Skiing this Winter with Location Based, Data and Social tracking - Epic Mix
Downside is only 5 locations in CO - upside is that by the end of year this could translate to other resorts nationally.
Smart use of RFID, location based services, networking and RSS data feeds...!
Nice one!
Windows 7 Phones Will Interact With Xbox, Demo Future of Gaming | Fast Company
Real-time console game interactivity is coming to Microsoft's Windows Phone 7 devices, which transforms the phone from a communications curio to an integral part of your game system. Apple may be following the same route. Should Sony be scared?
Microsoft's Mobility Solutions manager Greg Milligan confirmed at the X10 event that "real time" phone-to-Xbox links were going to arrive with the new Windows Phone 7 devices, along with sub-games that play individually on the phone, but then communicate with the full-scale console game to unlock extra content or functions. These games may cost significantly less than titles on the Xbox Live system, at around $2 to $3--though you apparently won't be getting much in the way of Twitter integration to inject a social angle into your gaming.
So what are we talking about here? It seems that Windows Phone 7 devices will be able to communicate with Xbox consoles, presumably wirelessly and we may expect to see in-game content served to the phone, or possibly the phone's sensors letting it act as a controller. Specific titles will take some of the ideas we're currently seeing on the iPhone (where console games like Mirror's Edge have special iPhone versions) and developing them to a new level of interactivity. It's good for players, who get to have a more "immersive" gaming experience, and it's good for developers who get their titles before players eyeballs for longer and reap extra cash from the smartphone app purchases.
It's exactly the sort of next-gen smartphone/console gaming that we speculated may be one powerful feature of the rumored new Apple TV--with the iPhone, iPad, or iPod as the remote handheld unit. If Apple's device really is priced at $99, it'll neatly undercut Microsoft's Xbox pricing, and the iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch are likely to be more ubiquitous than MS Phone 7 devices--meaning many people will have access to the gaming potential of the iTV. While Apple's system certainly isn't a console, lacking the raw graphics processing power, it does benefit from tens of thousands of games in the App Store.
Maybe Sony, with its fun but limited console-to-handheld interactive experiment on the PS3 and PSP, should perk up and pay attention ... it needs to get that rumored PSP phone out on sale as soon as possible.
To keep up with this news, follow me, Kit Eaton, on Twitter.
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Topics:
Innovation, Technology, gaming, smartphones, windows Phone 7, xbox, interactive, controller, ITV, Culture and Lifestyle, Microsoft Windows Phone 7, Video Games, Hobbies and Pastimes, Games
The Anatomy of Wow
Using nothing more than interior wood trim, high definition plasma screens and custom made software, Rationalcraft has ingeniously created something fun and interesting with their Winscape project. They mounting plasma screens on a wall with wood trim around the edges, they created virtual windows that add life and interest to any plain wall. The software that they have designed runs off of an Apple Mac Pro and allows the user to change the window “view” remotely via their iPhone, and soon with a wii console. It is also embedded with tracking technology which senses where the user is standing and automatically adjusts the view out of the “window” as the user moves about the room, giving it the appearance of a real, natural view.
This concept inspires creative thinking, utilizing known and readily available technology in a new, unique way. It proves that digital can be the answer to just about anything and can be used in a variety of unexpected ways… in the home and beyond.
Are You Ready for Six Screens? http://adage.com/u/U18G1a
Remember Three-Screen Marketing Plans? So 2007. Time to Get Ready For Six Screens
A Host of New Devices Are Making the Now Traditional TV, PC and Mobile Paradigm Obsolete
Posted by Judy Shapiro on 08.23.10 @ 05:25 PM
"The Sixth Screen." Sounds like something from a sci-fi flick with Bruce Willis, doesn't it? But actually, no; this is as real as it gets and we are quickly moving from three screens to six screens fast and furious.
Judy Shapiro To see what's coming, we need a quick primer on what the multiscreen concept is all about.
As marketers, we all understand the need to translate our brand message across the three screens -- PC, TV and mobile. Truth be told, that is easier said than done. The speed of content being served virtually simultaneously among three screens is presenting some pretty tough challenges for brands. Just mobile, for instance, is moving so rapidly to becoming our computing platform, which in and of itself complicates life for a brand. This stuff is so complex, in fact, specialty innovative mobile marketing technology companies have risen as the technological bridge to help companies move through this evolution. Augme is one example with its AD LIFE platform that enables "seamless integration of goods and services within consumer life experiences ..." In other words, they use mobile technology to match the marketing message to the real-time life moment of its users. This type of sophisticated marketing still requires a strong stomach on the part of marketers to execute.
While it's clear most brands are not all that comfy with the notion of three screens today, the bad news is that it's about to blow wide open to six screens. Why? Because "Judy Consumer" is demanding more and more control in her increasingly "pull" digital world. She wants to efficiently multitask; quickly moving from machine or hardware to consume content or communicate. And she is a quick learner. She will want content–centric entertainment, collaboration and communications systems that deliver seamlessly through her day within her new trust network -- her digital communities.
That's where we are going and here's my take on how we get there.
The screens of today
Screen 1: The TV
Recent Nielsen data shows that consumers are choosing to add elements to their media experience, rather than replacing them. Jim O'Hara, president, Media Product Leadership, The Nielsen Company, said that "although we have seen the computer and mobile phone screens taking on a significant role, their emergence has not been at the cost of TV viewership."People like TV as a device to view content and that is not going away. What's changing is who gets to decide what content comes through the device. More and more Judy Consumer will decide what's piped through her TV -- but we'll get to that in a bit.
Screen 2: The PC
The PC as the device to deliver information, communications and content was a hit almost from the time it landed, especially once the killer "app" for PC -- the internet -- came on the scene. Harris Interactive has been measuring how much time people spend online for quite some time now and it's no surprise to hear that time spent online has doubled in the past eight years; from seven hours/ week in 2000 to 14 hours/ week by 2008. Once we could connect to other people and information, we never looked back.And how do we spend our increased time online? In our social networks, of course. According to Nielsen, a whopping 22.7% of our time is spent in our social networks while the next closest activity, online games, clocks in at 10.2%. The PC and internet were a magic connector and once we connected -- our appetites were whetted for even greater content consumption and connectivity.
This is where our next screen comes in...
Screen 3: Mobile
Mobile is now primarily a communications device but it is quickly and simultaneously evolving as an access/interactive/ content-consumption device. The new depth of access and interactivity allows us to create an innovative, "interactive" bar scanning marketing programs to deliver location-based consumer offers. Mobile video content consumption is also clearly on the rise. Seven in 10 adult internet users (69%) have used the internet to watch or download video, according to Pew Institute -- a 70% increase since last year. Plus, now nearly half of all U.S. adults who use a laptop have WiFi.Our mobile communications devices are the bedrock of our digital lives and it is fast evolving to becoming our digital Swiss army knife.
That takes care of the three screens of today and they are largely about access to enable connectivity which leads us to ...
The screens that are coming
The next three screens let us imagine how much is possible when we break down the barriers between today's TV, internet and mobile phone platforms and reorient these technologies toward a socially connected, digital citizen called "Judy Consumer."
Once we do that, we can begin to solidify how this evolution may take shape.
Screen 4: Mobile Computing
The fourth screen is when consumers take the next big leap from mobile communications (screen three) to mobile computing via 4G networking. We are on the road to this -- but industry experts believe it is still a few years away because of the delicate dance required between the devices and the networks needed to keep everything synchronized. Here's a helpful explanation of the "real definition" of 4G courtesy of Ahuva Zucker, in a piece entitled; 4G -- It's all about semantics:4G is the 4th generation of cellular wireless standards. It refers to speed, usually. You should probably be aware that the labeling of anything 4G is a misnomer. There is no 4G available to the public yet. The only two technologies capable of providing 4G services are WiMAX and LTE. But, right now ... neither of them is even equipped to the ITU's standardization of 4G.
ITU's classification of 4G is speed. Enhanced peak data rates must be 100 Mbps for mobile users and 1 Gbps for stationary reception, or ...a lot faster than what you have now, which is something more like 1 Mbps for mobile use if you're lucky. It doesn't take any math skills to figure out that the requirements for 4G are impressive.
I rely on this quite detailed explanation to make one simple point – real 4G is not here yet – but it is coming and fast.
Screen 5: Location Aware Digital TV
The rapidly approaching fifth screen is the mobile digital television screen, similar only in size to the phone or wireless device. In fact, the fifth screen is itself a revolution because the data rates are so much higher than 3G/4G, due to the dedicated digital television bandwidth.The screens for this level will be so advanced that it will make the current iPad look about as sexy as the first generation "brick" cellphones are to us now. This communications device will be coupled with an HD-powered screen; integrating community-communications with entertainment and soon full-blown interactivity.
Which leads us to the final screen ...
Screen 6: Infinite "pull" screen of convergence
If screens one through five, though different in size and shape are all similar in that they focus on delivery of content, communication and applications, then this screen is the final step, because here is where technology can truly put the consumer at the center of the experience. At this point, the current nascent "pull" dynamic where Judy Consumer pulls what she wants when she wants, will have reached maturity. To "pull" off this level of convergence (pun intended), we will have sophisticated networks that allow communications and entertainment to be accessed over one integrated internet-protocol (IP) and wireless platform. This screen will not just deliver content or connections, but it will be intelligent to create custom information, advertisements, applications with specialized services as individual as the user.In this sixth screen world, Judy Consumer is finally able to mold her digital world to encompass real-time convergence of her trusted social networks, trusted content and trusted connections. This is when we will live in a perfect "opt-in" world where Judy Consumer will pull the "trusted" ads she wants to see and when she wants to see them -- sensitive to her physical locations. It will allow her friends to be apart of her sports experience at the stadium even though they are not there with her. She can go "virtual shopping" with far-flung fashionista experts who can make suggestions as she tries on different dresses even though none of them are actually in any physical store. And, of course, she will be able to easily and remotely check in on family members ensuring their health and safety.
That's how I see our evolution of the six screens. "But hey, Judy," some may protest, "aren't you just slicing and dicing content delivery across different platforms or cloud infrastructures? It's not really six screens at all." In some ways, that's a fair point as one could easily come up with an entirely different "screen set" roadmap.Yet what shapes my thinking on this subject is that this structure maps back to the dramatic speed of Judy Consumer's evolution from the current "push" model of first three screens to the "pull" business model that is characterized by the last three screens. The propellant for this evolution is her increasingly sophisticated desire to move to a trusted "many:many" interactions paradigm, freeing her to connect with content, communities and people how and when she wants.
I concede that I may be out on a limb on this one, but hey, it's a helluva unobstructed view from here.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
I dont think I agree with her argument here, but multiscreen and high speed through-put are definitely on the horizon. The telcos just need to all stop tripping over each other and learn to play nicely in the sandbox...
Dd
Live From Facebook’s Location Event (Video Stream)
We’re at Facebook headquarters in Palo Alto, where the social network is finally unveiling its much-anticipated location feature, which will be called Places. We’ve already published the first screenshots of the new feature, but we’re about to get the full rundown on how it works and who Facebook is partnering with. The company has invited dozens of press to the event (it even shuttled some of them down from San Francisco), and it’s clear that it’s treating this as a very big deal.
I’m liveblogging my notes from the event below.
pic of zuck 
CEO Mark Zuckerberg has taken the stage. Whenever we build something new we want to show to a bunch of people, we have a tradition of launch nights. The idea is to have everyone from the community come together, including people who want to write about, analyze, where we talk about the new things we’re doing.
“This will be a fun and interesting summer, we have a lot of new products coming out.” Today the thing we’re talking about isa new “Places” product we’ve been working on for a few months… a while. (people giggle — “I guess it’s been a little bit more than a few”.
We knew it was ready to go. I was out to dinner with my girlfriend in Menlo Park which I never go to. I’m showing her the product. She goes, hey Chris Cox and his fiance are at the restaurant right next to us. Isn’t that awesome?” It was at that moment, this serendipitous moment that we knew the product was ready to go.
Three purposes for this: Help you share where you are. Help you see who’s around you. And see what’s going on nearby.
Showing video of the feature. Shows it off on the iPhone app. The video feels a lot like something Apple would produce, showing friends chatting together with cuts to engineers talking about the product.
Michael Sharin (sp?), a product manager for Places has taken the stage.
Getting started: launching it on touch.facebook.com and in a brand new iPhone app being released later tonight. A new icon will appear on the homesreen. Open it, and it will show you a list of friends, including those who are nearby. Looks a lot like Foursquare. As soon as you check in you’ll see a list of places around you. You can search for nearby locations. If they aren’t there, you can hit the ‘+’ symbol to add a place.
To add a place you type in a name and description.
ON a place page you have a recent activity section (a News Feed for that place). On the web, there are a number of different section. Far right has a cluster o profile images so you can see friends who have visited. Places is not about broadcasting your location to the world, it’s about sharing where you are with friends.
Tap Checkin button. You’ll see a preview of the story at the top, with a notice of what will happen (and a link to find out what’s going on). Once you agree, creates a new story on the Place page.
Here now lets you see friends and other people who may be checked in at the same place.
Photos is one of most popular peroducts on FB.
Can tag people in photos and status updates (use the @ symbol). Creates a story on their wall and on my wall. Everybody on FB is familiar with tagging in photos and status updates.
Tag friends with you as your’e checking in — you’ll see a list. It creates a story.
‘Why tagging’. Not everyone has an advanced phone, but people want to be part of it. Tagging is a way for us to connect that with everyone Facebook (so you just have to be friends with someone with an advanced phone is what they’re getting at).
When you hit “Allow”. It’s as if you checked in there yourself. Will show up on Wall, Recent Acitvity on Place page, and (one more).
If you click “Not Now” _ Shows up on firend’s wall and recent activity. But not on your profile. You don’t appear in the here now.
Privacy
Default checkin to be visible to friends only. :Can dial it down and restrict to a few specific people. Can remove any checkin from your phone or on the web.
In the here now section, only there after you agree to an opt in.
Tagging: You can only tag your friends. You can only tag your friends while you are checking in (if you want to check in a friend at a sleazy bar you have to check yourself in there). You’re notified whenever you’re tagged. You can always remove any tag.
You can opt out of having friends tag you at all. Can just hit ‘Disabled’
API
Read API available tomorrow. Write and Search API in closed beta. http://developers.facebook.com/docs/api/#places
Partners coming on stage.
Scott Raymond – CTO and cofounder of Gowalla.
Gowalla has a “continued commitment to Facebook”. UI/UX remains the same, stamps and photos inline. When you publish something you choose if you want to post to FB or not.
Holger Luedorf – VP Mobile and Partnerships from Foursquare.
“I think it’s a great thing for the industry. This validates that we’re on to something. This will be a much bigger thing going forward.” “I think there’s different reasons people use foursquare. Gaming element is one of them. Points/badges drove a lot of early engagement. Familiarized people with checkin. Have to keep in mind checkin is at the core of this. At foursquare we’re going to continue innovating and making it a better user experience.” Will have add to foursquare which lets you add information from websites to foursquare system and when you’re nearby you get reminded about it. With regard to Facebook API, looking forward to seeing how we’ll leverage that.” This was a bit odd — came off as a big promo for Foursquare with 20-30 seconds about Facebook.
Yelp has taken stage. Excited to use Facebook API. Our integration is straightforward, can share with just yelp or of course can share to Facebook. We’ll publish that, shows photo of business. Soon we’ll be launching something where you can read FB checkin into our Yelp mobile application.
Booyah CEO on stage. New product called InCrowd. In three weeks we’ve put out client app on iPhone, full Facebook places integration. Can read nearby listings from FB. Can write Checkins to feed. Can search. Has Graph API integration as well.
Facebook VP Product Chris Cox on stage. Ray Oldenburg sociologist talked about this. His take: there are three places that matter. Home, workplace, and the ‘third place’, which is bar, library etc. Where random run-ins happen. Made observation that tech was in danger of destroying the third place as people sit at home… Where is this headed? Maybe one day you go to a bar.
Put your magical ten years into the future phone down. Suddenly it starts to glow and says hey this is what you might order here, this is what your friends drink. Shows photos of what your friends did here. Physical reality we’re in comes alive with stories we’ve told there.
Q: If someone creates a place at my house what control do I have over that.
A: We have visibility rules so if you create a place it will only be visible to you and your friends but if enough people check in then we say it’s something a lot of people are interested in and make it public.
You can imagine world of things that can be built. Photo tag with location etc. (dodged question on monetization)
Rolling out in US first. Won’t have full coverage of all 500 million people using FB immediately. If you’re not in US can still see posts from friends who are using it in the US.
Blackberry/Android. Right now we do have plans to add to all applications that would be able to support it (no timeline). At launch I showed you eample of web version of Place page. If it’s your business can click link at bottom of page and claim that page of your own. It becomes a business page.
This was a skunkworks thing internally. It was around Dec last year that the team came together around this specific vision. One of main things team had to figure out — what is a good set of features/product that’s different from what everyone else has built?
Facebook Launches Its Location Features [LIVE]
Facebook Places is almost here, and we’re about to find out just what geolocation concoction Facebook has been cooking up for the last few months.
We’re here live at Facebook’s headquarters in Palo Alto, California, for a press event. The world’s largest social network is expected to unveil its new geolocation features, dubbed by most “Facebook Places.”
How will Facebook handle geolocation? What will it do to protect user privacy? Will it integrate other checkin services? Is Facebook Places a Foursquare killer?
We’re about to get all of the answers. Here are my live notes from the event:
Facebook Places Live Notes
View As Slideshow »Facebook Location LaunchFacebook Location LaunchFacebook Location LaunchFacebook Location LaunchFacebook Location LaunchFacebook Location LaunchFacebook Location LaunchFacebook Location LaunchFacebook Location LaunchFacebook Location LaunchFacebook Location LaunchFacebook Location LaunchDo you like this story?
August 18, 2010 by Ben ParrAll posted times are in Pacific Standard Time
4:30 PM: We’re waiting here at Facebook’s offices on Page Mill Road in Palo Alto with the rest of the media. They’re going to usher us in soon.
4:50: Facebook decided to change its plans; they’ve stuck us on two shuttles to its California Street offices so they can make its announcement to its employees at the same time.
4:58: We’ve arrived.
5:06: We’re now waiting in another lobby…
5:15: Yet another room, this one is packed with Facebook employees and the press. Mark Zuckerberg is just standing around with his team while people take pictures.
5:23: Zuckerberg has taken the stage.
5:25: It’s official — Facebook Places is real. “We’ve been working on this for a while … more than a few months.”
5:26: Zuckerberg is talking about how he knew it was ready — his girlfriend was able to discover that Chris Cox and another person were nearby. Apparently there are three components to Facebook Places.
5:28: Facebook is playing a movie discussing the advantages of Facebook Places. They’re discussing check-ins, and much of it sounds like Foursquare.
5:30: Three key components: Help you share where you are, help you find where your friends are, and discover new places around you. It launches on mobile devices (web) and in the company’s new iPhone app tonight.
5:30: Check-ins are part of the platform. So is adding places. One difference between it and Foursquare is that Facebook doesn’t just show you nearby places, but places it thinks are relevant to you.
5:31: Place Pages on the web. It has maps and who’s checked in…more on it in a moment.
5:33: Photo tagging has been taken to places. You can “tag” friends that are with you at a specific location. Thus, everybody doesn’t have to check-in on their own. Tagging seems to be a selling point of the platform, but does this present a privacy issue?
5:37: There’s a “not now” feature to not broadcast your location.
5:37: Now we’re getting into the meat of the privacy controls. You can remove any check-in, settings are defaulted to friends only. “Here Now” is on after you check-in. Tagging only lets you tag your friends and notifies you whenever you’re tagged. You can always remove any tag.
5:39: You can turn off being tagged in Facebook Places.
5:39: You can report a place on the iPhone if it’s inaccurate or don’t want it on the system (say your home, for example).
5:40: Now the company is talking about the API and developers. There’s a Read API for reading check-ins and learning more about check-in pages. There’s a Search and Write API for making check-ins and searching through them.
5:41: Gowalla’s CTO Scott Raymond is on stage.
5:42: Gowalla is talking about the integration. Gowalla’s UI remains the same, but Gowalla stamps will appear on Facebook pages.
5:43: Foursquare’s Holger Luedorf, VP of Mobile & Partnerships, is on stage.
5:44: Foursquare is discussing its platform and its gaming and reward elements, as well as badges. He’s talking more about how they’ll build upon it, but not too many specifics. They just look forward to working with the Facebook team.
5:47: Next: Eric Singley, Director of Mobile Products at Yelp. He’s discussing the company’s mobile apps and its check-in product. Their integration is simple: every time you check-in, you can share it with your Facebook friends, Twitter, or just to your Yelp friends. It publishes a photo of the business as well as some info about it on your wall.
5:49: More partners! Keith Lee, CEO of Booya!, creators of MyTown. He’s talking about InCrowd, which is a game and service for interacting with friends in a virtual world. It has full API integration with reading, writing and searching Facebook Places.
Oh, random observation: I don’t think Foursquare’s all that thrilled to be part of this. It’s more out of necessity, as I wrote in an op/ed piece a few days ago.
5:51: VP of Product Chris Cox is on stage. He’s discussing how the places we go are critical (bars, restaurants, etc.). This is a discussion of the theories of Ray Oldenburg, a famous urban sociologist. It’s a discussion of the “Third place,” where we interact with each other.
5:54: “Technology can be the thing that pulls us away from the night club and out to the nightclub .. out to the bar…” The driving force is to keep the Third place alive and bring people together with the social graph.
5:54: Cox is really making a higher level argument for Facebook Places and location-based services in general. He’s talking about how Facebook Places will be a collective archive of our memories of what we experienced at a specific location or event, such as Lollapalooza. The company sees it as an evolution of the scrapbook or the photo album — now those stories will get more attention, those stories will be pinned to a physical location.
Q&A
- Q: Monetization plans? (I asked this question)
- A: Zuckerberg: They’re focused on getting the three core elements right (finding friends, checking-in, building stories about places), but he can see things such as rewards or deals with locations/companies in the future. But he’ll have to “check-in later” about it.- Q: BlackBerry and Android?
- A: All mobile apps that can support it will support it, which means Android and Blackberry.- Q: Business Pages, can they be linked?
- A: “Is this your business?” is a feature of the Places product. You can claim a business page.- Q: When did development start? (from Taylor Buley of Forbes)
- A: Skunk work project happened last year. Only around December when the team really came together around the vision behind Places.- Q: Can you check into streaming events like a movie or TV show?
- A: No.- Q: What if a place is closed down?
- A: The Place page will still be there. It won’t go away.For more Social Media coverage:
- Follow Mashable Social Media
- Subscribe to the Social Media channel
- Become a Fan on Facebook
- Download our free apps for iPhone and iPad
weve just upped the ante on location based services...
Do We Still Need Websites? - Advertising Age - CMO Strategy
Stay on top of the news, sign up for our free newslettersDo We Still Need Websites?
Given Our Obsession With Social Media, It's a Timely Question
by Pete Blackshaw
Published: August 11, 2010So with all this relentless talk about Twitter accounts, Facebook fan pages and cool new apps, I have a serious and timely question. Do brand websites still matter?
Pete Blackshaw Yes, I know -- even asking this question is a bit digitally sacrilegious. Websites are to digital strategy as models are to fashion, but do we really need them?
I mean, didn't things seem a tad curious during the World Cup when brands like Adidas and Nike actively promoted their Facebook page -- not their primary website -- at the end of their TV spots? Just this weekend, I saw a similar cross-feed to Facebook for Kohls. Talk about kicking the ball into a different goal.
Think about all the hoops we've jumped through to register proprietary domain names, in every country and business type -- this perpetually rationalized by an almost unstoppable parade of GoDaddy ads (titillation and all). As a domain-name collector myself, it's hard not to feel a twinge of asset deterioration.
But before you start penning the "ditch the brand website" memo, hold your tweets for a moment. Websites are not going away -- they might be more important than ever -- but they serve a different and evolved purpose today, especially in this new "social" context.
Think wholesale, less retail. Think distribution, less destination. Think serving, less selling.
At the end of the day, brands today live a decentralized, if not fragmented, existence. The brand "home" has line-extended itself into a network of smaller residences and rented apartments -- or what we might call "brand stands" -- all primed for meeting and interacting with the consumer at various stages in the purchase, loyalty or advocacy cycle. A Facebook fan page is a classic brand stand.
A smart website feeds and refreshes the brand stands. It anchors the brand database, arguably the most coveted asset, and sets the tone and standard for the brand's ethos and attitude about feedback, expression and service. Put another way, it establishes that first critical (often unforgettable) impression. A great website also smartly syndicates, re-circulates and curates social content from the brand stands.
In a seamless "just in time" distribution network, content is refreshed from the website's wholesale supply network. There are some variations to this, of course. YouTube, a de facto hosting and syndication platform increasingly popular to brands, mimics this hub-and-spoke model, but brands still control the primary distribution network or original video content.
Websites are important because you own them. They feed into your database, and the users they attract tend to more loyal and viral, a big reason we should never give short shrift to direct feedback flows. If you carefully analyze the migratory patterns of Apple influencers, for example, you'll find that the Apple website is one of the most critical and effective marketing tools. The same applies to Patagonia, which effectively uses its website to nurture what VP-Marketing Rob BonDurant described at a recent Word of Mouth Marketing Association conference as a "tribe" of advocates.
Even beauty brands like L'Oreal, Estee Lauder and Olay are effectively exploiting their websites as influencer, advocacy and customization hubs. New initiatives like Kotex U have appealed to social connectors and influencers on its website through smart sampling, online couponing and robust Q&A involving moms, experts and peers.
Importantly, if we're truly entering a POEM (paid, owned, earned) media mix model, brand websites are key. They anchor the owned, reinforce the paid and incubate the earned. Moreover, if search results are material to either your brand's reputation or purchase cycle, websites take on an elevated level of significance, as they consistently index at the top of search results. Worth mentioning here that "earned media" linking to brand websites indexes at exceptionally high rates, which for the ROI-wringers out there easily translates into "cash" advertising value. Linking is also a product of trust, and research studies consistently rank websites higher than other ad or marketing vehicles on the trust factor.
Of course, most brand websites are ill-equipped and ill-prepared for an adaptive, sense-and-respond digital "social" age. The site platforms are often impenetrably bureaucratic, impossibly inflexible and all too commonly cornered by territorial IT or "digital" managers who have little incentive or reward structure to drive innovation or real-time iteration. Most marketers -- most of whom "iterate" dozens of times a week in their own personal social-media pursuits -- have little patience for this.
And so we inevitably have lots of "work-arounds" -- essentially, rapidly assembled (and mostly "social") brand stands without a cohesive or coordinated center. Hence the overnight brand Twitter account, or the sometimes over-priced "mini-site." In the short term, that's good for innovation, but it starts to get tricky, if not risky, for short- and long-term brand equity. Consumers hate inconsistency and duplicity.
So what brands need today is a complete rethink and "refresh" of their site strategy. Flexibility and agility should be the orders of the day. They also need open feedback protocols and warm welcome mats (for example, the friendly and inviting "contact us") that drive consistency with the happy brand faces on all the external brand stands. They need to empower visitors with easy search and discovery, and enable tons of pass-along opportunity.
Most important, they need to be built to feed the next generation of brand stands sitting on mobile devices and app platforms, many of which will encompass next-generation e-commerce. Think of your next website as the mission-critical building block from which social media, mobile, e-commerce and other digital innovation draw. Keep in mind the skill that will be necessary to make all this come together. Indeed, curation, co-creation and distributed community management are the new lynchpins of "content management."
Here's a piece of good news. You don't need to figure this out in a vacuum. Both internal and external measurements can quickly get you the 80/20 on what you need to do. As with search, a website is a database of intentions, and the data flows from search queries, video engagement and FAQ pings, and feedback can wonderfully inform the content choices within the brand stand network, especially the Facebook fan page and Twitter account. External conversation is also a wonderfully underused cheat sheet.
So again, don't throw away the website. Listen, adapt and restock the exploding network of brand stands. Think less about "web master" and more about social "spoke caster."
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Totally agree - the last line captures it - "Think less about "web master" and more about social "spoke caster."
Take a look what Facebook is doing Aug 23rd by restructuring millions of brand pages to a new 520px wide format. All of these need to be resized and possibly redone to meet FB's new format. Why? because they can...
Editorial: ESPN bypasses corporate red tape with iPad and Xbox 360, wannabe innovators should take note -- Engadget
Perfect use of multi-purpose - not speciality purpose - device utilization...! Well done ESPN...
Jesse Rosten – iPad + Velcro
yeah - this is exactly what i need. I had the idea already to stick them to the back of headrests for my kids in the car. Glad to see someone thinks this is a viable idea!!
