Tag Archive for 'Marketing'

The rally people

Published on March 29, 2008 in Other. Closed Tags: Elections, Marketing, Politics, PR, US, Web 2.0.

rally people Last night we attended a great talk given by Amy Walters (political analyst for CNN) about the upcoming US elections and the ongoing democratic primaries. Because of recent private changes I got somehow involved into US politics. Even though I’m just an observer from outside, it’s interesting to watch the political process and how the political landscape of the US seems to change (oh, there it is, the “c” buzzword!) right now.

Anyways, I found especially one quote of Amy Walters interesting. The discussion was about how many people one politician attracts to come and fill up civic centers compared to the other. It’s often seen as indicator for popularity. But, as polls show, it’s not. At least the number of people going to civic centers doesn’t reflect the polls in any sense. It’s a matter of the target group: civic centers are filled up by the “rally people”. People who have time and money to go there.

It made me think about the hype around Web 2.0, the next big thing to generate millions page views and create so much more awareness about your product.

Most Web 2.0 services still only attract the “rally people”: people who have time to spend online and participate in whatsoever web service or people who are somehow professionally involved (mostly techies and PR guys). Or people who spend their saturday afternoons to write blog posts about themselves instead of doing their weekly grocery shopping.

I think all the countless Web 2.0 services, all the effort, still focuses on a very limited group of society.

Although it’s fascinating to see politicians heavily using Web 2.0, their real business, collecting votes, lies outside the web. That’s what polls teach us. The next president isn’t going to be elected by YouTube views, Facebook friends or Blog subscribers, but by real people with real issues they are concerned about.

Stuck on Facebook

Published on January 3, 2008 in Tech. Closed Tags: Facebook, Marketing, Privacy, Social Media, Web 2.0.

How cool is that?

Facebook asks you to import contact data from almost any popular email provider. As for the other direction, getting your contact data out of Facebook again, they aren’t quite as liberal as tech geek blogging celebrity Robert Scoble found out:

Why do this?

I wanted to get all my contacts into my Microsoft Outlook address book and hook them up with the Plaxo system, which 1,800 of my friends are already on.

It’s ironic that you can import your Gmail address book into Facebook but you can’t export back out.

2008 will bring us a lot more superb stories about social networks I guess. Monetizing the social graph has just begun. Personally I’ve observed myself withdraw information and increase privacy settings on some services. Until it becomes clearer what social network marketers have in mind, I’ll be more careful with personal information.

Something’s going on here…

Published on August 10, 2007 in Other. Closed Tags: Actiongroup, Austria, Blögger, Blogging, Blogosphere, Marketing, Viral.

…and nobody knows what it‘s going to be. No blogger-union, no application or software, nor another blog-directory but an action group aimed to raise awareness about local Austrian blogs, as the initiator claims.

Be anxious!

…and use a german keyboard!

Virtual Earth Hotmap

Published on July 18, 2007 in Geotech. Closed Tags: Analysis, Austria, Geomarketing, Hotmap, Mapping, Marketing, Microsoft, Research, Toursim, Virtual Earth.

Not only Vienna is heating up this week, we’re heading towards 35°C and more every day, no, even mapping sites are called hot today:
Microsoft released their research project Virtual Earth Hotmap.

Hotmap gives some insights about place popularity and shows where people have looked during the past 6 months in Virtual Earth.

It’s quite interesting that the map, the overall picture, is similar to other (spatial) analysis results we do in our day-to-day job: the map, literally based on hits and page impressions, shows an urban/rural divide and structures along major transport axis. Besides large urban areas, some tourism regions can be identified too – lake regions in Carinthia, skiing regions in Salzburg and Tyrol.

After a quick look at Virtual Earth Hotmap I’d say it provides some interesting data for regional marketing purposes and could be used additionally to other (tourism) website traffic analysis. E.g. if a tourism region doesn’t show up in Hotmap then probably not too many people are looking for information about or even searching directions to it (and going there?).

Experimental politics

Published on April 22, 2007 in Other. Closed Tags: Austria, ÖVP, ÖVPParteitag07, Blogging, Marketing, Politics, PR, Salzburg, Social Media, Web 2.0.

Austria’s conservative peoples party invited a handful bloggers to cover the annually party convention. Obviously not more than a PR experiment, but an interesting one, and, frankly, one I wouldn’t have expected from that side of the political landscape.

Besides inviting bloggers, the party will be posting videos on YouTube and photos to Flickr, making friends on MySpace and even is represented in Second Life. Seems like they got some social media budget to play with.

Politicians writing blogs, doing podcast, vlogs or generally participating personally in Web 2.0 (to name the buzzword) are nothing new. As one could observe during US elections those are quite powerful methods to create awareness. At the same time it must be handled carefully. Social media is controlled by the people, beyond the influence of PR departments or press agencies. Once the wrong message is out it can’t be controlled any more and, as we know, bad news are spreading fast, much faster than good news.

Since social media popularity in Europa isn’t as high as in the US, there is still some room for (safe) experiments left, like this one of the peoples party. Blogs surely offer a clever possiblity to reach certain audiences, still a small but increasing target group (as far as I know blogs are currently read by bloggers in the first place) and partly acting as multiplicators.

So what does it mean to invite known and rather popular bloggers instead of advising the own press department to set up and maintain a blog?

The invited bloggers can’t be said to be conservative or traditional peoples party followers. They simply had the opportunity to watch the convention, presentations and speeches (from the best press table btw) and blog about it, or not, don’t if they were asked to write at least a minimum of words on their blogs.

There is no such thing as bad publicity except your own obituary.
(Brendan Behan)

The result of that experiment is mainly a controversial discussion about the party, speeches, concepts, etc. in the blogosphere. Even a post titled “7 reasons why I will not vote for this party” from one of the invited bloggers showed up.

Inviting guest bloggers were in that case quite a good option: the posts are not directly seen as marketing activity and therefore leave a more honest impression than other initiatives. It doesn’t really matter if the posts are positive or negative. Suddenly blog readers receive an entire stream of posts about the peoples party. Posts which trigger follow-ups (like this post), lead to discussions within the blogosphere and create even more awareness about the party. Hey, otherwise I never ever would’ve thought about or even mentioned the party convention.

After all, I think it was a very clever move.

Technosexual, are you serious?

Published on March 11, 2007 in Other. Closed Tags: CK, IN2U, Marketing, PR.

Clearly, a bad public opinion is still better than no public awareness at all. But if your target group starts joking about your product than there is possibly something going very wrong.
[youtube 2yhgvJaO9uE]
Why didn’t CK include bloggers in their campaign?

There are quite a few rather effective ways to commercially create awareness inside the blogosphere. I think a bottom up approach instead of a top down campaign would market that audience much better.

Smells like terrible marketing…

Cool GPS

Published on January 7, 2007 in Geotech. Closed Tags: Apple, GPS, Macworld, Marketing, Rumors.

Like every year right before the infamous Macworld Expo in San Francisco, many rumors about what’s next coming out of Apple’s pipe are making the round. As Mac user it’s pretty hard to stay out of this circus.

Anyways, especially this rumor, about integrating GPS technology in Apple products and making their devices sort of location aware, has called my attention.

What could it mean?

GPS technology, besides its use in industry and in-car navigation systems, is currently an alpha geek gadget. There are a few early adopters, like the geocaching scene or OSM, who enjoy playing around with GPS. But it’s still a small user group and not ready for the mass market.

As seen many times before, Apple’s marketing department can easily stamp the word COOL on a product and turn an alpha geek gadget into a lifestyle product.

I think if Apple would suddenly start integrating GPS in Mac OS X or any other Apple product, it would

bring considerable attention from the entertainment sector to that technology,
probably trigger development of new (entertaining) GPS applications and
GPS would definitely become a COOL thing.

So, this year again, I’m anxiously looking to San Francisco on Tuesday.

Face lift

Published on January 6, 2007 in Other. Closed Tags: Austria, Marketing, Politics, President, Style, Vienna.

In times where appearance and self-marketing have become indispensable, well demonstrated by a certain Austrian minister (even though he obviously doesn’t need to read the entire article before quoting it on TV), I would suggest our honorable president a face-lift. Nothing serious, no plastic surgery, just a few modifications on his outfit. Maybe towards a more martial style.

Like the stencil on left for instance. Dark cop sunglasses and stars on the shoulder seem to suit him very well!

Christmas gift from JAJAH

Published on December 17, 2006 in Other. Closed Tags: Christmas, JAJAH, Marketing, VOIP.

Jajah is starting some heavy marketing activities and gives away free global calls, text messages and conference calls to all existing or new registered Jajah users on Christmas, from 24.12.2006 11:00am GMT until 26.12.2006 10:00am GMT.

The numbers called don’t need to be registered Jajah users. So if you have friends or family abroad, check this special gift out! (via commercialized digg)

Magic iPhone

Published on December 15, 2006 in Other and Tech. Closed Tags: Apple, iPhone, Marketing, Rumors, Usability.

Just impressing how a one-liner manages going up on digg. No need for reporting about uninteresting details like features or something. Magic iPhone markets itself.

Sure, there is a good chance that it’ll come nicely designed, probably having an interesting usability too. But still, it’ll be a phone.

What do people expect of wonderPhone?

What would I expect of a new phone?

Actually I would like to see more or less the same features my phone already has (how un-fancy and boring!), but easier accessible by an improved user interface and usability:

all my contacts and friends with every contact detail, quickly search able
calendar, with better editing features
messaging – email, sms, im, blog – with improved writing features, I don’t like writing messages on the phone at all
a good camera and display with easy upload – flickr, blogging, etc. – features
request: gps enabled with routing and other location based services
request: music, replacing my iPod nano by a phone would be great
request: wifi enabled, would like to use VOIP and faster web access
constraint: size and battery life must remain at least the same.

There is probably some room left for improvements in the mobile phone business. But I heavily doubt it’ll be a revolutionary new Apple gadget. Well, lets see what comes out of Apple’s pipe (if there is something in…).

Just my 2 cents on the iPhone hype.