Cory Booker Keynote at Affiliate Summit
Newark mayor Cory Booker spoke at this month’s Affiliate Summit in Boston. I’ve heard too many political speeches in life, but this one is up there with Obama’s “Yes We Can” moment in Columbia, SC during the primaries.
If you want to get a glimpse of a future president, go watch this video (and head over to the original Affiliate Summit blog post to thank Shawn and Missy for posting this up so quickly):
http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docid=-4158354476639468131&hl=en&fs=true
Yes, that is the famous Blue Man Group doing the intro for Mayor Booker. It was strange, but it worked.
Cory Booker Keynote Address at Affiliate Summit: “Cory Booker is the Mayor of Newark, NJ, as well as the subject of the Academy Award nominated documentary, Street Fight, a Rhodes Scholar, graduate of Yale University School of Law, blogger at HuffingtonPost.com, and he played tight end at Stanford University.
Mayor Booker spoke at Affiliate Summit 2008 East on August 11, 2008 in Boston.”
And here is the mp3 if you’re so inclined.
Evernote for Class Notes
So, I’m trying to get Evernote (one of my favorite web/mobile/desktop applications ever) to work with the notes I’m taking in classes.
Why not just type in the notes?
Good question. Basically, I like to hand write notes from classes and seminars. Something about muscle memory as well as respect to seminar participants (a lot of my classes are smaller, so having a laptop out is not necessarily disrespectful but I think it takes away from the human element of a seminar).
So, I get something like this…
What I’m attempting to do is take a pic of the page with my BlackBerry Curve, then send that over to Evernote via email to take advantage of Evernote’s mostly awesome text recognition capabilities.
This would allow me to keep notes searchable by specific terms and topics. That, my dear readers, would be killer.
Alas, it’s not working (yet). I’ll keep toying with it to see what I can do.
And I’ll keep you posted.
Harrison Bergeron
I had to read this story in the 9th grade and it was the first thing I ever read that had a lasting and deep impact. I hope the movie is a third as good as Vonnegut’s original story…
Market Leverage Interview from Affiliate Summit
The wonderful Debby from Market Leverage interviewed me in the Affiliate Summit East Bloghaus in Boston last week…
Market Leverage Update » Blog Archive » Interviews from Affiliate Summit East in Boston!: “”
XMPP as the Marketer’s Golden Egg; Latency as Magic Beans
XMPP has had a meteoric rise in term of its profile and application over the last two years. Part of that is due to the rise of microblogging services such as Twitter or Identi.ca that leverage the XMPP platform to deliver real time updates to users.
However, there has been a hiccup in Twitter’s usage of XMPP over the last few months and that hiccup has helped to give more exposure to XMPP instead of putting it on the shelf. The increasingly popular Track feature of Twitter (which allowed users to follow certain keywords they were interested in… in real time… without having to rely upon the latency of RSS and/or an increasingly hampered Twitter API) was pulled a few months ago. Twitter’s Biz Stone comments about the disabling of Track for everyone here:
Our goal is to support as many applications, projects, mash-ups, and devices as possible so we’ll continue to think about how best to do this. While the XMPP feed of the full Twitter Public Timeline is an amazing resource, drinking from the fire hose is not the best way to quench a thirst. With continued updates and refinement, our API will support most scenarios in a way that preserves overall system performance.
Track WAS the ultimate web tool and began to function as the neural spine for many of us. The latency of a hampered API does not fill the void. Early adopters like myself got a taste of its power and now thinkers and users such as Steve Gillmor are looking for an angry fix:
But Twitter is living on borrowed time with its XMPP blockade. The flowering of micro-objects opens the door to applications that leverage swarming around events and the growing availability of iPhone-class mobile devices. The success of App Store stars such as Evernote suggests that adding micro-object support will accelerate usage of the XMPP backbone. Latency in that environment will be an instant deal-breaker, opening the door for better-financed competitors to subsidize real time services to capture audience.
Before we go too much deeper, it’s important to explain exactly what XMPP is and why marketers should be researching and developing its application.
Wikipedia explains:
Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP) is an open, XML-inspired protocol for near-real-time, extensible instant messaging (IM) and presence information (a.k.a. buddy lists). It is the core protocol of the Jabber Instant Messaging and Presence technology. The protocol is built to be extensible and other features such as Voice over IP and file transfer signaling have been added.
Unlike most instant messaging protocols, XMPP is an open standard. Like e-mail, it is an open system where anyone who has a domain name and a suitable Internet connection can run their own Jabber server and talk to users on other servers. The standard server implementations and many clients are also free and open source software.
That sounds incredibly geeky and innocuous to most direct marketers, but put on your thinking cap for a moment and re-read Gillmor’s quote above with that information in mind.
It doesn’t take too much imagination to come to the realization that in the coming years, the real world web stars will be applications that deliver on demand, in real time and with micro-object support. XMPP stands as the protocol, above all other protocols, to deliver those messages to the masses.
The future of marketing is not based on latency or delayed access to timely information. RSS is wonderful and has changed my world, but its asynchronous delivery only makes me want to plant the latency bean in some fertile garden so that I can climb the vine to the ultimate marketing prize… real time tracking and delivery of information that I opt-in to.
Keep an eye on XMPP. And especially keep an eye on the first company to tap into its marketing power (Identi.ca?).
Branding on Twitter Study
Jeremiah Owyang continues his insightful series on branding and Twitter with this piece about how brands are succeeding on the Twitter platform.
If you’re at all interested in how microblogging will shape the future of direct performance marketing (it will) and corporate communications (it will), make sure to read this:
Web Strategy: The Evolution of Brands on Twitter: “Last week, I listed out 9 reasons Why Brands Are Unsuccessful In Twitter, and other microblogging technologies. Companies are caught between the minutia of the discussions and their willingness to be human or add value to the conversations. Although a one-sided view of what’s going wrong, now let’s focus on what’s going right.”
It’s amazing to see how much the perception of Twitter has changed in 2 short years. So many people I speak to now see the business application of Twitter (or microblogging in general) whereas a year ago, I was being laughed at for bringing Twitter up in such conversations!
Google Levels the Playing Field?
Robert Seidman guest-blogs on social media guru Louis Gray’s blog on the topic of how the Goog has made the playing field of web publishing much more accessible for anyone (rather than just an arena for A-Listers):
louisgray.com: Google Has Leveled the Internet Playing Field: ”
I know a lot in the tech blogging circles will opine on whether Google is good or evil. For now in my mind, Google is still good. It leveled the playing field for us. We have little in the way of expense overhead (almost $0, really) and sure, it may work out that I’ve made about eight cents per hour, but that’s the subject for another blog post. From my perspective, we are allowed to compete, and compete fairly without spending anything on marketing. It’s hard for me to find fault with a system that provides that sort of level playing field.Organic Google search (including Google News) is our number one traffic source. This leads to a lot of referral traffic from other sites and a good bit of the direct traffic.”
The question of whether or not Google is “evil” or not is about as subjective as any subject you can imagine. For all of its occasional (or sustained) “big-brotherness,” Google does allow for a plethora of voices on topics. The key to ranking well in Google is not to rely too heavily on the mysticism of SEO, but to make good (and easily discoverable) content.
GoFish for Big Revenue Jump
GoFish is an advertising agency aimed at the “tween” market and their associated parents. The company page explains:
GoFish is a leading entertainment and media company with a focus on reaching kids, teens and moms. We specialize in aggregating, and distributing premium content on a large network of quality sites for which GoFish is the exclusive brand advertising monetization partner. We reach more than 20 million users domestically, and over 66 million worldwide, currently ranking as the third largest youth opportunity and a top five ‘mom’ opportunity for blue-chip advertisers.
PaidContent is reporting that the company had a very successful Q2 of 2008:
Revenues were $1.28 million, a huge jump over revenues of $31,686 in Q207.
That’s a big jump for a niche specific publisher network. So, if you’re a publisher or affiliate in these troublesome economic times, there is a market for you somewhere.
Attractive Microblogging for Marketers 301
During my presentation called “Leveraging Social Media” at Affiliate Summit East, I took up most of the allotted hour to discuss tools and strategies that affiliate marketers could use to help them both better monitor and better participate in the increasingly important social networks out there in the wild.
This is an important issue because not only are these networks (in my presentation we touched on Twitter, Friendfeed, Seesmic and Facebook, but there are dozens of others) important for “traffic” but these hubs of communities have become an invaluable source for marketers to find conversions, early adopters and brand evangelists.
The main questions that most people had during, after and in the week since about the presentation pertained to the “how” aspect of using these networks in a responsible manner.
It’s not an easy question to answer since a great deal of operating in the social web is subjective and full of variables associated with individual programs, personalities and the social networks themselves.
At the end of the day, my constant recommendations all went along the lines of “do your homework, know the community and don’t feel obliged to use services such as ping.fm to cover everything.” In fact, I advise marketers to generally stay away from services like ping.fm because the fine line between “participant” and “spammer” is so easy to cross (and so easy to seemed to have crossed).
In other words, be interesting and provide a service (such as pointing to relevant info, even if its yours) in a responsible (whatever that means to you) manner.
DeWitt Clinton gets very geeky and brings in another aspect that you might want to consider if you’re a marketer with a little bit of know-how… attractiveness.
Head over to his blog and read the rest of the entry with the examples he gives. It’s a powerful read that points to the need for both functionality and appeal as you get your messages out there (and aren’t all messages marketing messages?):
Microblogging syndication formats » DeWitt Clinton: “This is just the beginning — I feel I’m only scratching the surface of what can be extracted from existing syndication formats. For example, comment stream aggregation (via the comments element or RFC 4685 autodiscovery) is a great next step after this. And I only call out FriendFeed because they’re the best at aggregating multiple content sources, but these concepts apply to any content aggregator, and finding a way to reuse existing formats like RSS and Atom to create rich presentations automatically will enable us to do more with less manual work between aggregators and publishers.”
While practicality is important to reach, don’t discount the need to reach people through visual appeal!