Author Archives: ciaoenrico

Google adds Snippets to Google Maps

Posted on September 14, 2011 | Leave a comment

I know I already posted about how I wouldn’t post about social media anymore. But I changed my mind. I’m just going to post about what interests me, if it happens to, because frankly I’m not making any money off of this blog anyway. I may as well enjoy myself.

That having been said, I’m going back to one of my favorite subjects today, Google. That is because today Google announced they are adding Snippets – or, “+Snippets, if we are to start correctly employing their attempt at owning addition – to Google Maps.

All you have to do is click on the “Share” button in your G+ toolbar when you’re on a map, and you get a number of options for storing or sending.

Now, if you’ve been wondering why Google Plus would have as much potential as Facebook in the social network arena, this is why.

You see, you probably already use Google Maps anyway. It’s likely you already use Google Search, Gmail and YouTube, right? So you’re reminded that there’s functionality you’re missing out on when you go to these things and don’t have a G+ account of your own.

We’re maybe another two or three years away from Google taking over creating the phone book. The nice thing is, before you call someone, you’ll be able to read their profile, look at satellite images of where they live, get reviews of them from co-workers, read where they like to eat…

Slowly but surely, Google is creating a stalker’s paradise, where no one will have privacy or be protected. Who else is looking forward to all those home invasions?

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Posted in Geosocial Media, Online Tools

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Great YouTube Ad from Samsung

Posted on August 31, 2011 | Leave a comment

Here’s a great ad for the Samsung Galaxy S II. It’s great because it gets a lot of things done, quickly.

First, they manage to be offensive. That’s a good thing, because invariably you’ll get people who are easily offended to talk about it, and probably share it around. The end result of hysterical people is usually increased awareness – I’m sure Eminem sold a LOT more albums after all those Christians tried boycotting him in the early 00s.

Think the agency that created this isn’t aware of that? They have a paid placement for this video on YouTube, showing the frame with Jesus on a unicycle. It’s brilliant idiot baiting. Because this isn’t an American product yet – they are pushing it in the American market to let us know it’s coming. What better way to get some easy word-of-mouth than to get bunched up Americans bemoaning their ad?

More importantly, the offensiveness has a place in the ad. It isn’t just shocking for the sake of shocking, but works to show the clarity of their screen (even if it does look a little simulated) and at times creates a metaphor for what they want to say, like the Russian dancer “kicking ass.” We’ve had shock for the sake of shock so long, it’s no longer shocking. People actually demand a good reason for the shock given, or else they write it off as what it usually is – cynical pandering.

That isn’t what was done here, and I appreciate it. This moves fast, has a concept, and doesn’t trip over itself trying to be funny at the expense of their core message: “Our mobile product does a lot of stuff well, and looks neat.”

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Posted in Advertising, Interactive Marketing

I’m Done with Social Media – Sort of

Posted on August 29, 2011 | 1 Comment

I’ve decided to stop posting about social media on this site. I obviously have nothing against social media itself, as I’ve crowed about it for years on this blog. Instead, I’m going to start posting more about marketing and advertising – the things you might want to know about once you have mastered all this new media.

Four years ago I started blogging for the advertising agency I worked for. They had two blogs – one for the agency proper, and one for the Interactive house. I was writing most of the posts, covering what was happening in Internet news and new media, but also in marketing, advertising, PR and traditional media.

When they told me to learn everything about what people were calling “social bookmarking,” that became a hot topic for both of our blogs. Our readers were hungry for information on the heretofore unheard of Twitter, MySpace, SecondLife… things that showed everyone the future was in progress.

That is no longer a problem, though. Just about anyone can get 1000 followers on Twitter, and once they do they usually use that as proof that they’re experts. There are so many bloggers writing about some arcane Facebook trick, there isn’t much of anything you can’t learn about Facebook with a quick Google search. And the number of stories telling you how you need a mobile app and QR code are legion.

However, there’s hardly anyone talking about communications, messaging, and how social media should be used to help your business. I see a lot of people showing their prowess at getting Likes and retweets and now +1, but then they fall short on how to turn these people into customers. It does not matter how neat all this new technology is if you can’t turn online fans into customers.

So there may still be some posts in the future about social, but from now on it will only be in the context of what you should say. I’ll also continue to post commercials I think do a good job of core messaging, and campaigns that work.

I think this is far more important than tips and tricks, and certainly a lot more enjoyable for me to write about.

Because if I have to write another post about how QR codes don’t work or how to get more Twitter followers, I’m going to pound nails into the floor with my forehead.

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Posted in Advertising, Blogging, Marketing

What’s Wrong with Blackberry

Posted on August 21, 2011 | Leave a comment

Years ago, Cadillac was the premier car on the road. It’s the reason some people still say something unrelated, “is the Cadillac of” whatever they’re talking about.

Then the Lexus and the Infinity started stealing their thunder. Cadillac’s response was to pretend they weren’t losing their dominance as the luxury car to own, and just kept doing what they’d always done: Turned out expensive, roomy cars with poor gas mileage. And of course, they got stomped.

Cadillac only really started to turn things around when they came out with the Esplanade. Gargantuan SUVs were in, and if there’s one thing Caddy knows how to make, it is oversized cars. And by 2005, you just weren’t anyone unless the Cadillac Esplanade is what you drove to the Source Awards.

Now, in the story above:

  • Replace Lexus with iPhone
  • Replace Infinity with Android
  • Replace Cadillac with Blackberry

Blackberry was also the phone of choice for people who wanted to do more than just talk. When you saw someone with that huge keyboard, you knew they either had a lot going on or an employer willing to get them a phone. It got e-mail, which was a magical concept just 5 years ago, and you could actually type out messages without having to press the 7 four times, then the 4 two times, then the 4 again three times, then the 8 once… because QWERTY keyboards were too cool to be believed.

Then the iPhone and Android phones came out, and the market changed completely.

What was the response of Research in Motion, makers of the Blackberry? They continue to turn out various versions of the same phone. The Curve and the Bold and the Torch have different features, but are essentially the same OS with the same keyboard. (Though the Torch has a touch screen that’s larger than the standard Blackberry, in a lackluster attempt to be iPhone-ish.)

If Blackberry wants their Esplanade, what they really need is a real update to their operating system, better support for third party developers, and prices that make sense for what they sell.

As a Blackberry owner, I do like it. The keyboard is still comfortable, and makes texting one-handed simple. The voice commands work brilliantly – far better than anything else on the market. Blackberry Messenger is still a free alternative to texting – if you know someone else who has a Blackberry, of course.

If RIM can’t figure out how to compete, they need to play to these strengths better. If they can’t do that, maybe they just need to get bought by someone who can. Surely Facebook is considering their options for getting into the mobile market. Buying up the once great house of Blackberry would certainly make the creation of an Official Facebook Phone a lot easier for them to do.

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Posted in Mobile Phone Technology

Tagged , , ,

Why I trust designers

Posted on August 2, 2011 | 2 Comments

My first marketing job was with a website in the pre-dot-bomb era. Back then there was little in the way of reliable analytics, SEO was  as easy as stuffing keywords, and everyone was advertising with banners. Lots and lots of banners.

My boss at the time, whose previous experience was solely in print, fancied himself a designer. As such, it was my misfortune to have to be his go-between with the design department. Whenever they would create a graphic, page or banner ad, he would have me deliver notes about cropping it in some slight way, or making some adjustment to the font. While he would never admit it, he did this so he could put his “stamp” on the work being done.

The worst was the day he actually sent me to them to say, “this banner needs to be more blue.” I remember blinking a couple of times at that, not sure even he would say something so dumb.

“More blue?”

“Yes.”

“There’s something wrong with the particular shade of blue?”

“It needs to be more bluer.”

Yes – he actually said, “more bluer.” It makes me think of this scene from, “Amadeus”:

An idiot trying to give criticism for the sake of giving criticism.

The Lead Designer went crazy when I passed this along, and rightfully so. I calmed him, telling him that yes, my boss was an idiot, and no, I don’t know what the hell that means either. I think this is why I had the job of talking to the Design Team – they respected me, even if it was impossible to respect him.

The point of this story is that marketers cannot second guess designers. When a design is run on a page, marketers can look at the resulting traffic, bounce rates, conversions, etc. to back up an argument that some design choice doesn’t work, especially if it has been run against some other choice in an A/B test. Making such calls based on our intuition and taste, however, is silly.

The designers working for you know what they’re doing. It’s likely they’ve done this for some time. They know what works and what doesn’t, because they’ve seen it work and not work before. Their gut call is worth more than a marketer’s gut call, because they have actually done this work in the past.

The reason people who aren’t designers tell designers how to do their job is they think it’s an aesthetic choice. They may like a font or color for any number of reasons that have nothing to do with sound design. In my experience, when testing what the designer came up with against what the non-designer wanted, the designer’s version always performed better. When you’ve done something long enough, you just know what works.

So if you have trusted designers to do a job, let them do that job. If you know better than them, you should be doing the work yourself. If you can’t, you need to unclench and trust their ability.

And if you really want something, “more bluer,” come prepared with the hexidecimal code for the shade of blue you want.

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Posted in Interactive Marketing

Why Social Media is bad for Blogging

Posted on July 29, 2011 | Leave a comment

Don’t get me wrong – social media is great for promoting blog posts. And given how many posts are written about social media these days, there wouldn’t be much to write about without Facebook and Twitter and G+ and everyone’s ideas of what constitutes “important” with all these sites.

The problem is with there being so many ways to share something simply, a blogger can loose steam. If every interesting thought you have is pushed out in less than 140 characters, you aren’t going to put in the work to spell it out in a full post.

The same is true of personal blogs. Why write out 300 words of why your day is going great if you can just make a quick quip, and attach a funny picture you found?

As I see it, part of the problem is everyone feels a responsibility to be entertaining. It’s high school all over again, where we want to be popular by posting the kind of things that get reshared and retweeted and get us more followers.

I’ve definitely fallen into this trap – especially now that Google Plus is on the scene. That is the point of social media, of course. It isn’t for broadcasting long ideas, but socializing. If you’re using all of your best ideas just socializing, though, you don’t have anything left to blog about.

So if you’re trying to blog, cut down on the fun time with friends and research a topic, or share an opinion with explanations of why you’re right.

That’s what I’m going to start doing anyway.

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Posted in Uncategorized

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Why we love Google, Apple and Facebook

Posted on July 19, 2011 | Leave a comment

I didn’t get enough sleep last night – so this morning I woke up so stupid-dumb tired I could barely function. When you’re in a mood like that, you want things to be simple, and just work, so you don’t have to think.

Hence the title of this post. The reason we are so enamored of these three mega-companies of the 3.0 age is that they offer a kind of Orwellian-socialist simplicity: The stuff always works, is always simple, and is always there.

Yes, there are a lot of other designs or tools that could work better. It’s the utilitarian ease behind Google Search, Facebook, or the Apple interface on anything that keeps us coming back.

Consider Facebook – why do we all keep coming back to a site with questionable privacy policies and no content of their own? Because it’s easy. If all of our friends are there, and nothing is ever too terribly broken (like Twitter is with that damn Failwhale,) we’ll keep coming back to it. Facebook doesn’t actually do anything except create a stage where our friends can entertain us, and we can entertain our friends. (Or game companies can entertain us with town and mob simulators, but that’s another story.)

Google was just another search engine, but with more believable results. Otherwise, the concept of search results is universally loved. “I ask it a question, I get an answer, I go on about my business.” It’s the reason Yahoo! and AOL before it were just as beloved: A simple service that let people use it and move on.

So many developers today think they need to reinvent the wheel to get the public’s attention, and have the next can’t-live-without-it product offering. It would be great if someone could figure out a need we have but aren’t aware isn’t being fulfilled: Search engines did that too, as did Wikipedia, e-mail, SMS/instant messaging… things we didn’t know we needed, but now that we have them can’t live without.

Apple did the same thing with personal computers instead of information retrieval or communications. I’ve used PCs all of my life, so you’d better believe I understand the appeal of Apple: Their stuff always works, all of the time. It’s easy to use and always looks pretty. PCs don’t work that way. PCs break, they’re usually poorly designed, there’s no consistency from one machine to the other, all of the really great viruses are written for PCs….

And don’t get me started on mobile! That iPhone is so easy to use, you have to wonder why all mobile interfaces aren’t required by law to mimic it.

Apple’s appeal is readily apparent to those of us who use PCs and wish they would just Goddamn work. If they managed to bring their price down to something approaching reasonable, I’d probably own one – but that is neither here nor there.

This is for the website and app developers: If you really want to innovate, innovate a simple solution that lets us get what we need and move on. All of the big, high concepts aren’t what we need. We need simple. We need something we can still use even when we’re horribly sleep deprived. We need something that makes our lives easier.

That’s how the big boys roll, because that’s all we really want.

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Posted in Facebook, Internet Technology

Google vs. Facebook? No. Google vs. Bing

Posted on July 7, 2011 | 4 Comments

We love the horse race in America. Whenever there are two choices that even appear to be in competition, we choose sides. Such is the case this week, now that Google has unleashed what everyone (except Google) is calling a Facebook killer, Google+.

In this case, picking a favorite to “win” isn’t really the point.

There isn’t any point (read as: money) in Google killing Facebook. Google makes their money from their search network. Facebook makes their money from… well, no one’s quite sure of that yet… maybe venture capital sources that don’t ask too many questions?

Anyway, the most likely point of Google+ is to keep people on Google, performing their searches on Google, which include their paid search ads, which makes Google money. If people continue to search with Google, they aren’t doing it somewhere else.

So Google+ isn’t about beating Facebook, but beating the Bing/Yahoo junta.

Google has been the absolute leader in search for years because they developed a better search algorithm than what already existed. This meant better search results, and a better product.

The methodology they created is now used by sites like Bing and Yahoo, and to many the variations in results between the three aren’t important. If that were to continue, Google might not be able to prove that they are better than their search rivals.

Enter Google+, something that will keep people close to their search product. They could actually trump Facebook with this. Personally,  I doubt it’s really their goal.

Can Facebook and Google+ both be popular at the same time? As long as Google+ members find their way to ads via their Adwords program, I don’t see how Google could possibly care.

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Posted in Facebook, Search, Social Networking

Tagged , ,

Google+

Posted on June 29, 2011 | 3 Comments

I got my invite for Google+ tonight. So far so good – it has some great features, but there’s one problem: No one is on it!

So with little to review off the bat, these are just some of my thoughts on Google’s new social site off the top of my head:

Google+ is in that persnickety “Invite Only” mode, like back when they debuted Gmail. Of course, I could use Gmail to get in touch with anyone. Here, I have to add my contacts to Circles – collections of friends – and hope they see this in their e-mail, join, then (I suppose) add me back so we can chat.

So like Facebook, there’s no public chatting area – everything revolves around your existing contacts. In fact, there are a lot of things about this that are very Facebook, but I don’t blame them for that. Wave was original and brilliant, but no one used it. If people don’t respond to original, by all means steal what has worked in the past.

Something I like off the bat with this that isn’t on Facebook is the ability to create chat groups that use webcams called Hangouts. I don’t know how willing most people will be to use their webcam, since so few people are as unabashedly into their good looks as I am. It’s definitely a good feature though, and I can’t wait for someone I know to join in with me already! One thing is for sure, though: Free web cams, on a social media site, means there is going to be a lot of porn on Google+ before long, unless there are some seriously draconian terms and conditions in place.

It uses Picasa for the photo album, which I suppose means I’ll need to start actually using Picasa. It also uses Gtalk for IMs, which I like, because I’ve been using that forever. (It has been kicking the ass off of Yahoo! Messenger since it first arrived.) I expect all of Google’s purchased properties will turn up here eventualy – and maybe even their failed concepts, like Buzz and Wave.

Also, that +1 feature is, as you’d expect, all over this site. It’s their version of +1. Another Facebook rip-off? Maybe. But remember, Facebook ripped off Likes from Friendfeed – and they didn’t even bother to use a different word.

Anyway, it’s just the first night, so it’s hard to judge Google+ just yet. I have high hopes, though – I’ve been a Google fanboy for years, and I’m praying something can finally kill Facebook.

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Posted in Social Media, Social Networking

You Can’t Block Facebook Questions

Posted on June 25, 2011 | Leave a comment

In case you were hoping for a way to block Facebook Questions from your account, you can’t – thanks to the typical enthusiasm for the ideas they’ve chosen to steal all by themselves, Facebook won’t allow you out.

block facebook questions

Facebook Questions

Facebook Questions, if you haven’t already used it, is a simple way of polling your friends. It’s a good idea actually, one that several thrid-party developers had already created, and millions of others had been using.

The problem was, as is the case with most third-party Facebook apps, you had to give it permissions to access your profile. Many people weren’t comfortable with this. So when Facebook created its own feature, it effectively killed using any of these third-party solutions.

The one real benefit of a polling app not made by Facebook is that you can block it if you want to. If you’d rather not receive them on your Facebook Wall, or have them sent to you, you are out of luck. Facebook considers Questions as integral to their experience as Photos or Events.

The big difference being I can prevent individual friends from sending me Events. They can be blocked easily enough in my privacy settings. Not so with Questions. The only solution for keeping someone from sending you a Question is to unfollow them.

One thing you can do keep these notifications from being e-mailed to you:

  1. Go to your Account Settings.
  2. Click on the “Notifications” tab.
  3. About halfway down the page, you’ll see the notification settings for Questions. Start unchecking boxes!

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Posted in Uncategorized