Headup - Social content syndication as you browse

With so many new features on browsers, what's your take on this? Do you really want everyone to know what you are browsing or is this a possible way of targeted online marketing? Tell us what you think!


SemantiNet Introducing: headup from SemantiNet Ltd on Vimeo.

Samsung's Interactive Annotations Viral Video

Really interesting concept where you chose where to go next at the end of the video. Read more about YouTube Video Annotations here.

Online marketing for your long term goals

Online marketing has progressed beyond your imagination. Or is it all about hype and a loosely used marketing term?

Companies can spend millions but what does that all translate to? It's beyond sales, web traffic, awareness, conversions. Let's face it. Long gone are the days of WOW factors. Sure, its great to have a new idea, new concepts, new creativity. But, the wow factor itself is just the tip of the ice berg (though its hard to get a good wow most of the time). Its the long tail effect that truely matters.

Sure, after this blitz of advertising, events, launch etc, the big question I always ask is 'What's next?'.

Targeted and well deployed online campaigns is a powerful tool to create that sustainability and longetivity of a product or service (assuming the product and service is good to begin with).

SEM, social media tactics, brand recall campaigns, clever email marketing, optimization etc deployed in a timely manner online is a perfect way of getting results you need in the long run. Even if the results don't seem favourable, you have data from your campaigns. Refine and redeploy.

Run the marathon, not just the sprint.

So next time you are planning a launch, plan beyond.

--
Sent from my mobile device

Social Media Optimization: An Easy Guide to Marketing and Promoting Your Blog

This presentation, originally given at the SixApart Business Blogg:

Social Media Optimization: An Easy Guide to Marketing and Promoting Your Blog

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: blog blogging)

Twitter is down again?!

Hilarious video on, perhaps, how some Twitter users live their digital lives?

Google Matt Cutts | How to Get Better Visibility on Google

USA TODAY's Jefferson Graham interviews Google engineer Matt Cutts on how to get your site to the top of Google with 5 basic, common sense SEO tips.

Industry Speak: Interview with Shannon Low - Shoplette.com

Industry Speak' is a series of interviews where we speak with practitioners in the online industry on their thoughts, theories and anything else in between. Watch this space for more interviews coming your way. This week, we speak to Shannon Low, Founder of Shoplette.com and Mobrick.

Q. Tell us a little about yourself and/or Mobrick.
Mobrick is a web startup founded in Singapore in early 2008 to build socially-driven and location-relevant web services that are fun and useful.

Our flagship product is Shoplette, a service you can use to tell your friends what you bought and where you bought it, check out what your friends have bought and where they’ve been shopping, discover new stuff to buy and new places to shop, and find out what’s hot and where to shop in other countries. It's all about shopping!

Q. How did Shoplette.com come about?

Shoplette came about because we love shopping, and a lot of people around the world seem to as well. We realised that shopping is a social activity - we go shopping with our friends, and we talk about shopping with friends. When people talk about shopping, the most common phrases we hear are "Check out what I bought!" and "Where did you get that?" So that's when Shoplette was born. We decided to create a web service for people to tell their friends and other people what they bought and where they bought it, so that people can exchange shopping information casually and discover new things to buy and new places to shop more easily.

Q. Shoplette.com is now in beta. What else can shoppers expect in time to come for Shoplette.com?

We've been working on a number of new features for the service, to provide a more fun and useful experience around social shopping and the concept of sharing what you bought with your friends. We want to bring the community of shoppers closer together, giving them more ways to talk to one another about shopping and where to buy great stuff.

Looking ahead, we're exploring more location-relevant features, and we're interested to go mobile. We believe that with mobile phone and location integration, we'll be able to provide some very interesting location-based features.

Q. How can potential advertisers work with Shoplette.com on building mind-share for their brands?

We're in the shopping space and we're all about shopping, so that's a great fit with brands involved in retail. Getting your product posted on Shoplette by a customer who bought it is a subtle yet powerful form of recommendation for the product, store and brand which spreads virally to the customer's friends. So, simply encouraging their customers to post items on Shoplette is already one way to build mind-share for the brand.

For broader ways to reach potential customers, we are rolling out an advertising programme which allows brands to advertise on Shoplette in various ways, targeting the customer profile that they want to reach.

For deeper engagement of existing and potential customers, we are rolling out a retailer programme to provide brands and retailers with a presence on the network and the ability to engage users on the site in appropriate and effective ways, all of which we aim to translate to bringing the right customers to the doorsteps of retailers.

Q. What do you see as the biggest opportunity in social media (or social retailing) over the next 12 months?

There's been growing interest in the social shopping space and yet, there's still a lot of unexplored territory in this space beyond the current ideas of product recommendation, price comparison and online shopping. We're trying to explore what happens if you approach shopping as a social activity, rather than the individual activity of deciding what you want to buy, doing some research on the Internet, and then clicking "Buy" on an online shopping site.

Q. Do you think social media is enough to be the only marketing channel used in time to come?

I think it depends on what you want to achieve and where you are in your marketing campaign. Social media has shown to be effective in certain situations and for certain products and services, some of which can spread, in the beginning, through social media alone.

However, as a product or service grows in customer base, sophistication and its touch-points with customers, social media becomes one of the many ways through which to reach potential customers, depending on where the customer is and what touch point is accessible to the brand. Ultimately, I think consistent brand awareness needs a broad campaign utilising many different ways to generate and maintain the momentum of conversation around the brand, of which social media would certainly have an important part to play.

We like to thank Shannon for his time for this interview!

The Web in 2010

Though this presentation in SlideShare (by Jimmy Wales) was made in 2007, it's immensely intriguing stuff about future web trends. Here is a list of my top 5 (in no particular order):

1. Mobile to become the dominant platform for connecting to the worldwide net.
   
2. Virtual worlds like Second Life to democratically elect their own virtual governments.
   
3. Information overload affects some individuals. Doctors might even be able to give affected people medical certificates for 'switch-off' holidays to be away from the computers and mobile devices.
   
4. Facebook becomes an operating system that is shipped with PCs and computers, with influence by Microsoft.
   
5. Printed newspapers become smaller & niche - and ends up as a more expensive, luxury item.
   

| View | Upload your own

Great stuff - worth some thoughts on where the world's corporate organisations, governments & societies are heading towards in the next 3 -5 years (perhaps even earlier than that in some cases).

Industry Speak: Interview with Oon Yeoh - Senior Researcher at Telenor

Industry Speak' is a series of interviews where we speak with practitioners in the online industry on their thoughts, theories and anything else in between. Watch this space for more interviews coming your way.

Up next is on our interview series 'Industry Speak' is Oon Yeoh. Oon Yeoh has been writing an ICT column for The Edge Malaysia, a business weekly, for the past six years. He's also written a book, Transition, about the impact of technology on society. He's currently working on New Media projects involving the convergence of text, images, audio and video. He also blogs on www.oonyeoh.com.

1. Tell us a little about yourself and what you do.
I'm a senior researcher at Telenor, a Norwegian telco. What I do is research latest trends in the mobile world and to conceptualize new ideas for the mobile platform.

2. How do you see mobile in these coming years in terms of technology, trends, and its use?
The biggest development will be the mobile web and content/services delivered through the mobile browser. Location-based services also has a lot of potential. And for course, there's mobile payment, which I also think will be big in due time.

3. How do you thing marketers can leverage from mobile?
Although behavioral targeting for the mobile platform is at its infancy, there is huge potential there simply because the mobile phone is such a personal device, which people carry with them everywhere. Internet advertising/marketing if done in a non-intrusive yet targeted way, could be the future of advertising.

4. If a company would like to embark on mobile marketing campaigns (as a key channel), what are the key considerations they should note?
At the moment, frankly, there are limited channels/ways to do effective mobile marketing and that's because the mobile web is not yet developed. The problem with SMS/MMS marketing is that it's very intrusive. Mobile web advertising is the way to go but it won't take off until the mobile web itself is developed. So, it will take some time. The most effective way for a company to leverage the mobile web would be to build a dynamic/interactive mobile website.

5. Mobile has always been a social tool for communication. With social sites now using mobile as another way to access social sites, what do you think will be next for 'mobile social networking'?
Social networking is very hard to do on the mobile phone because the device is so small. It's hard to navigate and enter text. As such, heavily text-based social networking would be limited. However, some form of social networking involving location-based technologies could be the way to go.

6. Only a few content providers have their websites 'mobile-enabled' (EG: BBC). Do you think content providers should embark quickly with a strong 'drive to mobile' strategy to grow the mobile business and ultimately generating revenue from mobile?
Absolutely, they should. But it's not just about creating a smaller version of your site for mobile. Some thought should be given to how to give value to the user should they decide to access your site through the mobile. This requires a good understanding the drawbacks and advantages of the mobile platform as opposed to the fixed web.

7. Any other thoughts before we end?
I think what the likes of Apple, Google and Nokia are doing with regard to mobile web is very exciting. These non-telco based companies will be the catalyst for development of the mobile web. They don't have any legacy issues to deal with and can be totally disruptive, which is what the industry needs.

Heard of Social Ice Cream?

Check out this fantastic video from the guys at Common Craft on how a new development in ice cream making has given everyone in ScoopVille (a fictional town) an opportunity to be a producer of their own ice cream and also ultimately - a chance to have a say in what they want.