Barack Obama Wins President Elect

// November 5th, 2008 // 2 Comments » // advertising, election, media, twitter

I had my doubts that he could pull it off, but I very happy for the new President Elect Barack Obama. This truly historical event makes me proud to be an American. During the news media coverage of the election, I experienced many different types of content and technologies that I wanted to document. What did you experience?

CNN Now Has Holograms

So… I assume the host is just talking to the air and pretending the other person is there? Photo from Alex Hillman

Endless news coverage Here is a collection of news websites that covered the election of Barack Obama. This collection from Jeff Junatas can be seen at this website.

Twitter Election Success Of course there is Twitter, which not only provided the quickest updates about the election but the SMS updates from the news sites had latest breaking commentary long before TV, web or radio. Plus Twitter did not fail and go down.

Updated: 11/5

Election maps from Jason Kottke - kottke.org

Jason Kottke summarizes here: “Most media outlets covering the 2008 US Presidential Election used the familiar red/blue map to track the progress of the race as results from the polls rolled in Tuesday evening. Here are several of those maps, in some ways as similar to each other as they are varied.” View them all

What else am I missing?

I will add more as I collect them. What cool technologies or content did you experience during the 2008 Presidential Election?

Automatically Improve Traffic from Social Networking Websites

// April 8th, 2008 // 9 Comments » // branding, marketing, media, networking, social, traffic

Are you getting (non paid) web traffic and leads from social networking websites? I am working on a comprehensive strategy to improve “Referring Social Network Traffic”. The business goals of using social sites include building brand exposure, creating customer relationships and bringing traffic back to the original website. This works the same for personal branding and corporate web marketing plans. Now you can automate the delivery of content to each of the social networking websites and stay consistently activate. This results in improving your “Referring Social Network Traffic”. The key is to make it really easy for customers to connect (friend) and find you on ALL of the social networks so the audience consistently increases. I think, all of your personal and/or business profiles need a consistent look and feel to ensure brand consistency.

Here are some things to think about:

1. Your website or blog needs to have a “Social Networking” section. This area should be very easy to find and include clickable icons with text links. You can also use Lijit and automate the icons that show up on your website, plus track those subscriptions.
2. Make sure your company or brand is easy to find in a search query on the popular social networking sites. This can be done by using target keyword phrases or tags in the personal profiles, business profiles and groups you create. Example: Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn and ect should all have a consistent about me section in the profile messaging that includes target keywords.
3. Companies need to move marketing dollars into video. This is especially important since YouTube is owned by Google. Video is an essential part of universal search. Naming and tagging your videos with keywords make them show up better in search results. Tip - Try TubeMogul and you can upload one video, then distribute it to ten sites at once, plus tag and track them all in once place.
4. Automate the content updates for ALL social networking sites. For example, with Twitter you can update your status on Facebook, Twitter, Pownce, Tumblr, SocialThing, FriendFeed and more. You can also automatically make your new YouTube videos show up on Facebook. Plus automate your blog posts, events, Flickr photos to show up on your profile(s). This makes the company look active and keeps your audience’s attention.
5. Connect with your audience with automated marketing research. For example, with TweetScan you can track keywords on Twitter and create RSS feeds out of that content. So, you can be notified automatically (web or sms) when someone talks about your brand or even a competitors. Also, Google and Yahoo alerts are extremely helpful to track blogs, news and ect.
6. Create viral content that is easily shareable. The biggest traffic drivers for me have been controversial articles that attract a lot of comments or people to Digg or Stumble.
7. A custom email signature is an easy way to express that you are using social sites. Having this on your personal or business emails will help increase your fans and friends.
8. [Addition] Widgets are great tools also, suggested by Justin Thorp. Widgets are a great way to deliver automated content, games and applications for a company or brand. Example: A health brand can create a widget for their audience to use on their desktop, Facebook, MySpace and personal start page or websites. Clicking links in widget and forwarding of applications will result in more traffic back to your site.

Who else is thinking about this?

Have you see other blog posts about the automation of content for social networking sites? Are you generating traffic from your social networking websites? Please post your ideas or feedback here.

I am testing this strategy across the web with corporate and personal websites to see which social networking sites bring the most traffic back to the original websites. Plus, I am experimenting with the best ways to get brand exposure, plus find ways to monitor the success in traffic, leads and conversions.

SXSW Screen Burn - See the Video Game Party

// March 13th, 2008 // No Comments » // media, podcast, southbysouthwest, sxsw, videogames

I am was very impressed by the ScreenBurn Video Gaming Fest & Party at SXSW. The 2008 edition of ScreenBurn, the gaming component of SXSW Interactive, is a five-day event providing up-and-coming gaming industry talent an opportunity to learn from more established professionals. Rise to the next level of your career through enlightening panel discussions, networking opportunities, and technical discoveries. ScreenBurn features four days of presentations related to the newest developments in the gaming industry, held on the Third Floor of the Convention center.

ScreenBurn 2008 also includes the ScreenBurn Arcade, taking place on the first floor of the Austin Convention Center on Saturday, March 8 and Sunday, March 9th. The ScreenBurn Arcade, an open platform of exhibitors and game tournaments, is free to the public and connects consumers, independents, developers, and soon to be masters of the game world.

Here is a walk through of the screen burn event, plus a little hello from Jose Castillo.

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TV Advertising needs a viral long tail to gain ROI

// February 5th, 2008 // 1 Comment » // advertising, commercials, marketing, media

On Sunday, prior to watching the Superbowl I was curious if there will be buzz about the TV Commercials in the twitterverse and much to my suprise, there was a Twitterbowl. I randomly found out about the event because I track the word “diet” and my SMS exploded with alerts about the Diet Pepsi ad.

My question before the game was:

“Which super bowl commercial will provide the biggest lift in revenue and provide the long tail word of mouth exposure”

Here is what I remember

1) The brands that I remember are: Bud, Diet Pepsi, Coke, Career Builder and IronMan
2) The website URLs that I remembered are: none, but I did remember GoDaddy asking me to visit their site. I also remember the Tide commercial, it made me laugh and it made me want to visit the site.
3) The ads that were most talked about during the game: From what I saw, the Justin Timberlake commercial for Diet Pepsi had the biggest buzz.

That leads me to determine which commercial would gain actual revenue from these ads. My opinion, the biggest winner will be “IronMan”, the movie. The film looks great and now all of America wants to see it. You can’t buy that exposure anywhere. Every boy and their father be in theaters for this.

My winner was Tide - because of the viral website.

If you visit the site, My Talking Stain, they have an excellent viral execution using multimedia. Its simple, its funny and it makes you want to enter your information. They do a great job of collecting leads, why? To send you coupons to buy Tide. Overall, it’s the most diverse way to get brand exposure and the viral effect of their “Get Famous - Film A Spoof” will last a while. Here is the spoof I created:

In conclusion, I wasn’t really impressed with a lot of the commercials. Especially CareerBuilder, it was terrible. But, maybe they wanted to do that on purpose to cut through the clutter. Sales Genie too, did they purposely make the worst ads. I would never go to the site on purpose because they were so bad. There were a few other funny ones, like the AMP and Shaq. I don’t even remember the brand that Shaq was a jockey in.

The winners for me are the brands that establish the relationship of the product to the attractiveness of the commercial. Then in collaboration with a great website it a full experience that I will remember. Next time I am in the grocery store I may pick up Tide to clean my dirty shirt. Now the creative concept can really expand using online media/ads, blogs, YouTube and everything else to reach audiences for weeks and even months to come. The viral creative concepts build the long tail brand exposure and produce the best return on investment.

Social media screen names are the new domains names

// February 3rd, 2008 // 1 Comment » // branding, media, social

Last year, I was having a conversion with my friend Droze about the ridiculous amount of new web applications coming out every month. Yet, I told him that I sign up for them all. Why, because screen names are not just your handle or usernames anymore. A screen name is really your personal brand. Similar to a domain name, you need to register your brand or it will get jacked by someone else. Maybe even a competitor.

Then I was surprised when I read that the Twitter feed from Seth Godin is really not the best selling author. He mentions how he doesnt even use Twitter. It was interesting to hear that someone else was using his name, even though it wasn’t for anything negative, but it easily could have been. Everyone else thought it was him, he has 1,417 followers and they are using a picture of him.

So whenever a new service comes out and gets popular I immediately sign up using my company name as the screen name (AlexDesigns). Here are a few examples:

http://twitter.com/alexdesigns
http://linkedin.com/in/alexdesigns
http://9rules.com/my/alexdesigns/
http://del.icio.us/alexdesigns
http://myspace.com/alexdesigns
http://vimeo.com/alexdesigns
http://virb.com/alexdesigns
http://ma.gnolia.com/people/alexdesigns

On the following, I was too late to get the correct URLs I wanted:
http://flickr.com/photos/alexharris/
http://youtube.com/alexdesignsllc

So as the next big thing comes out, it doesn’t hurt to just snatch up your screen name. Else you have some impersonators when you become famous too.