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First of all, happy new year everyone! I hope 2K9 brings everything you wish for.

Just wanted to write a short post on twitter before I head off on my new daily run around the block (one of my new year’s resolutions – to get fitter!).

Anyway, my brother brought this up today – what is twitter? I’ve had a few other people ask me as well. It’s basically just short updates like facebook status updates. You can have 140 characters in there such as “I’m going to walk the dog”, or “Obama will win Ohio”, etc… You can’t post pictures or tag friends. You can only leave the updates and you can respond to them. Because you can update it from your phone, its always constant updates. Links can be shared but they are in tinyurl formats (shortened forms of websites so that it can fit within 140 characters).

Again, just like RSS and Reader tools, I don’t believe its widely used here in Australia. Its only for those early adopters, working in marketing, journalism, or those social butterflies (you know who you are). Its more popular in the states and for those with internet on their mobiles.

I believe it was made by some former Google engineers. Its quite a neat application, but it hasn’t really caught on. People can follow you on twitter and you can follow others. Its stemmed from the facebook status updates, and the idea of staying connected with your friends even when they haven’t logged on or sent you an email. Check out this video, twitter in plain english for a better idea. There’s also an interesting article here about top 10 uses of twitter and why you need to be looking at twitter (from a marketing standpoint).

Personally, I don’t use it that much. I only update it once in a blue moon, though may start to use it more in 2k9 to see what other digital marketers are up to and ongoing trends in the industry. Some companies have started using it like Comcast and Telstra, to see what customers are saying about them and to respond to customer complaints.  I don’t think its appropriate for all companies to be using it, but they should monitor it just like they monitor what is happening on the internet (i.e. what consumers are saying about them via blogs, their search results, online forums, etc..).

What I like about twitter and facebook updates, is that they are bite size snackable updates (you can get a lot of social information at once). From a corporate point of view, you better have something interesting to say in 140 words or I’m not going to bother reading it If Jetstar had one and constantly updated it with sales offers, yes I would follow you!

This is my twitter account, check me out (best yet, follow me)!

At work, we use a tool called Yammer. This is a offshoot of Twitter, like a corporate version. I don’t think its related to Twitter - they’ve just given it a corporate use for it. Essentially, its the same thing but its not open to the public like twitter. We have created a work group in Yammer, and only employees have been invited (like a facebook page for only employees).

Everyone provides updates of what they are up to, their moods, thoughts and so on. It’s pretty cool. Its a good way for our manger and the other staff to see what projects people are working on, who’s having a shitty day , and to have conversation around the office. 

Example 1:  Someone had a problem with twitter, they didn’t know how to reduce the amount of email notifications they get. So my colleague posted the problem on Yammer, and I responded within a few seconds.

Example 2: We had a lively discussion between a few staff about having a weekly status meeting. Someone suggested it, then it was fine tuned via 10 – 15 Yammer posts, and then viola! We had the meeting the week after.

Example 3: I needed to use the printer for 30 mins to print out some urgent stuff.  So I posted a message on yammer to stop all printing for the next 30 mins.

The thing I like about Yammer is that it reduces the amount of email that clogs up our email inboxes. It’s like having a blog and everyone’s contributing ideas and suggestions. I’ve actually gone as far as downloading the desktop app, so its like instant messenger rather than a webpage I log into. We also use MSN as well for private and quick conversations. It hasn’t replaced it, but its an easy way to speak to a lot of people.

I’m out like instant messaging,

Matt Ho

I was thinking about this exact article content today. Whenever I first jump onto to the internet, I immediately check my facebook account and see what’s new and then Google Reader to see new articles fed to me via RSS and then my various email accounts.

But Facebook and other forms of social networks have started to eliminate email inboxes. We no longer swap email addresses with new people we have just met – its now “facebook me” , or “add me via facebook”. Before that it was “give me your number” and then “drop me an email”.

I’m using less email today and more of facebook and other tools like twitter, LinkedIN, yammer to see what people are up to. It’s much faster to do some microblogging via my facebook status or tweet it, then to drop an email to 20 people.

The other thing is, I don’t see why more transactions are completed within facebook or other social networks. To me these are like portals to the internet, where one day we could be doing banking transactions, searching, reading news, applying for jobs, buying goods and services through them. I’ve read that some people are trying to develop this, and it makes sense since we spend so much time within these networks anyway.

But it’s still going to be a long time before social networking eliminates email inboxes. Consumers and business people still prefer email as a form of communication. It is a much more trusted than blogging. Something like 20% of consumers trust blogging, though that percentage gets up to 40% amongst actual bloggers. I do believe that social networking and in particular RSS will replace email, as more people use these tools and the next generation arrive into the workplace.

Personally, I subscribe to about 15 different blogs / newsletters via RSS. I did it initially because I wanted to try it out, but its so awesome! I get regular updates and the newer stuff moves to the top. If I dont read the older stuff that’s ok, and I can quickly scan all the articles that I want to read. RSS isn’t widely used amongst friends and colleagues, but it should be!!! Instead of clogging up your inbox, it actually frees it up.

I’m out like email,

Matt Ho.

Can someone develop a hosted wiki where you can have public access and that’s reasonably cheap?

Is that impossible? I’ve been checking out wiki’s from clearwiki, brainkeeper, central desktop, confluence, etc…. and I have yet to find one which we can have it open to the public to edit and contribute AND have it hosted AND won’t cost the world.

Most of the hosted models out there are limited to 25 users, 50 users and when you look at the unlimited amount of users, it will cost an arm and a leg ($8K for Confluence). Someone let me know. Soon.

Today, I went to the AIMIA conference on “The Future of Digital 2009″. It was pretty interesting.  My company, Next Digital was the main sponsor and my general manager Stephen Lord was one of the key speakers.

There were a lot of companies represented like Microsoft, BBC, Communicator, News Ltd, ABC etc…. I figured if I was going to make it in this industry, I had to attend events like this, meet people and hear what people had to say.

John Butterworth, the CEO of AIMIA (Australian Interactive Media Industry Association for you noobs) gave a quick overview of the digital future. In 2008,  digital spend was $17.9 BILLION (yes BILLION!) and  25% of business revenue was generated through digital. After that, he said “Look around you at the 100 faces here in this room – this is the future of digital”.  It was exciting and also a bit scary at the same time! And hey, I was a part of the 100!!

The Agency – Stephen Lord, Next Digital

The next speaker was Stephen, who spoke about the agency perspective. He gave a brief overview of the major digital events that happened in 2008 such as:

• the iphone and the apps store (converging mobile and web)
• online viewing overtaking tv spend for the first time
• twitter coming of age and how the events of Mumbai were microblogged. At work we use yammer and its great! Its like a corporate twitter
• political parties using digital channels  – Obama’s heavy use of digital (YES WE CAN!!!!!)
• cloud computing  – one of my favourite topics

If 2008 was the year that digital spend increased, then 2009 will be about measurement and ROI. It’s true.  People are spending an increasing amount of time online and in front of the computer.  In fact people even do two of the activities simultaneously -  engaging in multiple media channels. Look at me now – I’m blogging as I watch House in the background! Digital spend will only increase as marketers direct more of their budget into digital as it is more accountable that TV, radio, print, etc… (did someone mention a recession?). But most importantly, this is where the audience is, hence marketing dollars will follow.

Digital will reach a tipping point – a point where more dollars spent won’t equal more results. Hence the search for accountabiliy and better measures. What are we measuring now as digital marketers, bloggers and media planners? Page views, bounce rates, CTR’s (click through rates)? Puh-lease!!!!!! That is so old school. None of these really tell you anything. So what if your page achieved 1,000 unique views, CTR of 18%. It doesn’t mean jack. We have to find new measures to determine engagement, influence, involvement, and stickiness. The metrics we use have not kept up pace with a constantly evolving digital world.

The thing about digital is that every user leaves a digital footprint. It is a captive and active audience and we need to understand how to better measure that. In the past, we were hunters / seekers of information (early to mid 90′s). Then we become do-ers, and now we are in a stage of feedback 3.0, where people are having true conversation in the digital sphere.

The Evangelist – Michael Jordahi, Microsoft

The next speaker was Delic8 Genius, aka Michael Jordahi, a developer Evangelist for Microsoft. So what exactly is an evangelist? I had a discussion with Peter about this on the way down since he knows a few. In fact, I met another Microsoft one from the UK, a pretty cool guy. An evangelist is someone that encourages people to adopt new technology, that engages with people about it, explains how it works, gets people to sign up for licenses and so on.

He actually was a really good speaker, like he had drank 3 redbulls before he got up. Pretty funny guy, and very passionate about Microsoft Surface, bordering on a sales pitch. I didn’t mind, because of the energy he brought and I really like the concept of Microsoft surface. FYI When you go to a lot of marketing presentations/industry events they tend to end up like sales pitches.

He gave us an overview of how we had from old school user interface (UI) to GUI to NUI (natural user interface). He compared them to reading a book vs watching a movie vs playing an interactive computer game.

He had a lot of interesting stuff to say, such as how we are no longer restricted to computers, keyboards, and mouses. Examples like Microsoft surface, Toncidot – this little cube you can move around to replicate real world movement, this sphere type device, holograms, etc… He even brought out October’s Esquire magazine cover which had a digital cover.  His view of the future was technolgy and social interaction (real not like facebook or myspace) becoming one.  His opinion was the natural surface and augmented reality was the future (I actually have no idea what he meant by augmented reality) but half the crowd was nodding.

The client – Paula Bray, Powerhouse Museum

I can’t believe she got up and held a deck full of powerpoint slides in one hand and navigated the actual preso with the other slides. I just thought it was going be dead boring and she did didnt do anything to prove me wrong. She was representing the Powerhouse Museum and started going through their website, some of their interactive display thingys. I rolled my eyes (and I suspect half the audience did too). HOWEVER, the next part of the presentation started to get real interesting.

She spoke about how the Musuem developed glassplate negatives of historic shots of Tyrrell. I don’t think anyone actually understood what Tyrrell was about but that wasn’t the point. They had all these old historic shots and so did the National Library. So they put them on FLICKR, the photo sharing website.  They were generating some pretty impressive stats re number of views. Then they decided to put their collection on the creative commons license, which allows anyone to use the image and it kinda of exploded. They let go their collection and people were helping them out by providing meta tagging, geo tagging (locating them on google maps), people started to mashup the pics with Google street view and so on. The craziest thing was that they started to upload pics of how Sydney looked in the past and how it looked now. Then it snowballed because people started contributing their current pics, and even going to the trouble of finding the exact same shot.

In fact, the best thing was when they were searching for Mosman Water falls and wanted to find out exactly where this thing was. They posted a query on FLICKR, and someone answered the query in 30 mins and directed them to a real estate website.  Paula, went out to the property, discovered the waterfalls in someone’s backyard and took pics to compare and share. It was pretty amazing, the find and the altrustic of this John Doe contributor on FLICKR. So they got in contact with him and tried to find out more about him, got him to come to the musuem (he hadn’t been in a decade), so now he takes his family regularly there and writes about the musuem on his blog.

To think that a government institution, a public musuem was prepared to do that was pretty amazing. The philosophy was to create a musuem without walls. They let their collection go out on a commons license (IP lawyers hide yourself!).

The futurist – Jen Wilson, Lean Forward

Let’s just say she was interesting. Every speaker had an agenda, and her’s was mobile. If I could describe her in a few words it would be “mobile evangelist”. Accordingly, the future for her was “mobile”. Not phone, but mobile, a point she distinguished.  About a year ago, I wouldn’t have thought so either. She gave a view of the world as everything going mobile – your camera, your car, your kitchen sink, etc…

In fact, she was probably the most interesting speaker because she really was talking about the future and was saying things I hadn’t really heard before. Of how mobile was breaking down the digital divide. For example, fishermen in Kerala using mobiles to arbitrage in the local fish market by calling into the port and finding out which fish markets were low and then supplying those markets.

I think she could have spoken all day and night about mobile.  Then she had a little rant about the “evil empires” ala how Google and Microsoft want to control everything…..Oh and did I mention that during the entire conference she was texting on her iphone? I only discovered later when I googled the conference and her twitter account came up, she was updating her twitter account every few mins!!!

That’s been one long recap of the AIMIA conference.

I’m out like the future of digital,

Matt Ho.

Just donated some money to a good cause, which also happens to be a source of amusement with my mate’s growing their Mo’s. Check it out here.

The coolest youtube video I have seen to date that really makes watching a video really engaging and totally out of the box. Check it out here ……….. it’s like nothing you’ve seen before!

Experimenting with the vodpod widget

[vodpod id=ExternalVideo.709820&w=425&h=350&fv=]

I have been having trouble as of late posting videos to wordpress. I worked out there was a button in the wordpress editor to post videos, but it seems to only work for the main video websites like youtube, daily motion, etc.. With blogspot, all you have to do is embed the code, which most video websites give you.

But I’ve experienced issues with wordpress embedding the code (like the last post with VIMEO). I also tried posting a vid from IMEEM and this failed to work. However, in my frustration I’ve installed “Post to wordpress: VODPOD”. It’s a shortcut button on my toolbars which I can easily click on and post straight away to my blog. All I do now when I see a video I like, is click on the button and paste the code into there and it viola! Blogged already.

Just like the above!

I’m out like being frustrated with WordPress!

Matt Ho

Check this out – the top 10 disruptive innovations in the last 10 years.

One cannot survive without the need for competition. It is innate in all of us – to survive and to thrive, we must compete against each other. Charles Darwin said it best “Only the strong survive”. It is what pushes us to reach the next level.

Free market economies of the world operate on this principle – the idea of competition. By allowing opposite and opposing forces to generate the best outcome. It is competition which drives innovation. It leads us to higher levels of thinking and standards of living. Sometimes it is as simple as someone looking at the status quo and saying: “I think I can do better than that”.

One of the most interesting concepts I have come across that turns this competition principle on its head is “open source”. The idea that you can release intellectual property to the wider community and have them collaborate to generate solutions. Software companies have been doing this for a while now. Revenue used to be generated in selling licenses to software and the user would have to renew it on a yearly basis.

But now companies are giving up the Holy Grail – the source code to the open community to work with. I have recently heard presentations from Atlassian and Google, where they have provided their proprietary knowledge to the world. To allow people to work on it and develop better solutions and to enhance existing products.

The beauty of open source is that it is always getting updated. It might be version 2.0 today, but tomorrow it could be version 3.0. Plug-ins, enhancements and so forth, will be rapidly developing in the background. It is a symbiotic relationship between the company that owns the code, software developers and customers.

We had a presentation at work today from Google about their new products, and the concept that kept reappearing was open source. The idea that anyone can access it, work on it, and develop into something better. This principle applied to the upcoming release of the Android mobile platform, which will be used across all phones. They also discussed this idea of “open social”, which is one platform for all social networking gadgets and the idea of multiple communities. The problem at the moment is that a lot of these sites like Myspace, Facebook, LinkedIn, Friendster, etc… use different platforms. Many of these companies are now migrating to an open social platform, so that new developments can be rolled out across all these websites without having to modify them.

The other interesting concept that I have come across is “cloud computing”. I first read about it 8 months ago and it has become a much bigger concept now. The idea of cloud computing is that users can access something from anywhere. To illustrate, I can access my email from my home PC. But I can also access it from my laptop, work PC, an iphone, mobile device, from an internet café. You get the idea.

The user can come from anywhere. So applications and platforms need to be built to encompass all these different scenarios. Think of it as a big cloud, and you can fly into it from many different angles. It is the idea that it can be universally accessible. For me, a great example is the social bookmarking site Delicious. I save all my bookmarks on this website and I can log into any computer, on any browser (Internet Explorer, Firefox) and can look at my bookmarks. Its brilliant. I have access to my information independent of where I am and from where I access.

The guys at Google also unveiled a new product called “Google Health” which is based on this cloud computing idea. You know how when you go to a particular doctor, that doctor has all your medical records. If you go overseas, and see a doctor in Barcelona, Spain they don’t have access to your medical records (true story – happened to me!). Or if you are in an accident, they need immediate access. In an even simpler scenario, you change doctors and all the records are with your old doctor.Google Health consolidates all your medical information onto one platform, allowing you to access it anywhere via the web. No doubt that security and privacy concerns abound – but you can see the power and the immediate usefulness of cloud computing.

Lastly, one of the cooler Google innovations discussed today was “Google Chrome”. It was released last week and it is a new type of internet browser, competing against Internet Explorer and Firefox. It has a lot of cool features (of course, it has to be open source), such as allowing you to save websites as shortcuts onto your desktop, change window panes around & resize them, view the source code and operating statistics, has all the built in plug ins and just runs a lot faster.

How they position themselves in the browser market will be interesting given that they fund Mozilla Firefox and Internet Explorer is planning to release version 8.0 pretty soon. But hey, competition breeds innovation. Let the browser wars begin!

In the IT space, we are seeing a different type of competition. Parties are collaborating together, proprietary knowledge is being shared and diffused to the public. Open source is likely to become the norm, as we collectively work together to solve problems. Will this also extend to other areas of business and other types of knowledge sharing? The idea of cloud computing also poses new ways of thinking – by combining all our information and having it accessible anywhere, anytime.

I went to the Vodaphone Mobile Advertising breakfast last Wednesday. It was sponsored by B&T, and was mostly about Vodaphone’s offerings in the mobile advertising world. So the seminar was more about educating the market about the advertising opportunities available through Vodaphone. The market in Australia is immature, as it has only been around for like 12 months, whereas overseas they have been doing mobile advertising for 2years at least.

Most of the people in attendance were from ad agencies, experiential advertising agencies and people in the mobile field. They spoke about opportunies to advertise through the Vodaphone Live portal (which can be accessed through most phones on the Voda network). I believe it is similar to the Optus Zoo online portal.

Different options available to advertisers include:

- banner advertising through the portal which take up 20% of the screen.
- MMS / SMS sends (2million phones can recieve MMS and all phones on network can recieve SMS). Incidentally 70% of phones are bluetooth enabled across all networks.
- advertising in voda booklets found in mobile stores
- LBS: Location Based Sends

They also went through some case studies of clients that have advertised through them like 20th Century Fox and the new reformulated disgusting Wolfmother drink.

The majority of Voda’s customer base is young (50% + under 35 years old), so it suits certain products better like energy drinks or movies. You can actually send up to 15 seconds worth of movie footage via MMS.

Typical advertising packages cost about $35ks which include 4 templates, mockups. They also have a package for SME’s at 10K, which is pretty good value. Much like email marketing, marketer’s need to bring their own databaes to send out to.  

Although, the seminar as a whole was a bit cheesy and the breakfast wasn’t that great (wafer like bacon), it was still beneficial for me to get out and meet people in the industry, and to learn more about the world of mobiles. I actually asked the second question during Q&A time about QR codes (Quick response) codes, to which the presenter was a bit hesistant to answer .

QR codes are essentially bar codes which contain a lot of information like website details, numbers, or whatever you would like to put on them. They have become popularised by the japanese who now use them for advertising as phones can now decode these barcodes. They are used to bring 2D objects into the online realm by directing people to websites or to gain further information. Recently Telstra has brought them into the market place and I asked whether Vodaphone was going to look at them too. The answer was yes, but a bit of a convoluted, confusing answer.

I’m out like wafer bacon,

Matt Ho.