Many will therefore decide to use an agency. Which is fine. But when using an agency it’s important you are giving them direction to make sure they are spending their time – which equals your money, on the most productive areas.

Many sole-traders however, will not consider an agency for online activity if they have a bit of knowledge of how things work online. They have used the Internet before, searched on google, have their own facebook page and even dabble with internet banking so how hard can marketing their website be?

Therefore I wasn’t surprised that after I had given some SEO and PPC advice which would keep a marketing team happy for a good few weeks, he asked the inevitable next question…

“OK, that’s good – What else could he do?”

Armed with the fact there was little budget, I took a deep breath and started talking social media marketing. Viral videos, Facebook business pages, Twitter profiles, status updates, Digg it, Like this, Buzz that, Tweet the other… It was all in there. I looked at his face and he didn’t have to say a word, “How the f*** are you suppose to do all that” was written all over it.

That’s when it struck me that an awful lot of companies, not just one man bands, will be trying to cover everything in a blind panic that if they don’t they are missing out. I’m not going to argue that the media multiplier effect works. But is it the best use of the marketing coffers to spread it over all forms of media?

The answer is of course simple. Yes… If it works! No… If it doesn’t.

Social media is just that – media, just the same as the telephone, carrier pigeon, postal service or smoke signals! And in turn needs to be measure and quantified in exactly the same way as any other marketing channel (although, good luck measuring the impact of smoke signals!). It may be new(ish) and exciting but it hasn’t necessarily made the revolutionary changes everyone seems to attribute to it.

It boils down to spending the time you have most productively. Which can only be understood through measurement of your activities.

Many people attribute social media with Barrack Obama being in power today. I don’t.
If the massively impressive PR train that was employed for Obama wasn’t using social media they would have been using other channels. Who knows which would have been most effective?
There are too many variables in this case to truly understand if social media had the impact many say it did.

If we look back to a time before social media there have been figures that have changed the world quite easily without one single tweet or status update.  I’m sure Martin Luther King would have had a Facebook page during the Civil Rights era if it had been around. That wouldn’t have meant Facebook caused social change.  It appears the founders of social networking sites would have us believe they have invented a media channel that is far superior to anything we have experienced before.  And this is the reason it is capable of such great things.  I believe it’s simply these now multi-millionaires are simply shouting louder than inventors of the past.  Just think how many important decisions have been made over the humble telephone.  Yet I don’t hear anyone attributing wars that have been won, disasters that have been averted and lives that have been saved to the humble dog-n-bone, do you?

Social media marketing is a worthwhile channel, but only by measuring its impact when compared to other forms of media can you know if this is the channel you should be investing your valuable time in.

This is why the single most important piece of advice I gave my associate was to install Google Analytics.  Unfortunately I suspect it is the one piece of advice he may act upon but never follow up.  To delve into Google analytics and use it to ensure you are choosing the best suited media to your campaign takes time and a lot of it.  Time that a single person battling to make a new company work just doesn’t have.

Apple’s Sept 1st 2010 Keynote was in my opinion even better than their June 7th presentation when they announced the iPhone 4. It may be a case of expectations being so high for the new “king of the smartphones” announcement that Steve Jobs was really in a no-win situation back in June. But I think with the grand reveal of their new iPod range, Apple TV (let’s please stop calling it iTV now!) and the sneaky dip into social networking with the announcement of Ping, this was one hell of a keynote.

As a side – I think the new nano looks fantastic and integrating a camera into the iPod touch to enable Facetime is a master stroke, but that’s another blog.

I want to talk about Ping. By integrating Ping into iTunes, Apple have opened up Ping to a mere 160m users in one foul swoop, that’s impressive. It’s what Google will do if they base their new social media offering on YouTube, so they must be watching with bated breath to see what happens.

By integrating social media into iTunes, Apple are saying this is “A Social Network for Music”. But I have to wonder how much this is just to keep Facebook happy, as in reality this is a social network for Music, Books, Films and Apps – many of which are Games.
Lets look at that list again…

1. Muisc
2. Books
3. Films
4. Games

Now if we look at what people talk about on Facebook and Twitter, we can see a large portion of that activity is based around those 4 topics.

Therefore we have the platform for wide discussion. Now all we need is to open this up to a wide audience.
Lets consider Apples hardware with iTunes installed ready and waiting, – First we have Macs (1.6m – 1.7m sold per quarter!)
- iPhones (8.7m sold per quarter)
- iPod Touch (3.2m sold per quarter)
So that’s a lot of platforms running iTunes. But wait. Did we miss something? Something that might open up Ping to an even wider audience. Something I’ve probably even already mentioned in this blog… that’s it… Apple TV.

This is where the killer blow could be made. If Apple market their TV offering with all guns blazing they could revolutionise the social networking arena.

Just imagine people networking over their TV. Talking about what Film they are watching. One word. Awesome. Listen to music your friends are into, after all they’re your friends because you probably have similar taste. Read books they like and watch films they are in to.

We could even go a step further and imagine what could happen if we stick a webcam on top of the TV and open up Facetime for Apple TV users. The possibilities are endless.

Apple has seriously lined its ducks up. They could dominate in so many areas – Music consumption, Mobile communications, social networking, TV. Will there really be any hours in the day you don’t find yourself interacting with Apple?

The launch of facebook places is not only significant in the fact that it shows as a company facebook is continually developing and looking for ways to expand it’s platform, but it is also significant in the fact it shows they can take any new idea which has been thought up by them or not and integrate it into facebook to open it up to the largest community on the web.

Facebook places is a way for users to “check in” to locations so their “friends” can see where they’ve been. Users can also add notes against places so their friends can see what they thought of it, what deals they may be able to get there etc, etc… just general info.

All in all, a good idea. Yes. But not an idea of some bright young developer within facebook HQ!

This idea happened to be the brainchild of Dennis Crowley who was named one of the “Top 35 Innovators Under 35″ by MIT’s Technology Review and Naveen Selvadurai.
This pair launched foursquare in march 2009 and now has over 3 million users.
Now, 3 million users all of a sudden doesn’t sound like that many. But that is only because of the monster that is facebook. The majority of websites would be more than happy and may even open a bottle of bubbly at the fact they’ve attracted 3 million users to their website.

The point here is that facebook can take any new idea, such as foursquare, integrate it into facebook and instantly expose it to an audience far greater than anyone else can imagine.

Therefore facebook faces no competition.

Although foursquare’s user base has apparently risen since the launch of facebook places, this will surely not continue. I can only guess this is due to the fact people are now more aware of the concept of “checking in” and are therefore searching for this and discovering foursquare.

Apparently facebook have been developing this for 8 months, so it took them only 9 months to track foursquare’s growth and decide to copy it’s idea.

It’s a shame, but I really feel we won’t see a new successful concept independently run, not integrated into facebook and grow enough to compete with the social giant.
It’s also a shame that more people hadn’t discovered foursquare first. As the 497,000,000 users that are members of facebook and not foursquare will think – cracking idea facebook… Well done.

I’ve been quite pleased with my purchase of an iPad, but when you spend your hard earned monies you want to be more than quite pleased. The reason I purchased an iPad was because I thought it was a revolutionary device, one that would bring a new dimension to surfing the web, enjoying multimedia and playing simple games.

But most of all I was looking forward to some apps from some highly skilled developers that would take advantage of the amazing apple UI that made the iPhone the best device of our time so far and the quality HD screen that displays bright vivid images beautifully.

Until now, I have been largely disappointed with the apps on offer, until now I have been struggling to find an app that delvers something new and noteworthy. Until now! So what app have I stumbled upon that has urged me to go as far as pick up my iPad and blog about it?
Answer: Flipboard.

Flipboard is a new take on the flip style flash interfaces many catalogue sites such as Next are offering. It allows you to add categorised content that is gathered from multiple sources to your contents page. So, you’re interested in technology? Add the TechCrunch feed, love food Add the smitten kitchen feed. The feeds are then presented in a flip style format, but you can also touch the article you want to read more about to see it in large format. This is presented beautifully with a slick zoom fade animation. If you want to see the full article on the web then a simple click on a web link takes you to the page. The clever part here is that it doesn’t just open up safari, it does this in it’s own browser so that when your finished you can go back easily to where you left off.

As well as adding content from multiple feeds, you can also add your Twitter and Facebook accounts. This again presents your Facebook and Twitter feeds in the same flip magazine style format. As far as Twitter is concerned, for me, this now makes it 100 times more interesting. The reason for this is the tweets from people you are following are pulled in as well as some of the content from links they are including in their tweet. This means you can read a snippet of the information on the URL they’re tweeting and see if you’re bothered enough to read the whole article.

The Facebook feed is also nicely done, allowing you to focus in on certain status updates or photo postings and add your own comments.

From the opening of Flipboard where you are presented in style with pics of the latest articles slowly zooming in and out, to then point you close the app after feasting on the all the content you’ve just flicked through. You know it’s an application you won’t be deleting any time soon.

I wouldn’t like to criticise anything about flipboard. You can see the time and effort that has been put in by the development team with every aspect of the app. I would like to see the option of adding more content boxes on the contents page, but understand this may have performance implications. The only other improvement I can think of is the ability to add urls of any rss feeds that are then pulled into the flipboard environment.

All in all though… What a Flippling good app! (sorry!)

As always with this type of campaign, the simplicity is astounding, there must be marketing agencies around the world saying “how the hell have we not thought of that!”.

The campaign

Old spice had their celebrity actor Isaiah Mustafa film several commercials and asked viewers online to tweet questions. The filming of the initial commercials would have took several weeks but the genius was in the follow-up.

When questions were tweeted they filmed responses from Isaiah in a bathroom with just a towel and bottle of old spice shower gel responding to the question. This was posted within an hour of it being asked. Now that’s no mean feat. Especially as they also injected some humour into the responses.

The impact was, as could be expected, huge. They have had over 4m YouTube hits, 70,000 Twitter followers and countless video responses and web bloggers like me responding to this campaign. Proctor and Gamble are laughing all the way to the brand awareness bank!

The fact they responded so quickly was the key to this success. Even Demi Moore asked for a response via her tweets!

It’s an example of how agencies are really pulling out all the stops to create the next best campaign and using online media to do it. Online enables such a quick response and has done for a few years now, so it’s a wonder something like this hasn’t been tried before. You can bet your bottom dollar it will be again now!

Old spice YouTube video

After the success of my fonejacker TV Soundbox on Facebook, I decided to try out the same with
two of my favourite characters.

Alan Partridge is a legend… pure and simple. Also, running through his tv shows – The Day Today, Knowing me Knowing you and I’m Alan Partridge, Steve Coogan has blessed our screens with a character that delivers some of the best comedy quotes ever!
Perfect for an Alan Partridge TV Soundbox…

The next character is Gene Hunt from the shows Life on Mars and Ashes to Ashes. Both show’s have proved to be the best thing to come out of the BBC drama vault in years and Philip Glenister as Gene Hunt doesn’t only deliver a cracking performance in each episode, he also delivers a plethora of quality quotes.
So again… Gene Hunt lends himself perfectly to a TV Soundbox application.

As I have used Widgetbox to make these applications, you can install them on any social networking profile or add them too your own website.

Check them out here…

Gene Hunt
http://www.neilsmithdesigns.co.uk/genehunt.html
Alan Partridge
http://www.neilsmithdesigns.co.uk/alanpartridge.html

Fonejacker
http://www.neilsmithdesigns.co.uk/fonejacker.html

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 http://www.neilsmithdesigns.co.uk/blog/2008/12/11/ http://www.neilsmithdesigns.co.uk/blog/2008/12/11/#comments Mon, 08 Dec 2008 22:12:52 +0000 nessasmith http://www.neilsmithdesigns.co.uk/blog/?p=11

Any friends?

Why are you here?
What, out of the millions of web pages on this ever growing beast that is the internet made you click on a link or type in an address to arrive at this page? It may be coincidence and you were searching for something totally different, in which case you are unlikely to have made it to this point in the post.
Hopefully this is not the case. Hopefully you are here because you want to read about why I have developed a facebook application, how I went about doing so and what lessons I learnt that I can pass on to you.

>> So why did I develop a facebook app?

For the very point I was making at the start of this post. To attract more visitors to this site. To gain more exposure and in turn encourage more users to sign up to this blog. In my view there is no point blogging to an audience of 1.

There are over 35.3 million Weblogs on the internet, so to make yours the one that a visitor reads means you have to do more that just post your articles and think the magic of the internet will do the rest.
Facebook is the web app of the moment. It comes and goes in phases, first it was Myspace then Bebo now Facebook. Surfers are fickle creatures that will set up a new profile on the next big social networking site at the drop of a hat, leaving their existing profiles frozen at a perticular point in their lives… sad, but true.

But facebook is where it is at the moment and one of the main reasons behind this is because they have given the power of evolving this network socialising tool to the community that use it.
They’ve done this by allowing developers to build “widgets” that can be installed in users profiles and these “widgets” can be anything the developer can dream up.

It obviously hasn’t taken long for developers to realise that through these widgets they can reach a massive audience faster than ever before possible. Word of mouth is the most powerful viral marketing tool available and this platform gives a perfect way of starting that marketing. So this is the reason I set about developing a facebook app, I wanted more visitors to this website and hopefully, as you are reading this… that’s already started to work!

>> How did I build the facebook app?

First of all I needed an idea for a facebook widget. If you’re a user of the site, I’m sure you will have noticed there is an absolute deluge of widgets that let you see how you compare to your friends, how popular you are or even what object such as car, vegetable or animal you are like. These are all good fun and have their place.
But I wanted to create something that users could get involved with and hopefully get a little more out of using.

I looked at my interests and the fact that I was trying to come up with an idea to engage more people with my website. One of my favourite shows on the box is Dragons Den, so I wondered if I could develop an app based around this show. “Pitch to the Dragons” is what I came up with. Where facebook users can pitch their idea to their friends for them to comment on and rate.

Fortunatly I have a background in php, which is one of the primary languages you can use to develop these widgets. The other language you need to become familiar with is FBML (Facebook Markup Language). This is where I really have to take my hat off to the developers of facebook. They have created an evolved subset of HTML which allows you to hook into the users profiles, mini feeds etc… and display elements in a facebook style in-keeping with the site.

I’m not going to go through the coding of my application, but I will say that with a sound knowledge of php it took me approx 18hrs to develop. Obviously this wasn’t continuous I was doing it in my spare time.
That said, I am now familiar with FBML and the anatomy of a facebook app, so the next application should be a lot quicker (depending on complexity!).

>> What did I learn that I can pass on to you?

First of all that you need to download the PHP (4 and 5) Client Library. This includes many facebook functions that you will need to develop you app. One lesson here was to make sure you know the version of php your using and therefore use the correct library.

Once you’ve uploaded the correct library, you may come across this error when trying to access it…
Fatal error: Failed opening required ‘IsterXmlExpatNonValid.php’, this is because you also need an XML library that can be found here Make sure you reference it correctly and the error should disappear.

The second lesson I learnt was using the Default FBML which is in your applications “Edit Settings” page.
I was trying for ages to get the actions I wanted in the users profile into this box. Unfortunately its rather restricted and you can better configure what the user sees in their box through the set up when they install your app.

You really need to setFBML for the users profile. To do this in php build what you want the user to see in their profile into a variable then call your facebook api client profile_setFBML function, e.g. $facebook->api_client->profile_setFBML($markup); //where $markup is what the user will see in their profile.

Aside from these two issues, everything really did run smoothly. My only other suggestion would be to use the FBML code as much as possible to make your app look like a facebook app.

So, has it worked? Only time will tell. I will post a follow up to let you know the difference it has made… At the moment I’m just hoping the next killer social networking application isn’t going to spring up tomorrow!