With the rise of people being more connected to their own media, the youth in our society are becoming most responsiver to marketing that tells a story about themselves.
Graham Brown illustrates this best in his newly released slideshow on slideshare.net:
First of all, if you aren’t reading Fred Wilson’s blog (one of the most successful venture capitalists in the world, partner in Union Square Ventures) then you are really missing out on the insights from a man who knows the territory very well.
Anyway, he posted a quote in his blog about a week ago on an article about Twitter changing the way we live, from Time magazine.
When we talk about innovation and global competitiveness, we tend to fall back on the easy metric of patents and Ph.D.s. It turns out the U.S. share of both has been in steady decline since peaking in the early ’70s. (In 1970, more than 50% of the world’s graduate degrees in science and engineering were issued by U.S. universities.) Since the mid-’80s, a long progression of doomsayers have warned that our declining market share in the patents-and-Ph.D.s business augurs dark times for American innovation. The specific threats have changed. It was the Japanese who would destroy us in the ’80s; now it’s China and India.
But what actually happened to American innovation during that period? We came up with America Online, Netscape, Amazon, Google, Blogger, Wikipedia, Craigslist, TiVo, Netflix, eBay, the iPod and iPhone, Xbox, Facebook and Twitter itself. Sure, we didn’t build the Prius or the Wii, but if you measure global innovation in terms of actual lifestyle-changing hit products and not just grad students, the U.S. has been lapping the field for the past 20 years.
Think back 10 years, and think of the ways that products in America have changed the way you live. We are innovators, no longer inventors.
Wilson also did a recent interview on the current trends on the internet, and what he expects to see in 2010:
Fred Wilson – Venture Capitalist Speaks On Future Web Trends
Okay, take a look-
This is what I saw when I logged into my Facebook news stream twenty minutes ago. An advertiser/affiliate spamming Facebook users with a trojan horse script.
I realize that the majority of affiliates do not participate in malicious behavior when promoting offers. On the other hand, there is a bad bunch of affiliates out there, with way to much time on their hands, making lame attempts at trying to spam consumers throughout the web, trying to convert their product.
This behavior really is hurting the industry as a whole, from advertisers, to networks, to affiliates, it effects everyone.
So, the next time you email your overseas programmer to create a script that spams blogs, Facebook, Twitter, whatever…, STOP.
Instead, take a walk outside, enjoy the beautiful June weather and only promote offers through the channels advertisers allow.
Many online marketers have built up strong profiles in the social web, and there are plenty of great reasons why they are doing so. Meanwhile, many smart companies are building their profiles online too. Either way, if you are in this socialsphere for more than just fun, (aka business) then you probably wonder everyday about how much the profiles have an influence on the people interacting with them. This is called social metrics/analytics. In the recession there are many people turning to the social web to launch new marketing strategies because the costs are way more efficient compared to traditional advertising. So, many people are told to take “stock” in their brand and see how much awareness their brand has, before spending money on more advertising.
How many of you online marketers and business owners actually know your brand’s equity online? Not too many… Why? Outside of large specialized online analytics agencies, there really have not been many affordable tools to measure your brand’s influence online.
The first step to measuring brand influence in the social web is by defining your success metrics, and knowing what goals you want to accomplish with each campaign. But first, Yong Fook, a social web developer said:
“filter out the noise” and “be strict and choose metrics that actually translate into a business context for your organization… ignore meaningless metrics like ‘number of followers‘. A successful campaign is about more than just getting attention.”
Then you measure your campaigns qualitative returns, or quantitative returns. To do this, I highly recommend you use this newly released social metrics software called Peashoot. I signed up just this week for a month long subscription for $15. Peashoot is developed by Yong Fook and Egg Co.. He built the app specifically to measure social media campaigns, which are built and measured through your own custom Peashoot domain and url shortener. Personally I have not seen any free or paid software that comes even close to this app, making it worth every penny. Plus Yong Fook is most definitely an experienced professional internet developer and marketer, he delivers a top notch product.
Highlights of the Peashoot App include:
With each new social campaign you launch, I know you’ve heard it thousands of times over and over again: Test, test, and keep testing to create the most efficent and optomized campaign possible.
If you are not already measuring your social campaigns, then you need to start doing so! Whatever tool you use, just make sure that your campaigns are developing your brand’s equity online and ultimately more ROI for buisness.
