Weekly Round-Up 6/5/2011

It was largely the week of the API for us.

• API Basics for Retail Companies from Best Buy
• Oren Michels of Mashery talks about APIs as fuel for “The New Creativity:”

Speaking of killer apps and creativity, something about virtual world hopping into real world engagement pretty much ensures virality on YouTube–4mm views and counting for this top-app, Angry Bird in a T-Mobile video:

Weekly Round-Up 5/02/11

Shameless Plug

• For more about Social/Local/Mobile, see us at the Social-Loco Conference—I’ll be speaking on the “Big Brand” money panel.

Entertaining/Inspiring

• Wrap your mind around this:  Escher’s Waterfall has our mind boggling!
• Check out Little Thor, a miniature hero who gives this year’s favorite Super Bowl character, Little Vader from the Volkswagen commercial, a run for his money.
• Will Turnage, VP, Technology & Invention for R/GA, shows off a shirt he hacked for a South by Southwest session.  This shirt not only flashes when he taps his phone through a Bluetooth control, but also lights up when someone tweets his twitter handle.

AppNation

• AppNation brought the growing consumer application trend to the forefront of the minds of all those who were fortunate enough to attend.
• Drew Ianni, Chairman of AppNation, joined us at Anthem Worldwide in San Francisco to share his view-from-the-top of the Apps Ecosystem.

Mobile

• I spoke at AppNation last week on Mobile Video. It’s going to be huge—already ½ of total mobile traffic in 2011. Here’s a run down of relevant data.
• Privacy Concerns over Apple’s tracking of location data on the iPhone flared
• GigaOm argues for greater transparency in this area
• Good reason for tracking concerns. Last week, Tomtom got into hot water when media discovered they were reselling anonymous data to local Police.
• Facebook unveils its group deals program putting the heat on Groupon and Living Social through it’s enormous scale and command of the socialgraph
• Since Apple added gyroscopes to the iPhone and iPad Augmented Reality (AR) apps have been exploiting those coordinates for a greater cool factor

Will Apps Disrupt Every Trad Media While Establishing a New One?

Perhaps the title question is too narrow and should focus on industries Apps will disrupt beyond Media, and my prediction is that Apps will disrupt nearly everything from the way we consume and engage with brands and media to how we transact, visualize, congregate and curate our daily lives and loves. With that thunderous prediction let me offer a couple of windows into the Apps EcoSystem which Gartner predicts will become $58 Billion in a few years and conclude with some thoughts informing these predictions:

• AppNation Conference in San Francisco this Wednesday and Thursday, April 27-28, promises to deliver the “State of the Art” view of the EcoSystem. Register to attend in person and catch full-benefit of networking with founders and leaders in this emerging space or follow the hashtag on twitter: #appnationconf 
• Spend an hour with Drew Ianni, AppNation Chairman and Founder, presenting his view from the top of the Apps Ecosystem. Former Wall Street and Jupiter Analyst as well as top guy at ad:tech, Drew created AppNation to provide the best and biggest conference for the space. You can catch his Briefing at Anthem San Francisco here:

• And, here are the companion slides to the video:

Some additional thoughts to complement my prediction that Apps will disrupt nearly every business and consumer interaction:

As Drew points out the value chain is shifting from the hardware–although the most elegant hardware can win massive share as we’ve seen with the iPad and iPhone–to the software or Apps on these devices. This content spans devices and channels jumping from Social/Web to Mobile and PC/Tablets and eventually connected TVs. This shift has been swift and taken the most immediately associated/impacted industries by storm and surprise. PC veteran, Michael Dell, admitted yesterday that he didn’t see Tablets coming and PC-maker Acer reported 24% drop in sales as a result of tablet disruption.  The primary utility for Tablets? Apps.

As a result of this consumer draw, we can anticipate new, creative business models and entertainment forms to emerge and become as large a part of popular culture as anything Hollywood has ever produced. And, of course, Hollywood may spawn and will appropriate these new entertain forms.

As we’ve seen with Social Media, consumer adoption and new behaviors will inspire enterprise adoption as well. So, my prediction started in the title with Media, the most obvious place for disruption as we see media transformed with superior features, connectivity and transaction abilities to change how we think about distribution and engagement with Print, Radio, TV and even the Internet media that came before Apps. In establishing a new medium and channel it’s important to emphasize this is about disruption not replacing or destroying. Incombent business models will have to evolve and embrace the new medium to survive and thrive in the disruption.

Will Apps have their own mass-events like the Oscars, Grammy’s, Cannes or Tony’s? They already have their own conference. Hope to catch you at AppNation this week and every year going forward. Cheers!

Global Social Gaming Overview

On Tuesday April 12 we presented a sweeping overview of Social Gaming from its scope, scale and size in the US to the development of this space around the world. We shared how marketers can engage consumers in the space and wrapped with some informative case studies by Toyota. Some impressions, slides, video and links follow.

Weekly Round-up 4/11/11

Returning to weekly round-ups to recap curation of last week’s activities in Digital Marketing:

Conference Roll-up

• Web 2.0 Expo: “Lessons Learned Launching Dozens of Brand on Twitter”.  Key take away: content is essential and active management gives you the super fresh content a brand needs to rise to the top.
• What do you think can change everything?  After interviewing dozens of smart people and analyzing over 100 2011-trends predictions, I distilled my thoughts into this presentation for iMedia Breakthrough: “This Can Change Everything.”
• AdAge Digital top tweets:  75 tweets of impressions from AdAge Digital NY Conference
• See us at adtech San Francisco presenting an overview for brands in Social Gaming. Joining this session bringing a full range of international and brand perspectives will be Jimmy Kim from Nexon in Korea, Tim Chang from Norwest Venture Partners and Kimberly Kyaw from Toyota.

Marketing Trends

• Univision outperformed NBC in primetime again last week and every 30-seconds a Latino turns 18-years old. FastCompany asks “What does this mean for your brand?”
• Hubspot posted a great presentation on ways your marketing should be transformed.  They express our core thesis of magnetism nicely in 64 visually and content-rich slides.
• Speaking of magnetism, we were honored to host Guy Kawasaki in our offices and virtually on BrandSquare for an hour-long webinar on his latest book, Enchantment. Slides and video are available in this Book Review.

Social Media

• Facebook updates iPhone app to allow you to see friend’s locations and event check-ins on a map view. An obvious but meaningful development.

Change Everything

This post presents the content and discusses the process in my journey to create the “This Can Change Everything” presentation for iMedia Breakthrough Summit on March 21, 2011. It was a 30-45 minute discussion where I covered So|Lo|Mo, Gamification, Maker-movement and Social CRM/Caring after a hat-tip to Moore’s & Metcalfe’s laws combined with the “People” coefficient. With an extra 15-minutes allowance, I may have added connected TVs as a potential “return to the Family Room” theme. Regardless, these themes are ones that I believe can change everything in the coming years.

Dirty Brand Secret (video)

On Thursday, January 20, 2011 Method Brand Co-Founder+Chief Brand Architect and evangelist, Eric Ryan, dropped by our offices to take on our current theme of Social Mission/Causes. You can’t talk about Method as a brand without punctuating it with their rallying cry “People Against Dirty.” Or, said in the affirmative via their tagline: “for the love of clean.” Slogans that are rallying cries and tag lines that convey passion? These are more than just tools for a company with the stated goal of being “in business to change business.” In the hour or so that Eric spent with us he shared how this inside-out approach to their brand has driven revenues and retail success along with employee and consumer passion to the level of starting a small movement. And, as we’ve seen of late in global news, if you’re taking on established, incumbent power you need a different tool kit and approach.

Weekly Round-up 2/07/11

Christians protecting Muslims during their prayers #jan25

Following Egypt

Despite an Internet blackout, Egyptians still got their word out by combining Google’s speech-to-text recognition and Twitter’s hashtagging

For greater texture about the environment in which they’re doing this, World News blogs on the state of reporting in an uprising. And Wired covers tech at ground-zero in Tahrir Square.

Al Jazeera, who’s been covering developments in Egypt, launched Twitter and Meetup Campaigns to bring broadcast to U.S.

Social Media was key in Egypt and Tunisia for expression and assembly. The question arises then, under a totalitarian, repressive regime – Is Facebook a human right?

AdWeek's "K Cole's Day in a Nutshell"

You’ve probably heard about Kenneth Cole’s poor judgment on Twitter that fueled an appropriate storm of backlash. Here is the top 10 list of parody tweets in response. My tweet take: “this really seems basic, but there are some conversations marketers just don’t belong in: porn, religion & politics are the most obvious.”

Tech & Government

Following the innovation-focused State of the Union Address, Obama announced the Startup Investment Campaign, with Facebook, Intel, IBM, TECHStars and others all pledging their support for the initiative

Startup America. The White House is paying attention to what’s working – tech entrepreneurship.

Super Bowl

BrandBowl2011 Ad Scores

Our friends at Mullen teamed up with Boston.com and Radian6 to showcase the top TV ads based on Twitter volume and sentiment. It’s a great way to see the real winners and losers from over 1/4 of a million tweets vs USA Today polls of a couple thousand people. Although the sentiment analysis is imperfect, this real-time view and measurement of ad impact is great to experience. You can see the aftermath of the engine at BrandBowl2011.com. You can also see my #brandbowl tweets reacting to the ads in real time.

Catch all the marketer Superbowl spots at AdAge. And you can find all the spots including Hollywood trailers with ratings on Fox’s round-up site.

Eminem was considered unofficial MVP for the BrandBowl. In addition to the Detroit/American anthem spot for Chrysler where he represents a powerful metaphor for redemption,  Slim landed in a Lipton Brisk Iced Tea as a claymation character. That’s Brisk Baby!

PepsiCo’s Jill Beraud and Ann Mukherjee talk PepsiCo’s return to the Super Bowl with Doritos and PepsiMax User Generated Content this year ; “Crash the Super Bowl”

Here are the Top 10 Super Bowl ads with most Twitter pre-buzz–worth noting that several advertisers chose not to reveal their ads until they aired for the Superbowl. And we’ll be tracking other post-mortems for next week’s round-up.

Other News

AOL Acquires Huffington Post for $315m & appoints Arianna Huffington Editor-in-Chief. Long article, but worth the read as it shares a lot of ideas around the future of media including AOL’s 80:80:80 focus–80% of domestic spending is done by women, 80% of commerce happens locally and 80% of considered purchases are driven by influencers. Also, at the end of this article All Things D discloses that the were in talks with AOL as well last year but stayed w/Newscorp’s Dow Jones.

Cause marketing is taking off. Peter Jackson raises $2 million to go after cause marketers at The Experience, a niche site where people who care deeply about a particular topic can share their experiences with others.

Facebook introduces a credibility score with new social commenting plugin

Super Bowl Ad Round-Ups: PepsiCo

This post was inspired by a poll & roll of PepsiCo TV spots on AdAge (subscription required after a certain date). By curating these ads in one post I’m hoping to keep the content evergreen. Here are AdAge’s picks for best Super Bowl spots from PepsiCo of all time, along with a some light analysis of an arc you can find between the years, spots and various expressions of the brand. Which are your favs? Any missing? Pls respond with comments below:

Weekly Round-Up 12/13/10

In the News

• Find your keywords for monitoring social media. Like the best conversations Listening is one part brain, two parts heart
• After 77 years, P&G pulls the plug on day-time soap ad spend, invests instead in social media. Two observations: 1) took 77 years to decline where Social’s taken 5-years to build; 2) Social Gaming is the new Soap pwning daytime viewership with a larger audience than same daypart TV shows
• Rumor – Apple iPad 2 will ship by February with back & front camera, USB slot and anything else you need to jump in
• To Trend or Not to Trend – how Trends—as in Trending Terms—are measured on Twitter

WikiLeaks

• WikiLeaks war continued throughout week with anonymous hacktivists attacking Visa and Mastercard
• Former WikiLeaks members form spin-off site “Openleaks,” with more structure around who can obtain the goods

Google

• Another reason why the Google Rainbow is part of our future– Google now controls 59% of U.S. mobile ad market
• A Yelp-like service called Hotspot will endeavor to win as the new Google location-based marketing platform
• YouTube 2.1 for Android brings revamped UI & smoother interaction