I thought I would fire up a quick post on the anticipation of the show and then follow this up over the weekend to see how the actual experience matched. I missed out last year so I’m expecting things to have changed a tad in the time I’ve been away. After all we do work in the fastest moving industry-type there is, don’t we?

The blurb says there’s “Over 300 solution providers and 12,000 visitors, combining five shows in one event, Internet World is the event for digital marketing and online business!”

All very well and good. But as we all know, the fact that suppliers are paying a hefty fee to exhibit at the earls court venue, means we attend these shows armed with the knowledge we are about to be pitched to harder than if we were Peter Jones.

That said some very good contacts can be found. This year I’m especially interested in mobile advertising having launched a new app for the company I work for. I’m also interested in any search providers who can offer up something a little different in terms of trending, profiling and customisation of the end user experience.

The main reason to attend however, is the keynotes. This year Internet world have certainly pulled in some big guns, so it’s worth having a look at a few.

Keynotes:

Brian Mc Bride, UK Managing Director of Amazon’s will be talking about their many successes!
This will certainly be of interest. I’m a loyal amazon customer and have always been impressed with their innovations over the years. They always seem to approach web design and development from the customer angle and as a result have never over complicated things. I’m also an amazon associate, so it will be interesting to see if anything on affiliate marketing is covered.

Semir Mahjoub, President of Ericsson Mobile Services at Ericsson is appearing, so I’m wondering if anything will be mentioned of the recent joint ventures with Microsoft. Something of which I have blogged about in the past.

Rick Kelley , Director for Inside Sales EMEA at Facebook will be presenting. He helps oversee expanding advertising efforts with an emphasis on emerging brands. While I would always look forward to hearing from anyone at Facebook, it’s just a question if will this be a sales pitch?
If I see a live ad published with real-time stats being displayed on click-throughs, I’ll be tempted to walk out. I saw that 2 years ago.

Two more possible sales pitches may come in the form of James Kent, Analytics Research Specialist at Google who measures the impact of display advertising and
Amanda Rosenberg, Business Development Manager at Google who works specifically with mobile ads. As mentioned I am interested in how mobile advertising is developing so I’m hoping this produces some useful insight and isn’t just a pitch for more business.

The one keynote that i am disappointed I wont be able to attend is that from Laurence Bret-Stern, Marketing Director EMEA at LinkedIn. Laurence covered Social Media and the Talent Economy. I’m a real advocate of LinkedIn and believe while many social platforms may come and go, LinkedIn will continue to grow. I just hope the presentation will be made available.

Anyway, here’s hoping it will be a good show!

I found myself in John Lewis at the weekend while looking for a digital camera when something caught my eye (as well as my ears!). It was a family cooing over a Sony 3D TV set up which was in the form of a mock-up front room. John Lewis had done well setting up a nice sofa, 46″ Sony 3D TV and surround sound, it was easy to see why the family were initially impressed.

The first thing that struck me was the kids arguing over who had the pleasure of looking stupid by wearing a very large pair of 3D glasses, the second was how the father took charge, said “just wait your turn” then donned the glasses himself and the final thing was how disappointed he looked when he handed over the glasses to the first child.

The previous week I had been at the Sea Life Centre in Birmingham where I had the pleasure of sitting in a small cinema for 4mins while we watched “The voyage of the turtle”. This was in 3D, but also had water that sprayed out the back of the chair in front, rumble pads in the chairs and wind pipes in the head-rest. It was a really good experience, the 3D was excellent and the extra 4D touches really impressed me. That said, 4mins was long enough for me.

Once the family in John Lewis had finished I thought I would give it a go. The experience was so far removed from that I had just one week earlier I had to question why on earth anyone would spend an awful lot of money to look stupid in their front rooms and enjoy an adequate experience.

Then in dawned on me. It would be because they have been to a cinema, watched Avatar 3D or Toy Story 3 3D and wanted to experience this at home. Well I’m sorry, but no chance.

Sony, Phillips, Samsung, LG and countless others are ploughing a lot of money into this market and I for one think they are wasting their time. 3D may be a good experience, but it has to be on the big screen in an environment removed from usual everyday life with surround sound and popcorn. At home I’ll be sticking to my plasma screen while only being frustrated i can’t find my remote never mind my special glasses as well. 3D… Keep it in the cinema.

I blog. As you can tell from the fact you’re reading this – I blog. Therefore I have something to say. It may not be interesting to everyone, but I’m sure there are many that would find it a good read.

My point is that there are millions on facebook updating status’s or on Twitter… tweeting, when they really haven’t got that much to say. But those same people have 1000’s of friends (or fans if they have a group/fan page), or have thousands of followers, even though they just re-tweet or post the same post automatically through a third-party api which merges keywords together works a bit of black magic then automatically follows 500 people. Point is, all these people are creating a following when they really have little to say.

I’ll admit, it’s not always the case. There are some that put in the work. Publish original content – that’s actually interesting – and deserve to be followed. But for every single one of these people, it seems like there is a hundred that’s playing the system in some way.

I want to see if it’s possible to gain real twitter followers that are actually interested in what I have to say.
To do this I’m starting from a certain point, setting a certain goal with certain commitments and measuring exactly what happens.

• The date (as the observant amongst you would have seen from the top of this post) is 22/07/2010
• My Twitter account is http://twitter.com/nessasmith
• I have 83 follwers,
• I’m following 53 people,
• I’ve tweeted 38 times,
• …and I’m listed in 7 lists.

This is by all circumstances a pretty average twitter account.

My mission is to generate a thousand real twitter followers in 3 months.

The guidelines

• No use of any third party APIs that automatically follow, automatically purge, automatically tweet, automatically boot up my computer – logon to twitter and send out tweets!
• No re-tweeting irrelevant content
• I can blog about whatever I like
• I can tweet about my blogs
• I can tweet about content related to my blogs
• I start today
• I publish a twitter follower count on October 22nd 2010 (hopefully 1083+)

That’s it – let’s see how it goes!

I came across Widgetbox when I was looking into developing a Facebook widget I had an idea for. As with most bloggers I want as many people as possible reading my posts, so I look into every avenue of marketing my website. The social network boom has made this an obvious place to look, with every person having so many friends viral marketing has never been able to spread so fast.

For my Facebook application I delved into FBML and already had knowledge of php so was able to develop my widget in about a week. However when I came across Widgetbox it looked on the surface like I could have saved time simply registering and going through their wizard.

That wasn’t quite the case although the features it does support are still quite impressive.
With php and mysql you can obviously create a far superior application than what is basically possible on Widgetbox. But it does let you interface with Flash and Javascript so there is scope to make a decent application.
As it interacts with Flash there are already loads of games that have been made into Widgets.

However the quickest and easiest way of creating a widget is by first creating a Blidget. This is a Widget of your Blog.
Widgetbox guides you through the process seamlessly, even loading Facebook within a frame to enable you to set up the necessary parameters.
You can then promote your new widget through Facebook, through a blidget promo badge you post on your website or on other social networking sites such as MySpace or Bebo.

You see, even though I’ve banged on about facebook, Widgetbox supports the OpenSocial container as well. Although Facebook is not developed on the OpenSocial platform and is at the moment the most used platform, OpenSocial is Googles attempt at standardising social networking… and I wouldn’t bet against Google winning in the long run, would you?

So all in all Widgetbox is a great tool for developing a widget to promote your blog really easily.
Infact you can install my Widget to have a look at what it’s like by clicking on the “Get My Widget for your site” on the left hand side of this page.

It looks like this…

I’ve only touched the surface of what Widgetbox can offer, but I can see that it will help loads of people out there spread their hard work to a far reaching audience. ]]> http://www.neilsmithdesigns.co.uk/blog/2008/12/use-widgetbox-to-promote-your-blog/feed/ 1