Social Media Marketing has often an ambiguous fascination for the neophyte. On one side, there is the happy face that promises free viral promotion, on the other a darker and scarier world, where success is an obscure secret for the few. Both faces are false. There are no mysteries to be unlocked, no gatekeepers with a superior knowledge, no secrets. Once you understand that, you’re already ready for success. And luckily a few new start-ups are emerging, which promise to take social media beyond the obscure buzzword fascination, and help make it a profitable channel.

One of them, recently reviewed by AllThingsD, is called Flowtown. What Flowtown does is as simple as potentially disruptive. All businesses with a digital presence collect emails from their prospects, partners and customers. Be it a signup form, a landing page, an event registration, a newsletter.  But in most cases these emails addresses have become no more than zombies, that every now and then (and always less) open a newsletter and maybe click-through it.

This is where Flowtown comes into play.  By entering in someone’s email address into its system, you can find out who a person is: name, age, gender, occupation, location and  the social media profiles that are attached to that email address: Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Myspace, Flickr, Amazon and Stumbleupon. It makes the emails suddenly relevant, and allows them to be targeted and better performing.

To start using Flowtown, create your account and start importing your contacts. The free version will import 50 of them and entitle you to 250 emails/month. But with only $14.99, you can upload unlimited contacts and send up to 10,000 emails/month (pricier packages are available for larger businesses).

Once your contacts have been processed, you can access them through the Dashboard where each account is associated to its social media profiles. Suddenly you get to know who your customers are, what social media sites they use. At an individual level. Imagine using this tool in combination with “influence” trackers, to identify the influencers among your customers.

And there’s more. Through the Insights section, you can access an aggregate view of your contacts broken-down  by age, social network, gender and location. This part per se is of incredible value for (small) businesses who don’t collect but email addresses, and know little to nothing about their audience.  I’d recommend using Flowtown just for this customer intelligence service.

But the most exciting part of it all is still to come and it is the campaign manager. When you create a campaign on  Flowtown, or via MailChimp (now integrated to Flowtown), you can target your message by the social network of your contacts, for example send it only to users with a Facebook account. The advantages of using this segmentation feature are immense: say you’ve created a LinkedIn group, you could only invite users who are on LinkedIn, or if you are planning a chat on Twitter, that email would only go to users who have a Twitter account.  No wonder Flowtown already claims higher open and click-through rates for its clients.

The brilliant minds behind Flowtown are its young CEO and founder, Ethan Bloch, and CMO Dan Martell.  You can follow their blog http://flowtown.com/blog/ or their Tweets at @flowtown.

Even if you’re not an Apple fan boy, you have to admit that Steve Jobs is one of the most captivating speakers of our days. He has been able to attract a cult-like following based on his public speaking abilities.

In The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs: How to be Insanely Great in Front of Any Audience , Carmine Gallo slices and dices Job’s presentations to reveal the “secret”  techniques of his storytelling. Gallo’s main message is that anyone can deliver an “insanely good” presentation: or for the average presenter, at least one that is not deadly boring.

It’s a nifty little book with many ideas to help reshape your presentations; and it’s worth a read, as long as you’re willing to accept an extra-dose of Jobs’ worship.   Even if you’re not into public speaking, the book is a good exercise for your product marketing skills. It will challenge you to get over yourself. To learn to sell a Dream. Nobody really cares about your product. They only care about how your product or service will improve their lives. Make your brand stand for something meaningful. When Jobs introduced the iPod in 2001, he said, “In our own small way we’re going to make the world a better place.”

The nitty gritty of the presentation skills.

In any speech – answer the one big question, why should the audience care about your product. Have 3 points – supporting the one big question. Be passionate. And keep it simple. Simplicity is key in telling your storry. In Jobs’ own words, “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication”.

A presentation is like a movie, with a storyline, three topical moments, an antagosit and a memorable moment.

• Storyboarding with pen and paper. Like a movie director, Steve Jobs “storyboards” the plot of his speech. Before even opening PowerPoint, spend time whiteboarding your ideas: you’re delivering a story. Pen and paper help being creative and getting over the bullet point void of ideas.
• One sentence headlines. Steve Jobs creates a single sentence description for every product. The MacBook Air is “The world’s thinnest notebook”. If you can’t condense the product/service description in a tweet, stop and start again.
• The drama. Create an antagonist to allow the audience to rally around the hero—your product. The antagonist can be a direct competitor or a problem in need of a solution.
• The rule of 3. Every Steve Jobs presentation is divided into 3 parts. Your audience is only capable of holding that much in short term memory.  Rather than go into the technical specifications on each product, Jobs often invites his audience to go to the website and in so doing he drives traffic to it and commits them to buy through their online store. 
• Forget bullet points! There are no bullet points in Steve Job’s presentations. Instead Jobs relies on photos and images. This technique is called “Picture Superiority:” information is more effectively recalled when text and images are combined. Add demos, videos, video clips. Make it interesting and entertaining. 
• Put your numbers into a context. In every Apple presentation, big numbers are put into context. The bigger the number, the more important it is to find analogies or comparisons that make the data relevant. 12 Gigabyte means nothing to the audience: enough music to travel to the moon and back is a number which will resonate.
• Simple words. Steve Jobs speaks in plain English. He described the speed of the new iPhone 3G as “amazingly zippy.” Jobs’ language is simple and direct. Amazing, cool, are frequent words in Job’s language. If you don’t convey passion about your products, why should your audience and customers do so?
• Build Momentum. Every Steve Jobs presentation has one moment called “Emotionally Charged Event.” For example, at Macworld 2007, Jobs built up the drama to introduce the Iphone. “Today, we are introducing three revolutionary products. The first one is a widescreen iPod with touch controls. The second is a revolutionary mobile phone. And the third is a breakthrough Internet communications device…an iPod, a phone, an Internet communicator…an iPod, a phone, are you getting it? These are not three devices. This is one device
• Practice. Steve Jobs spends days rehearsing. Nobody is born knowing how to deliver a great presentation.

2009 has been a turning point for the Internet of Things, as ReadWriteWeb names it, a revolutionary ecosystem of permanently connected “sensors” which promise to make our lives better, more “intelligent”.

Mobile phones and new devices have emerged which could change our behaviors in disruptive ways. Here’s a few of them designed to support our efforts towards a better lifestyle.

Chose a Quiet Place – WideNoise

WideNoise is an iPhone application that samples decibel noise levels, displaying them on an interactive map. With WideNoise you can monitor the noise levels around you, and map it to see the average sound level of the area around you. Readings can be shared online with the WideNoise community and tweeted.

Iphone users can purchase WideNoise for US$1,99 from the Apple App Store.

Stay Fit – FitBit

Fitbit is a small device that you can clip on your waist, in your pocket or on undergarments, and it accurately tracks your calories burned, steps taken, distance traveled and sleep quality. Its 3D motion sensor your motion in three dimensions, and converts this into useful information about your daily activities.

FitBit

Anytime you walk by the wireless base station, data from your Fitbit is uploaded in the background to Fitbit.com, from where you can see detailed data and also participate in collaborative fitness goals with friends, family and co-workers.

It costs $99, but to have it you have to add yourself to the waiting lists since it is sold out.

Sleep Tight – MyZeo

MyZeo is an elastic headband, which you’re supposed to wear to bed each night. In its center there’s a transmitter pod which measures your brainwaves and transmits them wirelessly to the clock on your nightstand.

MyZeo

When you wake up, you put the headband back onto its charging shelf on the clock. The screen shows you a graph of your night. The optional alarm feature will look for a “natural awakening point” based on your sleep patterns.

MyZeo stores your sleep records on a memory card so that you can go to MyZeo.com and upload your data to the Web. The website lets you slice, dice and cross-compare your sleep data in various ways.  You can plot the quality of your sleep, or one type of sleep, over time, by week or month. Or see whether your bedtime affects how long you sleep, whether you get more deep sleep on weekends and so on.

MyZeo costs $299 or $349 for an additional sleep coach program.

According to new figures released by the Interactive Advertising Bureau and PricewaterhouseCoopers, U.S. online ad spending in the third quarter was down 5.4% from the same period a year ago.

Is the economic downturn the only culprit? It might.  But it is also a testament to the failure of online advertising to deliver innovation, which leaves the web powerhouses scrambling to find effective ways to monetize their traffic.

So what happens when all Beacon-like models fail? If Mohammed won’t come to the mountain, the mountain must come to Mohammed. Wave your Online Privacy Good-Bye.

The facts.

Innovation comes with a cost: Google Personalized Search.

As of December  4^th, if you own a Google account , you have  been opted-in into the Google Personalized Search program. Which is to say that Google will look at your web history and behavior, before serving any search result, to increase their relevance and the likelihood of you clicking and generating ad revenues for them.

This is a game-changer move for search. The dawn of an age of “artificial intelligence” : just imagine the consequences of having this central brain learning from your habits and offering you the most compelling information, when and where you need it.

Despite all this, though, the debut of our future Big Brother is not the best we could wish for:

1) Why isn’t Google letting people know well ahead of time?

2) Why is it not making this an opt-in program instead of opt-out?

3) Why are they not explaining better how personalization is better for me, and how much of a manipulation it entails.

The lack of transparency makes even the most disruptive innovation look very suspicious, and begs the question of who is the focus, you or the “advertisers” and how a balance is achieved and preserved.

Unnovation – aka Facebook

Picture this. You’re dialing a phone number from your cell, and your phone company interrupts you to announce that moving forward all your conversation will be public, unless you say so. And even if you say so, a portion of your personal profile and the business you’ve bookmarked (the Pages) is now moved under a so called PAI section, Public Available Information.

Crazy? Spooky? Unthinkable of? Well, that’s what Facebook just did.

From Beacon to Scamville, Facebook has never been a paladin of innovation when it comes to monetizing its traffic. So it’s giving up, as simple as that, and proposing we all become public sharers and offer Google, Microsoft and whoever else the right to step into our life and that of our friends and use all this data for whatever purpose they have in mind.

Be it an academic data-mining, or a political one, or a mere advertising ploy to get us to buy something, you just don’t know. You’re just asked to take a leap of faith. And if tomorrow’s your insurance company calls you to question your mental illness, or if your employer lays you off because you’re a fan of a competitor or sharing offensive stuff, who cares? Not Facebook for sure.

Web 2.0 as we knew it is over, dead. Eric Shmidt, Google’s CEO, words are its testament

If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place

The Opportunity

Will new services, paid or with a freemium model, emerge in the near future to either train and alert people about what is safe to  share and what not, or offer them private networks, to keep using the Internet to share, collaborate and learn without the fear that it will be used against them?

There are services and products that radically change our experience. Google. RSS. Twitter. The Iphone. The Kindle. FourSquare… But there’s also another category of less hyped, but not less relevant services, that help make our lives better. Think Dropbox or Evernote. Instapaper is one of these wonders.

What is it? The idea is simple: we all find ourselves in a situation where we really want to read something, but we don’t have the time. Some of us will keep 100 tabs open, in the hope to find the time later, others will bookmark it. Either way, that post is gone. Chances are you won’t read it.

Instapaper is that “Read Later” in your life. With a simple click on a bookmarklet, you can save in one central place all the items that you want to Read Later. The web interface is clean and simple, and offers additional features to help you stay organized (archive and folders), share your reads, and discover what’s hot among other Instapaper readers.

But that’s not all.

-Integration with Google Reader. Besides using Instapaper through the bookmarklet, you can also save items directly from your Google Reader, by using the function Send To. (thanks to @tamar and @scepticgeek for helping me discover this!).

-Iphone App. You can access your Instapaper items from an Iphone app which will transform your iPhone in a mini-reading tablet. There are two versions, a free and a premium one. The free version will  save up to 15 items. The premium one, Instapaper Pro, which costs only $4.99, can store up to 250 items and downloads articles in the background, so any time you have it open, it’s updating the list of stories for you to read. Other premium features include the option to share your articles with the Instapaper community and read popular articles that have been shared by others. (If you’re a Tweetie 2 user, you can save posts directly to Instapaper!).

-Kindle/E-reader “Integration”. Until last week, you could link your Instapaper to your Kindle account and it would synch-up daily or weekly. But you had to pay $0.15 for each of the emails sent and it turned out that the system was unreliable.  Instead of over-the-air download, now you can use a USB key, where the 20 more recent Instapaper saved articles will be transfered as Kindle-compatible .mobi file. Instapaper also supports ePub downloads, the format that many other popular e-readers use (like Sony Readers).

Instapaper is the work of Tumblr lead developer Marco Arment and was recently named by O’Reilly as one of the top 10 Iphone Apps. No surprise there!

Do you use it? Do you like it?

FourSquare, SimpleGeo, Layar, Junaio are the start-ups of 2009. Amen! This is good, this is beautiful, and this is the promise of mobile coming true.

But there is an area that is still under-rated and under-hyped, and that is as needed as geo-location and mobile augmented reality for mobile to come full circle. That area is Speech Recognition. 2010 could be the year when it eventually hits mainstream, the year when voice becomes the “next touch”.

Why would that be?

The foundations have all been laid out: advances in speech technologies, speech recognition APIs, faster networks, broadband, cloud computing, better devices with user-friendly interfaces, compelling applications.

Who could be the game changers? The fact of matter is that there is nothing more sci-fish than using voice as a command. Captain Kirk’s talking to his computer is the archetype of our dreams. But the reality is a steep wall of scepticism at best, bad perceptions most frequently, towards services that so far haven’t always proved themselves.

The winner won’t be necessarily the company with the best technology, but the one who can sell us back to our dreams…

-Apple

In June, Apple unveiled Voice Control, its new voice user interface. What it does is very simple: it allows users to make calls and control the iPod features on the iPhone 3GS by simply speaking. Voice Control can be used to

• make a call by saying the name or number,
• tell the iPod app to play a song, play a playlist, shuffle, activate Genius, or have it tell you what song is currently playing.

-Google

Google’s bet on voice as the killer app for mobiles is not even a question. Google has developed its own speech recognition system, originally deoployed for the GOOG-411 free directory. A shortlist of its most recent milestones include disruptive services as:

• Google Voice, with its voice-mails and text messages transcriptions.
• Google free  turn-by-turn voice navigation.
• Voice Search.

-Microsoft

In October, Microsoft announced a slew of new services based on speech recognition:

• A mobile version of Bing with voice-enabled search.
• Bing 411.
• The Samsung Intrepid from Sprint, the first Windows phone to use the voice user interface of TellMe, the start-up that Microsoft acquired in 2007 for over $800million dollars. Intrepid users can press the Tellme button on the phone and say what they want — whether that’s to call, text a friend, or search Bing.
• Ford Sync, an in-dash recognition and search system.
• Voice Mail Preview, a speech-to-text technology, which automatically sends a text preview of voice mail right to the user’s inbox.

Nuance Communications

Nuance Communications, a provider of various speech recognition and predictive text products, is the behemoth of the voice industry with an estimated $1billion in sales. Recently Nuance has purchased Jott, whose service translate spoken messages into text and emails, and can be integrated with various web services, such as a Salesforce. Just today, AT&T announced its partnership with Nuance to offer voice-mail transcriptions.

Vlingo

A Boston-area company, Vlingo began to gain traction in 2008, when Yahoo licensed its speech recognition technology to empower its oneSearch offering.

Vlingo also offers a mobile app for Iphones, Blackberry, Symbian and Windows Mobile phones. Once the app is installed, it becomes the Voice UI of your phone. All you have to do is press a button and start speaking. The voice clip is put through speech recognition software, running on a server, and converted to text. The results are sent back to the phone in a matter of seconds.

The Vlingo application can work with other applications such as maps, notes, email and it also lets users update their Facebook and Twitter with a simple voice clip.

Vlingo has also opened its platform to developers who want to add voice features to their apps.

-SimulScribe&Ditech

SimulScribe has been around for a while with its voicemail-to-text technology. But lately it has stepped up with an exclusive partnership with Ditech, worth $17 million dollars, and released a version of its technology aimed at enterprises, with its new ability to operate behind firewalls. PhoneTag, its voicemail-to-text solution, is capable of around 85% accuracy and offers a human-powered service which can get up to 97% accuracy.

You might not love Ikea’s furniture, but you can’t deny that Ikea’s marketing strategy is nothing but brilliant: a cutting-edge blend of mobile, emerging technologies and social media.

Mobile Augmented Reality App
You see something, you like it. You don’t buy it! Why? The most common reason is that you can’t picture it in your own house. Visual memory is not a common talent, planning by the sheer power of imagination is even rarer.

The Ikea mobile application, dubbed Portable Interior Planner, is your new bionic eye. With a very clean and easy-to-use interface, it gives customers the ability to see exactly how the new designs will look in their home. And to do this, it uses mobile augmented reality features.

Here’s how it works:

• The application has images of the new PS line. Choose a product, select “Take a Picture” and aim the camera of the phone where you’re planning to place the new piece of furniture.
• When you do so, the piece of furniture is superimposed on top of the room viewed through the camera. Furniture pieces are also scaled to size, so that the proportions of the piece are not distorted.By using keys on the handset, you can move the piece of furniture in different directions.
• Once you’re happy with the result, you can use the camera to take a picture of the scene. The photo can either be saved on the phone, or sent via MMS directly from within the application.

For the German launch of the PS line, Ikea distributed the mobile application in three ways:

1. In-store through posters urging customers to send a free text message to receive a link to download the application.
2. On the Ikea website
3. Through Bluetooth pillars installed in certain stores.

Mobile Coupons and Loyalty Programs
How do you keep customers informed, improve their lifetime value and loyalty? Run a monthly contest, offer something valuable as a prize, get your customers to opt-in, and then form a community of loyal members who recieve exclusive promos.

That’s the gist of Ikea’s Seattle store marketing strategy in the last six months: consumers can enter for a chance to win the $500 Ikea gift card by texting the keyword “winner” to an Ikea short code.  When they first do so, they’re asked to enroll in Ikea Mobile, the retailer’s free program that provides alerts and special deals. Every month Ikea texts its members a coupon code, which they can redeem to the Mobile kiosk at the Seattle store.
Guess a number of redemptions? More than 15,000 to date!

Facebook Photo Tagging Contest

The story has gone viral and is already a social media case study!

Advertising agency Forsman and Bodenfors was engaged by Ikea, to create a special launch campaign for a new store in Malmo. The agency created a Facebook profile for the store manager, Gordon Gustavsson. Over a two-week period, it uploaded images from of Ikea showrooms to his Facebook photo album, and the first person to tag their name to a product in the pictures, won it.

Pure creative genius at work!

A NYT article, published over the week-end, sparked a heated debate over the legitimacy and value of an in-stream advertising model on Twitter.

-This idea has no official blessing from Twitter, yet.

-Back in September, the start-up changed its TOS to include the option of integrating advertising, in its service and search. And that time is approaching.

Open questions on the in-stream advertising models, and advertising on Twitter:

• Ambiguity- Can a 2chars hashtag (#ad) disambiguate an advertisement  inside a stream?
• Control – What prevents me or a spammer from exploiting this system and deceiving my followers? Anyone could post a tweet promoting a new Starbucks Coffee, and instead send traffic to a make-money-from-the-internet landing page or to this blog.
• “Advertorialization of Content”- How will the sponsorship affect the quality of the content produced? E.g. if a user is paid to place a Sony ad in her stream, will she still tweet or link to content that is not Sony-friendly?  And viceversa, will she start bragging about Sony to make her ads look more legitimate? Or to attract new advertisers?
• One platform- What’s in for Twitter in this model? Should its own future advertising platform be the only one allowed and sub-licensed to third parties? Will this model be open for third parties like an Adsense?
• Who is paid for what – As with the Murdoch-Google case, are we taking it backwards when we sustain that content producers should be rewarded on Twitter? Aren’t they the one who are benefiting from all the attention and traffic that they receive from Twitter, and for free?
• One-size-fits-all- Will the advertising based model come with a premium service that is advertising free?  There is a target of early adopters and users repellant to advertising, who would pay for the conversation to be unadorned and uncluttered. ( Except that without the ads, some conversation might sound a little strange).
• CPM, Metrics and Retweets- What are the new metrics in this model?   Ad.ly and Izea have CPM offers, where the CPM value is inferred from the influence of the Twitter user (followers, lists and their members and followers, retweets, engagement through @replies, etc). A caveat though: unlike traditional impression-based models, tweets tend to have a very short life span.  But it is also true that when the attention is captured, the ad could spark a word of mouth effects inside and outside Twitter, that is much more valuable than a pure CPM. Are there measurement tools to allow for this post-click analysis of a campaign ROI? Will users be able/prompted to retweet ads?
• Search vs Stream: with search you could reach way over the number of followers of a single Twitter user, and users who are interested, when they are interested and guarantee relevancy of the ad to the published content (the tweet). With in-stream ads there is the brand association factor, but it gets diluted by a smaller reach and the randomness of when it gets shown to the users.

Geo-location APIs will help close the sales loop for businesses with a brick and mortar presence, and make local advertising a very effective component of whatever advertising platform Twitter will come up with. That’s how far my certainties go!

Twitter did not invent retweets. Its users did: they created a mechanism, to allow word-of-mouth within the 140 chars world. Retweets are the vehicle for virality: you like an article, you pass it to your followers,with or without your comments, and they do the same.

Like in real-life, the original retweets followed the subject-object syntax: “I” recommend “you” read this, which was recommended by @friend1 which was recommended by @friend2, etc.

This EGO-system is very dear to all twitter users: make it a matter of vanity (me me me and my 1million followers), or of trusted sources (if Scoble says so, I gotta check it out real fast…). But it is also the only way virality works: I am telling you, and you might do what I ask you to, because it is ME saying so.

The new Retweet implementation is subverting this logic in different ways:

-Only the first person who divulges the news remains attached to the tweet, the others disappear as mere “supporters”;

-You get a retweet only once. So if 10 of my friends are deeming that same news important, I have no way to tell, or rather it is not as immediate as it was before. Rick Mans’ post on this is a recommended reading.

So why is this happening?

A few guesses:

-If users were to adopt retweets diligently, Twitter would have a much easier life in mining its database to analyze the dynamics of retweets and provide useful analytics tools to its future clients. And according to Dick Costolo at the Crunchies today, this is something that is close to being rolled out.

All the meta-data is there, on a golden plate, intact: one tweet– not 1,000s interpretations (retweets with comments), one short link. Mesh that up with the data on the “originator” of the news and the supporters/retweeters, their authoritativeness, their retweet patterns and let search engines gobble it all up in their search results. No duplicates, no weird comments, all is consistent and clear. Let advertise also jump in and mix within the stream.

“What’s happening” and Retweets go together: it’s a shift from a pure EGOSystem to a DataSystem. And, frankly, if you’re on Twitter to get the best news from the finest minds, you might end-up liking the new implementation of retweets.

But do retweets stand a chance to gain mass-market traction? There is one principle, which this particular UI implementation seems to have forgotten: trust. People are not willing to listen to someone they don’t know.  Removing the user from the twitter stream, and replacing it with the original source of that tweet seems like a move that might hinder virality in dramatic ways, across the board.

It’s that time of the year again, when we’re about to get bombarded by predictions for the next 12 months, 99% of which, let’s say it, are going to be wrong.

In this TED video, recorded at the Entertainment Gathering in December 2007, Kevin Kelly, co-founder of Wired , writer and futurologist, starts by observing that the Web is only 5000 days old, and offers predictions for the next 5,000 days. That should spare us up from a few years of wrong blabbering about unlikely futures.

Kelly postulates that the next Web will differ from the actual one because it will be:

• Smarter, with some AI, most likely the Google one;
• Personalized;
• Ubiquitos, for all devices become portals into it.

What will get us there? Three main trends are identified by the futurologist.

Embodiment

In the next 5,000 days, all will be connected through the web and become web-based. Software and phones are already there. Soon we will have one media platform and media will be “free”, i.e. restrictions on its use will fall apart. Humans will become extensions of the machine or the one web platform.

Semantic

The first phase of the web was about creating links between computers; the second was links between web pages; and now we are linking to open data and ideas everywhere. Semantics will allow us to create this Internet of “things” (physical things).

Co-operation

In order to be smart, the next web has to be totally personalized. But personalization comes at the cost of privacy. Only total transparency allows total personalization. If your data is transparent, Google could serve as much of your own memory or more: Google is moving towards AI. We are the web and becoming one “machine”.

Enjoy!