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OK, since you clearly like these hackery posts (e.g. the one I wrote last night), here's one more on the topic. Then it's back to the normal fare here.
I am on a quest to figure out how I can use web services to run my entire life at home and work. I have two key requirements: 1) that I can easily get data in and out of the online service and b) that I can access my information quickly using my cell phone or download it to the device or my computer. Usually this means the web service has to have email in and out capability.
When it comes to remembering things, I am really bad at it. I subscribe to the Getting Things Done productivity program and The David's philosophy of getting things out of your head. My iPhone is my ubiquitous capture device. However, when I can I create to do lists that consist not of text but photos! It's faster. Plus, like Mark Cuban, I have terrible handwriting so digital is the way to go for me. So far I am using this mostly for personal errands but I am dreaming up new schemes to create all my GTD lists by taking pictures of people that I need to do something for, etc.
Here's an example. When I run out of cleaning supplies, I don't make a shopping list. I snap a photo of the empty container with my iPhone (however any old cameraphone will do). Then I email it into Flickr, which is free. I mark all the photos as private. In addition, I tag them "todo". Oh and the emails get backed up into the Gmail nerve center since I use their SMTP server. I could probably add a filter and a label here too.
Here's what my todo page looks like. It's reminding me of two things - to pick up cleaning supplies and to buy a nice present like flowers for my Mom. (Oh and to my consumer package good client friends out there - you know who you are - my cleaning woman picks the supplies not me!)
Then, when I am ready to head to the store, I call up Flickr Mobile from my phone. You can use any other photo service here that supports email - Flickr, Apple's .Mac, etc. Sometimes I will use .Mac Web Gallery but I like Flickr's simplicity. Of course, you don't need email. You can simply keep the images on your phone. But I would rather back up my images.
This is just the beginning, however. I am thinking about giving out the special Flickr email address for the page to a small group of others (hmm, my boss?). That way they can put things for me on my visual list and I will get updates via RSS. I may even make a game out of it - give me the best mnemonic possible so that I really remember to do something!
Anyway, even if I don't take this further, I love having a visual to do list. And it's fun!
There's been a lot of chatter about the entire concept of social graphing. I have no idea if there is validity here or not. And certainly people smarter than I am are talking about the potential viability of the entire concept.
However, what I do know is that a lot of us are increasingly participating in social networks and we need a way to track it all. Also, most of us are hooked on email too. So, the good news is you can easily combine these addictions (um I mean "tools") to your advantage.
Thanks to gobs of storage, a pretty strong reason to stay locked-in (three and a half years of heavy email use), my Gmail account is the nerve center that runs my life. Yes, just as Gmail remains my personal nerve center, it now also tracks my social graph. I use Gmail as a Grand Central Station-sized hub that helps me track every social network I participate in and my friends' activity there - as well as my own.
Here are four tips that have helped me. Many of these tips will work on most social networks that provide RSS, SMS or email alerts as well as on all big webmail sites - e.g. Windows Live Hotmail, AOL Mail, Yahoo Mail or even Exchange. What I love about it is that it also works great with Treos, Blackberries and iPhones. This series has several parts...
Use Gmail to post to Social Nets
Let's face it, life is busy. Who has time to go to a site, log in and post something new. SInce I already spend a tremendous amount of time inside Gmail, I have rigged it so I can easily post directly to the social nets where I choose participate. In my case, this consists of Twitter and Facebook. It's simple.
In Twitter's case I use Twittermail. I have a super secret address that I send mail to and it automatically posts to Twitter, edits me down to 160 characters and formats my links.
Facebook doesn't have email in functionality for status updates, but you can use Teleflip or another email to SMS gateway to get around this. Configure it so that any mail you send it auto forwards to FBOOK (32665). Use the @ symbol to update your status. Other commands are posted here and listed below.
Track Your Friends and their Responses with Gmail
So now that we covered how to get stuff posted to social networks from Gmail, let's start using it to get updates so you can track your peeps - and their replies back at 'ya.
In the case of Twitter, it's simple again thanks to their API. Twittermail can automatically email you any replies to your Tweets. In addition, I use Twitter Digest to generate a feed of all of the friends I want to follow the most. I then stick this feed in my Gmail clips, which rotates whenever I am using the account. Even better, you can run a Twitter Digest feed through R-Mail (now owned by NBC and soon to be called SendMeRSS) and have it land in your inbox as an email message once daily.
How about Facebook? Easy. Log into your account, find the status update page, grab the RSS feed and run it through Feedburner. Why Feebdurner? Because you can keep it the feed and your friends updates safe from search engines, yet still subscribe to it via email. This doesn't just apply to Facebook but any site that lets you track friends via RSS.
Use Gmail (or other Webmail Service) to Build "a Lifebase" of Friends
Now, I don't know about you, but in my business relationships are everything. Increasingly social networks are becoming a theater of operations for PR. So we need ways to track our interactions over time. Enter email.
Using any of the methods described above, start subscribing to feeds via email for the friends you want to follow closely. If a feed doesn't exist in the social net you want to track and there's only text message capes (like Facebook), use an SMS to email gateway.
With the emails set up, then build some very smart filters in Gmail. For example - "from:R-mail subject:Scoble." This will find all messages that come in from R-mail from Scoble's Twitter stream. I have this search automatically filtered and archived to a special "Friends" label as Lifehacker describes here. Using this method, you now have a nice way to track a friend's entire stream - should you wish.
Use Gmail to Prioritize Friends You Care About Most and Weed Out Duds
If you follow the steps above you will start to amass a lifebase of all your friends and their social networking activities. This works especially well on services that offer unlimited storage, like AOL and Yahoo. Over time, you will open certain messages and ignore others. This will reveal just how valuable a particular friend's update is to you.
Using Gmail you can find these all instantly with a command like this - from:R-mail subject:Twitter is:unread. Then you know which friends you should toss - at least from Gmail.
These are just a handful of tips and this concept is evolving but even before someone builds the big social graph in the sky, I am just getting along fine using Gmail, thanks to a bit of hackery.
Although I was never the A+ math student in school, I am a big fan of drawing insights from statistics - if the method is simple. If it involves math that ends in "ometry" then it's way over my head.
In addition, I am also a huge believer in studying tendencies. Humans are all creatures of habit. Identify someone or some group's patterns and you can figure out directionally where's they are headed. This makes it easier to spot and capitalize on trends no matter what your interests are. (Believe it or not these lessons come from reading about NFL coaches who actively study player/team patterns "on film.")
Google Reader - my favorite RSS application - recently added a powerful search functionality that has made me infinitely better at studying people and their social patterns. Using Google Reader you can now search an individual feed, tag or a folder and get back a total item count, all sorted by date for as long as you have been a subscriber to that feed. In my case, some of my feeds go back to October 2005 when the Reader first launched. That's a ton of data to mine for trends.
Now that my reader shows a huge cache of posts, I am subscribing to tons more feeds, stuffing them into a folder solely for the purpose of data mining them. The site also has limited set of advanced search operators. One hopes they will add more. It's worth noting that I don't actually read these high volume feeds. Rather, I mark them all as read so they get logged in my feed database and can be searched for insights.
Let's take a look at this in action at a very simplistic level. One of my favorite blogs is Lost Remote. I have been subscribed to their feed ever since I started using Google Reader. So I have two years worth of posting data to mine.
Let's take a look at some searches for the major TV nets and the results they returned.
Let's take another simplistic example. Is Robert Scoble's showing more blog love to Facebook and Twitter than his newborn son, Milan? Hmmm, the data shows it. (Just kidding Robert!) This is just a superficial analysis of his blog but in reality I could also add Robert's Twitter stream do the same run as long as it all lives in a Google Reader folder.
There's much more data here than what I have in the chart. When you actually look at the search results, patterns emerge. The vast majority of Robert's Facebook mentions came after they opened up their development platform in May. He only mentioned the site 14 times in 2006. Now imagine I ran this same search across all of the big tech bloggers, the digg home page and Techmeme feeds - all at once. What would I learn? Data breeds insights. And insights makes you smarter at whatever you want to accomplish.
A lot of the very basic stuff - e.g. searches within a feed - you can glean from using Google Blog Search, Blogpulse and Technorati. However, do not underestimate Google Reader. If you subscribe to feeds just for the sake of data mining and organize them the right way, you will be able to read tea leaves better than you can using a search engine. This will make you smarter at whatever subject you want to follow. It works best on full text feeds, but try it on mainstream newsfeeds too. You can learn a lot about what words make it into headlines and how often.
Accountability - e.g. a company's return on investment in advertising - is an evergreen topic in the marketing community. Naturally, when it comes to the emerging sphere of Web 2.0 sites, advertisers want to sleep easy knowing that their money is generating a return. So with US ad spending on social networks expected to reach $2.5 billion by 2011, this is a good time to poke at conventional wisdom with hard data. It's not pretty.
Based on a informal analysis, my belief is that many online communities, bloggers, social networks will never attract a critical mass of advertisers because they are not set up properly to attract visitors who have a commercial intent to buy products and services. Online media is not sold this way now, but I bet it will be in the very near future.
Today, most advertisers size up community sites, blogs and social networks using traditional media buying models - namely, reach and frequency. Unfortunately, the reality is that many Web 2.0 sites, can't deliver marketers the numbers they want because of the effect of Long Tail. It's simple supply and demand economics at work. This is why efforts like the one announced by comScore and Federated Media are fundamentally flawed.
This week in New York I am participating in an all-day roundtable discussion about how to measure the impact of online influence. Edelman, my employer, is convening some of the industry's leading thinkers on this subject. It is my hope - and our challenge - to come up with new ways to measure the potential the web has on influencing purchases. Quantifying eyeballs is not the answer. We need new thinking.
My personal conviction - one that I plan to table - is that search should be the most important driver for how advertisers size up the influence of different community sites and the individuals who make them up. The problem is no one is thinking this way. Everyone is overlooking the organic impact of Web 2.0 on product-related searches in favor of quick and dirty old school metrics.
Microsoft AdCenter Labs has some demonstration technology that illustrates this vividly. (Microsoft is an Edelman client.) Their Online Commercial Intent tool uses terabytes of search data to calculate the likelihood of a web site to attract buyers.
I took a handful of different URLs and ran them through the Microsoft tool. To give you a sense of a benchmark, Amazon.com has 52% purchase intent. Here are my results (numbers are rounded) ....
Consumerist - 49% of visitors have a commercial intent
Gizmodo - 47%
Autoblog.com - 45%
Treehugger - 41%
Techmeme - 41%
Engadget - 40%
Gridskipper - 38%
YouTube - 38%
TechCrunch.com - 37%
digg.com - 34%
del.icio.us - 29%
PerezHilton.com - 27%
Wikipedia - 14%
Flickr - 14%
Facebook - 10%
Twitter - 5%
While a lot more analysis is needed, as you can see a lot of sites don't fare particularly well. They're set up to attract eyeballs, but perhaps - purely from an economic sense - not necessarily the right ones. Eventually ad spending will recede and marketers will place a greater focus on ROI. Purchase intent and search will play a key role. If you want to attract advertisers, start conveying that you attract buyers and make sure you are delivering on that promise.
i am on the road the early part of this week but will be posting on Twiter regularly. You can follow me with my aggregate lifestream feed. I will blog some longer posts I have bottled up in me later this week.
Speaking of which, how do you like the new format? What would you like me to write about more?
A month ago Google News started to allow any person mentioned in a news story that they index to email in their comments for posting. They now have a page and a feed that lists the stories that have approved feedback attached.
Over the last 30 days or so, Google has posted a grand total of 104 comments. I am sure the demand is far higher and they can't keep up.
As I suggested when it launched, I have no idea why Google is making this all a manual process managed by humans. It should be a mix of technology and humans. Let everyone comment, but highlight who the official sources are. Although the context is different, Mahalo does this nicely with these little icons
In my Advertising Age column this week I wrote about a new career path I see emerging. It exists both in PR/advertising agencies and on the client side as well - The Geek Marketer.
My thesis is this: it's very difficult for anyone in marketing to keep up with all the twists the digital space because technology changes so darn fast. It's like chasing a cheetah. Most marketers - be they clients or agency side - are heads-down running their business. Therefore, companies are creating a new role. They're hiring people who act as translators between the ultra geeks and the marketers, if you will, and shepherd the development of pilot programs. More follows in my column below.
This has sparked an interesting discussion (see posts by Stephanie, Jim, Teresa, Karl and others). Some disagree strongly, especially in the comments to the article.
More follows below. However, what I would really love to hear from you is: what kind of skills would you put in this person's job description? Do you agree or disagree that there is such a role in corporate America? I have a job description someone sent me for such a role and I may post it on a wiki to see what you come up with. As always, eager for your opinions.
As Technology Develops, So Does Role of Geek Marketers
These Cross-trained Specialists Are Fluent in Both Worlds
By Steve Rubel
Published: September 03, 2007
With the lazy days of summer officially behind us, now is when many start thinking seriously about their career plans. For those who are deeply interested in both technology and marketing, this is your time. A new kind of career is emerging: Enter the Geek Marketer.
While hard statistics are hard to come by, anecdotally I can tell you that dozens of Fortune 500 companies -- including some of our clients -- are recruiting Geek Marketers either from within or outside. That's not their specific title, of course. However, it is their role.
With CEOs demanding accountability and time spent online climbing, chief marketing officers are on a push to embed technology into every facet of their strategy. But marketers and technologists are not exactly two peas in a pod. They speak different languages. Marketers like GRPs (gross ratings points). Geeks like APIs (application protocol interfaces). Dilbert mercifully pokes at these differences. It's all very Mars and Venus.
Enter Geek Marketers. These cross-trained specialists are fluent in both worlds and bridge them. They are marketers by trade, yet they also have a hard-core interest in technology and social anthropology. As curious individuals, they are constantly studying how digital advances are changing our culture and media. Armed with these insights, they regularly apply them in a marketing context by working closely with brand teams to codify new best practices.
Geek Marketers create competitive advantage through rapid-fire testing and learning. The people I know in this role are shepherding the development, testing and measurement of all kinds of groundbreaking marketing programs. Their pilots span from the simple, such as building RSS feeds, to the complex, creating multifaceted community programs. Often they are paired with people like me, who are in a similar role on the agency side.
This may sound like the trendy occupation du jour, but something tells me the position has staying power. To be sure, the entire industry is innovating and everyone's technical acumen is slowly rising. Still, Geek Marketers are freed to live just a little bit further out on the edge than most. And with no end in sight for what technology can do to transform business, they can continue to play a key role.
