News & Notes

Aaron Worsham / Sep 29, 2008

Your customers want your brand as a friend

Cone, Omnicom Group’s strategy arm, released some data from a recent survey measuring brand trust. This research claims that 93% of the 1092 Americans surveyed thought that companies should have a corporate presence on social media. It went further, citing 85% of those surveyed being open to interaction with companies within social media. The demographic breakdown favored young males and weathly individuals, which can be a sweetspot for some marketed brands.

While networks like Facebook and Myspace may be old news for well polished marketing firms representing highly branded labels, this study is suggesting that the time may be right for more conservative consumer industries to follow suit. If your company is consumer driven, tending towards younger male Americans or the affluent population, Cone is recommending you look at social media for your next marketing campaign.

It should be said that the study is a bit self serving, as Cone is a ‘strategy and communications agency’ with a presumed stake in the growth on online Brand Marketing. That doesn’t make the results any less intriguing. One of the best pull quotes I saw was this response from the surveyor to the question of what should Companies be doing in social networks:

Companies should use social networks to solve my problems (43%)

People, it can be really simple. Find out what the top ten customer questions are for sales, the top ten service calls for your product, wrap them up and build them into an interactive Facebook app. Don’t just spit out one line information or a support number either, if the solution could be automated for the customer, take the added steps to do it.

Your customers don’t want you to be their Best Friend Forever. But even one answer to a ‘Hey, can you help me with this’ will make you 10x more valuable than a crate of flying sheep.

photo attributed to b_d_solis @ Flickr CC

Technorati Tags: brand, branding, social media, social media strategy, internet marketing, online marketing

Aaron Worsham / Sep 26, 2008

Quick Tip – Google Alerts

Are you interested in keeping tabs on something specific out in the web or in the blogosphere? Ever wondered how PR firms manage to contact you right after you posted a nasty comment about their client on your personal blog? Or are you fascinated in tracking just how internet famous you’ve become? Google Alerts may help.

Now this is really nothing new and it has been around for years. I think it may just be hitting mainstream users now with more people interconnecting through social networks and adopting blogging habits. Here is the gist. Google Alerts is a great little tool that can automate a search term and have new results pushed to your email. Lets see an example of an alert I use.

I’m interested in tracking where my full name shows up out on the internet. This sometimes helps me see where my work is getting quoted or where my name is popping up in community lists. Starting with the Google homepage, I test out the search query I’ll use. I could just enter:

ga1

The problem with this is that I will get results that include ones with ‘aaron’ and ‘worsham’ as separate parts instead of a full name. I’d like to have it look for ‘aaron worsham’ as a phrase, so how about:

ga2

This is better. However, now my results are cluttered with my own blog entries. Lets try to filter them out:

ga3

That should do the trick. site: is used to isolate what site you want to search while the minus in front of it excludes the site. In this case the () are use to allow more than one site.

Once I have my search term, I can go to the alerts page, login with my Google username, and add an alert for this search query. Options are limited, so I just used email me once a day with the results from the whole web. There, now I can stare off into my reflection until I drown from the comfort of my own email client.

Alerts can be setup for most anything that you want. Company name, client name, industry terms are all good use cases. Its smart enough to only send you new results within the given window, which means you can do really geeky things with the results like plot buzz trends over time for popular terms or track advertisement effectiveness. I’m sure there are other uses that I haven’t mentioned. How are you using Google Alerts?

Aaron Worsham / Sep 24, 2008

The impossibility of speed

speed1 Microsoft, founder, organizer and social chair of the Desktop First Foundation, now sees through their own well trenched oppositions and admits that maybe, possibly it makes some sense for some applications to simple live out on the internet. They now join Google, Yahoo, Apple, Salesforce.com, NetSuite, ZoHo, Meebo, Zimbra, as well as an uncountable number of neuvo-funded startups who have banked on the internet as the universal delivery platform for the future.

Oh, also, Google and Amazon agree that users get antsy when they have to wait more than half a second for their application to respond, affecting customer satisfaction and repeat usage. Google’s VP Marissa Mayer recounted having experienced a 20% drop in usage for results delivered as little as .5 seconds slower than typical.

Possibly not for the first time, your customers are demanding the convenience and portability of online web applications while still clinging to expectations that web applications should consistently respond as fast as desktop applications. An immovable object just shook hands with an irresistible force.

The problem with web applications, frankly, is the web. Months of tuning web code can save seconds in application speed only to be lost in the network through slow routing, lost packets, or bandwidth throttling. This is the impossibility of speed on the internet. You have very little control out there.

To keep up with our need for speed, we will have to move more and more interface code off the server and onto the desktop’s browser in the form of Javascript. Google’s chrome team seems to agree, focusing their performance efforts for web apps on a high speed Javascript engine. SproutCore, famous for running Apple’s MobileMe web platform, is a fully modeled MVC framework in Javascript perfectly suited for this kind of application. Servers could begin to revert back to simply offering data storage. Instead of pageviews, we may soon be tracking information requests. An online ad industry addicted to clicks and impressions may have to get back on the wagon and find a whole new model (they’re so agile). This could be interesting.

I’ll just suggest this to any kid starting out the web development world: Learn JavaScript

Photo attributed to pctalbot @ Flickr CC

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