Did I get a great sales pitch for Microsoft products in the Bill Gates - Jerry Seinfeld ads? No. But here is what is going on that makes these ads a home run … we are talking about them. We aren’t just talking about them a little either. Sites like Techmeme and TechCrunch are talking about them and getting tons of comments and more importantly trackbacks. Trackbacks mean that other sites are blogging about them and they are getting comments too. What has happened is that you now have a phenomenal number of people talking about Microsoft and their products even though the commercials themselves had little to say about either. Lets not forget that the commercials are also on YouTube and are getting video comments as well. Personally I think the commercials have been a home run. They are drowning out the buzz around the Apple ads and they are creating the buzz among the heavy tech users. Even the Mac Rumor sites are talking about it. This is a clear win.

The fatal flaw with blog software is that it is dependent on the blogger to actually write and publish content.  I have been busy with school.  Frankly the technology community has stopped innovating and all the “A” listers blog about is speculation over whether Google broke wind or not so who cares.  Of course then it is analyzed in a million different ways until you just don’t care anymore.  Since we are picking on Google… Did they stop innovating over there or what?  Anyway…

Basically The reason I felt compelled to pry myself away from a riveting sociology textbook was to comment on an article posted by Macworld.  It seems that all the social network pundits are asleep at the wheel and it took a publication whos sole purpose in life is to determine if that is the same black shirt Steve Job’s is wearing or does he have more than one to release something worth talking about in the social media front.  It appears Microsoft Research hosts an annual faculty summit.  This year one of the talks brought up some of the issues with web 2.0 social networks; they lack context.  If anyone has more information on this talk or others about social networks please share.

I am a big fan of Google’s Gmail.  It has lots to like.  First I like that it’s in the cloud.  I have my e-mail on any device from any place.  Light weight but full of features.  Sure the call tags labels but they work the same.  Labels work like Apple’s smart mailboxes.  I can label a message and it will appear under each label, but I only have one copy of the message.  I can aggregate all of my e-mail address into one inbox and with a couple of rules every thing is labeled and filed.

The thing I like best about Gmail turns out to also be my biggest source of frustration, e-mail threading.  Gmail will thread messages and responses together to give you a conversation.  This is great, the entire conversation is collected together both messages received and sent.  Only one flaw…the subject has to remain consistent.

If you are like me and most of the people you know are still stuck in the inefficient medium of e-mail for communication then you may notice that, for some reason, subjects begin to evolve over time.  Take this image of three different subjects for the same conversation from my inbox.

I auto label based on who I receive the messages from so the get one set of labels based on who I received it from and those labels will aggregate as a conversation grows.  But notice that these three messages are really the same conversation, but for some reason the subjects take on a life of their own.

It would be nice to have some way of merging conversations together within Gmail.  As far as I can tell, this just isn’t possible.  Google, add this to your list.

I have to admit I have been using Facebook less and less.  I am not sure I could put my finger on exactly why I don’t use it as much as I did in the past although the constant bombardment to use different applications that my friends have installed is a big reason.  I had made a post a while back called “Facebook Notes” and stumbled upon a new batch of notes that would be a great follow-up.

This is a list of ten things you didn’t know about Facebook posted by Guy Kawasaki a few days ago that I found interesting and I am just now getting back to them.

Here is his list:

1. You can syndicate your blog.
2. You can post images and set your status via your cell phone.
3. You can post “Polls,” or “Surveys” to different demographics.
4. You can track available demographics directly in Facebook.
5. You can track your friends’ statuses via RSS.
6. You can post Flash and HTML directly in your brand’s Facebook Page.
7. The largest demographic on Facebook is the 25 and older group.
8. Through a Facebook Page, you can track the traffic of a brand’s Profile.
9. You can tag anyone in a posted note, video, or photo.
10. Give others an easy-to-remember link to your Facebook Profile.

Guy does a great job of expounding on each of these points.

I have to say I am not certain that number 10 belongs in this list but I do see the benefit, but I wonder if you don’t already have that within Facebook itself.

Social Times just published an article today titled, “The 4 P’s of Social Media“  It does such a great job of distilling social media down that I thought it was worth echoing here.

1. Presence
2. Personality
3. Patience
4. People

Seems easy enough.  But so many marketers just don’t understand these four things.  If you can’t get these four things right, you stand to have a social media campaign failure on your hands.

Presence - Anthony LaFauce, the author of the Social Times post, made this profound statement “Presence is more than just being on social media, you need to have an actual presence in social media.”  This means you can’t view this as a banner or PPC campaign.  You have to have a real presence.  It takes time, care, and feeding to make a successful social media campaign.  You can’t pay your insertion fee and forget about it while it runs.  You need to be engaged.

Personality - This one is simple.  You have to believe in your companies product.  You are an evangelist for the company.  If your attitude is artificial, like one of those guys in an infomercial, no one will believe you.  You will sound like a shady used car salesman.

Patience - I would go so far as to use the term Perseverance.  Community building is not a project, but an extension of your company.  A community is not built overnight, it takes time and lots of care.   If you aren’t dedicated to building a community from the start, then don’t waste your time and money.  You need to be in it for the long haul.

People - Basically this point is just building on the rest.  Engagement of real people can only happen from a real person.  Putting up a message board and then never posting to it yourself is not going to build a community that you want.  You need to be involved, honestly and passionately.  You might want to read about Participation Inequality to help you understand the type of people that get involved in a community.

I encourage everyone to read the article on the Social Times site for more perspective.

I am not a big holiday guy. Yes I believe each and every holiday is a wicked scheme designed by Hallmark to extort more money out of me. April first is an especially loathsome “holiday”.

First of all April Fools Day or All Fools Day is the quintessential waste of my time. All the tech news will be useless and you can’t trust any commentary you read. Everyone is trying to get one over on someone.

That isn’t the worst of it though. Since everyone is expecting everyone else to act like a fool on April first, people are starting to unleash their ridiculous schemes on March 31st instead. Because of course we are not intelligent enough to realize that tomorrow is April first and they are springing the pranks early.

What seems really sad is that the pranks have gotten to be so outlandish that they don’t really seem to fool us anymore. It turns out that they are so bad in fact that it reflects on how uncreative the person is who is attempting to convince you that their prank is real.

Maybe next year I will just begin posting wanted posters on flickr for all the uncreative unimaginative people that attempt to convince me that their ridiculous pranks are real.

I picked this up from a tweet by Robert Scoble. This is an interview conducted by Shel Israel on a social media campaign run by SeaWorld.

I have explained this to my customers hundreds of times. It’s nice to see a large company that gets it. More companies should be conducting these types of social media campaigns as an integrated part of their marketing plans.

Picking up where del.icio.us fell down is Diigo.  They have received a little buzz recently for their V3 beta release.  It is a very impressive application.  To call Diigo a social bookmarking site would be to limit it to a box that it has grown beyond.

This application gives you everything you would expect from a bookmarking application.  You have tags, toolbar, bookmarklets, widgets and a ton of other tools to make life easy.  You can share bookmarks and connect to friends and even communities.  And it all works fantastic even if this was all it did.

Diigo goes beyond all of that.  You can comment on links, thus enabling conversation.  This is sorely missing from del.icio.us and it is weakly implemented in Mag.nolia.  You can schedule a link post to your blog or simply post a link directly.

As if enabling a conversation on a link wasn’t enough you can actually highlight passages or add annotations right on a page.  All of which can be shared.

Though most will likely give a collective groan to a new bookmarking site, if you aren’t using Diigo you might as well be living in a web 1.0 world.

Diigo does have a couple items I would like to see worked out.  First of all they didn’t get the memo that we have reached the mobile tipping point.  I would love to see an iPhone version of this so I can use it on the go.  Where is the API?  How can you have a service in today’s market place without an API.  Finally, trackbacks.  Let me carry the conversation back if I can.  So many social sites don’t implement this and it seems vital to enabling a conversation.

I know all the A-listers have glazed eyes over friendfeed right now, but they are really missing out if they don’t try Diigo.

Marketing is changing.  If you have missed the boat on this you might want to catch up.  Traditional marketing is a sinking ship and all that cash is bailing out to more fertile pastures of the online world.  So what is the key to interactive marketing?  I think a lot of people would say its PPC and I think they would be wrong.

Don’t get me wrong.  PPC is the cheapest form of online advertising you can get.  Cost per acquisition is minuscule. This makes it an important interactive tool, but the one you might be missing out on is social media.

Social media is a big change in the way we think about marketing.  Social media is about finding, and more importantly building, clusters of highly qualified potential customers.  Once you have a customer cluster you can drive home your marketing message in a personal way.

I have two great examples of this recently using Twitter.  The first example illustrates a way to build a customer cluster, the second illustrates how to push a customer cluster to your product.

A few days ago, Jason Calacanis, CEO of Mahalo, announced on twitter that as soon as he reached 20,000 Twitter followers he would give away a free MacBook Air.  Watching his numbers grow is like watching a gas gauge in a SUV go down.   For the price of a MacBook Air he is going to have a customer cluster of 20,000 that he can now continually push to Mahalo.  Cost per acquisition is around 9 cents a person.

Today I read about (via a Scoble Tweet) a site named Wine Library TV.  This is a video site about, you guessed it, wine.  But the interesting thing they are doing with Twitter is offering Twitter exclusive deals.  Anyone following Santa GaryVee in Twitter will get the chance to receive free shipping, discount codes, and other deals on wine and wine related products.  Thus building his customer cluster and driving highly qualified traffic to his products.

John Tropea gave a talk on Knowledge Management as an ecosystem. If you are like the company I work for and others I have heard about, knowledge management is a big push recently. With all the collaborative tools coming out, it appears to be hitting it’s tipping point. Here are the slides from John Tropea’s talk to get you started:

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