Posted by Tattletech on Jun 24, 2009 in
Enterprise 2.0,
Social Networking 
Today on the Emerging Web Memo out of Boston from the E 2.0 Conference, ink Communications Director of Social Media, Alexandra Crabb talked about how she is using social media to engage employees of companies internally. Alexandra is using it to extend the enterprise outward through her marketing campaigns. The article goes on to talk about thinking about Enterprise 2.0 in three new ways: 1. Consider ROI Through Imagining Absence 2. Rethink the “I” for Which You’re Trying to Achieve “R” 3. The Nature of Social Media Implies Return. It’s an all around great article on whats happening with Enterprise 2.0 right now.
Tags: Alexandra Crabb, Enterprise 2.0, ink Communications
This week in a ReadWriteWeb article on the changes of MySpace, the writer Marshall Kirkpatrick said “Facebook can’t rule the world for ever. No one can.” We could not agree more – we believe social networking should represent a free exchange of personal data, contacts, photos, videos and any content the user want to share. Instead of a walled garden, we see a community garden that allows users interact, share, exchange, collaborate, and discuss whatever they want to. This raises a question around social networking in general – is it “platform agnostic” or not? Absent any substantial differences in quality, does it really matter whether you park your online persona at Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, Flickr or any of the dozens (hundreds?) of other sites?
Obviously, we don’t know exactly what the future looks like – if any of our readers do, please e-mail us! But we do think that the future of social networking is not going to be about the providers/platforms per se, but about the larger community and how providers facilitate user interaction. Open standards or open social may be at the bedrock of this future networking, going hand in hand with the augmented reality demonstrated by LBS. Just a quick glance in the direction of Egypt in the past year or two, and more recently Iran, shows exactly what we are talking about: its back to the old saying that its the message (real time interaction) that counts, not the media (Facebook, Twitter, et al). – JLH
Tags: Facebook, Marshall Kirkpatrick, MySpace, Social network
If you haven’t figured it out already, there are some entrepreneurs that are memorable and some that are not. This one you can’t forget even if you try – Ari Wegter, one of the Co Founders of LoveFilm, the European online DVD distributor like NetFlix but with a better name; and now one of the Co Founder’s of GlibHippo, a new vertical for 18-34 year old males in the Net Generation. Caught up with Ari in his restaurant in Copenhagen – and we warn you, it’s raw and uncensored, like we like him!
Tattletech: Your site says “We Speak European”. I like that – how does it inform your everyday business practices?
Ari Wegter: GlibHippo is an opportunistic play – After years of doing start-ups with capital intensive, bleeding edge technology, I wanted to do something different, something simple that made money from day-one. So I decided to exploit the inherent inefficiencies of today’s online advertising market in which buyers and sellers are both clueless and disconnected. This venture is conceived of as a luxury guide product, a kind of bespoke digital navigator for Alexa 1000 customers. In other words, GlibHippo caters to blue chip publishers and advertisers, connecting them via GlibHippo’s propietary trading platform. Here’s how it works: we buy web traffic internationally, re-package that traffic by vertical media category, e.g. video games, movies or music audiences, and sell it to European advertisers. Since many of our upstream customers are American – who labor under the illusion that the EU is a coherent single market with a common language – we arrived at the tag line “We Speak European”. Just a dash of Monty Pythonesque humor to denote that we are a vintage European internet company.
TT: It sounds like your target audience is 18-34 year old males. Doesn’t that exclude a lot of potential users?
AW: Yes, it does – if you consider a global audience of 250 million users to be a limitation to our reach. GlibHippo specializes in media categories that correspond closely with our publishing network’s core user profile, namely young, tech savvy, digital entertainment-hungry males with disposable income to boot. We understand the behavior of this premium segment because we belong to it ourselves.
TT: Social networking is being cited as the cornerstone for the marketing efforts of more and more companies lately. What kind of sustained or increased growth do you see in social networking, and in what directions?
AW: Social networking as a marketing tool is underused and overrated. The more intrusive facebook becomes in my private space, the less likely it is users will want to return there. Also, social networking traffic is cheap. Traditional online advertising is no different from above-the-line content in that it works in best in semi-public spheres. Only when the message becomes more sophisticated can we expect to see internet user tolerance grow beyond the remote-control response adopted from skipping TV-ads. I believe marketing trends will shift gradually from advertisers preferring major portal channels towards highly targeted niche (i.e. vertical content) social network sites. Eventually, analog channels will be entirely displaced by online / mobile marketing worldwide. And then, whoever owns the pipes controls the flow. And no – content is not king, liquidity is king.
TT: You must have some gamers on staff – what do you guys enjoy playing most, what are some of your new favorites?
AW: That is true! We dig games and gadgets. Between the GlibHippo founders we cover all platforms from console to PC. So Josh is a Call of Duty veteran who “gits some” every day on XBox Live. Søren is a real guitar hero. Maik,our German Sales Director, loves Killerspiele and has developed impressive chainsaw skills on Gears of War. I prefer racing and simulation games with any type of hardware.
TT: How has your success with Lovefilm dovetailed with the development and growth of GlibHippo?
AW: I lost my virginity as an entrepreneur at Lovefilm. As Europe’s largest digital entertainment site today with more the 1.1 millions active users, Lovefilm showed us how hard it is to reach your target audience on the web. Controlling your cost-per-acquisition of new customers is the key to sustainable growth, particularly in a cash-constrained environment. GlibHippo helps advertisers to achieve this goal while connecting them to the right publishers. The next step for us is to build a full-fledged exchange platform.
TT: As the recent economic downturn has dragged on, inventory management and control have become more crucial than ever. Do you have any indication from your partners and publishers that this has started to relent?
AW: Signals are weak, so no real indication yet. Traffic sales are down, inventory prices are depressed and advertisers are still in cost-cutting mode. It’s a bear market out there with little change is sight til Q4 this year.
TT: Word on the street is that Ari Gold is your hero, any others out there?
AW: Want to hug it out bitch? I admit: Ari Gold is my alter-ego. Jeremy Piven has gotten the break he deserves with this role, from playing the perennial best-friend to leading man in Entourage. His abrasive, hyper-American management style is everything Europeans loathe and fear about the land of the free. I find that amusing. Gold is a post-modern superhero, a flawed human specimen endowed with mythical powers of persuasion and greed. Pretty easy to identify with, just like my other HBO favorite Tony Soprano. I think Ari Gold will give Obama a run for his money as Republican nominee in 2012!
Tags: Advertising, Lovefilm, online advertising
We just stumbled on JuiceCaster while doing some research on a story on location based geo tagging (we think this is the space to watch) and now are distracted. Why? Well first the name is just plain cool. Second, their value proposition is simple and does what we should be doing with content from our mobile, geo tagging without having to think to add a geo tag. It’s automatic.
Fierce Wireless reports that JuiceCaster provides one-touch, real-time sharing of pictures and videos directly from a camera phone to many social-networking and blogging sites. JuiceCaster is about keeping people constantly connected to their online communities/social networks. The beautiful thing is that because all pictures and videos are geotagged, users can look for content based on specific location criteria. Isn’t this is what having a mobile is all about – we are on the go, we take a photo and it should be tagged from the spot where were took the photo. It should easily flow to our social networks and better yet, it should pop up on map that not only shows me where my friends are but where that content was taken or where other geo content resides. I want one big snapshot of my content and my social networks. Better yet, give me a real life screenshot of my social network and content. Seeing this already with the visual social network platform IRLConnect where you can now see geo tagged live mobile video broadcasts (via Bambuser), mobile video and photos (via MobyPicture) and all your social networks on a map. Yup, that’s what I want, a screenshot of my life. - JLH
Tags: Bambuser, Geo tagging, IRL Connect, JuiceCaster, Mobile content, MobyPicture, Online Communities, Social network
Nimbuzz, the super fly mobile social messenger, just brought in a new CMO, Neal Fullman. Neal has chops. He is the former International Communications director at fring and is in charge of brand development, marketing and communications strategy for the ever expanding Nimbuzz.
It’s like someone added MiracleGrow to Nimbuzz and they are seeing unprecendeted growth with more than 25,000 new users joining every day. Plus, some very strategic global distribution deals which are not yet announced. (more on that later). – JLH
Tags: Neal Fullman, Nimbuzz
Lot’s of talk out there about location and how to reach users with advertising. Proximity based, location based and now zonal markting takes center stage. As the location based services market continues to evolve day by day, we see constant shifts as both mobile operators, mobile applications and web based location based services struggle to find the heady mix that captures what is at stake: money.
Zonal marketing is different. In this recent article we read about Vodfone’s new zonal marketing campaign launching in Czech Republic and Germany, oddly early adopters for this type of advertising. Instead of traditional location-based services which essentially identifies the current location of the user (s) to process location-dependent information, zonal marketing, according to the article states that “people on your friends list are automatically logged into a zone as soon as they enter it. A zone-based service doesn’t first have to locate your friends for you because in theory it already knows where they all are.”
The article also goes on to say that the technical differences between normal and zonal LBS may be subtle and highly technical. And the big kicker is this — zone-based technology promises to make location-based services and advertising slicker. Does slicker mean more targeted? In a recent Read Write Web article, users have indicated that they are willing to accept ads if they are targeted to their very specific interests and current location. So there is hope, but this would mean that the whole system has to change – that the mobile/advertising/location ecosystem has to get to know their users and where they are, what they are doing when they get there and what is around them. It’s a whole new world out thre and the user will decide what they want in to enter their world, not the advertiser. -- JLH
Tags: Location-based service, Zonal Marketing
Today on the Emerging Web Memo out of Boston from the E 2.0 Conference, ink Communications Director of Social Media, Alexandra Crabb talked about how she is using social media to engage employees of companies internally. Alexandra is using it to extend the enterprise outward through her marketing campaigns. The article goes on to talk about thinking about Enterprise 2.0 in three new ways: 1. Consider ROI Through Imagining Absence 2. Rethink the “I” for Which You’re Trying to Achieve “R” 3. The Nature of Social Media Implies Return. It’s an all around great article on whats happening with Enterprise 2.0 right now.![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=721b77c5-ec5f-4e8a-956a-9da8342df19f)
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=cbd384ab-edee-48ac-b071-28fb8a9ce72e)
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=33219bba-5a3e-456d-87df-0f606f22aedf)
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=c87b156a-2e3e-4d47-ae8f-00ede1404d89)
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=4841b1b1-6540-4e0b-8b7a-ff5fea0137a7)
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=4382cea1-5cf4-4895-8493-d0919edcfafa)
