3D glyph tracking, once again, this is so hot right now, I am sure it will explode in the media some time soon.

Sweet as hell, very practical indeed.

Use the 3D postal box sizer (mail simulator) to overlay your real parcel, hard to articulate in words, I suggest watching the video.

This is the bomb Googles Favorite 87 Cool Things of 2009.

Read it, click and explore.

I gave up my Saturday night to go through it, def worth the investment, bloody brilliant to be honest.

Some high lights; augmented reality, building projection, Google maps mash-ups, stuff, cool stuff and more.

Can I interest you in an entr’ee below?

“FAME knows no bounds for chk, chk boom girl Clare Werbeloff.

Not only has she become an internet phenomenon for her made-up description of a Kings Cross shooting on Channel Nine, now a racehorse was registered last week under the name Chik Chik Boom.”

Well being a bit of a geek I could not miss the chance to have a chat and grab a photo with her recently at Adknowlegde Social Media event at Cockle Bay (& sneak in a blog post).

That’s me on the right, super dork (I always close my eyes in photos, I got to really concentrate not to, hence the bug eyes. LOL).

Love her or hate her, personally I think she is quite a good sport.

I did find the stunt tongue in cheek, and some one asked “do you feel bad for misleading the media?”, ummm, the media has a stellar history of misleading and manipulating the public, also channel 9 was in such a hurry to get an exclusive they they did not fact check properly. I see it as performance art.

BT Barnham , Yellow Kid Weil and the Chaser would all be proud as punch.

She seemed quite happy to chat at #asm09, it think she sums up gen-Y quite well, in teh now, act don’t think, I am sure she will learn a bunch new life skills along the way.

Clare did mention she just finished shoot an 8 part TV series for Southern Cross, and is doing a few appearances and the like, she is hoping there will be some more stuff when after the show airs.

You wanna see serious bad ass, YouTube web fame?

See Kimbo Slice, his story is remarkable, once again controversial, but he is HUGE in the US and will only get bigger as a reality TV The Ultimate Fighter 10 goes to air, this sport (UFC) is exploding exponentially.

Be warned it is, raw and authentic, the word smiths have woven a compelling story. I love it’s, no BS style.

TVC, clothing deals, TV show, ads etc tec.

Who wins in Aust Vs the US?

I will leave it to the judges to decide, sorry Dana White, goes against your advice.

Let’s not talk about the new Vegimite iSnack 2.0, #fail.

Good luck, god speed and work smart.

JA

]]> http://lewiscarroll.wordpress.com/2009/09/26/ecuacion-social-media-fundamental/ Sat, 26 Sep 2009 11:19:27 +0000 lewiscarroll http://lewiscarroll.wordpress.com/2009/09/26/ecuacion-social-media-fundamental/ http://lewiscarroll.wordpress.com/2009/09/20/en-busca-de-la-pole-en-google/ Sat, 19 Sep 2009 23:31:09 +0000 lewiscarroll http://lewiscarroll.wordpress.com/2009/09/20/en-busca-de-la-pole-en-google/ http://lewiscarroll.wordpress.com/2009/09/18/social-media-como-en-los-viejos-tiempos%e2%80%a6/ Fri, 18 Sep 2009 12:02:09 +0000 lewiscarroll http://lewiscarroll.wordpress.com/2009/09/18/social-media-como-en-los-viejos-tiempos%e2%80%a6/ http://lewiscarroll.wordpress.com/2009/09/11/the-three-laws-of-robotics-applied-to-social-networks/ Fri, 11 Sep 2009 10:22:58 +0000 lewiscarroll http://lewiscarroll.wordpress.com/2009/09/11/the-three-laws-of-robotics-applied-to-social-networks/ http://jamieandrei.com.au/2009/09/06/dominos-and-social-media/ Sun, 06 Sep 2009 04:26:12 +0000 jamie andrei http://jamieandrei.com.au/2009/09/06/dominos-and-social-media/

Disclaimer: this post is a bit messy, half from PC and the rest finished on my phone in bed. Apologies.

Finally had some time to blog.

I found a few cool twitter tools in my travels worthy a mention:

http://ping.fm/

Ping supports over?40 social networking sites and they’re adding more all the time.?

“Between our straight forward posting methods and advanced custom triggers, we make it easy for you to post your messages exactly where you want them to go.”

http://www.twhirl.org/

Some of twhirls features:

1. Windows (2000/XP/Vista) and?Mac OSX
2. connects to multiple Twitter, laconi.ca, Friendfeed and Seesmic accounts
3. shorten long URLs (using?digg.com,?bit.ly,?snurl,?twurl or?is.gd)
4. cross-post your updates to many sites
5. post images
6. search tweets using
7. find tweets mentioning your @username
8. record a video on Seesmic, and share it on twitter immediately
9. seesmic updates in real-time using XMPP
10. English spell checking

http://hootsuite.com

Hootesuite allows management of multiple users and accounts from one app.

You can schedule tweets and it supports metrics to track how many clicks year URLs in tweet get.

It’s great to see your friends succeed. It’s even greater to see your former students succeed. But it’s unbeatable when a friend who happens to be a former student knocks one out of the park.

I can’t take much credit for Seth Michalak’s success, because he was pretty bright long before he became my student a few years ago. But as his friend, I can sure as heck take pleasure when his hard work and innovation earns some well-deserved public validation, as it did the other day. Seth runs marketing for Savannah-based social media developer Balaya, which I’ve written about before. Balaya recently won the Metro Atlanta Chamber’s 2009 People’s Chocie Contest, thanks to a combination of a) a great offering, and b) Seth’s thoughtful, well-executed social media campaign.

As I’ve noted before, economic down cycles are important times for innovation. Creativity comes in all shapes and sizes, including everything from product innovation to operational improvements to marketing strategy. Maybe you’re getting a better offering ready for market. Maybe you’re finding new and better means of production. And maybe you’ve got a great service already, but you’re looking for inventive ways of getting the message into the marketplace – something that’s always a concern, especially when budgets tighten (as they always do in a recession).

In all cases, if you’ve making your company better while others are turtling – if you’re working to thrive while the competition is just trying to survive – you’re going to be pretty well positioned when the market bounces back.

Balaya and Seth are the only ones doing a good job of making lemonade in a lemon market, but since I’m a big fan I thought I’d say a public congrats.

Sonia over at Copyblogger has a great piece on “The #1 Conversion Killer in Your Copy (And How to Beat It).”

What makes people almost buy? What makes them get most of the way there, then drop out of your shopping cart at the last second? What makes them stare at your landing page, wanting what you have to offer, and yet, ultimately, close the page and move on to something else?

It turns out there’s a hideous troll hiding under the bridge. Every time you get close to making a sale, the troll springs out and scares your prospect away. Get rid of the troll and your copy will start converting better than it ever has before.

The ugly, smelly, dirty, bad-mannered troll is prospect fear. And it’s sitting there right now, stinking up your landing page and scaring good customers away.

She does a great job of explaining where the “conversion troll” comes from, and she’s 100% correct. If you’ve grown up in this society, you have probably have a degree of well-justified trepidation about trusting the claims of those trying to sell you something.

I’d go her one better, though, because I feel like the principles she’s articulating when she says that “[t]rustworthiness, transparency, credible authority, lots of high-value content, and just plain old decency are your best weapons” apply to a lot more than the point of sale. I’ve had the argument over and over again, in the context of PR and a variety of marketing communications discussions, about how important it is to build credibility through acknowledging the reader’s reality.

Old school PR pretty much never admitted that anything bad had happened. The whole world can see that the corporate headquarters is being strafed by dragons and the official comment would be something along the lines of “we’re aware of certain operational challenges and expect to have them all sorted out shortly.” That’s if there were any official comment. I used to deal with a large corporate group whose PR motto could have been “no comment.” I couldn’t get them to talk about even the least controversial subjects for an employee newsletter. I joked that you could have replaced the whole PR group with an answering machine. “Hi, you’ve reached the ABC Corporation Public Relations Office. No comment. Thanks for calling.”

The problem with this approach is that you can only communicate if you have credibility, and you have no credibility if you refuse to acknowledge what the audience knows and believes. If they think your service is shoddy and you lead with “we’re committed to outstanding customer service,” you’re either going to get dismissed out of hand or yelled at, and neither is conducive to a strong customer relationship.

So yeah – credibility (which stems from frankness), trustworthiness, transparency and a content base that reflects your belief in an honest conversation, these things are the key to killing off the conversion troll as well as his relatives, many of which lurk around other parts of your business.

Food for thought…

Thanks to Jim Burnett for passing this story along.

From the talented folks at Commoncraft.

Simple, easy, human explanations of all things.

Can your company explain it self better? More simply? Build trust and convert sales?

memento

Attended my 1st Wiki Weds in support of a colleague presenting some slides and a talk on Yammer.

Google Australia supported kindly by supplying a meeting room and with some staff attendance.

Topic was Wikis, how’d you guess?

I am confused though, as my cultural definition of a Wiki is a shared, live knowledge base (note I will get myself into trouble here), with an encylcopeadic bent.

I have ben a big far of Google Docs and Google pages for many years now.

It is interesting to me that these items would be called Wikis now.

Mat Ho talking tech.

When I stumbled across them they were collaborative or live docs.

I just feel that the wiki label has been championed post gratis for me.

I live Google docs, maube I just got to live with it. I might do a wee bit of research when if I get a chance as to who came 1st.

But Wikis or what every they are labelled at this time are cool as hell.

chocolate soya milk only 80c for 200ml

On live, version of a document for example makes an organisations smarter, it is the old, standing on the shoulers of giants.

There needs to be more of it, like from three years ago….come on people get with the program.

I remember seeing the head of Google Enterprise (docs & pages) talking about this stuff 2-3 years ago, back in the day.

Nite.

La posibilidad de dar a conocer material propio a través de la red de redes, y de forma gratuita ha sido, desde el advenimiento de Internet 2.0, un auténtico pellizco de maná para miles de músicos. Desde hacía ya tiempo existían servicios de distribución digital de música no ligada a contratos discográficos, los bien entendidos independientes: ahí estaba (y está, aunque eclipsado) Vitaminic y sus panfletos en los que se animaba a jóvenes artistas a subir sus composiciones para que pudiera darse a conocer. “¿Subir adónde?” nos preguntábamos perplejos allá por el 98… Fueron unos pioneros en esto de la publicación libre de contenidos, y gozó de una discreta atención mediática, habida cuenta del propósito de la gesta (dar a conocer a miles de don nadies) y la por entonces escasa repercusión que en la vida real tenían las ideas gestadas en Internet.

Varios años después, y ya pudiendo disfrutar de anchos de banda razonables a precios honradillos (hasta que los Paco Martínez Soria del cibermundo descubrieron lo que pagaban los demás europeos y japoneses por un servicio infinitamente más rápido), nació el que hoy en día es el monstruo de la autopromoción digital de todo tipo de artistas: Myspace.

La idea es simple, simplemente brillante. Basta grabar cualquier inquietud en tu ordenador, calentito desde tu casa, y publicarlo sin tener que rendir cuentas ante absolutamente nadie. En cuestión de minutos, el mundo entero puede disfrutar de los partos musicales más variopintos. Libertad absoluta, del Chiquigrind a tributos copleros a Chimo Bayo, pasando por virtuosos de guitarras de doble mástil completamente anónimos. Como debe de ser.

A raíz de tan suculenta idea, y acuciados por el hambre de reconocimiento, crítica, o simplemente locos por incordiar, cientos de miles de grupos se han lanzado, directamente o delegando en terceros, al universo de la publicación de bocaditos digitales para, en unos casos, dar a conocer lo que tienen que ofrecer al mundo y, en otros, promocionar sus trabajos ya editados en casas discográficas, de corbata y de chándal.

Grupos de notoriedad internacional no han querido dejar pasar esta oportunidad de promoción patillera y han parido su huequecito en la red. A medida que ha ido adquiriendo popularidad, y en parte merced a una banalización del objetivo del grupo, el número de usuarios ha crecido de forma exponencial. Y digo usuarios, y no sólo artistas, porque han sido legión los que, alentados por la mera popularidad del servicio, han decidido abrir una cuenta “cadáver”, sin contenidos, simplemente para constar en acta. Y no hablo de artistillas, pelagatos musicales o defensores del mal gusto auditivo. No, me refiero a gente, generalmente chavales, aunque no exclusivamente, que han utilizado un servicio inicialmente destinado a músicos y amantes de la música como si de un IRC o un Messenger se tratase.

Y con la saturación del servicio, llega la debacle. Precisamente en el momento de máximo apogeo de un servicio, es cuando quien realmente vela por el cumplirse del propósito original, es decir, dar a conocer música, le da la espalda, o cuando menos busca vías alternativas y, sobre todo, menos trilladas para depositar sus compases.

Sabiamente hay quien ha decidido apartarse de esta pauta borreguera de publicar por publicar y crear espacios donde tenga mayor cabida el sentido común (musical, se entiende) que el yaqueesgratismo. Un grato ejemplo lo constituye esta cabaña de flautistas llamada El Músico en Forma. Ideas claras, objetivos concretos y contenidos sabrosos. Agua fresca para quien, como un servidor, ha superado el umbral de saturación ante la vacua variedad que ofrecen miles de sitios musicales. Pero la senda más ancha sigue siendo la que pisa la mayoría. La que pisotea, en ocasiones.

Hoy en día, para toda una generación, si no estás en Myspace no existes, musicalmente hablando. Y, antojando el parecer de muchos músicos serios (y por serios entiendo gente que se preocupa por su producto y no por dejarse ver sin más, no gente que ha alcanzado un estatus que le permite dedicarse exclusivamente a la música), hay que replantearse el modo de mostrar al mundo tus encantos. ¿Cómo hacerlo?

La red es, y será cada vez más a menos que alguien pare esta locura, el instrumento fundamental en esta época para que el músico de a pie difunda su obra de forma rápida y económica. Y dejémonos de las anécdotas de telediario sobre “aquellos gañanes de Torrelodones que han hecho gira en Japón gracias a Internet” y mitos y verdades sobre la difusión digital.

Tiene que haber un trabajo detrás de todo, el golpe de suerte lo pueden tener tres o cuatro, pero si partimos de la idea de que nos haremos famosos publicando un par de jits y esperando a que algún productor nipón nos vea y al grito de “Vente pa Osaka, Pepe” nos monte en el autobús de la fama y los desayunos jamelgueros en hoteles de postín, apaga y vámonos. En primer lugar, y en segundo, y en tercero, debe haber un estudio, una práctica interminable y una constancia que satisfaga al músico. Art for art’s sake. Y, después, cuando tengamos algo concreto en la mano, lo sacamos a Myspace.

Pero esto ya no basta. Hay muchos artistas noveles (¿cuántas veces tendrán que ver estos ojitos esta palabra mal escrita?) que, siguiendo el razonamiento del productor asiático, se ancla en Myspace y se olvida de que hay todo un mundo más allá, y de que la promoción de un material válido tiene que recorrer diversos senderos hasta encontrar el adecuado. El Músico en Forma puede constituir, como decía, un buen punto de partida (y con toda seguridad más sensato).

Pero para buscarse las castañas, hay que emplear la artillería pesada, si realmente nos importa. Dentro de Internet, publicar en redes P2P, crear una página propia (hay dominios gratuitos, para quien a estas alturas no lo sepa) con contenidos a gusto del consumidor. Y, sobre todo, FUERA DE INTERNET, canal olvidado por algunos pero sin el que ningún tipo de música puede sobrevivir. Bueno, la música de verdad. Los canales clásicos de promoción, si bien más costosos, ya sea en términos de tiempo o de dinero, suelen conseguir que se giren menos cabezas, pero las que lo hacen suelen quedarse más con la copla. Las emisoras de radio locales, las pegadas de carteles y adhesivos por las calles, los artículos en fanzines de papel, la brasa en los bares para que pinchen un CD… todos estos métodos, de probada eficacia, no deben ser desdeñados. Nos sorprendería saber la cantidad de promotores y cazatalentos que no han visitado ni una sola vez una página web. En serio. Llamadlos trogloditas, pero simplemente se rigen por un modelo de negocio que sigue funcionando en muchos frentes.

Tal vez dentro de 10 años alguien relea este artículo y se eche a reír al llegar a la parte en la que afirmo que la música no puede vivir exclusivamente en la red. Pero, hoy por hoy, el canal físico sigue teniendo una importancia decisiva para la distribución en la inmensa mayoría de géneros musicales. Jóvenes, no dejen de lado la oportunidad de darse a conocer más allá de Myspace. Machacar los tímpanos de los transeúntes en un parque, guitarra en ristre, es, a su modo, autopromoción.

Desde ya mismo podéis visitar el Facebook de la tienda de Greenpeace España, esperamos que os guste y participéis. Desde Notodovale nos encargamos de mantenerlo actualizado.

http://www.facebook.com/home.php?ref=home#/pages/La-tienda-de-Greenpeace-Espana/76954323725?ref=nf