Everyone likes to predict the future, right? So here are my fearless predictions for 2010:
Brands using social media will listen more and talk less.
My blood pressure will rise 10%.
As more brands/marketers attempt to “engage us” (engage=overused), people will become more discriminating, placing greater pressure on brands/marketers to be genuine and provide real value.
We’re still a few years away from the full merger of TV and internet, but we’ll get closer in 2010.
I will re-finance just because my mortgage provider (New York Mortgage Trust — I would hyperlink to them but they don’t have a freakin’ Web site) charges me to pay my bill online, and they won’t acknowledge my email complaints. I’ll keep mailing checks and they can pay someone to open them! I also guarantee they aren’t monitoring social media, so they’ll never know about my subtle bashing of them.
The Facebook interface will evolve at least twice.
Location-based applications will take off and become mainstream as alternatives to the iPhone take off, like Android.
The proliferation of Email Newsletters will slow because no one has time to care about information that a company thinks matters. However, Email Marketing will continue to grow in importance and sophistication because enough people will act when asked to act…and it will continue to be cost effective for marketers. (“act” doesn’t have to be “buy” either).
More pedestrians will be involved in car accidents while doing something on their mobile phones. Be careful people!
Wireless electricity will become better understood and more common. The copper mining lobby gears up for a battle.
I learned some valuable lessons this week. They’re so valuable that I’m keeping them a secret from everyone but my 2 readers, and the purveyor of the 4 rules. I know I haven’t written in a while, and frankly, that probably won’t change. (My ideas are better suited for Twitter, Brightkite and Facebook.) But sometimes things just have to be written.
I was preparing for a meeting to present ourselves (my employer) to an organization and had a fateful chat with the aforementioned purveyor of rules. These rules that I am about to impart upon you changed the presentation, the dynamic, the outcome, and my approach to meetings forever. And it begins…
1) Never enter a room if you don’t know the audience
Never attend a meeting if you don’t know how to create the following 4 outcomes…
2) “Wow, I didn’t know that”
3) “I hadn’t thought of it that way”
4) “Thank you! I’m going to go do that right now.”
5) “I like him/her/them”
OK so there are 5 rules. Actually, here is a bonus rule:
6) if a client calls at 4:30 AM because their Web site is down, and you spend 45 minutes getting it fixed, and you consider going back to bed for 45 more minutes even though you’re wide awake, don’t do it and go running. It’ll get you through the day — even on Friday.
I began believing the theory that the homepage is dead because search and deep links allow many people to bypass the homepage. I still believe that you design and write every page as if it were a homepage, but the homepage is alive my friends. Why? Domain names. As long as espn.com takes me to a page called “index” or “default”, it is, and needs to be, a homepage. From there, I will drill down, consume content, and maintain my edge in sports knowledge. But it is a homepage.
The other day I tagged Web Designer Wall, a good looking blog that has proven to be useful too. My wife is out of town, so I thought I’d look catch up on some reading, and I read about Clixpy. WDW proclaims it is “a revolutionary analytic tool (that) captures everything your visitors do on the site including: mouse movement, clicks, scrolling, and form inputs.” Try it out here.
Cool huh? It seems they’ve found a way to blend ScreenToaster-like desktop recording with web analytics. I’m eager to test this out and see what insights can be gained. I don’t think mouse movements can tell you everything, but it’s better than straight data.
As for pricing, you can buy…
10 Captures = Free (new sign up)
100 Captures = $5
200 Captures = $10
600 Captures = $20
1000 Captures = $30
So you can’t capture every visitor, but could you really watch a 1000 captures and learn something beyond that? Probably not. So use Clixby for testing. Peek in on a few hundred visitors and see what you can learn. Optimize. Repeat.
Does anyone know if YouTube playlists can be embedded in a Sprout widget, as opposed to a single YouTube video? I want my video widget to update automatically and avoid posting each video as an asset. It seems that Sprout doesn’t accept YouTube playlist URLs.
Sprout answers:
This currently isn’t available but we are working on it. Media RSS is very powerful and its in our roadmap to incorporate into Sprout Builder.
Why does this matter? Imagine a week-long conference, like SXSW or UNICEF’s J8 Summit in which a tremendous amount of content is being generated, including photos and videos. If it’s not current, it doesn’t matter, and a widget is a great tool to stay current on the media being created. It allows outsiders to participate. It allows partners to leverage the content on their own websites. RSS makes it possible by feeding content into the widget in real-time. The problem is that, currently, it only works well for news. Photos are a bit easier. But each video needs to be loaded into the Sprout Builder tool, either as a video file, or by linking to a YouTube URL.
By allowing YouTube playlist URLs to be streamed into your Sprout widget, you can simply have your attendees upload their video content to YouTube and add those videos to your playlist. The rest happens automatically and your widget displays the most current and timely videos.
So stay tuned. I’m hoping this upgrade happens soon.
How not to sell. That’s what I learned at Home Depot this weekend. In a world where you’re bombarded with messages…most of which are 140-characters and actually interesting…I find myself becoming more and more impatient with marketers who don’t get to the point.
Case in point: while browsing the wasp killers at Home Depot and deciding if an extra buck was worth 7 additional feet of spray versus a modest 20-foot stream, I was approached by a tie-clad young man who asked “how you doin?”. He went on to tell me “what he’s doing today is” showing free designs for remodeled kitchens. (Do I look like I care? I’m shopping for wasp killer here.) Apparently walking away didn’t make the point as he tailed me asking about my home. My comment about new granite counters had the opposite of my intended effect. Needless to say, I lost my patience, patted him on the back (nicely) and suggested he find better prospects.
All I wanted was some plumbers putty and wasp killer. I couldn’t get actual employees to help, but this 3rd party sales guy was all over me.
So what did he do wrong?
Introduction. Ask me a question, don’t tell me what you’re doing, because I don’t care.
Clarity. I’m still not sure what he was trying to accomplish.
Brevity. Spit it out, man.
Perseverance. When your prospect is clearly uncomfortable and walks away, cut bait.
Which brings me to this: if 140-characters can be used for an RFP and tweets pass you by like 1-2-3 and what happens now is gone…now…you have to scrap the “elevator pitch” and adopt an “escalator pitch.” Tell me what you’re selling in 15 seconds or less and I’ll decide if I want to keep talking. Smart marketers create conversations that don’t make people squirm and walk away. Visit www.girleffect.org and tell me you don’t want to talk more.
Now that I wrote about Twitter hashtag spam, everyone is sending me more examples. No one cares about this topic…yet, so this will be my last post on it, but I thought I’d share one last example courtesy of Ernie that takes full advantage of the tremendous buzz around Wolfram Alpha’s mind-blowing computational search engine. Racy! At what point will it affect the Twitter user experience?
So as I was saying in my last post, Quest for Relevance, Hashtags vs. Meta Tags, hashtag abuse is a threat, much like meta tag abuse was a threat before search engines got smarter. Here’s a great example from tonight’s dcMoMo event at the Embassy of Finland in Washington DC.
#dcmomo was the hashtag we used to share questions, quotes, and ideas. Take a look at this snippet of conversation. Which one doesn’t fit?
Lot’s of good discussion and dialogue, interrupted by a sales pitch for flycast.fm, apparently. This was one of several self-serving tweets during the event. Annoying? Yes. Easy to ignore? Pretty much. A threat to Twitter? I doubt it. But it makes you wonder if rampant hastag abuse on Twitter is a weakness that could grow into more.
Posted by egilbertsen 
Posted by egilbertsen 
Posted by egilbertsen 
