nuance intelligence

In case some of you thought the blogosphere was simply a haven for losers in basements worldwide, the INSIGHT blog from EyeTraffic Media highlights a recent study from TNS Media Intelligence/Cymfony that includes some good data:

• 49% of senior marketing executives believe that social media should be monitored at the executive level and be allocated significant resources
• Uses of social media: 37% said to gain consumer insight, 21% said to build brand awareness, 18% said to increase customer loyalty
• 88% of U.S. senior marketing executives (65% global) agreed that reading and analyzing social media to understand unfiltered consumer perceptions would have the most impact on the future of their businesses
• 50% of senior marketing executives said creating a user community of bloggers to provide user feedback is the most effective use of social media
• 47% of senior marketing executives said using social media vehicles to generate a viral campaign would also be very effective in a product launch

What’s the nuance? While this might seem like good news for our burgeoning consultancy, I’m concerned that it will continue to add noise to the already crowded ‘sphere, and the worst kind of noise, at that — corporate marketing speak. Only if they can understand the cluetrain manifesto’s primary point, that markets are conversations, and speak with their real voice will they have a chance of creating some signal (even Microsoft seems to get it). And if the marketers can’t distinguish between viral and organic marketing, they will succeed in further isolating themselves from the market, exactly the opposite of their goals. Evolve or die.

From: The Mint

This will likely be the only private fund based at a university and among the few that hope to have a social impact such as creating jobs and growing sectors that help people, who earn less, in addition to achieving returns.

Some funds, particularly those interested in clean-technology investments, have asserted that both goals can be achieved and with high returns.

A person familiar with socially conscious seed fund, who did not wish to be named, said that right now it is an experiment to see if both these goals can be met. Achieving double-digit returns in this type of investment is considered successful, even though typical private equity returns have been around 30%.

When I started reading this report, I thought it was about a new US-based social entrepreneurship fund (because that’s why I was researching Omidyar). When my brain registered “in Hyderabad,” I remembered we’re really not in Kansas, anymore.

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I stole away about two minutes today to think about the amazing experiences I had in Bahrain last December. I was the Program Director for FIKR 6: Arab Strategies for the Global Era, a conference where we brought an Arab lens to the intersections of global issues including technology, media, energy, investing and social responsibility.

After fetching a few links for the piece on the Soros / Google / Omidyar investment in India, I saw some old blog posts at the top of the Google search from some very special people.

Enjoy their thoughts, and I’ll share more about this in coming weeks and months:

• This conference summary from Global Voices includes comments from the burgeoning Bahraini blogger community, including our friend, a self-described gap-bridger over at Mahmoud’s Den.
• This conference report from the incredible Mike Furdyk, including his thoughts on the impact of social networks (his TakingITGlobal in particular) on cross-cultural dialog and positive, practical social outcomes.
• This critical and thoughtful look at the hypocrisy between the conference design and leadership, and the hard realities in some Arab communities, from Nicola Nasser, a Palestinian journalist living in the West Bank.

Doesn’t matter if we’re talking about search, marketing, or web 2.0… organic is the new viral. A viral campaign uses its hosts to its own ends usually increasing attention to a particular web site.

An organic campaign nourishes the hosts (or network nodes), and gains the social ‘word-of-mouth’ hyper-growth as the result of its direct benefit to the host.  In fact, organic is not just about a marketing campaign, but should be integral in the design of the product in the first place, reducing the need for flashy or creative marketing.

Take Facebook and LinkedIN as examples. Whether I’m reading the digerati or talking to close colleagues, professionals have become weary of widget spam on Facebook, because the widgets are noise, not signal. But new features from LinkedIN actually provide benefit to professionals, and are therefore quickly adopted.  In this comparison, Facebook is viral, LinkedIN is organic.

Here’s the summary one-liner from Google Search Guru and former Technorati CTO Kevin Marks’ blog Epeus’ epigone:

I spent the last weekend fighting off a flu virus, partly by eating lots of organic fruit. I expect social networks and their users will continue to do the same.

A good friend, John Siewierski, said this to me another way a few weeks ago, “think about what you are doing for your network, not what your network is doing for you.” Pretty organic, John.

“Ask not, what your country can do for you…”

I’m doing a fair bit of research into location intelligence, geo-coding of data, and data visualization for AWhere these days, and found out that Quantcast (competitor of Alexa and comScore) is now including location-based info in their reports.

From their announcement:

We believe geographic and business/organizational data will be a powerful characterization of publishers’ audiences, especially as advertisers begin to evaluate online media opportunities on a more targeted basis.

I thought the localization of advertising started in the ’97 and ’98 not ’07 and ’08, but it’s great to see the trend coming around again through another sales cycle.

I got to visit with an old friend, musician, music producer and uber-geek Jim Ruberto for a bit on Friday.

In addition to talking about online reputation and Drupal’s strengths and weaknesses as a platform to support social networking and rapid development, he showed me some of the next generation graphics toys on the web (Jim was the first to tune me into Second Life, three or four years ago, where he was running an early online casino).

So, enjoy these:

1. PicLens – Firefox plug-in that provides a whole new way to surf images from lots of foto feeds, including the big photo sites, as well as Google image search and others. Lets you see entire collections (including dozens of pages of Google image search results) in one ‘photo wall’. Check this out now.
2. Photosynth – Microsoft’s newest image searching and matching technology takes a series of images of a particular area (they demonstrate with an ancient city center somewhere in Italy), and places the images in a 3D map of the area, as well as sorting by similarity, and estimating where each photo of the same location was taken from. Very cool, even if it doesn’t run on my Mac.
3. Havok – This graphics engine powers some pretty incredible online games and movie special effects. Their new physics engine provides eerily-real effects that is providing breakthrough reality for the way things work in the graphical realm.

Have a good weekend, and don’t spend it all in front of PicLens!