Marketing, Communications and Technology

Just clicked through this on SlideShare and I found it to be a great resource for presenting the idea of Web 2.0 to folks.  Normally, online slide cannot hold my attention but the visuals and information worked great.  Kudos to the creator and contributors.  Great Work.

It’s no secret that the iphone is one of the best tech toys out there, but to me it’s a life changer.  Its a revolution in function and where it goes from here could change everything.

The word phone is actually a misnomer.  It would be more accurate to label it a handheld computer that can make phone calls.  Never has there been so much function in such a compact, easy to use format.

Although it is easy to make hardware comparisons and compose bullet lists versus other smart phones, the ace in the hole for Apple is the App Store.  In the same way that video game consoles live and die by the success of software (games), so will smart phones.  Except that the iPhone already has a long line of developers clamoring at making applications and the hardware itself is so hot that it often sells for double or triple depending on what part of the world you live in.

The iPhone, like a computer with only an operating system, is a blank canvas.  Yet it holds many advantages over even the best laptop.  Microphone, Speakers, Camera, GPS, Accelerometer (tilt sensing) Wifi, and 3G (Fast data) all in the palm of your hand and all with Apple’s trademark easy to use interface.

There is so much to talk about that new websites spring up everyday concerning this device.  A podcast called iPhone Alley is dedicated to iphone news only and then there is the legions of hackers “jail breaking” (allowing them to use unlicensed software) their phones because they can’t wait for official applications but I could be here forever if we travel down that rabbit hole.

Lets get to my favorite applications so far:

Productivity

Evernote is an online repository for notes. You can take them in any fashion: photos, recordings, writing.  They are stored and archived for you in a an online repository for future use. It even has the ability to take handwritten notes and recognize the text. The iphone application lest you do all this from your phone with ease.

Weatherbug: If your business is outside, then knowing what is going on with the weather is very important.  There are many ways to get this information but with the built GPS and a real-time radar, it doesn’t get much easier to tell of that rain is coming your way.

Microsoft Exchange email support works flawlessly and was easy as pie to setup. Typing on the screen became second nature to me after a couple of days.  The trick is just to trust the phone, it will auto-correct spelling in most every case.  I can now type pretty fast on it and do not miss my berry one bit.

Kyte.com lets you broadcast live photos and video via a website and the iphone application only supports photos at the moment but is expected to support live video.

The Fun Stuff

Facebook: This one is both fun and productive as many organizations use a facebook account to keep in touch with customers/students/alumni.  You can post images directly, post new messages and chat.

Twinkle: This is a twitter application which amazingly takes your current location and shows you what other people are talking about. You can post a photo direct, respond to messages and make your own posts.

More Cowbell: There are so many novelty applications on the App Store,  I thought I would include just one of my favorites.  Some of you may remember the Christopher Walken skit from SNL. Essentially this turns your iphone into a Cowbell.  Best part is it works with music.  So if you are using your ipod to play music, you can run this app and add cowbell to any song. LOL

The Future

I only scratched the surface here, the killer app is the App Store itself, it represents the life changing possibilities I alluded to.  The list of problems that can be solved is endless: pull up medical literature on a drug, read a CT scan, measure how many calories you burned (based on movement of phone), buy anything, read a book, control your computer, access a server, get directions, find out who is around you, get all your news, watch anything, talk to anyone in the world via wifi, turn photos of text into text, etc etc etc.

All these things were already here or on the way on multiple portable devices. However, no device (other than the iPhone) so far brings them all together and makes them easier to accomplish at the same time.

Oh alright, there must be some cons right?  Battery life is rough, although I heard it was the same or better than most 3G devices.  Video is not there yet but I think this will be a software upgrade.  Maybe this was a battery life decision.  I know its capable, here is a clip of it being used.  As far as cut and paste and MMS messages, I do not really care.

Needless to say, I highly recommend it to everyone. You will wonder how you functioned without it.  Sliced bread’s got nothing on the Apple iPhone 3G.

I have been away form the blog for a while and away from marketing as well.  I have been charged with the task of organizing a search committee and a plan for our new central web team.

My assistant found this great site and I wanted to share it.  If you need to write a job description for a field that you are not completely familiar with, this is great place to start.  Of course it’s also a nice job search engine for job seekers as well.

Essentially, it searches live job posts and profiles the information much like google, including salary averages per city.  Although the information is only as good as the posts, you can always click right through the results and read the actual description that was posted.  Its great resource that I will definitely go back to.

If you are like me, you found it much easier to grow a facebook group than a facebook page since you cannot send out “join” requests for a page and until recently we were not able to even see a page without logging on.  Groups however were easier to grow and a bit more viral in the features available. (Credit to my assistant, Karina, who discovered this recently for me.)

A request to Facebook and 24 hours is all that is needed to turn your group fans into page fans and maybe grow your page from:

this

to this

in 24 hours!!!

Here is all that is required:

1. Visit the Facebook Help Form Page.
2. Subject line should read: Convert Group to Page
3. Make sure you include the url for both the group and the page in the body of the request.
4. Watch your page fans grow!!

We doubled are fans with this new feature.

I’m going to confess, I am very green on the subject of social media, to the point that I only started reading the Cluetrain Manifesto this year. By internet standards I’m a total newb. However, most of my circle of friends and colleagues are by far even more naive to the end of business as usual.

Image Credit: Scobleizer

My first real experience with the concepts of this life changing phenomenon occurred at a Higher Education E- Marketing conference hosted by Stamats last year in Chicago. I have to credit Thomas Frey of the DaVicni Institute with his presentation on ” the future of education”. He ingrained in my mind a sense wonder and a thirst for knowledge. Other presentations at the event went on to discuss how universities were using social networks and I returned to my own institution, energized and full of ideas.

But the concepts transcended my work in marketing. They pointed to what is so eloquently written in books like Cluetrain or Groundswell. Everyone knows that the only constant is change but the majority of people still do not realize just what an incredible revolution the web has made possible and how it will continue to change our culture, our habits, our lives.

So should you care as a marketer? Damn straight you should care. How much? That is dictated by your customers and the product or service you are selling. In higher ed, its a no-brainer.

Here are a few links I found very informative:

How To: Effectively Talk to Execs and Clients about Social Media - This one is of great importance to me since many times, talking to folks that do not use social media is a real challenge.

Is Social Media Marketing Right For You? - A good recent post on the subject.

The Press Release is Dead: How Web 2.0 Could Save PR and Marketing - and of course there is the social media press release developed by shift communications.