posted by Scott Monty at 3:40 PM

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Thursday, February 01, 2007

Truth and Consequences in Social Media

As social media becomes ever more prevalent, it's clear that some thought should be applied in advance of actions. Wal-Mart and Sony flogs, client pitches and viral marketing gone horribly wrong are all examples of what happens when you don't think about unintended consequences of your well-planned strategy. And when it's so easy to bring a marketer's foibles to the attention of the world, it's more important than ever to question the tactics with some good old common sense.

We've gotten to a point in our World 2.0 where we do things because we can rather than because we should. We have oversized cars & houses, we're cloning embryos, we SuperSize everything - pick your issue and your political persuasion and there's something you can point to that we do or have, simply because it's available.

That's not exactly the way to run your marketing campaign. "We can strap battery-powered electronic devices to bridges to build buzz!" Uh, yes you can, but you probably shouldn't.

And all of this naturally affects brand and reputation, which is more fragile than ever for smaller businesses, with consumers taking control of the conversation in our MyTubeTechnol.icio.us world. It takes so long to build a trusted brand, and it can all be undone with a careless action, heated conversation, or a plan that sounded good one time in a meeting.

Case in point: Maggie Fox over at the Social Media Group notes Why you need to pay attention to the blogosphere - now that the law firm Sullivan & Cromwell is getting smacked around in the blogosphere. According the Globe and Mail, the firm is trying to maintain its reputation amidst

[M]ostly unverified accounts from anonymous posters, suggest[ing] workplace morale is awful. One anonymous blogger who claimed to be a former Sullivan & Cromwell employee said on The Wall Street Journal’s law blog that he had “never worked with a bigger bunch of sycophants and cowards.”

And on yesterday's Small Agency Diary, Marc Brownstein penned an entry called Retaining Talent: What Works? in which he created a check-list of how an employer can ensure that employees are interested in sticking around. In his comments section (glad to see he has one!) Brownstein was greeted with a scolding from a former employee who advised him to walk the talk.

This is part of the risk in taking a strong point of view in a blog. You're bound to find detractors. But the point is, you've provoked a conversation. In this case, Brownstein can not only monitor the conversation, but can engage in it as well. He'll need to make a decision about how to respond: refute the assertions, let them die out, or keep building his reputation by cross-posting on other blogs and encouraging peers and clients to speak what's on their mind. With any luck, it'll be positive.

Blogging is not for the faint of heart. It takes dedication and courage - courage to know that you will be judged on what you write, how well you communicate, and whether your ideas are equivalent to your reputation.

Are you up for the challenge?

Labels: 2.0, blogs, ethics, Marketing, New Media, Risk, social media, Viral

Posted by Scott Monty at 5:23 PM

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Over the last year, the blogosphere has been abuzz with the evolution of the Social Media News Release first introduced by SHIFT Communications. There have been improvements and suggestions along the way, and I've seen a number of clients express interest in moving to this model of press release.

I just found a great little widget, courtesy of eHub, that allows marketers to bump up the SMNR another notch. Along with the excellent multimedia links available in the SMNR - audio, video, graphics - for those of you who would prefer to engage in phone conversations rather than email exchanges with your audience, Gizmo Call is your solution.

You just download a quick piece of code and in 20 seconds, you're ready to rock. If you put your phone number into the code, you can plant some HTML in your press release so that with a single click, editors can be on the phone with you. Of course, they'll need a headset to do so from their computers.

Sounds pretty cool. I'll let you decide how it works - here's the link: Call Me for FREE

Of course, the site does have a legal disclaimer, including:

* Call length limited to up to 10 minutes per day to most landlines & select mobile phones around the world. Additional restrictions may apply.

Labels: 2.0, New Media, PR, social media, tools

Posted by Scott Monty at 3:16 PM

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Monday, October 23, 2006

Color Me Impressed

I recently blogged about giving Second Life a second chance. It seems that there's more to Second Life than I initially thought. Consider the following:

IBM recently broke ground in Second Life for hosting corporate meetings;
The Economist did a piece on living a Second Life;
InfoWorld remarks on the uniqueness of this "fundamentally social" outlet;
According to current statistics on the home page, there are currently 1,097,422 residents who have spent US$580,371 on the site in the last 24 hours

And, perhaps most significantly of all, Joseph Jaffe, C.C. Chapman, Neville Hobson and Shel Holtz are the first to found a company completely within Second Life called crayon. Neville notes that crayon is "both a real and a virtual company," which will be housed on Crayonville Island in Second Life, but will operate in the real world as "a true mash-up that combines the best in traditional and new thinking about marketing, advertising and PR."

Shel also covers it well on his blog, noting that crayon is "a startup that features a killer team of communicators and a laser-like focus on New Marketing."

crayon is something of a mashup...not an agency or a consulting firm...We’ll approach our assignments with fresh eyes that see the new environment in which traditional marketing and advertising is failing so dismally...Engagement, conversation, co-creation, involvement—these are the approaches that we are anxious to bring to our assignments. Not as an afterthought or add-on, mind you, but as the cornerstone of our work.

If you've never listened to C.C.'s shows or read his blog, his enthusiasm is incredible - you can really sense how excited he is to be part of this entity. I'd be just as excited if I were in his shoes. This is groundbreaking stuff.

The official launch of crayon in Second Life is scheduled for Thursday. Stay tuned to see how this A-list team leads new marketing to new heights.

Labels: 2.0, Advertising, Marketing, New Media, PR, social media

Posted by Scott Monty at 11:20 AM

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Wednesday, October 11, 2006

Show Me the Money 2.0

The San Antonio Express-News Business section has picked up on the wave of Web 2.0 activity. A quote from the article that we already know here: "Social media are a huge opportunity for business."

Some Web 2.0 stats from the Pew Internet & American Life Project survey covered in the article:

Percentage of Internet users who have done this Web 2.0 activity:

34%: Used the Internet to get photos developed or display photos.

30%: Rated a product, service or person using an online rating system.

27%: Shared files from their own computer with others online.

26%: Shared something online that they created themselves, such as artwork, photos or videos.

18%: Taken material found online — like songs, text or images — and remixed it into their own artistic creation.

14%: Created or worked on their own Web page.

13%: Created or worked on Web pages or blogs for others, including friends, groups they belong to, or for work.

11%: Used online social or professional networking sites like Friendster or LinkedIn.

8%: Created or worked on online journal or blog.

These numbers are really remarkable, because just 2 years ago, they were probably about half this size. I would hazard a guess that in the next year, we'll see an explosion in the above, with more consideration being given to these entities in the BtoB space.

Labels: 2.0, New Media, social media

Posted by Scott Monty at 10:17 AM

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Friday, October 06, 2006

Beware of Falling Social Networks

After only 10 weeks, Wal-Mart is closing their attempt at a social networking site, The Hub. Evidently, they went a little overboard with product promotion, and users quickly lost interest in such an obvious self-serving site.

The firms that get it right are the ones who stand aside. My definition of social media helps to clarify the role of companies in the process:

Social Media is all about making tools available to enable and track conversations about your brand or product.

These conversations are already going on. If you want to be the fly on the wall, you provide some vehicle, some nifty little tool or some cool new site that allows users to have these conversations more easily, and you follow the discussion.

You don't market your product, you don't smack down or erase negative comments. You let it happen naturally. That's when customers will be themselves and will be more likely to trust your brand.

Labels: 2.0, Risk, rules, social media

Posted by Scott Monty at 10:52 AM

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Monday, October 02, 2006

What's a Social Media Debate Between Friends?

My colleague Douglas Reynolds of Douglas Reynolds | Experience (nice new banner, branding and favicon on the site, Doug!) recently noted that this whole Web 2.0 thing "sounds like the portal strategy of years ago," as well as "the familiar frenzy of money eager to be relieved of its value," and "a lot of questioning of the business model for social media sites."

To which I would reply: "Yes and no."

While there is a sort of frenzy out there, the money being thrown around is nowhere near the astronomical an irrational figures of seven years ago. I would argue that the market has learned from its mistake, and if anything, venture capitalists are even more conservative with their investments as a result.

The difference between Irrationality 1.0 and Irrational 2.0:

The Intenet is much more wide-spread and universal in use and therefore the new media have a broader reach
Technology is such that many individuals and companieare developing applications, solutions, and business models
Operating margins for a single-person shop doing a blog or some unique application code are almost neglible
Any small investment in such entities will not sink the market overall

That being said, I would agree with Doug with the fact that there is a frenzy going on. Sites like Micro Persuasion, TechCrunch, and eHub are dedicated to enlightening readers on the coolest 2.0 applications on a daily basis.

It's what we do with these offerings that makes all the difference. A cool tool is useless until someone figures out a way to monetize it. It's one thing to show such a site to friends and family - but have you figured out how to present it to a client in a profitable way?

Footnote (added 10/2/06, 10:35 a.m.): BtoB Magazine has a post called When will the social media bubble burst? Answer: never.

The social media bubble isn't going to burst any more than the e-mail or instant messaging bubbles burst. In fact, there is no bubble. Bubbles need an air supply in the form of venture capital and inflated expectations from investors. They also need a payoff. Almost none of that exists in this market.

Labels: 2.0, New Media, social media, tools

Posted by Scott Monty at 1:10 AM

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Sunday, October 01, 2006

Giving Second Life a Second Chance

I first took a look at Second Life about four months ago, when I created an identity and promptly didn't do anything with it. Frankly, the concept of creating a persona in a "meta" universe just didn't do it for me - it was too similar to Dungeons & Dragons.

Lately, I've been hearing about Second Life at every turn: advertisers such as Toyota, Sun Microsystems and Wells Fargo are turning up there; Leo Burnett just added a presence, evidently to link their creatives and to better understand the space.

What's all this about, then? Real entities setting up shop in a virtual world? I suppose it's the next logical step from MySpace, in which it's a two-dimensional world. Second Life, in short, could be considered a mashup of MySpace and SimCity. Take the social networking aspect of the former and combine it with the ability to create something physical in the latter, and you've got the setting for unlimited advertising.

The Economist does the subject a bit of justice with Living a second life.

I think it's a little early to expect masses of people to create critical mass on Second Life, especially with so many other forms of social media that are easier to understand and implement. I can see the future potential of a BtoC advertising presence. At this point it's tough to see a strong BtoB application. One might be a life sciences company setting up a virtual call-in site or center of excellence for customers to interact with their experts for advice.

But mainstream this is not. Let's face it: some individuals are still striving to get a first life.

Labels: 2.0, Advertising, b2b, New Media, tools

Posted by Scott Monty at 11:41 PM

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Wednesday, September 27, 2006

It's All Geek to Me

David Armano over at Logic+Emotion has posted an uproariously funny graphic, along with a perspective on geekdom.

The Geek-types who used to be social outcasts (well, let's face it, some still are) are now at the pinnacle of the 2.0 phenomenon. According to Wikipedia, "geek" is defined as:

A person who is fascinated, perhaps obsessively, by obscure or very specific areas of knowledge and imagination, usually electronic or virual in nature.

But to step it up from Geek 1.0, according to Armano, "these aren't your parents' Geeks. These are the Geeks that invent the Facebook's Firefoxes and Flickr's of the world."

Bottom line: anyone with a passion about something specific, with a profound knowledge in that area - technology, literature, sports, music - is (or can be) a Geek. Hell, I'm a Marketing Geek!

Thanks to a number of well-placed and innovative Geeks, we now have the ability to share our geekiness through user-generated experiences, creating opportunities for others to share our knowledge and enjoy the thing each of us is passionate about.

The Geeks shall inherit the earth!

Labels: 2.0, David Armano, New Media

Posted by Scott Monty at 11:33 AM

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