Photovine, by Google

Photovine is Google's latest foray into the social media world. It is a social photo sharing application, that lets people snap and share photos instantly, and group them thematically in "vines"; I would equate "vines" to twitter's hashtags. Anyway,the service which apparently was invitiation only just last month is now available for download. HALT! Before you all go running off to download it, you should know that this app is ONLY for the iphone.

Why would Google go and do something as crazy as that? Well, I read somewhere that this app may have been developed by a social media acqusition of google's, Slide. They probably started developing this thing before Google bought them last year. SO there you have it folks, yet another something to mold our ever looming hive society!

Check out the video below for a nice little demo on how this Photovine works:

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It's all about that perception

The Point: Good ideas should be shared.

Today while reading one of the blogs I follow, http://www.scottmonty.com, I came across this very interesting video by Rory Sutherland:



The truth is before this, I had no idea who Rory Sutherland was, but I now think I'm going to find out more about him and his ideas. I urge you to spend the necessary time to listen to his ideas; I assure you you wont regret it.

His main points are (as summarized by Scott Monty on his blog post, http://www.scottmonty.com/2010/06/on-perception.html):

• All value is subjective
• Persuasion is better than compulsion
• Create intangible value to replace material value - particularly when we can place a far higher value on things that already exist rather than creating new things
• Change the interface to change the behavior
• "We are perishing for want of wonder, not want of wonders" -- G.K. Chesterton

Also, like Scott Monty, I would encourage everyone to explore the TED Talks web site if they're not already familiar with it. The ideas expressed at this forum are really worth spreading.

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Night at the office...

Point: This is just a fun run down of the last couple of hours before the Central Park Challenge (CPC)... and other stuff.

Over the last almost-5 years, I have come to realize that few of my family, and even fewer of my friends (those who DO NOT work at YAI, because I have like, 5000 friends at YAI who kinda HAVE to know what I do as a requirement of their jobs. Kinda.) know what I really do for a living. And I don't think they really care to know... I know I could give a rats a$$ about the daily drudgery of their professional lives.

But I think you are a little curious about what I do, so I'll tell you. I am a Senior Fundraiser, Marketer (web & print), Event Planner, AV Consultant and Social Media Nerd for the YAI Network. Otherwise known as a Senior Development Associate.

After graduation from college, I started as an intern with the organization, and quickly became a fixture in the development department, as part of the three person team responsible for planning the organizations largest annual fundraiser. This fundraiser, called the Central Park Challenge is really just a VERY large party in Central Park with a guest list of over 10,000. The really remarkable thing about this event however is that though it's over in about 4 hours after it begins in Central Park, it actually takes a little over 8 months to plan and host every year!

I have occasionally toyed with the idea of keeping photo and video documentation of every week for the 8 months during which we plan the event, so I can one day share the wonder of creating this event with everyone... but that's nuts. Instead, I'm just going to tell you what the last few hours before the Central Park Challenge are like. This year, the CPC was held on Saturday, June 5.

At 5pm on Friday June 4, we (the three person team responsible for the organizing of this event, along with our web master and intern) said goodbye to the rest of the 200+ employees on the organization. As you can tell from my team mate's face, this was not the most exciting point in work history for her; she knew it all went down hill from there on.

At 5:30 pm, I documented how far along we were on our fundraising. I was rooting for us to hit our goal before we went to the park the next morning. Note, at this point, we were just prepping for the long night ahead. Just in case you can't make it out, we were at 99% or our goal of $1.5M. The exact amount was $1,495,919.27.

At 6pm, we shut down all online registration.-- you wont believe how many people decide that it's a great idea to wait till the last minute to register! And then the madness began: when they couldn't register online anymore, everyone and their grandmothers began an assault on our telephone lines and e-mails! It was insane! We couldn't respond to e-mails fast enough or hang up fast enough before another call or e-mail came through again. Somehow, we managed to survive that bit of the night.

Then 9:43pm hit and we were in the full swing of preparing registration lists, finalizing maps, updating blog and facebook posts, and tweeting. You probably won't believe this, but the bit about creating lists, year after year, has proven to be the piece that drives us up the wall. And every year we express that "up the wall" sentiment in different ways. This year, a few our us had our artistic tendencies awakened and we created this sometime between 10:30 and 11:16pm:
No babies were...ummm... injured in the creation of this work of art.

At about 12:30am on June 5, I realized I had to make it back to Jersey City, get a little sleep, and be up in time to get to the park by 6:45am. Lol. Yeah, that didn't happen. But that's another story for another time. I did leave the office at about 12:30am though since I live in another state. To my understanding, everyone else donated another 2 hours of sleep before they headed home that night/morning.

The thing about all this is, it happens almost the same way every year. And though we don't particularly look forward to it, it kinda signals the final countdown to the close of every year.

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Today in social media

The Point: There is a lot of Junk parading as social media tools these days. Some last, like twitter, and become useful. Others just... die. Like Swurl. Don't get lost in all the chaos, pick your medium of communication and stick with it.

(Image source: http://communitywealth.com)


The title of this posting might lead you to believe I know, or even care about what the new rage in social media is today.

I don't.

Well, maybe I care a little bit because I don't like to feel too old. But anyway, I digress. It was during a conversation with a beautiful young lady about breaking into the world of communications, that I stumbled into how truly daunting, and confusing the world of Internets 2.0 could be. I (and others who have had the pleasure of meeting me) would agree that I am a fairly intelligent and technologically savvy person. So when even I begin to mentally flail and sputter while trying to explain how to go about implementing a social media campaign, I believe it's time for people to get serious.

The problem is that there are so many gimmicks and fads out there (think Swurl), and many more being created each day, which instantly seem to act like geek flypaper! And of course, if all the geeks (I sometimes count myself amongst those ranks) are on new platform XYZ, and you hope to communicate with us, then of course you're gonna have to follow us right? Not necessarily, but this constant influx of short lived fads tends to complicate the landscape and make it a pain for any would-be born-again geek to join the ranks of their forefathers.

My suggestions? Spend some time trying to figure out what exactly your goals are for implementing a social media campaign. Try to identify your target audience, and get an idea of what messages you hope to be sending them. Figure out what the best medium of communication would be to send those messages (not everything is twitter appropriate). And remember that you don't HAVE to do EVERYTHING! Granted, having a Facebook page is almost a no-brainer, especially since (it is rumored that) Facebook has plans to take over the world. It's also not a bad idea to have a youtube channel if you have videos that people may want to see. Besides those two, I don't believe I would rank any other social media tool as an "almost-necessity" ("almost" because not everyone has something sensible to say via youtube!)

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Myspace-ing not a great idea in this economy

Despite the title of this post, the truth is facebook-ing, twitter-ing and most other things-ings that involve social networking are probably not a great idea if you're posting stuff that current or potential employers might find offensive.

I was just listening to a CNN story about a former restaurant worker who got fired for "gossiping" about her boss. The fired employee then decided to file a lawsuit againt the restaurant in federal court. This issue is worthy of note because the decisions the court comes to will have far reaching implications on the privacy debate-- and on the way information can be accessed and used, and by whom.

I couldn't find a link to the CNN story, but here is a WSJ story that mentions it. Please post comments and share what you think of this issue.

update:
Two employees actually got fired. There is some discussion going on on the CNN twitter channel if you're interested: http://twitter.com/cnn

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Swurl

Swurl was an aggrigator of all one's web content, a life stream if will, of all one's activity on the interweb. Then one day it was no more. Just like that. Gone.

Certain blogs have made mention of some sort of "goodby note" that was left by the creators of swurl.com that read:

"We built Swurl as two guys doing something we love in our spare time. Unfortunately, due to the pressures of our day jobs and other distractions, we can no longer support or maintain the service at the level that we think our users deserve."

I for one never saw that note since (as you might have noticed) swurl.com now takes you to some ebay page, so I cannot verify this. Good news is, since swurl was an aggregator, no user content was lost. However, the fact that swurl just shut its doors and dissappeard raises an intersting question and and sounds a distinct alarm: in this world where everything is quickly going "paperless", and massive amounts of information are being digitalized and stored on the net (in some cases ONLY on the net), what safeguards have been built to make sure that information published online don't just disappear when the platform it was published on does?

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Web marketing in developing countries

A friend recently sent me this link: http://tinyurl.com/da2756 with the word "Thoughts?" attached to it. I had a little to say about it and I figured I'd post my response here. Please let me know what you think about this by sending my an e-mail or leaving a comment. Thanks.

"I think Henry (friend 1 on e-mail list) and Seyram (sender of link) have between themselves presented the crux of the problem: 1. FB and other social networking sites that depend on advertising to survive cannont charge local companies the same amount of money they charge here (U.S.) for advertising. 2. Ghana and other developing countries are not integrated into the global payment processing system so even if people wanted to buy, they couldn't. Additionally however, I strongly believe that home grown businesses in developing countries like ours have not gotten to the point where they fully appreciate the power of internet marketing (and it makes perfect sense that they should not-- I don't believe that more than 30% of the population of Ghana even has access to the net). For that reason, most people might be quite reluctant to shell out the big bucks for this purpose.

Now if some Ghanainan company came up with an awesome online advertising business like Paa Kwasi suggested, that would be quite nice for all involved. However, they'd still have to contend with the high bandwith vs. low return on advertising sales problem. Paa Kwasi, you made mention of myjoyonline: does anyone know how much profit (if any) myjoyonline is making from the advertising business? Also, is it sustainable or are people just jumping onto the bandwagon for the moment because some sweet tongued exec. has promised them that it's the wave of the future? Are companies going to stop advertising when they realize that their advertising money isn't being translated into sales? I don't know the answers, but I do believe that before we can get full swing into the internet advertising game ( and be profitable at it) learn to walk before we run, otherwise, invent a way to fly so you can skip the walk phase. This basically translates into us (Ghana and others) building the infrastructure to allow us to plug into the global payment system so people can actually buy, otherwise, we should figure out an entirely different way to allow advertising to translate into money. If/when this happens, people will be less reluctant to spend good solid amounts of money on internet advertising.

Thank you :)."

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Social Media Marketing: Is it right for you?

Most people know or have at least heard about social and new media. For the benefit of those who've been under a rock for the past year or two, here are some definitions to guide you:

Social Media: Are software tools that allow users to generate and exchange content. For example, blogs, twitter, myspace, facebook etc.

New Media: It's a general used to describe non-traditional ways of delivering (advertising or promotion) messages. For example, DVD, youtube, v-casts, podcasts etc.

NOTE: Social media and new media have become so intertwined that all references to social media can be assumed to include new media.

Now, social/New media is the latest craze in marketing in these days of web 2.0. Everyone seems to have an opinion about how to make it work for you, and there are many self professed "experts" out there who are more than willing to help you implement some stratergies -- for a fee of course. The question however remains: should you be using these new marketing tools? The short answer to this questions is a resounding YES! And I'll tell you why if you care to read a little bit more.

There are lots of facts and studies out there, backed be some really reputable sources, that will tell you that times have changed-- the balance of power has now shifted from organizations and their marketers, to consumers. This basically means that organizations no longer call the shots. I'm not one of those reputable sources (so I'd encourage you to do your own research on the issue), but I can point to a couple of scenarios to suggest that this assertion is probaly true. For example, when was the last time you bought an item just because you saw an ad for it? Versus, when was the last time you bought an item after you saw an ad for it and consulted some message boards or talked to a friend who had used the item or read a blog about it OR all 3? The point is, people no longer care what organizations say about themselves or their products. People care about what OTHER people say about organizations and their products, and that's where social media comes in handy.

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