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How Does the Internet See You

Episode: VMC #218 – How Does the Internet See You [right click to download ‘Save the link as…’, video-player available below]

“Personas scours the web for information and attempts to characterize the person – to fit them to a predetermined set of categories that an algorithmic process created from a massive corpus of data. The computational process is visualized with each stage of the analysis, finally resulting in the presentation of a seemingly authoritative personal profile”.

How to use it?

Run ‘Personas‘ before and after a campaign, product launch, news realease, etc. and you’ll notice how the digital portrait will change. This is a great tool that can help you in defining how a brand, or personal brand, is/can be perceived online and whether your communications plan got the right message across or not. Remember: this is a complement, not a substitute to your strategic communications plan.

I mentioned Personas in my report last year in August 2009 and I kept playing around with it for the last 6 months. It’s a valuable tool and I’m still using it so I thought to show it in action with this video. Enjoy it!

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Show Notes & Credits: Personas, Music by Dennis Logan

All this is nothing without a plan! Please keep it in mind.
The focus of this post is more at tactical level. Don’t forget your strategy. Your analysis must support, focus and be related to your overall strategy. If you have no idea of what I’m talking about I suggest you to have a look at a couple of other posts I wrote and that you might find interesting:
Communications Planning Guide: A step by step road map that will help in crafting your plans at strategic and tactical level.
Communications Plan – Strategy & Tactics: Helps you in understanding the difference between strategy and tactics. Way to many people still confuse or mix the two.
7 New Marketing Tips for your Organization: What new marketing does and why it works. List of basic tips that you can take into action in your business/organization.

Had a look at Personas? Got some inspiration, ideas, suggestions? Go on! Share them in the comments or via twitter @vascellari (in order to help me and other readers to monitor the conversation please remember to link back to this post!).

Andrea

[Report] for January 27th 2010 – AndreaVascellari.com

Do you want to get these report-updates in real time? Subscribe to the live-report RSS feed! This feed includes only report related items. It’s not a substitute but a complement to my main RSS feed which still remains the official one that brings you all my blog posts.

Forrester’s Social Technographics: Conversationalists get onto the ladder – Two and a half years ago, Charlene Li and I introduced Social Technographics, a way to analyze your market’s social technology behavior. The big addition this year is “Conversationalists”: people who regularly post status updates to places like Facebook and Twitter. This re-design by Mike Arauz makes the findings a little bit clearer, and also compares 2009 to previous findings from 2008 and 2007.
The Maturation of Social Media ROI – The debate over measuring social media investment inspired many brands to cannonball into popular social networks and join the proverbial conversation without a plan or strategic objectives defined. At the same time, the lack of ROI standards unnerved many executives, preventing any form of experimentation until their questions and concerns were addressed.
Led by Facebook, Twitter, Global Time Spent on Social Media Sites up 82% Year over Year – According to The Nielsen Company, global* consumers spent more than five and half hours on social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter in December 2009, an 82% increase from the same time last year when users were spending just over three hours on social networking sites. In addition, the overall traffic to social networking sites has grown over the last three years.
Ten Ideas for the New Decade – An Edelman Digital White Paper – Downloadable PDF + Video.
Video Interview: @Scott Monty Ford Motor Company (via @SteveRubel) – In this four and a half minute video, which I shot yesterday, Scott talks about what he does in his day job, how social media is integrated into Ford’s communications engine (pun intended) and how he works with his executives.
Why The Agency Of The Future Looks Like My Fantasy Baseball Team – Clever.
World’s First Computer to Human Marriage: London Girl Weds Laptop – My friend Hermione is getting married. I wish them the best.
5 Top trends in online PR for 2010 – Online PR enthusiast predicts the next big thing after Twitter.
The 5 Reasons You’re Failing In Social Media – Short and spot-on.
Healthcare Marketing: 5 Social Media Examples – More than ever, it’s essential for hospitals and health providers to rethink their healthcare marketing mix to include social media. The proof is in the numbers: 34% of consumers use social media to search for health information, according to research data from How America Searches: Health and Wellness.
WooRank Screens Your Website, For Free – WooRank is a brand new service designed to let website publishers and marketers evaluate the SEO-friendliness and other aspects of their Web sites on the fly.
Uploading any file : Uploading and exporting – Google Docs – Now you can upload all your files without converting them to Google Docs. You can use Google Docs to open these files anywhere and share them with anyone.
12 Surprising Things Holding Back Online Video Advertising – Few things to keep in mind if you do online video.
Twitter’s Answer To Facebook Connect – Twitter is preparing to launch a new set of tools that will let third party websites easily integrate Twitter features directly into their web sites and services, multiple sources have confirmed. In a nutshell, this is their response to the massively popular Facebook Connect.
10 Musts for Marketing on Facebook – This post was initially wrote to target women only, but I think that some of theses tips can apply to other audiences too. Facebook has done a great job of giving marketers a powerful tool with its Pages product, but like most things in life, it comes down to execution.
18 Online Productivity Tools for Your Business – You may have occasion to bring your work home with you, or require frequent access to your to-do lists, notes and documents on the go…I do, always.

Smart Use of Google Calendar

Productivity – Google Calendar is more than a simple calendar. Here’s how it works for me.

I create different calendars and use them for different purposes like:

Do/Done list: In this calendar I write what I have to do everyday. What I can’t accomplish in a certain day is moved to the next one or to a different date. At the end of each day I have a list of tasks that I completed and a list of upcoming tasks that I’ll have to take care of in the next days/future. I usually mark the entries in this calendar as ‘all-day’, I don’t set specific time or place.

Meetings: In this calendar I save all my meetings – virtual (via Skype, Adobe Connect, Cisco, Google Hangout etc.) and in the real world (face to face). All the entries have detailled information about place (for virtual meetings I mention a specific URL or on which platform they’ll run), time (including the corresponding time for participants that live in other countries. Here’s a handy tool that can help you setup your meeting time) and alarm notifications.

Use hastags (#): Google calendar is searchable. By using hashtags in your calendar entries it will be easier for you to search and keep track of certain items/lists over time. I use #tags for all sort of activities in my calendars (work, sport, shopping, etc.)

As you probably noticed in the first screen-shot (above) some of my calendars are named as ‘project…’. In the next post dedicated to tools I’ll share how you can use Google Calendar to help you with your project management. Stay tuned by subscribing to this RSS feed!

Did you know that you can manage and sync all your calendars on the go? You might find interesting:

Why and How to Sync Google Calendar – iCal – iPhone

How to use Google Calendar as Project Management Tool

How do you use Google Calendar? Share your tips and ideas in the comments or via a quick “comment-ready-tweet” @vascellari!

Andrea

[Report] for January 16th 2010 – AndreaVascellari.com

Do you want to get these report-updates in real time? Subscribe to the live-report RSS feed! This feed includes only report related items. It’s not a substitute but a complement to my main RSS feed which still remains the official one that brings you all my blog posts.

Global Study Reveals Proliferation of Consumer-Based Social Networking Throughout the Enterprise and a Growing Need for Governance and IT Involvement – Cisco released the results of a third-party global study designed to assess how organizations use consumer social networking tools to collaborate externally, revealing the need for stronger governance and IT involvement. The new study is based on extensive interviews with 105 participants representing 97 organizations in 20 countries around the globe.
10 Gorgeous Social Media Infographics – Enjoy… 😉
Ad.ly Analytics – Understand Your Followers – Good analytics for your twitter account.
tweetcloud – what’s being said? – The goal is to quickly show users “what’s being said” across the Twittersphere or from a specific Twitter user through an intuitive interface (a cloud).
CMP.ly – Need to disclose? – Provides bloggers and advertisers with a simple disclosure solution.
ShoutEm – Roll your own Microblogging Social Networking – Handy. I love to use it for internal communication but it’s great for public too.
Ushahidi :: Crowdsourcing Crisis Information (FOSS) – The Ushahidi Engine is a platform that allows anyone to gather distributed data via SMS, email or web and visualize it on a map or timeline. Their goal is to create the simplest way of aggregating information from the public for use in crisis response.
Just because you only met social media idiots does not mean that everybody is one … by @nicolesimon – Nicole comments on comment so called experts. Well written post.
How to create a music video clip 2010 style – So this is how you produce a Music Video Clip 2010 Style. You ask your fans to turn on their webcam, mimic a frame they get presented and upload it. One frame at a time and together with other visitors you become part of the latest video of C-Mon & Kypski.
Mike Arrington interrogates Mark Zuckerberg – Where the privacy on the web will go in the next couple of years. “Public Is the new “social norm”.
The 10 Stages of Social Media Business Integration – Full social media integration often happens in stages — it’s an evolutionary process for companies and consumers alike.
10 on 10 – Ten consumer trends for 2010 and beyond from Edelman.
Google – Internet Stats – Collection of the latest Internet stats – This Google resource brings together the latest industry facts and insights.
What Is Engagement And How Do We Measure It? – Did you get something from your audience that can make your business better? That can mean profits, ideas, referrals and recommendations, digital merit badges…
How Saatchi & Saatchi’s Toyota social media disaster unfolded – Toyota’s now disastrous foray into social media offers a demonstration of what skills an agency needs to play in that space.

Why and How to Sync Google Calendar – iCal – iPhone

Why?

I’m always on the go and I need to have access to my calendar/s from wherever I am and whenever I need it. Instead of calendars I look at them as sets of data related to the projects I’m working on. During the last years I tested a good number of tools but I got the best out of the ‘Google Calendar – iCal –iPhone or iPod touch‘ combo.

How?

Enable Google Calendar in Apple’s iCal (this will work only on Mac OS X v10.5… or newer)
Sync your Google Calendar with your iPhone/iPod Touch (by default only your primary calendar will be synced to your device. To sync additional calendars see next point…)
Sync your additional calendars with your iPhone/iPod Touch by visiting https://www.google.com/calendar/iphoneselect from any browser (via desktop or mobile device) or For Google Apps users: https://www.google.com/calendar/hosted/YOUR DOMAIN NAME/iphoneselect
When you sync your iPhone/iPod Touch on iTunes make sure to select the calendars you want to sync (in the screen-shot below I synced all my calendars). iTunes > iPhone/iPod Touch > Info > Calendars

Advantages?

Your data doesn’t live anymore on single devices like your computer or you mobile phone, it lives in the cloud. Devices are used to simply edit or interact with your data. This means that…

after you edit one of the calendars (iCal, Google Calendar or iPhone) the changes will reflect in realt-time on all the others. Basically you use ‘one ring to rule them all’.

Tip: If you are using an iPhone/iPod and you don’t have wifi/data connection when you are on the go…no worries. Keep updating your calendar and the when you’ll find a connection (or when you’ll plug your iPod/iPhone to your computer > iTunes) your calendar entries will sync automatically!

you always have an online backup of all your data. So there’s no problem if you lose your phone or your computer crashes.
if you don’t have with you or you can’t use your phone or computer, you can still access your data from any other device connected to the internet. (I’ve been in this situation once… and this literally ‘saved me’)

What appears to be a simple synchronization actually opens up a huge number of new doors on how you can better organize and manage your life, work and projects. Give it a try!

If you liked this post you might be interested in also checking out:

Smart Use of Google Calendar

How to use Google Calendar as Project Management Tool

Meanwhile… Do you have any related tips you want to share? What advantages you find syncing with the cloud? Questions? Ideas? Special requests? Feel free to share them in the comments or via a quick “comment-ready-tweet” @vascellari!

Andrea

[Report] for January 7th 2010 – AndreaVascellari.com

Do you want to get these report-updates in real time? Subscribe to the live-report RSS feed! This feed includes only report related items. It’s not a substitute but a complement to my main RSS feed which still remains the official one that brings you all my blog posts.

Keep track of what you need to do thanks to Google – …I – LOVE – IT!
Facebook for iPhone 3.1 Adds Push Notifications, Address Book Syncing – There’s finally a way to extract your contacts from Facebook!
HootSuite Now Lets You Update Your WordPress Blog – The feature doesn’t limit you 140 character updates, and you can include URLs, photos and files in your updates.
Habbo Hotel launches conversation tracking tool – Habbo Hotel, the virtual world for teens, is offering marketers the chance to understand what its users are saying about their brands with a tool that has been piloted by MTV.
Search engine optimisation ‘to evolve’ with Google’s incorporation of Twitter – Google recently announced that it will be incorporating live updates from sites such as Facebook and Twitter into its results pages. Keywords would have to be included in Twitter posts, descriptions and accounts in order for the feed to be “properly optimised” by the search engine.
Location-Based Ads Come to Augmented Reality in the US – Location-based social network Brightkite announced this morning that it has added what it calls the first mobile Augmented Reality advertising for U.S. markets to its AR layer in the Layar augmented reality browser
Pepsi Chooses Social Media Over Super Bowl – Pepsi appears to understand that they are talking to people, and this is a huge point that scares many larger companies away from social media.
Twitgether – Social Twitter Client for Gmail Gadget, Facebook App… – Twitgether is a full featured twitter client for social networks.
How Much Information? 2009 Report on American Consumers (PDF) – In 2008, Americans consumed information for about 1.3 trillion hours, an average of almost 12 hours per day. Consumption totaled 3.6 zettabytes and 10,845 trillion words, corresponding to 100,500 words and 34 gigabytes for an average person on an average day.
Engaging Employees in the Age of Streams – Steve Rubel offers three potential solutions.
Social Media Guide for Journalists – It’s not enough today to have a good rolodex of sources (seriously, who even has a rolodex nowadays?) and a solid recorder, journalists need to be able to make use of every tool in their arsenal in order to stay afloat in today’s almost real-time media landscape.
Need an effective presentation? 6 PowerPoint tips – Useful.
Google Alerts for Twitter Lists – listimonkey – Get free email alerts whenever a keyword appears in Twitter Lists of your choice. Good monitoring tool…
20 Essential Gmail Tips You Probably Don’t Use (but Should!) – Awesome round-up of tips.
Ten trends that will matter to every company in 2010 – Neville sums it all up!