I was recently interviewed by the New York Times about “smartphone etiquette” in this day and age. The main question was whether or not I thought it was acceptable to type away in meetings. As you might imagine, I had an opinion on this and one of my observations made the cut in the published article. Here’s the article:

Mind Your BlackBerry or Mind Your Manners

In the meantime, I’ve lost track of all the apps I have running to keep track of everyone. Let’s see what I typically have running in the background:

Trillian: Work and personal MSN, AIM, YIM
TweetDeck: Twitter, Facebook status updates
Yammer client: Work-related “yams”
MS Communicator: Work colleague IM’s

Whoa, talk about application overload. (Maybe this is why my computer is so slow.) But this doesn’t even cover Flickr or RSS feeds. I’ve been thinking that it’d be nice to have a SINGLE multi-platform (read Adobe Air) app that could rule them all and have an open architecture that could extend to future uses.

Fallon, the advertising agency, has come up with something close called Skimmer. They call it a “lifestreaming thing” and it’s a great effort at trying to consolidate your social life into a single app. Worth taking a look at if you’re looking to simplify your life.

Enough already!

When are we going to just drop the “Digital” and call them what they really are? It’s easy to think this is a minor point, but qualifying something as “digital” is old-school, traditional thinking. No wonder companies have such a hard time becoming digital. This is not a new topic by any stretch and it’s generally created by the incumbent as a way to distinguish the traditionally accepted way of doing things with potentially new and disruptive methods. It’s a subtle change, but an important one because in some ways, de-legitimizes the new way of doing things and forces the new to prove its worth. Fair enough.

In the “Innovator’s Dilemma,” we learned how disruptive innovation often starts off as an low-performance substitute for the incumbent technology. No one believes in it initially, but then after a few key iterations, it takes off and takes over as the dominant technology.

This theory has played out over and over again in nearly every industry from steel mills (b-school case studies galore) to telecom to photography. It is only a matter of time before we see this happening to digital and social marketing. As the tools to connect brands to customers and to other customers get better, more reliable and trustworthy, the more we will see a shift away from traditional means. If we apply social marketing to the graph above, I would say we’re still at the beginning part of the trajectory.

Those who are in traditional industries, like TV, need to adapt rapidly and learn to use the new technology to become relevant to their audiences. Take new Late Night talk show host, Jimmy Fallon. As an avid tech guy, he has made use of Twitter to generate a following of nearly 300,000 people whom he can directly engage with. He invited Engadget editor Joshua Topolsky on and Digg founder Kevin Rose. (The guy is clearly in touch with the digerati.) He asked his Twitter followers for questions to ask Cameron Diaz. He has even used it to help generate enthusiasm for his show, but even members of his audience. The other day, he picked a random guest — Bryan Brinkman –  and asked his Twitter followers to follow Bryan on Twitter. Within a day, he went about 30 to over 20,000 followers. This is how to use social tools to connect with your customers. Those who get it have already hit the ground running and are ahead of the curve and are betting their futures on digital.

So, what does this mean for businesses? Even though it’s been over a dozen years since the web started taking off, it confounds me that web and digital marketing accounts for a small percentage of overall marketing budgets. At some large Fortune 500 companies, I’ve seen them allocate less than 10% of their budget on digital; the cost of creating and running a commercial can often buy them an entire years’ worth of digital marketing effort. Despite this, I’m not particularly concerned because it’s still early days and digital and social marketing will eventually take over as the dominant and become the incumbent way of marketing. At that point, they will simply be referred to as “marketing.” Period. That is, until another technology comes around to once again, disrupt the value chain and take over as the legitimate incumbent. You can bet that the smart money is already on it.

A little lighter fare for this weekend. For people like me who are into their mobile devices, their selection of apps reveals a bit about their personality. I used to get excited to try out new apps, which come out daily. But now, figuring out what screen to put them on stresses me out!

There are now over 25,000 iPhone apps available in the iTunes Store but the iPhone has slots for 148 applications, or 9 screens full of apps. Even if you bought all 25,000 at a cost of US$71,442, many are pointless (Bubblewrap anyone?) And until Apple provides an easy way to manage them, except manually dragging icons around from screen to screen, I’ve become less inclined to experiment with potentially time-sucking apps. Of the 7 screens of apps I have, I’d say screen 2 is by far the most heavily used one. I think I use most of these everyday and some several times a day. My recent post on juggling priorities and availability of various applications on the iPhone help narrow things down to just the essentials above.

Looking at my most heavily used screen, the top row shows that I am a news junkie. Yup, guilty as charged. You might wonder why I have both the NY Times and USA Today apps  and for good reason. The NY Times app until very recently, was pretty crappy and unreliable so I used USA Today as it is much stabler and faster. Plus it has more sharing features, like sending URL’s to text messages or Twitter.

Row 2 tells you that I’m rather food-obsessed with 4 dining apps in the second row, but these are just the tip of the iceberg! I have a whole other screen chock-full of other food-related apps, including one specifically for espresso drinks! OK, enough about that.

The third row is where things get ultra practical — subway schedule/map, flight tracking tool, note taking app and weather. Row 4 is about socializing, from instant messaging to microblogging to full-on blogging. You know, gotta have various ways to kill time in airports, traffic or boring meetings. Not like that ever happens to you now, does it? Maybe I should use that time to figure out what applications to download next.

]]> http://www.jasonchan.com/strategy/2009/03/07/iphone-application-addictions-er-additions/feed/ 0 http://www.jasonchan.com/strategy/2009/03/05/measuring-influence/ http://www.jasonchan.com/strategy/2009/03/05/measuring-influence/#comments Thu, 05 Mar 2009 05:01:57 +0000 admin http://www.jasonchan.com/strategy/?p=73 One of the things I help clients do is figure out how we are going to measure success. For some clients and projects it’s growth in traffic, for others it’s e-commerce sales. Those are relatively straightforward to report on and there’s no shortage of metrics there. But increasingly, my clients are looking for new ways to engage with their customers and the traditional metrics don’t…quite…measure up. This is particularly true in the social media space where the interactions are numerous and vary tremendously in levels of engagement.

A recent post on Mashable caught my attention, a how-to guide on measuring online influence. It begins with a dictionary-type definition of influence followed by the requisite discussion of personal branding and what it means online. Where things get interesting is how the author dives into mathematical formulae of how to measure influence with the following equations:

Influence = (Personal Brand * Trust * Expertise)

Of course, since Expertise = (Knowledge * Trust), we can further refine the equation to:

Influence = (Personal Brand * Knowledge * Trust2)

I am all for quantifying results but how does one come to these conclusions and more importantly, how does one make these calculations? Whatever happened to integers and real values? I will agree that influence is made up of these components, but to stating it in these terms isn’t helpful nor is it actionable. Some units would be a start.

The next part of the article delves into measuring influence by looking at tings like traffic, connections, track record and so forth. All interesting and valuable metrics. But where the article falls short is defining how these are related  and what to do with the metrics. They are data points without a story to wrap them up in a logical way. They’re sort of like ingredients without a recipe; they’re all important but without knowing what to do with them, they’re just ingredients. I admire the author for putting these ideas together but at the same time, let’s be careful not to position it as a how-to guide when the step-by-step part of it is missing.

I mentioned in an earlier post that quantifying things with rigor is the way to go and in this economy, clients are increasingly expecting this. If it were easy to do, it would have already been done. There are no clearcut accepted ways of doing this yet, so I’m all ears for looking at new methodologies and approaches. Some will work, others won’t. But shying away from facing reality isn’t going to cut the mustard these days. This is something we will be hearing more and more of, so I’ll be revisiting this topic in the future.