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    Digital Marketing

    The Digital Triangle. The Perfect Start-up Womb.

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    The digital triangle, located in NYC, bears three distinct corners.  DUMBO in Brooklyn. SOHO in Manhattan. Union Square, also in Manhattan.

    DUMBO is where the coders are.  A youthful tech workforce who live digitally-centric lives, they are smart and have engineer-friendly minds. (A lot of gamer consoles burn out in DUMBO.) It’s a little men and boy heavy.  Union Square is where the money is.  Where the incubators are.  It’s where the DUMBO denizens with entrepreneurial spirit visit with their hands out.  It’s close to NYU and also has a lovely, youthful energy. Parking is expensive in Union Square but the smart money walks the streets.  SOHO is what makes the digital triangle different.  It is where designers, the truly creative and exceptionally beautiful like to call home. They don’t live there really, just work, shop and hang. If you can’t get inspired in SOHO with all its art, nubes, soft tacos, fashion, and vibe, you can’t get inspired.  All these neighborhoods are a subway or bike ride apart and feed off of each other. It is a perfect storm for start-ups.  

    Unlike Sand Hill Road (money), its surrounding neighborhoods of Menlo Park, Palo Alto, etc. (tech engineers) and San Francisco (ad people) the Digital Triangle is close but not really connected. The west coast likes campuses. It works but not like the digital triangle. As technology’s pull increases and more and more of the economy is tied to digital commerce, NYC will grow in importance globally and will become a tech capital with no peer. Just ask Fred Wilson. Peace.

    Smartphone Apps Flowing Like Mothers Milk.

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    0

    Milk Monitor is an application available from the AppStore. It allows iPhone (and possibly iPad) toting moms to tap and record their babies milk consumption. The data can be stored, reviewed and trended at a later date.  Apparently moms like to do this kind of stuff – typically using bits of paper and napkins when recording on the road.  If you have a baby on your shoulder tapping is better than typing.  If you are carrying a smartphone around anyway and recording this data helps – especially for fussy babies — this is a great application. Go iPhone!  Go app developer!

    Application development at the smartphone level is like life on another planet.  There are currently 80 trillion apps (JK) for the iPhone today and about 6,000 for the PC (please don’t retweet, I didn’t count).  Now most iPhone apps don’t get used, but that’s not the point.  Some may. Some may help. Some will even save lives. And that’s cool.

    Just as Twitter will open new doors for smart marketers, smartphones and their apps will open new rooms for marketers.  The application developers who think like people first and coders second are the ones who will win.  

    The developer of Milk Monitor deserves congratulations two times: one for the app, one for the new bouncing baby she’s feeding. Peace!

    Twisted Juice.

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    2

    Mitch Joel and Jaffe Juice’s Joseph Jaffe squared off yesterday in a podcast that was a good deal of fun.  Each agreed they were good friends but that was about all they agreed upon — save for the obligatory strokefest at the end.  Mr. Jaffe is a principal at Crayon now owned by Powered and Mr. Joel is president of Twist Image a leading digital shop based in Toronto.  Both are published (books, blogs and pods) and practiced “duelists.”

    The discussion with which they played pong was “Is social media a discrete marketing practice?” Mr Jaffe says “yes,” Mr. Joel “no.” 

    The crux of the debate is this:  Social media needs to be well integrated into the marketing and digital practices of corporations. Today, it’s not.  Mr. Joel says there are smart companies doing so and he’s right.  Mr. Jaffe says those companies are the “exception not the rule” and he’s right. Powered is betting that specialized shops – best of breed social shops – will be better positioned to make waves and earn low hanging engagements.  Mr. Joel believes that cleanest most likely social successes will come from integrated digital shops, and in the long run that is probably more correct.  But his approach is less promotable and less newsworthy.   Social media is the haps today.  There is demand for it and a social marketing swell surrounding it. 

    Da Monies.

    So where is the money in social media?  Tweeting buy the pound? Friending by the hundred? In strategy?  Yep.  Where is the money in the integrated approach? The answer is tweeting by the pound and building websites – a more lucrative approach.  

    Win by Knockout?

    No. Both arguments are very compelling. Mr. Jaffe and Powered CMO Aaron Strout are loudly breaking new ground. (There are supposedly scores of quiet social media agencies in NYC alone.) Mr. Joel gets it for sure, and though his sound bite is not as powerful he will probably have higher margins this year. Were I a marketing director and these two pitching my business, I’m sure the last one to present would win the business.

    Screen Grab Retouching for All.

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    0

    I suck as an art director but that doesn’t keep me from appreciating art and wanting to play at it. Having looked over the shoulder of some pretty good art directors, watching them silhouette and manipulate images and color, I know what can be done with the right tools. The problem is the tools aren’t ready for mainstream.  And they are not free.

    Polyvore

    Polyvore is a women’s fashion website gets this and has developed a smart application where users drag and drop various clothing and accessories together into “sets” or looks. The UI (user interface) lets you flop things, flip things, enlarge, reduce, change color and purchase. By surrounding that functionality with comments, a community of fashionistas, and smart curating (showcasing Taylor Momsen and Keira Knightly sets, for instance) Polyvore has created a business. 

    Snagit

    Polyvore has tapped into people’s need to art direct or fashion direct and it points to a business I think is ripe for the taking.  A company by the name of TechSmith is aware of this and sells a product SnagIt that lets you grab and copy pictures and images via screen grab and do with them what you will. It looks fairly easy and for active users is a deal at $49.95. But the web needs an ad-supported version of this software for free. Think of it as a rudimentary retouching site – much like Flickr was to photo sharing a few years ago. Make it simple and they will come.

    Creating a Social Media Monster?

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    0

    Mission Control is a well-produced 76 second video by PepsiCo’s Gatorade ‘splaining how Gatorade marketing monitors the web for comments, chatter and potential product improvements. The “war room” at mission control is filled with AT&T NOC (network operations center) -like people in front of multiple monitors — their fingers on the pulse of Gatorade enthusiasts.  Looks like they are a busy bunch.

    Interspersed with the mission control pictures are great shots of Kobe, Serena, etc., helping viewers work up a sweat…which is what Gatorade is and should always be about.

    Right now this vid is kind of inside baseball for the marketing, advertising and social community – plus I think it’s being used in and around Cannes to round up votes. It’s a great spend, by Gatorade as they “set the stage for digital leadership.” I’ve written before that every large corporation in America will have a social media dept. and I believe it.  Smart senior agency people have nodded in agreement yet told me that the truly creative ideas and productions that hit wire/less will still come from agencies.  That, too, I believe.

    After a while though, after all marketers have jumped on this listening bandwagon and consumers are conditioned to provide product input, message input and marketing input, it will begin to dull the strategic senses. It will turn the world into a place filled with screen-scratching marketing interns, when what we really want to do is listen to the influential “Posters.” (Google whatstheidea+posters.)

     

    Let’s watch out for that monster that we are creating. Peace!

    Rubel, Facebook and Fruit Cocktail.

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    0

    There’s a pretty interesting debate going on over at Steve Rubel’s Posterous stream.  It revolves around his moving his stream (sorry, guys of a certain age) to Facebook.  He’ll continue at Posterous but feels Facebook gives him more visibility, a bigger audience and a richer discussion. 

    Mr. Rubel initially moved to Posterous because it was a place for him to aggregate his musings. Plus it was an easy and elegant interface.  (The aesthete in me likes the Posterous look better than the templatized Facebook frame.)  Sequestering most of his business and digital observations on Posterous and moving everything  else — business, personal, real time — to Facebook seems like a good strategy. But is it? Time will tell.

    Specificity

    In America and countries that look to America for tech and taste, specificity rules the day.  No one ever became president (of anything) being a generalist.  Let’s leave Mr. Rubel for a moment and use Ms. X as an example.  Say you’ve never met Ms. X but you think she’s a brilliant marketing mind. She may be a lousy partner, driver, dancer and cook but she can really mesmerize a room filled with marketers. You may be marginally interested in her meatball recipe but it is certainly not the driver of her attention.  The more meatball recipes in her stream, the less likely she is to be unique. By mixing all of her postings into one stream, Ms. X is not managing her brand very well. Her fame is diluted.

    Moving Toward the Middle.

    This is another example – common a couple of years ago when social computing companies were all trying to match each other’s feature sets – where everyone is moving toward the middle. It should not be. LinkedIn is about business relationships. Twitter is about real time info and immediacy.  Facebook is about friends and self and entertainment.  As Facebook moves to the middle, attempting to be all things to all people (brand fan pages included), it becomes like fruit cocktail — that can of fruit in the back of the cabinet where everything tastes like peaches. As quickly as Facebook is growing, I’m afraid it will mirror Google and turn into nothing more than an amazing advertising platform. (And then divest.) Peace!

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