The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Google will introduce a module that will allow Gmail users to view a stream of status updates from their connections.
The Journal source says the new feature is designed to make it easier and faster for users to share media and status updates with friends. It’s likely Gmail users will be able to monitor activity on other Google properties such as YouTube and photo sharing site Picasa. No word on whether the module will compete with TweetDeck and allow users to monitor live feeds from Twitter and Facebook.
Ordinarily, a minor move, until you consider the facility with which Google organizes and captures information. Marketers might want to keep an eye on this one.
As a B2B ad agency we deal with people from nearly every walk of life. Doctors, contractors, truck drivers, nurses, packaging professionals and a whole slew of other professions you probably haven’t even heard of.
This video for the fictitious Rockwell Retro Encabulator clearly contradicts that thinking. Made by electrical engineers, this video mocks the technobabble that’s so prevalent in B2B marketing. As you can see, engineers do, in fact have great senses of humor. They’re also a heck of a lot of fun to work with!
First we had social media. Then we tried to quantify the conversation by counting Facebook posts and Tweets. We refined that metric by using algorithms that try to gauge the sentiment of the comments. Now we have Trendrr, a tool that, according to its website, “allows you to track the popularity and awareness of trends across a variety of inputs, ranging from social network to blog buzz and video views downloads, all in real time.”
Trendrr lets you to compare trends to one another, monitoring and evaluating this comparison across a variety of sources. You can use Trendrr to track the brands of your company and the competition and view web-based metrics in chart form. The service comes in a stripped-down free version and several pay-per-month tiers.
Trendspotting isn’t new. Technorati has listed the top 100 blogs for ages. There have been articles about trendspotting (”The Trendspotting Trend“) and books, including 2011: Trendspotting for the Next Decade and cyberpunk novelist William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition, a fascinating romp with a woman who is allergic to brands. But Trendrr goes beyond narrative. It distinguishes itself by gathering data that can be displaying and manipulated to provide a benchmark for future studies of a brand’s social media ROI.
While Trendrr attracted attention during the H1N1 virus scare last year, one of the most popular and clever uses to date came this week with the tracking of the popularity of various artists who performed at the Grammy award ceremony.
The charts show that on Twitter, the phrase “Lady Gaga” has averaged more than 10,000 mentions per day over the past three months. That, and other interest, has translated into song plays on MySpace, where her daily totals have hit the million mark three times since last November.
Other than the fact that the world is gaga over Lady Gaga, the charts show she’s trending well against female competitors Beyonce and Rihanna.
Want to know the buzz about your organization? There’s a chart for that.
One of the more intriguing trends in the digital word is use of the social graph. The phrase, coined in 2007 by Facebook, describes the network of contacts people have online.
“The social graph is the representation of our relationships,” Jeremiah Owyang writes in “Explaining what the ‘social graph’ is to your executives.” “Today, these graphs define our personal, family, or business communities on social websites.”
Social graphs are charts that map the links among a person’s online networks. Ben Ullman, senior visual designer at Bank of America in Charlotte, NC, uses circles and lines to organize the links. My social graph uses icons representing various social networking sites to display the relationships: it’s available at my website and on Flickr. People use social graphs to chart their entire online presence or their relationships on a single site, such as Facebook. You can find more examples at Social Graph Central or by using the “image” tab on major search engines. Loic Le Meur has created a video that outlines the process.
“Everyone has a social graph,” Ken Mallon and Duncan Southgate write in Advertising Age. “In fact, the point of social networking has been to build one. We will now see services like Facebook and Google start to use social graph data more aggressively as we move away from the ‘destination web’ towards a ‘social web’ whereby people get information through their networks rather than a specific site. Facebook’s new ‘reconnect with’ feature is one implementation of social graph data.”
As a way to identify influential people, the social graph isn’t new. Malcolm Gladwell wrote convincingly about influentials who use a traditional form of social networking, word of mouth, in his first book, The Tipping Point. “Word of mouth is something created by three very rare and special psychological types, whom I call connectors, mavens and salesmen.” What’s new is the ability of others to track down and quantify the networks of those thought-leaders and deliver them to the sales staff.
That’s significant, because while we (and our clients) may not be aware of social graphs, online data aggregators are, and they can use that data to target customers. Google recently released a new application programming interface called Social Graph API that allows its users to find the “public connections” (friends, coworkers, etc.) of a URL (blog, social networking profile, etc.). An API is a program that enables interaction among other software programs, such as an application that sends posts from Twitter to Facebook and LinkedIn. You can view the Google Social Graph API video here.
Mallon and Southgate see this as a call to arms for the industry. “In 2010 there will be a heightened need for brands to understand how to be more social in order to access these more segmented networks.” For marketers who want to reach their most influential customers, the social graph could become the next holy grail.
swb&r president, Scott Friedman flew to Las Vegas last week to help out and make sure everything went smoothly. Check out the booth graphics we did for Paslode below. We also produced a cool video and some sales collateral for them.
We’re confident the 2011 IBS Show in Orlando will be just as successful for both Paslode and Masco!
How do you stay motivated on the job in an era of fewer bonuses? Forget the money and discover non-monetary ways to motivate yourself, says author Daniel Pink in his new book, Drive.
Pink was interviewed recently by Barbara Chai in the Wall Street Journal (“How to Stay Motivated—and Get That Bonus”) and had this to stay about the corporate reward system: the old ways no longer work. The traditional carrot-and-stick method, in which companies offer money as a reward for the successful completion of a task, is not only ineffective for motivating employees but potentially harmful.
He draws two conclusions from the current recession. One, the U.S. economy is moving toward conceptional work, and creatives don’t always do their best work when they’re motivated by money alone. And, two, the consensus in America after the meltdown in the financial system is that providing executives and shareholders with more money isn’t the primary motivation in their lives.
That does not rule out bonuses, he points out. Companies could combine financial with other rewards. That said, employees can’t count on their bosses to provide the appropriate motivation. So what can people do? Investigate a better career path. And how do they do that? Start with a few questions. “It’s a process of discovery,” he says. “What do you do for fun? What would you do for free? What do you do in your spare time? Think about whether you can make a living doing that.”
Dan Rather shared his thoughts on public relations and its practitioners at a cableFAXIES luncheon. Take some time to watch the speech he presented at PR News.
I remember the first time I saw an iPod. It was back in 2001 and I was working as a personal trainer at New York Sports Club in Parsippany, NJ. A gentleman I was training came in with this weird contraption that stored hundreds of songs and played them like a regular portable music device. He said it held his music on a hard drive and was the wave of the future. Being the wise sage I am, I politely nodded in agreement while privately calling him a “quack”. Nine years later that iPod has been replaced by smaller devices with the ability to hold thousands of songs, videos, podcasts and pictures.
In those nine years, we’ve grown accustomed to purchasing music through iTunes. But, according to MacLife.com there are other options out there. In a recent post, MacLife listed the top ten best alternatives to the iTunes music store and reviewed each one for you.
Below is MacLife’s list. Check them out and let us know how they compare to iTunes.
In B2B public relations, we focus on our markets and often overlook our employees. After a recession that has cut staff and morale, now’s a good time to recognize workers for keeping us in business.
Masco Bath, the maker of whirlpools, shower enclosures and tubs, extends that process to relatives of employees being deployed overseas. In late January the marketing staff created packages that will be sent to soldiers for Valentine’s Day. In a twist, Masco Bath invited its consultants to participate, incorporating the activity into a day-long meeting that included product briefings and factory tours.
The next step is to publicize the efforts among employees at all company facilities.
Oscar Mayer’s two famous jingles aren’t being used in the most recent campaign. Instead of “wanting to be an Oscar Mayer weiner” the new tag line is “It doesn’t get better than this.” The new campaign promotes the same products, which is its range of meat products, including bacon, hot dogs, bologna, premade sandwiches and sliced meats.
to track the popularity and awareness of trends across a variety of inputs, ranging from social network to blog buzz and video views downloads, all in real time.”
William Gibson’s 
“The social graph is the representation of our relationships,” Jeremiah Owyang writes in “
Social graphs are charts that map the links among a person’s online networks. 
As a way to identify influential people, the social graph isn’t new. 
That’s significant, because while we (and our clients) may not be aware of social graphs, online data aggregators are, and they can use that data to target customers. Google recently released a new application programming interface called 
He draws two conclusions from the current recession. One, the U.S. economy is moving toward conceptional work, and creatives don’t always do their best work when they’re motivated by money alone. And, two, the consensus in America after the meltdown in the financial system is that providing executives and shareholders with more money isn’t the primary motivation in their lives.
I remember the first time I saw an iPod. It was back in 2001 and I was working as a personal trainer at New York Sports Club in Parsippany, NJ. A gentleman I was training came in with this weird contraption that stored hundreds of songs and played them like a regular portable music device. He said it held his music on a hard drive and was the wave of the future. Being the wise sage I am, I politely nodded in agreement while privately calling him a “quack”. Nine years later that iPod has been replaced by smaller devices with the ability to hold thousands of songs, videos, podcasts and pictures.
Oscar Mayer’s two famous jingles aren’t being used in the most recent campaign. Instead of “wanting to be an Oscar Mayer weiner” the new tag line is “It doesn’t get better than this.” The new campaign promotes the same products, which is its range of meat products, including bacon, hot dogs, bologna, premade sandwiches and sliced meats.
