Monthly Archive for July, 2007

Top 13 Marketer Blogs

Published
by
Karl
on July 16, 2007
in Marketing
. 6 Comments

Peter Kim, an analyst at Forrester has put together a list of top marketer blogs, and i’m thrilled to say i’m on the list, with some pretty fantastic company. Peter made a very interesting distinction with this list, in that he only included individual blogs by marketers who are working for brands (as opposed to consultancies). This list is only 13 so far because those are the ones that Peter could find, i’m pretty sure the list will grow so I think this will be a very interesting list to watch.

So I’m starting a list to highlight the most popular blogs written by client-side marketing professionals. These are people who are doing their brands a favor by engaging customers and prospects in conversation.

Really fascinated by what Max Kalehoff of Attentionmax.com had to say:

Examining Pete’s initial list, I think it is important to note that many also are largely personal and passionate endeavors, as evidenced by the quasi-independent relation to their employers. In other words, these are not “official” company-sanctioned blogs; they live on completely different hosts and domains. Most are personal blogs and digital profiles likely to travel with these individuals regardless of their future relationship with their employer. This is a new phenomenon in business, where niche yet potent and personal brands are playing a bigger role in marketing. They’re benefiting the companies while changing the dynamics of employee-business relationships.

And a gem from David Churbuck on the benefit of indipendent blogging:

It’s not that I wouldn’t have an official blog, but shit, could I say “shit” if I did? Or post a picture of my dog with a shaved ass? Or make fun of people who marvel that teenagers are discovering their bodies?

Amen David!

All I can tell you is i’ve subscribed to all these feeds and will be interested to see where this goes.

Here’s the list so far:

  1. Flooring The Consumer  :: Technorati authority = 504.  Authored by CB Whittemore, Director of In-Store Innovation, Wear-Dated Carpet Fiber.
  2. Marketing Nirvana :: 424.  Mario Sundar, Community Evangelist, LinkedIn.
  3. ExperienceCurve :: 332.  Karl Long, Web/Social Media Integration Manager, Nokia.
  4. The Marketing Excellence Blog :: 254.  Eric Kintz, VP Marketing, Digital Photography & Entertainment, Hewlett-Packard.
  5. cgm :: 191.  Pete Blackshaw, CMO, Nielsen Buzzmetrics.
  6. Decker Marketing :: 167.  Sam Decker, VP Marketing, Bazaarvoice.
  7. Masiguy :: 162.  Tim Jackson, Brand Manager, Masi Bicycles.
  8. AttentionMax :: 153.  Max Kalehoff, VP Marketing, Nielsen Buzzmetrics.
  9. Churbuck.com :: 148.  David Churbuck, VP Global Web Marketing, Lenovo.
  10. Emerson Process Experts :: 130.  Jim Cahill, Marketing Communications Manager, Emerson Process Management.
  11. Bernaisesource :: 99.  Dan Greenfield, VP Corporate Communications, Earthlink.
  12. John Dragoon’s Blog :: 29.  John Dragoon, CMO, Novell.
  13. Randy’s Journal :: n/a.  Randy Tinseth, VP Marketing, Boeing.

This Could Be The Most Extraordinary Book Ever Written By Bloggers (except for Naked Conversations, maybe)

Published
by
Karl
on July 16, 2007
in Co-Creation and Marketing
. 3 Comments

Buy the book here!
The age of ConversationHyperbole? Maybe, maybe not. What’s extraordinary about this book might not in fact be the writing, but might be the that it exists at all. I mean, who would have thought that in the short space of a few months 100 plus people could get together and author, edit and publish a book. Maybe what also makes it extraordinary is that I was able to contribute a chapter, and even get it in by the deadline (almost :-)

The book itself is a 103 perspectives, not chapters per se, but facets, aspects around the idea of the age of conversation. In some ways the “age of conversation” sounds antiquated, but as the Clue Train pointed out in 1999, technology is bringing about the resurgence of a “marketplace” culture where vendors and customers just talk to each other. Conversations drove the marketplace then, and is beginning to drive the marketplace again. But now I guess the marketplace is not just about products, it’s the marketplace of ideas that social media facilitates.

Anyway, I can’t offer you an iron clad guarantee around the books content, some might work, some may not, but in the end I think the idea is important, and the charity that all proceeds of the books sale go to, and to the memory of CK’s Mum.

More about the book at:

and read the post that started all this “Want to author a business book?” at Drew’s Marketing Minute

Buy the book here!

Below is the amazing list of authors (thanks to Kristin for the format here)

Editors:  Drew McLellan | Gavin Heaton    For you:  CK

A   AJ James | Amy Jussel | Andy Nulman | Ann Handley | Anna Farmery | Arun Rajagopal    
B   Becky Carroll | Bob Glaza | Brian Reich
C    CB Whittemore/Flooring The Consumer Cam Beck | Carolyn Manning | Cedric Giorgi | Colin McKay | Connie Reece | Cord Silverstein | Chris Corrigan | Chris Newlan | Craig Wilson
D   David Armano | David Berkowitz | David Brazeal | David Koopmans | David Polinchock | David Reich | Dustin Jacobsen |
E   Ed Cotton | Emily Clasper |  Emily Reed
F   Faris Yakob
G   Gareth Kay | Gary Schoeniger | Gaurav Mishra |  Geert Desager | Gia Facchini | G.Kofi Annan | Dr. Graham Hill | Greg Verdino
J   Jamey Shiels | Janet Green | Jessica Hagy | Jim Kukral | Joe Raasch | John La Grou | Jordan Behan | Julie Fleischer
K   Karl Long | Katie Chatfield | Kim Klaver | Kimberly Dawn Wells | Kris Hoet | Kristin Gorski
L   Lewis Green | Lori Magno | Luc Debaisieux
M   Mack Collier | Mario Vellandi | Mark Blair | Mark Earls | Mark Goren | Matt Dickman | Michael Morton | Mike Sansone
N   Nathan Snell | Nick Rice | Nick Wright
P   Patrick Schaber | Paul McEnany | Peter Corbett | Pete Deutschman | Phil Gerbyshak
R   Richard Huntington | Rishi Desai | Robert Hruzek | Roberta Rosenberg | Roger Anderson | Roger von Oech | Ron Shevlin |  Ryan Barrett |  Ryan Rasmussen
S   Sacrum | Sandy Renshaw | Scott Monty | Sean Howard | Simon Payn | S. Neil Vineberg | Spike Jones | Stanley Johnson | Steve Bannister | Steve Roesler | Steve Woodruff | Susan Bird
T   Tim Jackson | Toby Bloomberg | Todd Andrlik | Tom Clifford | Tony D. Clark | Troy Worman
U   Uwe Hook
V   Valeria Maltoni

DEC’s Vision Of The Future From 1994

Published
by
Karl
on July 13, 2007
in Fun Stuff
. 0 Comments

How far the internets have come:


Link

I love the dramatic music :-)

Via

Political Discourse Taken To Higher Level Through Social Media (Obama Girl vs. Giuliani Girl)

Published
by
Karl
on July 13, 2007
in Advertising
. 0 Comments

From the aptly named Barely Political comes a trailer for the a new song and video:

Hat Tip to Steve at Adrants

Conversational Media Summit

Published
by
Karl
on July 11, 2007
in Co-Creation and Strategy
. 0 Comments

another crazy name, but a great speaker lineup. It’s in San Francisco, September 11th and 12th. Strangely you have to request an invite to the summit before you can pay them the $695 to register? It’s like the gmail of conferences…. except gmail’s free of course.

Here’s the speakers:

  • Jay Adelson; CEO, Digg.com
  • Barak Berkowitz; CEO, Six Apart
  • Matt Cohler; VP Strategy, Facebook
  • Laura Desmond; CEO, Starcom MediaVest Group/The Americas
  • Scott Donaton; Publisher, AdAge
  • Sarah Fay; Group President, Isobar
  • Shawn Gold; SVP Marketing & Content, MySpace.com
  • David Grubb; Worldwide Media Director; Microsoft
  • Curt Hecht; EVP, Chief Digital Officer, Starcom MediaVest Group
  • Carla Hendra; Co-CEO, Ogilvy North America
  • Casey Jones; VP Marketing, Dell
  • Patrick Keane; EVP, CMO, CBS Interactive
  • Ross Levinsohn; Former President, Fox Interactive Media
  • Daina Middleton; Dir, Global Interactive Marketing, Imaging and Printing Group, HP
  • Jon Miller; Former Chairman & CEO, AOL Inc
  • Kent Nichols; Co-Creator of Ask A Ninja, Beatbox Giant Productions
  • Greg Ott; VP, Global Marketing, Ask.com
  • Randall Rothenberg; President & CEO, Interactive Advertising Bureau
  • Suzie Reider; Head of Advertising Sales, YouTube
  • Douglas Sarine; Co-Creator of Ask A Ninja, Beatbox Giant Productions
  • Tina Sharkey; CEO, BabyCenter
  • Rishad Tobaccowala; CEO, Denuo
  • Johnny Vulcan; Founder, Anomaly
  • Jeff Weiner; EVP, Audience, Yahoo!

Social Media Mobile Phone - Brainstorm

Published
by
Karl
on July 11, 2007
in Co-Creation
. 11 Comments

Update: it looks like Dave Winer is experimenting with exactly this sort of thing with the N800, this will be very interesting.

[note: when I say blogging, I don't mean primarily text, i'm including photos, audio podcasting and video blogging in the mix. i'm trying to get at the value of mobility, video, audio, pictures, and a bit of text]

With the Samsung announcement of a 3G mobile phone targeted at bloggers

Samsung Electronics will launch in Europe this month its Mobile Blog 3G Phone (SGH-L760), which allows users to upload content directly to blog sites on the Internet such as YouTbe, UBlog and Buzzet. Digital Chosunilbo reports.

“The mobile blog function’s speedy data transmission will distinguish the phone from other handsets. The phone will debut in Germany and Spain this month and next hit the Southeast Asian market.”

via Textually

I was just thinking, what would I really like in a boggers/podcasters phone? Here’s a few features that spring to mind:

  • Posting photo’s as a blog entry - Already doable using flickr MMS, would like to automatically add tags to the blog post, put it in a certain category, would like to include multiple pictures in one post (currently flickr system does one pic per post
  • Stereo audio recording - I don’t think i’ve found a phone yet that has different settings for recording audio. For me I would like to easily select my recording options depending if i’m interviewing someone or recording music. Being able to plug in external mics would also be amazing (should be able to record audio stand alone, or with video)
  • background audio and video uploading to selected services over most appropriate connection. I have wifi on a few of my phones, I would love it if I could tag certain recordings to be uploaded to specific services when I come in proximity of previously defined wifi locations.
  • Also different content should be uploaded to different services, for instance I might want a video to got to youtube, blink.tv, and dailymotion at the same time; podcasts should get posted to my blog, or what ever service i’m hosting them on. Ideally this should happen on the server side, that way I upload once and it is automatically distributed from the server
  • Podcast editing - not sure how this would play out, but basic cropping and joining of audio and video files would totally rawk

If your are a blogger and a podcaster what features would you like to see in your phone?

Quick plug for Shozu which already does some of the things i’m talking about around uploaded content to different services.

UPDATE:

LOL, David Armano has just designed his own phone and posted it on his blog, it’s called the MyPhone :-)

Jeremiah pointed to this post on Dave Winers scripting news on the features that should be on an “open podcast player”

Open podcast device ideas Permanent link to this item in the archive.

I’m at the mobile identity workshop today, and I led a discussion this morning about features that people want for an open podcast player device. The rules were anyone could blurt out any feature they wanted and I put them all on the list. (I’m not endorsing these ideas, or explaining them.)

clips
recording
open platform
auto-tagging/voice tagging
transcriptionability
speaker
TiVO features/last ten seconds
voting mechanism
popup menu for categorization
wifi
hyperlinks
touchscreen
no buttons
keyboard
mashable
waterproof
synching
text input
video input
not modal
lots of dials
real volume control
multiple people
mixer
bookmarks
one-click publishing
surfing

Love the one “lots of dials” hysterical :-)

Terrorists Need Brand Identities Too

Published
by
Karl
on July 10, 2007
in Branding
. 0 Comments

Ironic Sans has an very thought provoking blog post that looks that the brand/logo taxonomy of terrorist organizations. Here’s the group that use stars as their key visual element, and as Ironic Sans points out “stars inside circles” is a distinct sub group.

terror logos

Go read the rest of the article

Big hat-tip to fimoculous

I’m on Pownce - Twitter on steriods

Published
by
Karl
on July 9, 2007
in Fun Stuff
. 6 Comments

I just signed up for Pownce which is rather like twitter, except instead of just 140 characters of text you can send links, files, and events to all your friends. They’ve also developed a nice little Facebook application. For a really good overview of pownce you can watch this great screencast from Molly at demogirl.com

If you’d like to add me as a friend on pownce or facebook please go ahead. I also have six invites for pownce to send out, first come first served.

Jeramiya Jeremiah at the web-strategist has been collecting all the pownce reviews here, certainly worth checking out if you want to get ahead of the curve on the next twitter. Also Mashable have a review here.

Cheers,

Karl

Telsa Coil Plays Techno, including Mario Theme

Published
by
Karl
on July 7, 2007
in Fun Stuff
. 2 Comments

This is a solid-state Tesla coil. The primary runs at its resonant frequency in the 41 KHz range, and is modulated from the control unit in order to generate the tones you hear.

So just to explain a little further, yes, it is the actual high voltage sparks that are making the noise. Every cycle of the music is a burst of sparks at 41 KHz, triggered by digital circuitry at the end of a “long” piece of fiber optics.

What’s not immediately obvious in this video is how loud this is. Many people were covering their ears, dogs were barking. In the sections where the crowd is cheering and the coils is starting and stopping, you can hear the the crowd is drowned out by the coil when it’s firing.

This Tesla coil was built and is owned by Steve Ward. Steve is a EE student at U of I Urbana-Champaign. He and Jeff have been going to Teslathons, which is where they met.

It’s been suggested that a good name for this coil would be the “Zeusaphone”. “Thoremin” has also been mentioned, though personally I think we need Theramin type inputs for that.

To answer a few questions I’ve received, YES, someone did yell “Play Freebird!” after the first round of music.

SAP Global Survey on Social Media/Web 2.0

Published
by
Karl
on July 5, 2007
in Strategy
. 2 Comments

It seems that SAP, one of the biggest suppliers of software that help run big businesses is working on a research report to help understand what’s really happening in the world around social media. They have got Shel Israel (co-author with Robert Scoble of Naked Conversations) to help in this and Shel is taking a similar research approach as well, talking to people. one of the great things about Shel’s research is he’s publishing interviews as he goes on his blog, here’s his conversation with Doc Searls, and again with Robert Scoble.

The point is here 1. there’s some great stuff in these interviews, and 2. big companies, no, scratch that huge companies are paying much closer attention to social media.

What’s your facebook strategy?

Couple of quotes i like:

Scoble
9. What social media tools are on the rise and which are sinking? Is this the same or different worldwide as far as you know?

Hot: Facebook.
Hot: iPhone.
Hot: Twitter/Pownce/Jaiku (Pownce is hottest this week).
Cooling: blogging (Twitter is taking a lot of attention away from it).
Hot: Photosharing services and Scrapblogging stuff.
Steady but not sexy: Wikis.
Cooling: Second Life.

Doc Searls
5. How has business fundamentally changed because of social media? How will it change in the coming years?

The walls of business will come down. That’s the main effect of the Net itself. Companies are people and are learning to adapt to a world where everybody is connected, everybody contributes, and everybody is zero distance (or close enough) from everybody else. This is the “flat world” Tom Friedman wrote “The World is Flat” about, and he’s right. Business on the whole has still not fully noticed this, however.

Doc Searls
1. You are one of the founding fathers of whatever it is that is going on now…

And what is that? If it’s Web 2.0, I demand a paternity test, and I am sure it will reveal, in the immortal words of Michael Jackson, “the kid is not my son. ” If what’s going on now is the Live Web, and I think it is, we shall get to it shortly.

Thanks Hugh