Let the mocking begin. The Boston Red Sox have purchased the proud English franchise. And to commemorate the occasion, a T-Shirt company has already suggested a new uniform look and feel – “The Fenway Edition.”
Category: Marketing (Page 9 of 26)
So, my friends and colleagues have been working in the online space for a long time. Going back to driving downloads and pushing POS items, all the way now to Facebook Apps and QR codes. We’ve seen a ton of fads and fixtures. I bet I’ve signed up and tried out hundreds of programs.
Last night Rich Barton spoke to a group of alumni from the UW CIE. He ran us through a list of his new projects, and a history of Zillow. But he framed all of his companies under 3 simple tenets, which pretty much sums up the entire history of the internet, no and forever.
- If it can be found, it will be found.
- If it can be rated, it will be rated.
- If it can be free, it will be free.
Find me a company that has been able to break this. Anyone?
There are a lot of semi-useless social media tools out there. One that I am liking more and more is Paper.li.
In a nutshell, it takes your Twitter feed, and distills it into a front page of a newspaper, so you can scan all the important topics you care about in one shot. It even splits them into categories like Sports, Media, Politics, Technolgy, etc….
Now, it only grabs feeds from the people you follow, so if you are one of those “uber important” types that only gets followed themselves, then it’s not going to be much good. And if you follow a bunch of people that tell you about their sandwich, then you’ll have a boring paper.li as well.
Here’s part of the Monday morning grab from http://paper.li/aboyer
I’m not sure which books Seth Godin would have been between in 2006 when he gave this Ted talk. But the lessons are still valuable today. Worth the 20:00 if you have it today.
Seth Godin at Gel 2006 from Gel Conference on Vimeo.
Nothing revolutionary here, and I may be a little late to the ballgame on this one. But I’m having a lot of success working with Flavors.me as a super simple, 10 minute way to build out nice looking web properties.
There’s nothing genius in the concept, but the execution is unbelievably quick and easy. In about 20 clicks, you can aggregate together all your social feeds, upload background pictures, change the font colors, and – if you choose too (I haven’t yet) – grab a custom url. So if you publish for multiple blogs, in theory you could grab all the rss feeds from those blogs, and suck them into your single Flavors.me page.
There’s real value in the system if you are struggling with clients who have multiple locations, and can’t decide if they should have different url’s, different Facebook pages, etc… This gives you a nice aggregation capability.
For personal branding, I can’t think of anything much easier. Get your resume, photos, designs, feeds, reading lists, etc… all dragged into one place for an employer / client to look through, and save them the hassle of google.
Give it a whirl and let me know what you think.
How hard is it to build a video production studio in your house? Watch and learn…
Fun little side note here to what is probably the most successful guerilla YouTube ad ever, Nike’s “Write the Future. Now, we’ve all seen the actual ad about a gajillion times. I’m not sure why I was interested in digging in here – probably because I figured they created all the audio in a studio. But it turns out the main theme from the spot (other than the use of Van Halen’s Hot for Teacher drum rift in the beginning) actually comes from a 1970’s Dutch band. The Dutch band were even the ones who had the yodeling. Check it out here.
There’s a new viral music act climbing the charts lately — and it ain’t Gaga. The Gregory Brothers — of “Auto-Tune the News” fame — have scored a spot on the Billboard Hot 100 with their remix, “Bed Intruder,” another feather to add to a cap already feathered by a top-selling iTunes jam and an upcoming pilot on Comedy Central.
It’s worth reading the whole Mashable article here.
(My previous Blog post on Antoine here.)
A friend of mine recently commented that they never quite understand what I do for a living, but it always seems cool. I couldn’t agree more.
Whether it be building batting cages and selling corporate ticket packages in minor league baseball, writing press releases and guiding customers on the top of a ski resort, working for a future Senator and selling the idea of audio and video on the internet, assisting professional athletes and their families raise money for charities, aiding venture backed startups with Go-To-Market campaigns, or most recently, helping guide a social media and community management agency go from 2 to 35 employees, the two common threads have always been challenge and fun.
So July 2010 marks the start of the next great adventure – social3i Consulting. Xavier Jimenez and I will team up for the 3rd time now, taking what we’ve learned from our last few years working with the largest social media team in the region, and reshaping it to a more focused, strategic, and consultative presence that can work for exemplary brands, where size doesn’t matter.
Our old colleagues at SCG continue do fantastic work in the realm of community management, and we wish them continued success as they drive forward. But the focus of social3i will be different. We’re going to be doing more classic strategic consulting, and lots of team building, training and development. Rather than execute long-term tactics and serving the role of outsourced engagement and analytics, we’re going to use a data driven approach to deliver Insight, Ideas and Influence (hence, the 3i) to clients tasked with building their own in house programs. We believe our past experience building these types of teams and our history of working with some of the largest technology brands, positions us well to solve huge social marketing problems for brands that we’re excited to help out. Plus, we’re going to be able to join forces with some folks down in the Bay Area who I’ve been hoping to work with for years. It’s too early to talk about now, but it will add a neat new angle to typical marketing analysis.
Like every new venture, I’m sure we’ll have our share of hiccups and bugs along the way. But it’s an exciting time and I hope you’ll come find us and follow us on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. We’ll look like a bunch of clowns if we only have 4 followers, so if you read this blog, consider following social3i in these social channels the tax you need to pay for all the free content you’ve gotten over the years 🙂
Thanks again to the SCG team for what has been a fun couple of years. But I’m not sure I could ask for a more exciting way to open up the 2nd half of 2010 than launching social3i.