communication Archives | waveSpawn Marketing

November 15, 2010

Facebook announces email and social inbox

Facebook announces email There’s been a lot of speculation regarding Facebook’s “secretive email” platform. Internally this has been dubbed the “Gmail killer”. At the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco today, Facebook held a press conference to clarifiy this rumor.

“It’s true people are able to have an @facebook.com email addresses” announced Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg. However, he later added “This is not an email killer.” The new developments at Facebook included three items:

Social inbox – filtering techniques to show the messages that you want to see
Single conversation history – which includes a complete historical thread of user conversations
Seamless integration – a means of aggregating a variety of communication including email, text, IM, etc.

According to Facebook engineer, Andrew Bosworth (or Boz) “The system is definitely not email.” It is not intended to act like email or replace your email accounts. He summarized that this is Facebook’s way of using individual social graphs to filter and improve communication. By having categories of friends, it’s possible to be notified by those people that are closest or most important.

This announcement seemed to be met with confusion and doubt. Do we really need to keep a complete communication log with friends? Don’t we have enough data coming at us each day as it is? Most emails are deleted for a reason – they’ve already been read or answered. If it needs to be stored, it’s got a specific title and date to reference. I’m not sure people want to comb through a thread to find the snippet of useful data. It’ll be interesting to test these features out to see how effective they are.

March 3, 2010

Directing air traffic at JFK is so easy even a caveman can do it

Child directs JFK air traffic Apparently the “bring your son to work” day at the JFK air traffic control tower was taken a bit too literally a few days ago. While his son was on winter vacation, a father who works in one of the world’s busiest air traffic control centers, thought it would be entertaining to not only bring his son to work, but to encourage him to communicate directions. “Jet Blue 171, clear for takeoff,” the young boy said, according to one of the audio recordings from LiveATC.net. It’s a rather scary thought for anyone who regularly flies into or out of the airport. Even if the child was being coached by his father, it only takes a minor slip to create a disaster. As I learned of the report, I was expecting to hear “What’s your vector, Victor?” or “Roger, Roger”.

According to ABC News, “The FAA, which hasn’t released the names of the controllers involved, is not treating this as a joke. It is investigating the controller, as well as a supervising controller. Both have been relieved of their duties, the FAA said.”

In another exchange to a plane bound for Mexico, the child says “Adios, amigo.”

What’s your opinion… is this just innocent child’s play or something more serious? Is social media magnifying the impact of this event? Should Geico use this for their next ad?

January 21, 2010

Conan blows $1.5 million of NBC’s cash

Conan O’Brien, who recently walked away from NBC with a reported $45 million settlement after the late night fiasco with Jay Leno, decided that wasn’t enough. Since his show is running through the end of the week, he is on a mission to run up a tab for NBC by broadcasting songs and media bits which demand high royalty fees.

“We can do whatever they want, and they have to pay for it,” said O’Brien at the beginning of the sketch. And later, while describing the reason for playing the Stones’ “Satisfaction,” he said, “Is it crazy expensive to play on the air, not to mention the rights to re-air this clip on the internet? Hell yes!”

Perhaps the buzz will actually help NBC attract a spike in viewers over the next two nights. We’ll have to wait and see. Is he doing the right thing, give the way NBC treated him? Or is he entitled to express his resentment for getting bumped off of the air?

January 21, 2010

What’s next for Twitter?

What's next for Twitter? After millions of people scrambled to get a Twitter account activated, they later asked themselves – ok, what’s next? While the underlying concept behind Twitter is interesting – stay connected with brief snippets, the software is still in its infancy. There are several companies trying to add more functionality and purpose to this infrastructure.

January 20, 2010

Profiting from social media

Many people continually ask me how they can make money or increase sales from social media. My answer is simple: it’s like losing weight. There are no shortcuts or magic pills that will instantly shed pounds. Losing weight is a lifestyle change and commitment to health and fitness.

The same holds true for social media. Don’t expect to sign up at Twitter or Facebook in the morning and start generating sales in the afternoon. It’s not that simple. It’s a change in corporate culture. It’s a commitment to participating in relevant online communities and discussions. It is most effective by adding relevant and interesting content and opinions, inviting others to share their experiences, and most importantly reading and listening.

Jeffrey Gitomer had some interesting observations in his article: Social media – the new cold call. Wanna play?

There are key words to consider as you try to build your social media world. Connections, attract, video, value, consistent, fan, relevance, write, allocate, monetize.

But there’s a secret. How you position and promote yourself in the NON-social media world is critical to your success in the social media world. Your writing, your website, your blog, your ezine, your personal brand in your marketplace, your perceived value in the marketplace, and your reputation, are elements of attraction that affect your social media status – and surely your success.

There’s billions of dollars of new business being generating by social media – how much of it will you get? Maybe you need to get a bit more serious about being a bit more social.

It’s not an overnight sensation; social media is here to stay… and your involvement could be critical to the future of your business.

January 17, 2010

Avatar – buzz marketing on steroids

I was recently asked by Tech Bucket Blog to write a review on Avatar. I thought I would repost it here – and add some brief marketing thoughts.

For starters, I have not been to the cinema in over three years. This is for two primary reasons – 1) I have a three year old child and 2) nothing has truly captured my attention enough to want to go.

Over the past few months, I have heard so much hype about Avatar that my curiosity got the best of me – and I’m honestly not a big sci-fi fanatic. I had the good fortune of seeing Avatar in the IMAX before too much information has been revealed. I had only heard that it cost over $300 million and was in 3D. While it’s not known exactly how much was spent marketing the film, I can only speculate that the revenue numbers would not be dramatically different if they had spent $0. With a movie of this size and magnitude, the power of buzz marketing is the best endorsement. Every media outlet and entertainment program has something to say. Friends, families, and colleagues are all posting personal opinions and recommendations on Facebook, Twitter, blogs, and other social media sites. The film is capturing major headlines around the world.

All I can say is WOW! What a phenomenal piece of film work. It was truly a riveting journey – it had a fascinating ability to make you feel like part of the action. James Cameron successfully created the illusion that you were on another planet – Pandora. The Navi (alien) characters were well developed and believable.

While the special effects were ridiculously brilliant and worthy of an Oscar (in that category), the story was heartfelt as well. The movie evoked a variety of emotions throughout the plot. There were clear ties to today’s current events – the most recognizable being our quest for more natural resources and our willingness to go to war to obtain them.

Since I don’t think this movie will have the same impact on a home TV (even on a 70” HDTV), this is a must-see on the big screen.

January 11, 2010

Start your communication wave…

Don't just market, communicate!

Announcing the launch of waveSpawn.

Throughout my years in marketing, I have identified a few common business problems. Many small and medium-sized businesses just don’t have the time or expertise to complete some of the most fundamental marketing tasks. Either they don’t need a full-time marketing person, or simply don’t have the budget to hire someone which would include health benefits, insurance, and additional overhead costs.

The concept behind waveSpawn is to provide an affordable alternative for these companies to increase their visibility, brand recognition, customer base, and ultimately their revenue growth through a combination of traditional marketing as well as the latest social media marketing techniques. The key to this relationship is to minimize our customer’s time commitment to these tasks. This means fully understanding our customer’s business… and to become virtually self-sufficient.

I look forward to interacting with you, sharing my knowledge, hearing your personal stories, and getting your feedback.