Category: Social Web

The key for success in this digital era

I believe that the key for success in this digital era lies at the intersection of technology, business and people. It’s something so simple, right?

Well, you might be surprised to know that for many this is still a difficult concept to understand and achieve.

Just think about it.

Think about how many talented teams of engineers (people) have great ideas and develop new excellent products (technology) but don’t know what an actually business plan (business) looks like. On the other hand, think about great marketing campaigns that sell lousy products or when products are targeted to the wrong audience. Every time you see a project failing there’s always something missing from one of these 3 core spheres: technology, business and people.

A vital concept that many people probably don’t pay enough attention to because of its almost too extreme simplicity.

At the world blogging forum (check video below) I explored some of the trends that we are seeing in the 3 spheres linking back to what we are doing in Finland.

Please keep in mind: The audience was ‘general’ and not representative of any specific niche so this was not a technical talk, a keynote presentation or a workshop targeted to advanced strategies and tactics to leverage each aspect of these 3 spheres. I simply introduced the audience to this concept and left the topic open for discussion during the panel with the other panelists. If you are interested in more specific presentations with advanced content you might be interested in having a look at m my speaking archive.

I once again thank Ritchie (@datadirt) for inviting me and for the flawless organization of the event. And now, enjoy the video!

Andrea

Andrea Vascellari -The key for success in this digital era from World Blogging Forum Vienna 2010 on Vimeo.

The key for success in this digital era

I believe that the key for success in this digital era lies at the intersection of technology, business and people. It’s something so simple, right?

Well, you might be surprised to know that for many this is still a difficult concept to understand and achieve.

Just think about it.

Think about how many talented teams of engineers (people) have great ideas and develop new excellent products (technology) but don’t know what an actually business plan (business) looks like. On the other hand, think about great marketing campaigns that sell lousy products or when products are targeted to the wrong audience. Every time you see a project failing there’s always something missing from one of these 3 core spheres: technology, business and people.

A vital concept that many people probably don’t pay enough attention to because of its almost too extreme simplicity.

At the world blogging forum (check video below) I explored some of the trends that we are seeing in the 3 spheres linking back to what we are doing in Finland.

Please keep in mind: The audience was ‘general’ and not representative of any specific niche so this was not a technical talk, a keynote presentation or a workshop targeted to advanced strategies and tactics to leverage each aspect of these 3 spheres. I simply introduced the audience to this concept and left the topic open for discussion during the panel with the other panelists. If you are interested in more specific presentations with advanced content you might be interested in having a look at m my speaking archive.

I once again thank Ritchie (@datadirt) for inviting me and for the flawless organization of the event. And now, enjoy the video!

Andrea

Andrea Vascellari -The key for success in this digital era from World Blogging Forum Vienna 2010 on Vimeo.

Art & Copy – A Must Watch Movie

Yesterday I watched Art & Copy, a fantastic documentary about creativity and advertising. Big names in it, inspiring, insightful, sharp. It sucked me in from the start to the end. Unquestionably one of the best documentaries I’ve seen about our industry.

Rent it on iTunes, buy it, do what ever you want but get it, watch it and I’m sure you’ll enjoy it.

Here’s the trailer

Andrea

How To: Get the most out of Facebook’s Impressions and Feedback stats


Check out the original post on The Next Web!

Special thanks as usual to Zee M Kane (@Zee) for the opportunity of sharing some thoughts with The Next Web friends, and to Brad McCarty (@BradTNW) for his magic touch & contribution.

Facebook Pages’ Administrators might be happy to hear that from now on they will all be able to have access to stats on the number of impressions and on the feedback of each entry posted on their wall.

Until now this feature was available only for pages that had at least 10,000 fans, but now it’s available to all administrators. Having access to this data is definitely something that will make happy many small businesses and organizations.

Want to see what the hype is all about? Check this out:

But now that you have it, what are you going to do with it? First off, you need to understand the meaning behind the names –

  • Impressions: raw number of times each entry has been seen on the wall and in the news feed of fans
  • Feedback: Number of comments and Likes given, per impression

So let’s say that you post something and it is seen by 10 people. Of those 10 people, one left a comment and one clicked like. Your Feedback score, then, would be 20%. But you have to take these numbers inside the context of what they mean.

For instance, let’s say that as your popularity grows, you see a greater number of impressions but a smaller feedback number. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing (though not necessarily good, either). While it’s our hope that everything you post gets liked and commented upon, you have to understand that what we want and what we get aren’t always one in the same.

In any transaction-based situation, as the number of users goes up the potential for interaction increases. However, it’s not likely that the act of interaction will increase by the same number.

As is true with almost anything that you’re doing publicly, you’ll need to gauge the reaction and take it into consideration from two directions. First, is the reaction overall positive or negative? Second, based upon the first answer, what did you do that was different from what you’ve done before?

Getting the most out of any statistic is a matter of taking all sides into account. With Facebook’s addition, it will give you some insight, but it won’t answer every question. So take the information as it is given and see what interesting things you can find with it.

How to Search old Tweets and Messages

Find for old tweets that are not showing up in twitter search results. I bet many of you had to deal with this problem. I already blogged about other solutions to backup you tweets and make them searchable using Google Calendar but in that case you can search for public tweets only, forcing you to leave private DMs out of the picture.

During the last couple of days I bumped into and tested this new service called SnapBird. My take? It’s just great. Here’s where you can search with it:

  • further back than 10 days
  • within only your friends’ tweets
  • within your direct messages
  • within any user’s favourites

I hope you’ll find it useful as much as I did!

If we are not connected yet via twitter feel free to get in touch over at twitter.com/vascellari 🙂

Andrea

Being Active on Twitter is Paying Off

@vascellari

this week stats via twittercounter

This week I decided to be more active on Twitter and so far I must admit that is paying off. I met a lot of new interesting people, had great conversations publicly and privately via DMs (direct messages), and got a bunch of new #FF (follow friday) at the end of the week.

I’ll invest more time inTwitter from now on and if you want to join the party… get in touch with me @vascellari!

Andrea

Some of the new #FF Keep ’em coming! Love to connect with you! 🙂

@vascellari

World Blogging Forum 2010

Episode: VMC #228 – World Blogging Forum 2010
[right click to download the source file – ‘Save the link as…’, video-player available below]

Subscribe to the show on YouTube!

Show Notes & Credits: Powered by itive.net, World Blogging Forum 2010

I’m wearing Frogger

My website is ‘wearing’ a new theme, Frogger!

2010-11-08_1238

Frogger is something more than a simple wordpress theme, it’s an amazing design project we are working on with my team at itive.net.

Subscribe & stay tuned, I’ll blog more about it… Or if you are interested in getting your own custom design visit us at itive.net and ‘Get Started‘!

Meanwhile, what do you think about the new design? 🙂

Andrea

7 Takeaways on the Future of Interactive Video

2010-10-26_1742

Today I received and email from Jeff Pulver in which he was talking about a new groundbreaking music video (Thanks Jeff!). I checked it out and it was actually pretty cool. It’s an interactive video and you can have a look at it over at AndyGrammer.com

2010-10-26_1742

Technically it’s a no-brainer, it reminds of a couple of flash projects I worked on a couple of years ago with my team at itive.net. What’s interesting about it is the fact that it’s all done within that vevo player, Today I received an email from Jeff Pulver in which he was talking about a new groundbreaking music video (Thanks Jeff!). I checked it out and it was actually pretty cool. It’s an interactive video and you can have a look at it over at AndyGrammer.com

Technically it’s a no-brainer, it reminds of a couple of flash projects I worked on a couple of years ago with my team at itive.net. What’s interesting about it is the fact that it’s all done within that vevo player, definitely great work.

Here’s a list of a few important takeaways that I thought to share after watching the video:

  1. Although video is a channel that is getting more and more traction online, having ‘just a video’ out there is not enough anymore. A higher degree of interaction and strategic thinking is needed.
  2. High quality engagement experiences are unquestionably one of the key factors that will help in winning the battle for ‘online attention’.
  3. Will these kinds of projects be the only ones that will give you a higher chance to succeed? No. I’m sure we’ll still have low budget and amateur videos that will go viral.
  4. Whether he will use this kind of technology or not, Loren Feldman will keep rocking and 1938media will survive.
  5. I believe that the attention span of people will keep decreasing. This will make the difference between real artists & professionals who are able to capture the audience’s attention and amateurs that will get lost in the countless number of non-sense videos that we have online.
  6. Unfortunately projects like this won’t run on every mobile device any time soon. Until Apple and Adobe figure out a way to go hand in hand in this we’ll have to enjoy these kinds of shows just sitting in front of our laptops & desktops, so communicators and strategists must keep that in mind.
  7. It’s going to be expensive. Until someone will come up with automated solutions which are able to cut down the huge amount of work and editing to get to such results (like for example Animoto did for videos/photos) the budgets for such projects will still be relatively high. In any case if you want to get things right with online video it’s going take a lot of work, experience and strategic planning so it will increase in the future.

What would you add to this list?

Andrea

Apple and Adobe…You guys should talk

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Adobe Flash Player & Apple

Apple and Adobe have figure out a way to go hand in hand in this. Now Apple won’t even ship anymore Macs with a pre-installed Flash player leaving that as an option to the end users that will have to download it directly from Adobe. Same goes with Java, although I believe that could have a minor impact. Anyway, Apple and Adobe should really talk about this. It’s 2010, how long this battle will keep going on? Com’on guys…

Your Take?

Andrea