At Metablocks we wear both developer and marketing hats! Most of our business revolves around user interface and application design, especially social media applications, but we also have a growing consultancy business around social media marketing.
One of the new social media marketing tools that has gained popularity and momentum in recent months is Twitter and a growing number of new media marketers have become big “Twitter Marketing” fans (IgnitePR, Citizen Agency,TechnoSailor, i.e.)
What is Twitter, you ask? Twitter defines itself as a tool for “staying in touch and keeping up with friends no matter where you are or what you’re doing.” (more…) Marketers have reinterpreted that as a way for companies and brands to stay in touch with customers or prospective customers no matter where they are! For those interested, I recently added a page on our Wiki with a list of Twitter marketing related resources including articles and success stories.
Here are some practical applications of “outgoing” Twitter marketing in action:
- A TV show or music network automatically updating viewers and fans via Twitter about upcoming episodes
- A news network distributing news headlines regularly on Twitter
- A corporate blogger automatically updating their Twitter feed with links to their latest news, events or blog posts
- A local government sending weather and other alerts (such as Amber alerts) to their residents via Twitter
Here are some “incoming” Twitter marketing applications:
- A cable company using Twitter to identify customers with support needs or issues
- A technology company using Twitter for find information about competitors
- A marketing company using Twitter to gauge the “buzz” or interested around a Brand
- A reporter using Twitter to find out what the “Topic De Jour” (topic of the day) happens to be
Another interesting “application” (verb) of Twitter is to actually integrate it into desktop and web-based applications (noun) to automatically share information about a users activities or interests (with their permission of course). Here are some examples
- Your cable set top box automatically “tweets” the TV shows you are currently watching
- Each time you sell an item on eBay, Craigslist or vFlyer, it show up on your Twitter feed
- Videos or photos you share on sites like YouTube and Flickr instantaneously get reflected in your Twitter feed
- Blog posts, news and events you create automatically show up in your Twitter feed
Too much information (TMI)? Perhaps, but a growing number of people are now living “Twitter-enhanced” lives and marketers are realizing that Twitter may indeed be that best way to reach them!
The new Apple iPhone 3G hit the stores on July 11 and despite some technical glitches has been quite a success. By Sunday, July 13, Apple announced that iPhone 3G sales surpassed 1 million units is just three days. Apple also said that iPhone and iPod touch users have already downloaded more than 10 million applications from the App Store.
More than 800 native applications are currently available for the iPhone and according to Apple, more than 200 are offered for free and more than 90 percent are priced at less than $10!
These are pretty impressive numbers for a “new” platform! You’ll find applications in obvious categories such as social networking, games, news and entertainment, photography, business and media on Apple’s newly launched App Store (accessible via iTunes).
We are currently working on a handful of iPhone development projects (and I am sure dozens of other developers are as well) so you can expect the number of iPhone 3G applications to keep climbing!
Here is a quick roundup of a couple of recent interesting widget news and trends:
- Book Widgets for Authors: Authors use widgets to help promote their books and online communities.
- What’s Next For The NYTimes Online: Excellent example of comprehensive social media marketing by the New York Times! More and more companies are beginning to realize that social media outreach needs to be comprehensive and broad in order to be effective.
- Understanding Widgets: Not a trend or news piece but nice short post that helps “frame” widgets for those thinking about have one developed.
- Enterprise Widgets: I liked this piece about a new and emerging breed of widgets – widget being used within the enterprise!
- Political Widgets on Facebook: Makes absolute sense this election season, I think every politician should have their own widget
- Mobile Widgets?: Kind of – Nokia labs launches widget initiative that tries to integrate your desktop with your phone (build on the Yahoo! widget engine). I am more interested, however, in seeing widgets move to mobile platforms in more meaningful ways.
We’ll cover some of these trends in more detail in upcoming weeks!
We have moved the Metablocks Wiki to its new home at wiki.metablocks.com. We will phase out the old Wiki as we transition partner projects and other content to the new Wiki. Most people have used Wikis at one time or another (Wikipedia, i.e.) and understand how they work (you can read our wiki definition).
A growing number of organizations, including ours, use Wiki for a variety of business purposes ranging from collaboration, support, project management to light-weight content management (CMS). Some Wikis try and capture information about an industry or market (Inman and Zillow for example have real estate wikis) while others are designed to provide customer support and build community ( eBay, vFlyer and Meebo are some good examples). Ours is simply designed as both an internal and external resource for archiving information on development and marketing projects and efforts that we have an ongoing interest in. Feel free to check it out.
After my post on Hillcrest Labs, one or two clients mentioned that they didn’t realize we were such big Adobe Illustrator users! I am not surprise since its not common knowledge that in addition to our core business of web and social media application design and development we provide a broad range of other service to clients including infographics and other information-driven communication. Most of this work stems from our web design group who help clients better communication aspects of their technology or architecture visually. In the process we have developed a growing library of “object-art” that helps us in the story telling process.
Here are a couple of examples of some past infographic work:
Tags: infographics, diagrams
Users love feedback and the love real-time activity! At Metablocks, we always been big fans of user interface elements and widgets that convey real-time feedback! Digg Lab’s Stack represents a great example (and a nifty visualization) of the potential power of providing real-time activity information. We recently built a similar visualization (naturally, inspired by the Stack) for a client in the music space to show real-time activity information on music tracks being played!
Simple Complexity’s Chad Burt takes a slightly different view:
These are beautiful for visualizing the information they present, but there’s one big caveat. This is all real-time information. Maybe it would be useful for Digg’s own sysadmins to have this sort of information available, but for an end user it is just a pretty proof of concept.
I would like to differ, here is why:
- Users want to know what other users are doing right now!
Real-time activity visualization does exactly that. By combining information about what users are doing and how many users are doing the same activity, this sort of visualization is a real-time gauge of what is popular.
- “Moving data point” in real-time conveys and reinforces the notion of real-time!
Everyone wants a real-time system! Financial brokers want real-time information, law enforcement needs real-time data, and even the Internet consumer prefer real-time system. What many user interface designers forget is that user interface elements and widgets can be used to solve “marketing” or “communication” problems! Sometime “showing” your site or service functions in real-time is more important that the actual real-time information a user is looking at!
- Sometimes it’s about the “Coolness Factor”
Pushing the envelop when it comes to visualization definitely plays up your “coolness factor”. Having user interface elements that do no interfere with the general function of your site or service, but play up the “coolness factor” and capture the imagination of your users generally cannot be a bad thing! With so many “me-to” sites and services, innovative data visualizations (real-time or not) can be a much needed breath of fresh air!
