Conversation Agent - Valeria Maltoni

Brand Matters

"Companies that place high importance on managing the economic value of their intangible assets and primarily their brands, consistently outperform basic economic measures." [Interbrand Top Performing European Retail Brands, 2008] I was reading an article in Ad Age about how, increasingly, the people who handle the brand inside organization are being considered for top jobs. Brand matters. It contributes significantly to the company's value. Lived and owned rather than an afterthought - a deliberate, two-way conversation between a company and the marketplace - a brand is a powerful asset. Especially in an increasingly crowded competitive environment. A brand that does... Read more →

Designing Business through Interactions

Recently, I've been coming back to the question of designing business. Who does it? How is it done? Do we design business through interactions? A long time ago, what brought us the tools we now take for granted - the mighty mouse, the flat screens, the software and hardware - was the desire to design interactions with technology. Those stories are told in Designing Interactions by Bill Moggridge. The focus of design is the end user. The enjoyment that individuals - we - gain from using well-conceived products is the hallmark of good design. We design story, an experience, and... Read more →

There's a Randy Pausch in Each Person

This past week, Randy Pausch, professor at Carnegie Mellon University and author of The Last Lecture [video, 76:00 minutes], died of pancreatic cancer. He was 47. In reading the comments to posts like Jeremiah's I often see one or two that say something to the effect: "we need more people like him." This is the same thought I've had on the rare occasions when a mentor or an individual went above and beyond the inspiration meter in my life. It would be easy to let ourselves off the hook on this one. Pausch was a smart, articulate, and cultured human... Read more →

Blog Council Unveils Disclosure Toolkit

Today the Blog Council unveils a disclosure toolkit. Before I get into what these checklists are designed to do, a word about what the council is. It is a volunteer group of companies designed for members to share insights and experience with each other. Period. We participate in monthly conversations to learn from each other about the applications and lessons learned using social media. We also meet face to face a few times a year. I attended the last workshop in Chicago and helped facilitate a discussion around engaging detractors - something we're all called to do from time to... Read more →

What is the Most Valuable Function Online?

That would be search. It allows you, the user, to find information and content you need and want, fast. Google gets that, and they serve your ads with it. Search also allows a site owner to figure out what people are looking for - there are services like Lijit that give you a snapshot of what people looked for on your aggregated content. Take publications with great content and deep, digital archives, and you can see why. There are already a few search APIs out there - the New York Times announced one recently, so did NPR and TechCrunch. [hat... Read more →

The Social Banner

Gianluca over at [mini]marketing has an interesting proposition about banners - what would happen if we made them more social? When I looked into banners for digital advertising I was not impressed by the metrics - the number of views that translated into clicks is not at all as good as traditional trade print media. That despite, as Gianluca observes, online ads being increasingly bigger, bolder, more intrusive, dynamic and interactive. Why is that? Could it be because we cannot interact with banners? I just finished reading Herd by Mark Earls, a book that explains and demonstrates through stories how... Read more →

Micropipelines and Implications for Digital Marketing

Isaac Mao has a thought-provoking post on micropipelines as unblockable infrastructure. This is how many-to-many relationships develop and work. [image created by Isaac Mao] The digital revolution has given us more than the opportunity to find any kind of content we want or connect with anyone - a-la one click of separation. One day we may well have artificial intelligence agents as discovery channels. In the semantic Web, pipes could talk to each other. This indeed opens all kinds of possibilities for individuals to organize themselves. It makes the world not as flat as we'd like to think - given... Read more →

1,800 in Extreme Scale Collaboration Game

Imagine 1,800 people collaborating in an alternate-reality game for 32 days. This was the world without oil game played in 2007. You have this massive multiplayer collaboration through gaming that is also a competition to build a reality that looks more like our favorite game - to become more engaged with the real world. Jane McGonigal of the Institute for the Future (IFTF) organizes this kind of reality game. She recently talked at the 2008 New Yorker Conference about Saving the World Through Game Design. IFTF examines the past to understand where the current stories came from and take a... Read more →

How does a Company Dip its Toes in the Conversation?

Start with the proper attitude. There is a bit more to that, as it turns out. There have been a lot of discussions about chief bloggers, social media experts and where blogging and social media fits inside an organization. While establishing roles and responsibilities is important, there are a number of things an organization can do to start dipping its toes in - to use an already oft-invoked term - the conversation. My friend Scott Monty started a new job last week. He is leading the social media efforts at Ford. A marketer by experience and trade, Scott has worked... Read more →

Social Media Group Acquires Livingston Communications

Today Maggie Fox of Social Media Group, which is headquartered in Toronto and has offices in Calgary and Washington, DC and Geoff Livingston of Livingston Communications based in Washington, DC join forces. What this means is that there will be one company, Social Media Group, which will acquire The Buzz Bin and Blog Potomac as part of the deal. The acquisition of Livingston Communications will be completed in August, 2008. This is good news for companies starting to ramp up their social media efforts. Traditional, full service agencies have been scrambling to add social media to their suite of offerings... Read more →