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BizDev 2.0 aka Marketing via API

Posted on 10. Oct, 2009 by Antonella Stellacci.

What do Twitter, Facebook, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Salesforce, EBay, Flickr have in common? They all offer APIs that other companies use to build businesses and products on top of them.

API technology and its standards have been around for a while. But only recently, companies have started to use them as a commercial enabler that creates new business opportunities. Caterina Hack, the mastermind behind Flickr, called this BizDev 2.0, back in 2006!

What are the advantages of using APIs as an integral part of your marketing plan?

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Tired Of Spam On Twitter? It Might Soon Get Worse.

Posted on 09. Oct, 2009 by Antonella Stellacci.

Yesterday news broke that Twitter is in advanced talks with both Google and Microsoft to let them include Tweets in their search. The partnership could be a game-changer. The way search works today is still very 1.0 or top-down: the “importance” of a site is vastly determined by the authoritativeness and number of sites linking back to it (in meaningful ways).  But, as pointed out by viral marketing scientist Dan Zarella, “Page to page links are too slow. And news can take days to get indexed. More and more news is breaking on Twitter, not Google, because it’s not real time”.

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The Day The Iphone Stopped Ruling The World

Posted on 06. Oct, 2009 by Antonella Stellacci.

About time! Google’s attack to the Iphone brainwashing of the masses has started. This morning, Google and Verizon Wireless announced an agreement to deliver mobile applications and devices. The companies will develop several Android-based devices preloaded with apps.

The first new phones are expected at market within weeks. Two will be released before the end of the year and they will support Google Voice and have Google’s Android Market preinstalled.

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The Suggested Users List Ambiguity

Posted on 04. Oct, 2009 by Antonella Stellacci.

Say you want to learn a foreign language. You could

• Learn the rules and words – through an interactive course or a class;
• Learn by “association”, finding native speakers or traveling to the country where that language is spoken;
• Turn the TV on and watch Martha Stewart speaking a few words of that language….

Uh? Well, that’s what would happen if you followed the” Twitter methodology”. New users are welcomed by a few instructions and a “SUL”, a suggested users list, which should provide them with guidance. In Twitter’s words:

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Crowd-Sourcing Translations

Posted on 01. Oct, 2009 by Antonella Stellacci.

The monopoly of English in the Internet is long time gone. The Internet penetration in non-English speaking countries is through the roof, and tools to help webmasters and site owners go local are spreading very quickly.

Today Google announced the introduction of a new translation widget that, on the fly, displays the content in the visitor preferred tongue. It is a no-brainer to install it, a simple snippet of code that you can put anywhere on your site. The quality of the translations is not the highest, nonetheless this is a free and  quick way to get your site, or a rough idea of it, spread in roughly 50 languages.

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Video: Seth Godin On The Internet As A Radio for Ideas And Freemium.

Posted on 29. Sep, 2009 by Antonella Stellacci.

How do you get people to use your free stuff? And how do you move people from free to premium?

Seth Godin’s 3 minute answer:

Create Quality > Get Attention> Connect >Monetize= Free to Premium

One example is musicians: the more music they give away for free, the more money they can make from live gigs and records.

Another example is Seth himself: by giving away for free his “Unleash The Idea Virus” book, he ended-up selling more full-priced hard-cover books than his previous book.  Readers check the book and if they decide they like it (i.e. if there’s quality to it), they will buy it and they did. No one buys business books anymore without knowing what they are about.

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Remember Facebook Before Its Platform? Here Comes Oneforty For Twitter.

Posted on 24. Sep, 2009 by Antonella Stellacci.

They say that personalization is coming to the 2010 web, in the form of filters and recommendations, to help user discover relevant data.

They also say that the vast majority of Twitter users are clueless. And Twitter’s efforts to engage and educate them through the Suggest User List (SUL) and the tiny ads of Twitter apps haven’t done much so far. TV celebs and the likes seem to only drag with them a few millions of rather inactive “viewers”….Neither could Twitter implement Facebook Connect to educate users through their Facebook tweetering friends…

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Getting Ready For Digital Advertising 2010

Posted on 24. Sep, 2009 by Antonella Stellacci.

According to a forecast from ad firm GroupM, the Internet will account for 15% of global ad spending in 2010, hitting $65bn annually, as advertisers continue to shift their budget from traditional media to digital

• 6% of it will go to Mobile which is expected to experience the biggest increase (+19%) as mobile apps continue to spread;
• 43% will be allocated to search, which continues its steady growth;
• 34% should be the share of display ads, the only sector who might see a decrease of -1%

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Challenging Dunbar: Gist.

Posted on 19. Sep, 2009 by Antonella Stellacci.

A known principle in the social relationship science is the Dunbar’s number.  Dunbar was a British anthropologist who theorized that, because of our cognitive limits, we can maintain only a limited number of relationships, in which we really know who each person is, and how each person relates to every other person. The number after which you become socially numb (or dumb) was identified to be 150.

In our hyper-connected society, even the most socially inept has a network bigger than 150 “contacts”. But keeping up with all of them is becoming a nightmare and a challenge for businesses where each contact has a very measurable dollar value.

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What Are You Telling Me?

Posted on 16. Sep, 2009 by Antonella Stellacci.

Sometimes companies are forthcoming about their plans and products.  Think of the new Ipod Nano and of Steve Jobs words. “We’ve seen video explode in the last few years,” he said, showing a picture of a Flip video camera. “Here’s one, a very popular one, four gigabytes of memory, $149, and this market has really exploded, and we want to get in on this.”  Plain and simple.

Other times, companies speak in riddles. So you know that, when you’re using their service, you’re contributing to the making of something different than what you’ve been told. And in the near future, you might find yourself in a totally different reality.

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