New Media Tools
Beyond Web 2.0 - Getting Prepared For The Next Step In Web Technologies |
While planning events, the mediums to communicate with the prospects and audience have grown massively. A few years ago, event planners could never have dreamt of having such upfront and direct communication with the attendees before the events even took place. Today, not only is it possible, it is a highly recommended approach for planning your events.
Planning and marketing an event is about building the entire experience for all stakeholders involved. The better you can build a story around the event - the more the excitement and anticipation. It’s fascinating to see how different social mediums can be leveraged to communicate these stories for the targeted audiences to spread. This involvement and communication with your customers is so important now, that it can make or break your events. And since we all want to leave that good after-taste in everyone’s mouth and earn our well-deserved bragging rights, I strongly recommend trying your hand at these social mediums to your advantage. They pay off for events and parties that I plan, every time!
You can only understand its true value if you put yourself in your customer’s shoes. Imagine yourself in a raving crowd on Superbowl or in a pub at a local party, or at a conference launching the coolest gadgets, or at a countdown on Time Square? When surrounded with people who share your interests, chances are that your excitement will amplify and become contagious.
Now imagine building an event with that kind of viral and contagious excitement even before it happens. Imagine the traffic it would generate to your local party, big conference, product launch, or whatever it is that you are planning. It has worked wonders for us, and I’m sure you can benefit a lot from it as well. It’s time for you to think about how to build the right kind of stories around your events and most importantly, how to effectively build a strong online community of fans.
Simon U Ford (SUF.EDBD)
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Google News is ensuring a 100% digital future |
So when everything else is going digital, and readership stats of paper newspapers were decreasing - we had this thing in the back of our minds that it might not go away completely. We’d still need to access old papers in libraries, right? Wrong.
Google News just announced an update to its Google News Archive that it will store electronic text and scanned newspapers of the past.
This is great for researchers, who will then be able to ’search’ through actual historical newspaper data while working on their projects and papers. However, keep in mind that all of this content will take time to load up and integrate. So, only time will tell how well this initiative goes for Google.
Great things ahead!
Simon U Ford (SUF.EDBD)
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Platform integrations - Facebook + There.com |
Will has a nicely detailed post on there.com’s “Facing There” application that strategically integrates the experience of there.com users onto their social networks on facebook. It is an interesting way of extending the experience of their users a step beyond by synergizing with one of the more popular social networking platforms. This is also a good case to evaluate how people are planning virtual events on there.com and sharing the event details on their facebook pages. Does this level of syndication, synergies and cross-platform interactions help enhance user experience?
There.com recently launched a Facebook application, Facing There. Facing There’s app design, launch and roadmap are part of There.com’s strategy for operating in a world where their users have to manage participating in a growing number of social graphs.Michael explicitly cited the exploding number of social graphs online, and we discussed his company’s strategic decision making on how to partner with Facebook and MySpace versus compete with them. These large social networks do not have support for avatar based interaction, the core of There.com’s user experience. Facing There is an explicit attempt to allow users to take their There.com experience and make it a part of their social networking experience.
You can read the complete post here.
Simon U Ford (SUF.EDBD)
Today’s tip! One stop shopping for all your event marketing in social media needs you can’t go past my Events Listed networking and marketing platform. It’s invite only, here’s a backdoor pass on me.
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Top secret Intelligence agencies discover the power of social networking |
I read an interesting article today on cnn.com about how CIA and FBI have built a social networking site, just like facebook, where their analysts can share information and have discussions. They figured that social networking platforms are the best way to gaurantee that there aren’t any unconnected dots or loopholes.
A-Space is ofcource highly classified and nobody without the right security clearance can access the space. However, I’m glad that agencies are finally starting to discover and utilize the power of social media to their advantage.
Here’s an abstract, enjoy!
“”It’s every bit Facebook and YouTube for spies, but it’s much, much more,” said Michael Wertheimer, assistant deputy director of national intelligence for analysis. The program is called A-Space, and it’s a social-networking site for analysts within the 16 U.S. intelligence agencies.
Instead of posting thoughts about the new Avenged Sevenfold album or Jessica Alba movie, CIA analysts could use A-Space to share information and opinion about al Qaeda movements in the Middle East or Russian naval maneuvers in the Black Sea.
The new A-Space site has been undergoing testing for months and launches officially for the nation’s entire intelligence community on September 22.”
Simon U Ford (SUF.EDBD)
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Top Technology Uses In Events |
1- Quick updates via Twitter messaging through cellphone/wireless networks. Ally has a good post on this here.
2- Sensors for foot traffic calculations. This has been around for a few years, but its how the data is applied to streamline traffic, staff placements and reduce risks of bottlenecks thats important.
3- Interactive Video multi-channel dispay screens. Link this up with live web-casting and you’ve done a favor to all of those people who could’nt make it.
4- For parties, having LED lighting choreographed with music adds a level of oomph.
5- Gadgets for direct attendee data tracking to use during and post event analysis…
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Save Money And Touch Up Your Event Pictures Yourself |
You’ll hardly find anyone who doesn’t bemoan the perfect photograph being spoiled by that gigantic palm frond in the background or a fly landing on the cheek at the wrong moment to give you a mole that puts the black hole to shame.
We all have attics and storerooms full of junk but in all that junk are memories too. These memories are stored in form of old, battered and tattered photographs. No matter how well these treasures are cared for, time takes its toll on them.
wowApic comes to the rescue in both these situations. They not only touch up and improve your photos but also restore the old ones. They do it for a fee but as they have skilled professionals; if a customer isn’t happy with the result, they reimburse the money.
The site also allows you to earn money by becoming an “affiliate”. You can refer the website to other people or even promote it on your own website; either way you end up making some pocket-money on the side.
Such a website is nothing less than a treasure trove for anyone who is marketing or launching events. There should definitely be more of these. You don’t need to hire professional photographers charging exorbitant rates. All that is needed is a camera and someone to happily click away; an added plus is that both print and digital photos can be used…
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Is Yahoo Buzz all Fuzz? |
After opening up to the public, it seems Yahoo Buzz has been able to generate quite some traction around the product. To me, the six month wait was rather disappointing in the sense that they didn’t blow me away with anything innovative. So far, it seems to be at par with Digg, Propeller and others of their like.
In Yahoo Buzz any one can submit their interesting story to a link and have an opportunity to get buzzed by the Yahoo community. The stories are arranged by category and is very similar to the concept of digging. Stories on that topic will get an extra boost in the rankings. You can also discover most remarkable story or video or can share it with other social networks.
Is there anything different that they’re doing? If you’ve benefited from regular traffic spikes through Buzz, share your stories with us.
Simon U Ford (SUF.EDBD)
Today’s tip! Every marketing campaign starts with keyword research. If you’re serious about earning money online you’re first investment should be a great keyword research tool.
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Zookoda - driving traffic with email newsletters |
Email newsletters have always been a great way to keep your community members in the loop. Its a way to keep in touch with them, off and on, without actually have to write an email. All you have to do is repackage your content and send it off to your lists on a regular basis - weekly or monthly, depending on the list type. Its also a way to quickly show your lists pictures of your recent successful events without having them go to your websites or event pages.
Basically, Zookoda is linked to your actual Blog and sends summaries of the posts to your lists via email. You can choose to send the emails on a daily, weekly or monthly basis. It summarized the content itself and sends off a link to your Blog for those who are interested in reading further.
Its a great way to package your posts and deliver them to people that matter to your business. Since these people have opted in for the newsletters themselves, they wont find it intruding or annoying to get some quick updates from you. You can also try to make sure you schedule the newsletters in way which is least intrusive.
Two things interest me. 1- It allows us to customize the look and feel of the email according to our Blog’s brand. That adds a level of consistency and personalization that I find rather appealing. Secondly, it allows you to send Blog summaries to mobile phones in the form of text messages - which can be very useful in special situations. Lets suppose you are hosting an event and are posting traffic and other updates on your blog for interested attendees. With Zookoda those messages can go go directly into the pockets of those people that are on the go and need them the most.
You can send off promotional emails and also schedule recurring broadcasts with it. This can be good for any pre-event podcasts that you have in store for your audiences.
Simon U Ford (SUF.EDBD)
Today’s tip! To succeed online you must start engaging prospects into a never ending conversation. To do this you need a world class email auto-responder system.
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Putting your contacts in one place - the Soocial way |
Soocial is a pain relief when it comes to managing the headache of finding contact information. People who network a lot, have tons of contacts to manage in a multitude of different places. Soocial is a tool that syncs them all up into one master address book. No matter where you add or change some contacts details, this tool updates the connected web apps, devices automatically. Phew, quite a relief!
Hassle-free contacts:
If you can ignore the cheesy Hasslehof picture on their main page, I’d say do give this tool a chance. Its a great way of making sure your networking contacts are insync, updated and handy. So, currently they work with 37signal’s highrise, Gmail, Mac’s address book, their own online application and different kinds of telephone devices.
With the onslaught of networking tools, its good to see that people realize the need to add some organization to the chaos. Organized chaos, so as to speak. Truth is, each one of these contacts is important. Some may turn out to be partners, some potential customers, some prospects, some evangelists, some super promoters, some regular followers, some will teach you a thing or two. When we’re crunched up on time and need to get things finished, we often don’t have the patience to parse through multiple address books to select or shortlist people. But if you have them all in one place and have them organized into categories, its easier to make the best use of them.
Simon U Ford (SUF.EDBD)
Today’s tip! The first step to being super organized is to manage all of your passwords in you’re browser. Being able to share them across your team is a bonus.
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“Bubbles” increases access to web apps |
If you have a few online applications that you use very often, like gmail or someone calendar tool; you can use BubblesHQ to add them to your desktop. This makes it much easier to use them and you don’t have to open up a browser to see if theres anything new there.
This level of flexibility is important for event marketers, when we have to keep a tab on multiple threads at the same time. Theres no point being restricted in a browser window if we can avail the benefits of our desktops.
Heres what they have to say:
“Your favorite web applications have been running in a Browser for too long. They’re trapped in tabs, crammed between a gossip column, driving directions and an image search for cats. With Bubbles, your web-apps are a click away. super-charged with new features like customized notification windows, even when your web-app is minimized. No more separation between your desktop and the web - use Bubbles, and your favorite apps are just a click away.”
Just like desktop apps, bubbles puts up icons of your web app wherever you want it and shows notifications of updates.
Simon U Ford (SUF.EDBD)
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