Black Dog’ reader (and former student extraordinaire) Jeffrey Folck sends this item along:
I thought you might enjoy this… especially the first line about how Clinton is leading the way in innovative use of the media…
[sigh]
And still, her utilization of mobile is a joke. Mailing a DVD out is fine, but it’s hardly revolutionary. It’s called direct media marketing (like direct mail, only you send CD-ROMs or DVDs) and it’s been around for several years now. Continue reading
As I noted a few weeks back, my old colleagues at Gronstedt Group are hosting a weekly “fika” at their “Train for Success” site in Second Life. These get-togethers are a good chance for corporate training people to compare notes, explore, ask questions, and generally socialize themselves to the booming 2L multiverse, which is evolving into a pretty serious business environment.
One of the issues holding 2L back, I felt, was the lack of voice integration. Continue reading
So says Mark Cuban. Now, I’m typically a big Cuban fan. But I’m looking at an AdAge report on his remarks from yesterday’s Cable Telecommunications Association for Marketing (CTAM) Summit, and I’m a little puzzled.
Speaking at the Cable Telecommunications Association for Marketing (CTAM) Summit in Washington yesterday, Mr. Cuban declared “the Internet is dead” in an otherwise subdued panel that included executives such as ESPN President George Bodenheimer and Time Warner Cable CEO Glenn Britt.The real growth medium is the “intranet,” otherwise defined as the on-demand and digital video-recording platforms provided by cable companies. “There’s less restriction on the intranet, it’s like your own corporate network for all the cable networks and even wireless,” he elaborated in an interview after the panel. “It’s all locally driven anyways. It has a true neighborhood feel. If I’m in Dallas and I’m on Time Warner Cable, I want localized content.”
Mr. Cuban views the TV as the real computer, citing the decline in sales of desktop computers as a direct result of where media consumption is moving. “All that [content] is moving to the TV. What’s the difference between a PC and a TV? Nothing.” Social networking and user-generated content are all the rage for Web 2.0, but there’s “nothing on the horizon” from a content perspective, he said (apparently glossing over the looming launches of NBC and News Corp.’s NewCo web-video venture and Joost). Broadband video, according to Mr. Cuban, has “stopped growing.”
There’s a lot to try and parse here, and I wonder if his views would be clearer if I’d heard the entirety of his remarks.
In any case, his concept of “intranet” seems to refer to a proprietary content dump where there’s not much community or interaction. Continue reading
And now, for a happy story. I bitch so much about how people get it wrong that it’s always great when a company gets it right.
My mobile contract was up and I was looking to upgrade my service and my handset. I work with social media and mobile and the phone I’ve been carrying around is almost embarrassing to pull out around colleagues. It’s kind of like working for Volvo and driving up in a KIA. But more than image, I needed to be fast-forwarding my capabilities – I need to be able to show clients and prospectives what I’m talking about and I need to be able to function better away from the laptop. Continue reading
Every time a new medium catches our attention we have to endure this awkward period where people who have decision-making and spending authority but no understanding of the medium at all treat it like it’s the old media they’re used to. Old assumptions, old practices … failure. It’s like in 1996 when ad agencies discovered the Internet. “I know, let’s digitize our print ads and use those!” Remember how much fun that was on a 9600 baud modem?
Now it’s 1996 for mobility, and nobody is not getting it quite as dramatically as the political sector. Continue reading
A couple days ago I had some comments on Obama, Clinton and Edwards and their respective mobile marketing activities. Turns out I was wrong about a couple facts, but finding that out has now opened the door to some new questions and concerns.
Here’s where we currently stand: Continue reading
If you’ve snooped around the site, you probably know that mobility is coming along a lot more slowly than I feel like it should. For every business out there doing a good job ramping up mobile marketing there’s probably a few thousand doing nothing. Why is a little hard for me to fathom – mobile is a preferred medium for Millennial-aged consumers, who control more disposable income than any generation in history. Why you’d refuse to communicate with these customers on their own terms is beyond me.
Well, maybe not. Mobile is comparatively new for most corporate decision-makers, most of who fail to understand the real extent of its capabilities. Sure, new technologies and practices often take longer to get traction in the marketplace than we’d expect – I remember the result of a poll from about 1996 or so that said less than half the US population had even heard of the Internet, and at that point in time the Net was being dramatically underused, as well.
Recently, though, I’ve noticed a phenomenon that concerns me Continue reading
Brian Angliss has an interesting take on software patents and patent trolls over at Scholars & Rogues. I’m no expert on either (although I wholeheartedly agree on the troll issue), but since software development bears rather directly on the world of innovation marketing, I thought I’d point you to it….
And this morning, a glimpse of the future:
Sprite Launches Mobile Social Network
by Tameka Kee, Thursday, Jun 7, 2007 6:00 AM ET
MOVE OVER, MYSPACE AND FACEBOOK. Coca-Cola’s Sprite is debuting its own social network, called the Sprite Yard.The brand’s global interactive marketing team is betting that the mobile platform will set new benchmarks for consumer brand engagement.Launched officially in China on June 1, with plans for a U.S. rollout to start June 22, users connect with the Sprite Yard through any WAP-enabled phone. After texting the word “YARD” to 59666 (LYMON), they are invited to register–and to create a tag name, a profile, and even an avatar. Members of the community can then share pictures, send “Shouts” to their friends, post “Scribbles” to a discussion board, and plan events on a shared calendar.
At the Sprite Yard, users will also have access to “Nuggets” of exclusive downloadable content, from mobisodes (short animated and video content created by Coca-Cola and other media partners) to ringtones. The branding tie-in is designed to drive sales as well as engagement, as content can only be unlocked by using a PIN found under Sprite bottle caps. (Story.)
I’m in no position to predict how well executed this project will be, but the concept is dead-on and I wouldn’t be surprised if it becomes the model for consumer brand mobility over the next couple of years. Continue reading
Today’s Online Spin column by Joe Marchese addresses a topic that’s been front and center around here lately. To wit, what exactly is “social media”? It’s a term that’s being tossed around pretty enthusiastically these days, but as is so often the case with particularly fresh and buzzy marketing jargon, not everybody is 100% sure what it means. Hey, I didn’t quite know what people meant when I first heard it, either, so don’t feel bad if you’re a little fuzzy on the details.
However, it occurred to me that this terrain is actually more familiar than we might realize. Way back in the Dark Ages (1993) the catchphrase was “interactivity.” Everybody used it, but it became quickly apparent that no two people were using it in quite the same way. Continue reading
wordSmith | Writing / Content Marketing 