Facebook and.....Bing!

Tonight is not going to be normal Friday night. No, instead of heading downtown with the beautiful people and getting my "crunk on", I'll be home at my computer, along with millions of other nerds, waiting to jump on Facebook at exactly midnight to grab my custom Facebook URL. You haven't heard of this? Well, here is the link to the story on the WSJ blog and a link the Facebook blog. There aren't too many Jeff Majkas in the world but I'll be damned if I don't get facebook.com/jeff.majka nailed down...

I'll also be there to grab a URL for my agency's fanpage on Facebook...check it out if you haven't visited lately-- we just uploaded some pictures from Susan G. Komen Walk last weekend!

Hey, what do you know, there is a new search engine in town! Bing! And the initial reviews are in- generally positive- Bing! I checked it out and my initial review is - Bing!- I like it! Here is a link to Bing! and a story about the new search service.

AdAge Likes PR Now

Sometimes being late to the party has its advantages. A grand entrance, perhaps. But arriving just as the party is wrapping up is bad timing. Traditional PR is dying alongside traditional media. A new form of earned media is being born right now- do these guys get it?

Last week, Jonah Bloom wrote an interesting article for AdAge about the new-found acceptance of PR. Apparently, there was a lot of positive comments about PR from Unilever CMO Simon Clift and Union Square Ventures honcho Fred Wilson at the recent Ad Age Digital Conference. The idea here is that social media is raising the importance of PR within the marketing mix

Fred says:

"There are still a lot of marketers out there buying their media when they could earn it, and earn it a lot less expensively," he said today at Ad Age's Digital Conference in New York.

While overall spending on marketing may go up, traditional-media outlays are declining, and spending is growing on the creative and technology necessary to implement social campaigns on Facebook, Twitter and MySpace. Agencies have to find a way to continue to make money in this environment.

"The total amount of money flowing out of marketers' pockets to agencies won't decline and will likely go up, but the mix is headed for important changes," Mr. Wilson said.

He goes on to point out that:

The challenge for marketers and agencies, then, is to engage with social media in an authentic way, and know they are going to be punished by its denizens for any perceived spam.

Which, I think, is missing the point. The problem is earned media in the past was that were was no solid ROI for any dollar spent on PR. Yes, everyone knew that an article in a trade mag or coverage on CNBC would yield awareness and credibility, but no one on earth could track just how that turned into sales and profits.

Simon Clift is the top marketer at one of the largest (if not the) consumer products companies in the world. One of his main points is that (emphasis added by me)

"brands are now becoming conversation factors where academics, celebrities, experts and key opinion formers discuss functional, emotional and, more interestingly, social concerns," and "of course, the conversation is no longer one way or 30 seconds. ... You may want to talk about sport and just doing it, and the consumer raises the uncomfortable question of sweatshops."

That's the whole point! Ongoing one-to-one conversations isn't marketing, it is relationship selling. Selling that has to be credibly earned. That isn't a intrusion. That can be tracked over time. That you can assign a ROI to. The transformation of the PR profession from pitching media to sitting at the intersection of sales, marketing and customer service.

I just don't think either of these three fellows quite gets where we are headed.

The World's Greatest Links...Right After My Brush With A Crazed Swine Flu

I'm just back from a week's vacation in Mexico with my lovely girlfriend and I haven't dropped dead of swine flu yet. Sadly, I'm spending this renewed gift of life weeding through emails in my Outlook inbox, fighting trojans on my home desktop, catching up on the news and trying to re-engage with the world.

BTW, if you get some time to spend in sunny Cabo San Lucas, I highly recommend it. Here is a picture of Medano Beach, the main swimming beach in Cabo. Very nice. Notice the lack of swine flu...

One of the things I really don't like about vacations is coming back and having to go through hundreds of emails. Long ago, I had set up a number of rules on Outlook to manage the flow of emails and route them into various folders, but I ran out of space for new rules which resulted in my main inbox being overrun with spam, newsletters, etc. It took a lot of time to sort through them each day.

Today, on a whim, I created a new rule for the massive amount of emails I get from Twitter now. It worked! Has anyone noticed this? Is this some new upgrade from Microsoft? If so, I'm really happy. I'm going to be creating lots and lots of new rules from now on.

On a sadder note, I returned home to discover than my virus, trojan and spyware protected home computer had become infected with Virtumonde. I, being an experienced, spyware removal expert, spent many hours yesterday scanning, quarantining, deleting and repeating. No luck. Now, my computer has been taken over by the trojan and...get this...locked me out of my own computer. Looks like I'm going to have to do a repair installation of XP. Good times. I liked it better on the beach!

Here are some links I've come across yesterday and today that I've found interesting...

Om Malik shares some interesting stats of the usage of applications across PC, Mac and Internet platforms.

Microsoft has released the private beta of a slick looking emergency social networking thingy called Vine. Brier Dudley calls it Twitter plus Facebook on steroids.

I've read last year than super-hyped Dubai was going to be able to withstand a commercial and residential housing correction, now according to a story in the WSJ, not so much.

Those of us who own and love our PocketPC's tend to get snippy when people talk about how groundbreaking the iPhone is. Yes, the GUI is pretty slick but I've had a 3G touch screen smart phone for years and years now. It's not new. So, while I'm encouraged than Microsoft and Verizon are working together to continue to improve the experience, headlines like these, "Microsoft, Verizon in Talks to Launch iPhone Rival", drive me mad. Talk about burying the lede (emphasis added):

Verizon has performed well despite not having the iPhone. On Monday, the company reported solid first-quarter results in its wireless business, edging out AT&T in net customer additions.

Jeez.

Interview with George Spohn at Satellite 2009

One of the more interesting industries I work with is the satellite industry. Characterized by extremely large upfront capital expenditures, this adjunct to the overall telecommunications field had some hard times caused by overcapacity issues in the early part of the century. Since the onset of the war in Afghanistan, and the military's embrace of the use of civilian bandwidth to support the warfighter, along with the sudden growth in popularity in both satellite radio (XM/Sirius) and satellite TV (DirecTV- note, I am a subscriber to this fine service), the industry has been growing at a healthy solid rate.

Each year, one of the main industry get-togethers is the Satellite show held here in Washington DC. This year, I took a video camera down to the show and interviewed some of the movers and shakers in the industry. One of those leaders was George Spohn, Vice President, North American Sales & Marketing at Thrane & Thrane. Thrane & Thrane is the world´s leading manufacturer of equipment and systems for global mobile communication based on sophisticated satellite and radio technology. I've know George for years. He is one of the smartest people in the satellite industry, and I'm glad I got the chance to pick his brain about the trends he is seeing.



Go to YouTube if you can't view it here.

Were you at the show? What do you think the greatest opportunity is for the satellite industry now? It's greatest challenge?

Social media and government 2.0

There has been a lot of interesting discussions and events recently about the intersection of government, social media and web 2.0. Broadly described as government 2.0 or gov 2.0, there was even a way-cool barcamp like event, Gov2.0 camp last week. Even a traditional government IT event like FOSE was a-buzz with chatter about terms like twitter, conversation, brightkite, etc.

At FOSE, I had the privilege of interviewing two leaders in the field of marketing IT services and products to government customers both directly and through channel partners. I think you'll find their insight invaluable.

First, I sat down with Brian Grainger of SpectraLogic's federal group. Go to YouTube to view the video, if you can't see it here:



Second, I spent some time talking with Ed Bursk. Ed is a long time marketing leader behind the marketing campaigns at KORE Telematics, Nortel Networks, Alcatel/Lucent and other technology companies. Go to YouTube to view the interview, if you can't see it here:



What do you think about Ed and Brian's views of government spending priorities? Will the stimulus money actually hit the streets this year in an impactful way?