Friday, December 16, 2011
Thursday, December 15, 2011
10 tech startups that wowed us
The market is stuffed with fascinating digital marketing startups doing everything you can think of, and a bunch of things you couldn't even think of. In this midst are a collection of outfits focused on solving your digital marketing problems. Find your problem below and check out the company focused on solving it.
How can I do more mobile advertising without all the creative hassle? With Celtra you can build amazing mobile rich media units lickety-split. Celtra's platform enables creative teams to make ads that do exactly what you want them to, but without the cost and complexity of finding mobile dev experts or versioning for all the various platforms. The platform easily integrates video and other rich formats with the stuff that makes mobile so effective -- location, time of day, multiple types of interactivity, and long-term engagement. Ads can run in-app and on the mobile web across top ad networks, premium publishers, and DSPs. A built-in analytics package gives you a broad range of stats across your entire campaign to prove performance and drive more effective optimization.
How can I get my marketing material translated quickly and efficiently? Cloudwords offers a first-of-its-kind technology platform and community of carefully vetted translators to get you up and in market quickly and efficiently. Brands post a project and receive proposals from translators in the community. You can check out their work, read and post ratings, and choose a vendor that fits the bill for you. Built-in project management capabilities make it easy to collaborate, track, and warehouse the localized content. Vetted translators, competitive bidding, and no more files with names like WebsiteCopy-German-Version27-FinalFinalFinal.doc.
How do I become part of passionate consumer conversations online? Amplify Social combines social, mobile, and online display in order to create high reach, high engagement brand interactions. Its core offering thus far is the Virtual Fan Network, which places brand messages within the context of sports discussions wherever they occur in digital media. Sports are unique in both the reach and depth of consumer interest that they inspire. The network offers its sports team and player clients a platform through which they can connect with their fans across digital media. Product marketing messages are integrated into and carried along with these highly portable discussions, providing the scale as well as the association benefits of working with sports brands.
How can I encourage more positive social recommendations for my brand? Zuberance offers a platform that empowers brand fans to more easily rate, comment, and distribute their praise across the web. Zuberance starts with your CRM or other database, and then asks your passionate enthusiasts to tell their stories, make comments, or provide service ratings. From there, Zuberance gives the brand fans the opportunity to place their comments in one or more high-traffic review environments. Zuberance doesn't pay people for positive comments, so they preserve brand credibility as they help your fans spread the word and be an organic part of your brand marketing team.
How can I make my site direct buys more powerful and efficient? Legolas bills itself as the first audience futures marketplace, using a unique media sales platform to help brands and agencies buy audiences in advance from publishers they like and trust. Most brands buy some inventory site direct to capitalize on great audiences and custom solutions. But for pub direct, you generally had to choose ROS or context. Many brands want the premium association without the waste inherent in ROS or context. Use Legolas to set audience characteristics, frequency, budget, flighting, and a ceiling media price with platform guidance. Legolas estimates the available reach within the marketplace, and the buyer then pushes the specs to publishers. After publisher bidding, Legolas suggests the optimal plan that the buyer can adjust. Brands buy or manage through the platform without meetings, faxing, and unnecessary back and forth. Additionally, you can plan budgets, make adjustments, and review measurement.
How do I get more business from local search listings? Yext makes a local business's listings stand out by adding additional pieces of information so that consumers notice one listing over others and are more likely to convert. Using Yext, the business can manage multiple listing presences from a single venue, and even monitor online reputation across social media with email text alerts. With Yext, a business listing can be supplemented with a "verified" logo, offer promotions, an additional URL, photos, and business hours, and get tracking and reporting across social sites. Additionally, Yext optimizes listings for mobile search.
How do I drive better results from my e-commerce site? EyePredict is a company that uses predictive attention software based on neuroscience to dynamically arrange items on your pages for maximum results. Whole industries have been created to help physical stores plan layout and display assortment. In the digital front, great strides are being made. The EyePredict solution generates thousands of possible layouts and then selects the one that will maximize results. In contrast to eye tracking evaluations, which have limited scalability and require expert interpretation, EyePredict optimizes layouts automatically and delivers them seamlessly to the consumer while the page loads.
How can I get a great referral program for my brand up and running quickly and easily?
Everyone knows referral programs work, but most of us grimace at the amount of work they can take to implement and track. Extole promises to turn frowns upside-down. One service offering lets you custom brand your program and easily deliver rewards that encourage customers to tell your story to their friends. Extole delivers your message in Facebook, Twitter, email, and on blogs. It manages fulfillment by delivering the rewards of your choice -- custom gift cards, PayPal payments, or branded service credits. Extole also offers services to enable turnkey sweepstakes to grow your fanbase.
How can I get a great referral program for my brand up and running quickly and easily?
Everyone knows referral programs work, but most of us grimace at the amount of work they can take to implement and track. Extole promises to turn frowns upside-down. One service offering lets you custom brand your program and easily deliver rewards that encourage customers to tell your story to their friends. Extole delivers your message in Facebook, Twitter, email, and on blogs. It manages fulfillment by delivering the rewards of your choice -- custom gift cards, PayPal payments, or branded service credits. Extole also offers services to enable turnkey sweepstakes to grow your fanbase.
How do I get real experiential brand impact in social media? Social advertising not only needs to be compelling but it also needs to fit seamlessly into the flow of the game or any social activity. Why? Because you want your ad to be more than a speed bump on the way to "my farm." MediaBrix simplifies the creation, buying, measurement, and refinement of campaigns in social environments across a footprint of more than 500 million users globally -- almost 200 million in the U.S. Through the MediaBrix platform, marketers can target an audience, outsource creative development, book a campaign across multiple social venues, receive ongoing creative optimization, view consolidated reports, and gather actionable insights. The MediaBrix Social Flex solution is fully integrated into social experiences and offers compelling, sharable, high-impact experiences designed to create brand advocacy.
How can I simplify the process of planning, placing, and optimizing social network advertising? Adaptly offers an integrated platform for the purchase of social media advertising across communities like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and StumbleUpon. Instead of using multiple self-service platforms, you use the Adapt.ly offering to make all your purchases across the platforms and ad formats. What's more, reporting is in real time, and in an integrated interface. No more staring at incongruous graphs and charts wondering what they mean. Optional auto optimization helps improve the effectiveness of your campaigns and extend those learnings across multiple communities.
Wednesday, December 14, 2011
Brand Social Grows Up
Lately there have been a lot of articles pointing to growing
brand interest in social media measurement. Like all marketing activity, social
is now being more thoroughly scrutinized to determine if it is making a
significant business impact.
What is perhaps getting short shrift in that coverage is the
massive shift taking place in HOW companies engage in social – where they are
active, what they are doing, and how they are representing themselves in these
critical environments. Which is definitely a good thing.
In my view, there have been three more or less distinct eras
in brand social:
- Social 1.0 – Primarily characterized by social media listening, analytics, and customer relations management. The common denominator was RESPONSE – processes through which companies could address issues and opportunities that customers made them aware of.
- Social 2.0 – In this phase, companies sought through social to cost effectively reach consumers using social platforms with highly controlled messages. In essence, treating social as a media vehicle like Print or Radio. The theme here was BROADCASTING in different venues.
- Social 3.0- This important new phase has brands proactively interacting with consumers, whether through becoming part of conversations or delivering messages designed to drive consumer input and evangelism. The theme here is PARTICIPATION.
In this third phase, the very nature of how a company is
presenting itself has begun to change. Part of this is driven by the rise of
Twitter as an important social outlet. Since Twitter is ultimately about
content and news rather than “static messaging” and offers, brands have had to
adapt their voices and stream of commentary to be more human, interesting, and surprising.
Whether on Twitter or in the new Facebook news streams,
brand information needs to be at least as interesting as what our friends and
colleagues are speaking about. Capturing and maintaining consumer interest
requires a greater focus on the consumer and thinking about what THEY want, not
what we think they want or “what they don’t know they want yet.”
In my view, the final difference between this social era and
the earlier phases is that brands now seem to be more comfortable sharing
control of messages with users, even though they are more likely to deviate
from whatever is the core brand message. To put their own personal spin on why
a brand is great or valuable or worth our time.
Accompanying this is a change
in the way ad campaigns “work” – a sort of blending between the classic one
message/one format/one tagline approach that has always characterized online
and the one-off-centric approach that has, for better or for worse, typified
digital. Greater variation is essential to capturing and holding consumer
attention, and nowhere is this more true than social.
The very nature and character of brand social is changing.
And with it a recognition that social is not “media” so much as a marketing
approach.
Tuesday, December 13, 2011
12 totally incorrect predictions for 2012
1.
Courtney Stodden will…sign a $7.8 million dollar
contract with The Talbots.
2.
Sheldon and Amy will…conceive during October
Sweeps.
3.
HBO Real Sex will…live up to its name.
4.
Adrien Brody will…choose The Dry Look.
5.
The Occupy Movement will…sign corporate
sponsors.
6.
Nikki Minaj will… endorse Mitt Romney for
President.
7.
iPhone 5 won’t… sell well.
8.
Fox will… focus on “hard news”.
9.
Fabio will… play Mr. Darcy.
10.
Calista Gingrich will…get a perm.
11.
Kim Kardashian will… tour the country advocating
for girls’ self esteem.
12.
Posh will…do an infomercial for “natural look”
makeup.
Monday, December 12, 2011
Sunday, December 11, 2011
A collection of Jonah Mowry responses
I first saw Jonah's video this afternoon, and have since been struck by how many people replied to his video with their own flash card vids. I thought I'd share some of them here. Can't seem to stop searching for them.
I suppose I had the usual amount of crap thrown at me as a kid. Nothing like these folks have been through. But I've certainly had times when I felt alone, lonely really, with a world coming at me from all directions. But I cannot imagine the pain that kids go through who are attacked so.
What is it in people that makes so many so able to hate? Is it a feeling that by hurting others, somehow their own status stays unthreatened? Does it make someone feel stronger to attack others who have been singled out for whatever reason?
I feel fortunate to live in a world where the people below were so moved as to send him video messages of support. I hope that it makes Jonah and the many other kids who share his pain feel less alone. That other kids -- and adults -- who are so horribly ostracized can see in these homemade videos some of the promise of how the world can and will get better for them.
That there are more good people and relationships than bad ones in their futures.
Apparently Jonah's life has taken a positive turn. That as a result of this effort, his school and the kids surrounding him have largely apologized, and are treating him better. That's magnificent. For some inexplicable reason, this seems to disappoint some people, who think he was lying about his pain. Ignoring the fact that he has so many scars from cutting himself to numb the pain.
I for one am very glad that Jonah did SOMETHING, and that that something helped improve his situation. Unfortunately, far too many kids don't see an improvement in their situation fast enough to prevent them from taking their own lives. These are kids. With "presents" so painful that they can no longer cope.
I am so happy that these wonderful videos made a difference in his life, and hope that they can make a difference in the lives of people who haven't yet found their voices.
Watch them. Watch them all.
Jonah's story seems to be ending well. For far too many kids, their stories end in wooden boxes and urns.
I suppose I had the usual amount of crap thrown at me as a kid. Nothing like these folks have been through. But I've certainly had times when I felt alone, lonely really, with a world coming at me from all directions. But I cannot imagine the pain that kids go through who are attacked so.
What is it in people that makes so many so able to hate? Is it a feeling that by hurting others, somehow their own status stays unthreatened? Does it make someone feel stronger to attack others who have been singled out for whatever reason?
I feel fortunate to live in a world where the people below were so moved as to send him video messages of support. I hope that it makes Jonah and the many other kids who share his pain feel less alone. That other kids -- and adults -- who are so horribly ostracized can see in these homemade videos some of the promise of how the world can and will get better for them.
That there are more good people and relationships than bad ones in their futures.
Apparently Jonah's life has taken a positive turn. That as a result of this effort, his school and the kids surrounding him have largely apologized, and are treating him better. That's magnificent. For some inexplicable reason, this seems to disappoint some people, who think he was lying about his pain. Ignoring the fact that he has so many scars from cutting himself to numb the pain.
I for one am very glad that Jonah did SOMETHING, and that that something helped improve his situation. Unfortunately, far too many kids don't see an improvement in their situation fast enough to prevent them from taking their own lives. These are kids. With "presents" so painful that they can no longer cope.
I am so happy that these wonderful videos made a difference in his life, and hope that they can make a difference in the lives of people who haven't yet found their voices.
Watch them. Watch them all.
Jonah's story seems to be ending well. For far too many kids, their stories end in wooden boxes and urns.
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