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DOUG SCHUMACHER

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Creativing :: Seinfeld on smartphones, a variety of iPhone app approaches, and development issues marketers should know

October 23, 2009 By Doug Schumacher

What’s going on in new media marketing, pulled from social bookmarking site Creativing.com:

What Seinfeld thinks about Blackberries and iPhones

I don’t know what he’s been doing for the past five years, but he hasn’t lost it.

Adobe’s Photoshop.com iPhone app goes live

I’m digging this. It has the standard color balance and tinting features, a couple of special effects, and a series of preset image effects. It very fluid: Love the interface of sliding your finger left to right to adjust the strength of the effect. That part of it actually feels more intuitive and accurate than the computer app.

Volkswagen latches onto iPhone game for GTI

Not all iPhone apps have to be a big production. This game behind VWs GTI app was around for a while. Apparently VW just dropped in the GTI module, and then gave it away for free as branded content. I think this is a smart way to spend an ad budget, and suspect we’ll see more of this type thing. As the iPhone app store shoots towards a projected 100,000 apps by the end of this year, there’s a lot of great content out there with very little exposure. And VW realized they didn’t have to reinvent the wheel to make an impact.

Branded Virtual Goods Clicked 10 Times More Than Non-Branded Counterparts

An interesting report amid all the clamor about how sick people are of commercialism. Sounds like it’s more the commercials they’re sick of. There have been a million definitions about what good branding means — a promise to the customer; what people say about you; the value of a company once you subtract all the assets. This finding is a testament that good brands still matter. And whatever branding represents, it’s something people respond to.

Microsoft Cuts Deal With Twitter and Facebook to Integrate Feeds With Bing

Clearly a lot written on this subject this week. Beyond the amusing love/hate quadrangle going on between Microsoft, Google, Facebook, and Twitter, the big headline for me is that this is the first time I’m aware of that Google has had a search competitor who was able to generate search results for content that they couldn’t. That combined with Bing’s already positive reviews and this should get interesting.

Martha Stewart Says It’s About Omnipresence

Love her or not so much, she’s build a powerful brand and shown resilience when the chips were down. Her statement about omnipresence is really an amalgam of concepts including touch point marketing, CRM, brand consistency, and social media’s best practices. This also underscores the need for authenticity, as the more places and forms a brand’s communications live in, the harder it becomes to forge a message that’s not true to the company’s core.

Infographic of the Day: Watch the World Wake Up, on Twitter

Called ‘Good Morning’, this animated infographic takes tweets that say “Good Morning” and charts them on a rotating globe graphic by what time of morning that was tweeted. Early, mid or late. What results is a wave of colors sweeping across a region of the world. What’s most noticeable in both of these is the lack of activity on Twitter in China. Maybe he just couldn’t parse Mandarin, but if that’s not the case, it’s a striking difference.

An Inside Look at 4 Developer Ecosystems

Facebook, iPhone, Twitter, and Google Wave. A look at the pros and cons of developing on each. As creative marketing solutions continue to be heavily defined by the platforms they live on, an understanding of the benefits and challenges of those four majors is not only important for developers, but also the creatives, strategists, producers, and account people involved in the project.

iPlotz: wireframing, mockups and prototyping for websites and applications

One of my favorite new Web hosted apps. If you do any level of wireframing or diagramming and aren’t wed to an installed app like Omnigraffle, this is worth looking into. Some very smart time saving and customizing features.

Full Circle In Sight As Inventor Of The World Wide Web Signs Up For Twitter

Tim Berners-Lee, credited with inventing the Web, has found Twitter, and apparently isn’t impressed. I love that the guy who gave us the wild and wacky chaos of HTML finds the Twitter interface confusing.

Filed Under: Fascinating Tagged With: apple, facebook, iphone, microsoft, social, twitter, video

Creativing :: Gaming goes off at E3, a social marketing snafu, and Web 3.0 explained

June 5, 2009 By Doug Schumacher

My weekly update of news and events in new media marketing.

Weirdo Kid Starts Huge Dance PartyVideo
This is just a fun, quirky video from some outdoor event in Australia. A good example of how community behavior is more than an online network.

DC viral marketer slips up on 4chan? on TwitPic
Careful, your viral marketing street team is showing. A social media street team member accidentally posts the creative brief along with their ‘genuine’ comments. Snafu’s like this are ripe for happening when you have a lot of people following orders they don’t completely understand, or are just jumping into the social space to help blast the word out. Authenticity is key, and while companies are sure to keep pulling stunts like this, they’re going to have to tighten it up or the cat will slip out of the bag.

YouTube – Project Natal for XBOX 360
Google and Microsoft are trading blows over who can deliver the knockout technology news. Google Wave last week, Microsoft Project Natal this week. And each presentation was brand-revealing. Google geeky and open source, Microsoft slick and highly produced. Both in the dev stage. At this point, I’m calling the fight for Microsoft, though.

While the Wii comparison’s are obvious, the physicality of Project Natal as a gaming experience is remarkable. And that’s what blurs the boundaries between real and virtual.

Facebook Ads Now Available for ‘Pages’ and ‘Events’
With social media still generating massive corporate interest and paid media still owning the bulk of the current spend, it makes sense that figuring out how to transition between paid and social media will be a big topic. Facebook takes their rather unglamorous-at-first-glance display ads and gives them an inside track for parlaying impressions into a social media action. You can now Fan a brand, or RSVP for an event, right in the ad. My guess is Forwarding, along with the RSVP option, is coming up soon.

Microsoft to link 360 to Facebook, Twitter
Project Natal wasn’t all the gaming news from Microsoft. Xbox, the focus of their entertainment center ambitions (yes, say goodbye to the Media Center) is now going social with Facebook and Twitter linkage. So when you login to a game, you’ll see which friends of yours are playing, and can post to FB and Twitter that you’re online playing. You can also post acheivements, which the good gamers are sure to do. Any brand that offers a shared experience will have a lot to benefit from this type of social net integration.

What is Web 3.0? Semantic Web & other Web 3.0 Concepts Explained in Plain English
Just when you figured out the diff between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0, here comes Web 3.0. While I’d say some of the 3.0 here is 2.0, there’s no denying that the semantic web is going to give marketers a wave of new tools to play with.

10% Of Twitter Users Account For 90% Of Twitter Activity
The general trend here isn’t that surprising. A while back I saw a similar stat for YouTube, though maybe not quite as extreme. But I’m surprised that Twitter is more in this direction than YouTube. Creating video content requires a lot more than typing 140 characters, so it would seem there’d be more even distribution with Twitter.

Maybe the point is, because Twitter’s only 140 characters, those that are participating are able to do so in high volume. There’s also a trend towards using Twitter in a broadcast fashion, as most celebs and a lot of brands are doing. And it’s an easy vehicle for that. You can blast a personal, 1-to-1 feeling message out to millions. And while they can freely respond, few of them truly expect a reply in return.

Dear AmericanAirlines
Funny exchange between a UX designer complaining about AA.com, and the staff’s response.

Virtual tour of NY
The website for a photog team who shoot aerials of NYC. A nice showcase for their work.

Filed Under: Fascinating Tagged With: facebook, gaming, microsoft, technology, videos

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