Hyping The Hype Cycle

I wanted to write a post about the Gartner Hype Cycle, which I saw it posted on Advertising Labs's blog but as I was reading their post I saw this curious link in the post. Basically, Gartner doesn't want anyone to post the Hype Cycle Graph without paying for it. This seems like a silly decision. Without people posting and talking about the Hype Cycle Graph how would Gartner sell the full report. I think a freemium model would be best here as the Hype Cycle Graph would get people interested and if they wanted to know more they would buy the whole report, which I am sure talks in much more detail about each point on the graph.

The point on the graph that has me most excited is Augmented Reality which I first found out about when google launched Android and now that the iPhone has GPS and a compass it has made possible things like an AR Twitter app featured in the video below:

I think this is the beginning of some potentially cool applications and it will be really interesting how game publishers take advantage of this technology. There are already scavenger hunt type race games like Urban Dare and the Great Urban Race so it will be interesting to see how these evolve as Augmented Reality apps become more mainstream.

the never ending question...

...What is twitter? Every time I visit my family, in between eating and Aidan and I playing with my iPhone, we start talking about technology and its impact on society this question always comes up. They all get blogs, podcasts, and some of the other aspects of web 2.0 but twitter seems to confound everyone. The "In Plain English" series from Common Craft does a great job of simply explaining twitter as a utility.

But the strength of twitter goes beyond what is explained in the video. Twitter's open platform has allowed people to develop using the API. Twittervision is a perfect example, it allows you see all the public tweets visualized on a world map. Twittermagnets is an application developed as a crowd sourcing poetry project.

Twitter also allows for great data mining and there are a ton of tools can help visualize this. There are lots of ways to see what people are saying but one of my favorites is Cursebird which shows all the tweets that have curses in them and which curses are the most often used. Apparently, I curse like a bad golfer which is not very good assuming good is cursing a lot.

Twitter also allows you to follow some really smart people who are not tweeting about them mundane happenings in their lives but rather interesting stuff they are passionate about.

• Steven Johnson - Writer/economist
• Malcom Gladwell - Excellent writer and generally smart guy
• Mark Cuban - Owner of the Dallas Mavs and winner of the Yahoo! lottery, oh and really smart guy
• Saul Williams - Talented musician, writer, and actor

There are a lot more famous and non famous people that great to follow and you can follow your friend and know exactly when and how many times they went to the shake shack.

Tracking via Social Media

Recently, a luddite friend of mine, who finds my frequent updated and posts on facebook a bit much, discovered my twitter feed and said:

"I always thought you were a little carried away with the Facebook updates...then I saw what you do on Twitter. Oh my."

It is my guess that he has recently discovered twitter based on what has been what has been in the news (here and here). My response to him was "Yeah I also use Qik, the share feature on google reader, and one or two other social tools. I like being social without the burden of actually interacting with people" but that is not the point of this post. In my new job one of my minor roles will be to help define how the company uses social tools and trying to track what is being said.

There are several ways to track what others are saying about you and any discussions going on. Search.twitter.com has a great feature called "trending topics" which lists out some of the top topics people are tweeting about. TwitterDeck is also a great tool to monitor all things twitter. Robert Scoble talks about how he uses Twitter in this Kyte video (it is a bit long and meandering but it will give you a good sense of how someone super connected keeps up):

I also recently learned about the rooms feature on FriendFeed which aggregates all feedback from several sources. I haven't started using this but will set it up tomorrow and see how it works.

Social media are allowing anyone to easily monitor and respond to anything that is being discussed about you. I wonder what this will do to public relations people I am sure the tech savvy ones will be able to pick up lots of new business, while the ones who ignore all the different tools available to the average person will suffer.

Brand Tracking in a Web 2.0 World

Brand tracking has always been an Ad Agency function that is shrouded in a bit of mystery. Now it is more than ever important to know how people perceive your brand and what kinds of conversations they are having about you. For small start ups who can't afford an agency to track brand perceptions there are several DYI ways to get a good pulse on what is being said about your brand. 

Ice Rocket blog search has a great function called Big Buzz that will give you a running timeline of anything that is said about your brand. People are also using Twitter to track what people are saying about brands, below is a map of tweets about brands during the Superbowl (found in the NY Times)

Facebook groups are also a good way to see if there is any positive or negative discussions are happening about your brand. Ultimately, you have to be vigilant about about keeping a finger on the pulse otherwise you will be caught off guard when something good or something bad happens.

Copy & Paste and Qik

I decided to Jailbreak my iPhone again. I originally did this pre app store launch in order to get some really interesting 3rd party apps on my iPhone. When the app store was launched I didn't feel the need to have my phone Jailbroken as I was pretty happy with all that was/is available via the app store. But there are 2 apps that I have been reading about that made me want to jailbreak again. 

The first was "Clippy" an app that adds copy and paste functionality to the ".?123" menu on the virtual keyboard. So far the couple of times I used it, it works pretty good. The only annoying thing is that it obscures the area where you are typing slightly but this is a minor annoyance. The second app is the Qik app which allows you to broadcast a live video stream. Below is the quick test video I did yesterday (excuse my messy apartment):

Qik also allows you to send out a message via twitter that you are broadcasting live and so your Twitter followers can go to Qik and see what you are doing. This is a pretty cool feature that would get more people engaged. During my test it didn't seem that my audio was working but as you can see/hear in the video above it seems to be OK. The second test video was at my computer shooting my live feed giving the window within window etc. effect.

Friday I am going to go to the Queens Museum to check out an exhibit on a full model of NYC and I will broadcast via Qik. If you care to check it out I guess the best way to know when it will be live would be to subscribe to my twitter feed.

Graffiti vs. Brands

Graffiti artists and Brands have one thing in common, they both would like to be ubiquitous. What happens when graffiti artists start attacking brands' ubiquitous logos? 

The artist attacking these brands is Zevs and his intention is to force the passer by to pay attention and question to these images rather than just letting them slip into our subconscious.

Another graffiti artist attacking advertising here in NYC is Poster Boy, you can read about him here and see his all of his work here. 

Poster Boy slices and mashes 2 or 3 different ads to create a composite image, which still remains brand heavy but adds cheeky irony to it. 

What does this mean for marketers/advertisers? Well we need to be much more cognisant of what media we are buying and where our message will be going. Brands that are socially conscious and accessible for dialogue will get attacked much less than brands that are closed off to 2 way communication and only interested in spreading a message. Social media/application, when done right, can be a great way to foster communication between brands and consumers. A good example is Comcast which was getting attacked for is poor customer service by a rather famous advertising critic, Bob Garfield of Ad Age and On The Media. Comcast started a twitter account in order to be more responsive and to start a dialogue with customers. Marketers need to realize that consumers and advocates have a lot more power to spread their message weather that message is positive or negative is up to the brand.

Enjoy your thanksgiving holiday.