This article from AdAge Digital was really timely therefore when I read it (at work) this lunch time. Seems there are really good reasons to be in the enlightened 'allow' camp, But most of the guys last night were in the 'restrict' corner.

Around the table last night were (for the sake of explaining the 'research panel' composition) : 4 Americans, 2 Germans, 4 Brits. All aged 30s or 40s. All either digital, studio or Systems / IT professionals. Most (to my surprise anyway) were dismissive of using social networks (for social network read Facebook as that is the one everyone cited).
Most also didn't 'get' twitter.

Interestingly though, they all used I.M a lot to liaise with team members / colleagues globally (time zones allowing) and also in the same office for instant project chats etc.

One of them did use twitter as it seems I do , namely to get quick updates on trending tech / digital topics, to seek recommendations from industry experts etc. E.g more a work related tool than a purely social / entertainment tool.

So I guess the guys I had dinner with would fall squarely into 90% of Info tech managers who deny or curtail staff usage of social networks. That's the figure from a recent Economist report, as cited in the AdAge article.

So it could be that my Dinner partners' curtailment could stifle collaboration between in-house teams, industry partners, intelligence-gathering from their competitor set etc.
And to my mind it may also stifle intellectual rigour and professional development .

I  can't substantiate that - I'm proclaiming that form behind the weight of the Economist and also AdAge  -  other than to say I've learnt both useful detail and also broad marketing / technology trending insight in the last 12 months or so alone from reading expert blogs and using twitter.

One thing I've done though is switch off tweetdeck and other clients as that was a distraction on my monitor - I actively attend to microblogs or full blogs or Google stuff when I get any down time or when I need to research stuff - but it is at work not just at home.

Some of us in te digital space at work also tried a Wave group from  a collaboration point of view (and talked of trying yammer). We also used NING fairly successfully on one initiative.  But none ultimately progressed that far. A mix of sharepoint , email and I.M sill seems order of the day as it works well.

What do you think? How do you use twitter at work? Used any in-house / private collab platforms ?

I 've been using twitter lists for a while as a way of making sense / curating the mixed bag of interesting people I follow. I won't detail the why's and wherefores of that here, see an earlier post on that.

Suffice to say I have found Lists really useful.

And I've also used Delicious for a long while , but that usage kind of tailed off as I started to use twitter as a bookmarking service in some ways.

Now along comes Pearltrees. Not brand new as I believe it was launched end of last year - but new to me.  Thanks to twitter.com/jeffmclfc for the tweet that led me to it.

I've just started playing with it and my first reaction is that it should be easier, more interesting and hopefully more habit-forming than using the somewhat dry Delicious service.

caveats: IF I can sustain the impetus to keep curating all the interesting stuff I come across on the web. And IF twitter lists don't fulfill that functionality.. which in some ways they do (certainly in recording blogs I like, as one use).
But I'm aware that using Twitter lists is a subset of all the possible sites out there e.g someone has to be a twitter user and a blogger before I could curate them as 'an interesting digital blogger'.
Pearltrees would just let me read their site then pearl them straight off (hmm, that sounds wrong) as a blog to retain a note of.
And pearltrees additional features , the social part, where I can see who else likes that blog or has different info resources to me, is an area I haven't made any use of yet.

It's the social part that is the cool thing - curate or interrogate web content based on shared interests not just share friends or broad industry / profession categories.

This curation malarkey takes time. But I think if I was researching a particular subject then pearltress would become a richer area to mine that perhaps a straight wiki approach also? As long as there is a big enough crowd-curation take-up of pearltrees of course.

There is a nice roundup from February on pearltrees at the 'down the avenue' blog. (Which I've just discovered and have added it to my twitter lists, great blog) And now I should also add it very easily to my pearltree account with the firefox plug-in.

The drag and re-arrange interface is really nice too. A lego brick approach to constructing your own take on a subject area in a way that makes sense to you.. and you can use specific bricks (pearls) from other people you stray across when you do a search for a specific topic..

For example, I did a random search on 'genealogy' (not so random as I have an interest in this area) and found some great sites curated by someone with the handle of gdappel.
To date I've either bookmarked interesting (to me) genealogy sites I've found or tagged in Delicious. Pearltrees allows me to see some context (in the relative visual spacing) of new genealogy resources gdappel has found AND those they have links or connections to elsewhere.

My one (BIG) concern is that I could lose HOURS following some of these new sites up.. uh oh!

Stop Press : seems you can import Delicious public tags also.. cool.
My Genealogy pearltree will be grown in the near future then.

The camera control for end of fight scenes is also excellent.

I haven't got the hang of it yet - hence one game , one lost..

There were some great examples shown of what is possible now with the basic toolkits. And it was a reminder that AR technology will be ubiquitous in the way we interact with the world in the future (at least those of us lucky enough to have access to the technology).

Layar have stated that this is the year they are making their mobile browser tech available in a massive ramp up strategy:

(from their site) : Layar will enable  ".. the possibility for producers and publishers of AR content to offer their experiences for sale. In addition, Layar reached agreement with one of the top 3 mobile handset manufacturers for a global distribution partnership, which will bring Layar capable phones to the mass market. This will enable tens of millions of people to experience Layar AR content on their mobile phones in 2010."

I think they will be back in the iphone App store soon?

That is mobile but last night we also saw desk based / at home instances and the hint of what could be done with AR in marketing with sales -promotion tie-ins.

I've already written about the monster Doritos campaign but we saw what Citroen have started to do with printed brochures :

example of AR in automotive brochureware with Citroen

There was also a nice example of adding AR to trading cards for kids. Created by Total Immersion, who sadly couldn't attend last night but the demos were nicely shown by Matt Trubow from Hidden Creative.

The example used was Wayne Rooney .. but I cant actually find a link to that. So here is (from  the same card company I think) an eexample using Baseball stars in the USA (turn down the sound, the music is awful):

For me it isn't just the technology which will decide what works well in marketing.(there are of course other allocations for AR but I'm in marketing services mode on this blog).

The technology has to work with a creative campaign idea, fantastic interaction layer design, compelling reasons to interact as a consumer, compelling reasons to refer it on - to provide product up-sell, cross-sell, brand building or data generation for future activity.

Sounds familiar eh? AR will definitely revolutionise marketing opportunities and advertising but the old marketing fundamentals /  best practice will be ignored at your peril. Otherwise you just have a very faddy / gimmicky campaign on your hands that damages the brand and looks 'trendy' and me-too.

in my view that is what the latest Adidas range of AR -enabled shoes does.

It has the 'huh?' factor. not the Wow factor.

More of that in a later post I think..

It depends who or what you read.

For me it's just as bemusing as Wave, in that I'm still figuring out if it is more useful as an info source or easier for me to 'connect' than via my 3 existing (pretty ubiquitous) channels of Linkedin, Twitter and Facebook.

Actually - I have been thinking of trimming down my Facebook friend's as I just can't absorb or process the myriad of status updates from (some) nebulous 'friends'.
I don't mean that in a dismissive way, I've probably accepted some friend requests in the past with good intention but as I've used it more and more, I realise that I need to trim down to retain just those with real resonance and a reciprocal connection / affection.

My wider work/social/life network may be best served via twitter.. although some would argue that that should be clearly one OR the other not the hybrid usage I have it for on occasion.

So - Buzz.. better than the triad mentioned above? A new layer of connections and saring or a subset of detail I finf it hard to give time or headspace to? A coherent social network rising from the GoogleSoup which will ultimately dominate the web?

Possibly - but only when it is free from Googlemail. I'm in mail mode to read 1 to 1 long hand messages, not to browse interesting articles or comment on photos.

A standalone twitter-like presence for Buzz would serve it better I think. Though the iphone App helps me differentiate form email nicely, to be fair.

There is a great succinct round up of what Buzz hopes to be is here at techcrunch:

http://techcrunch.com/2010/02/09/if-google-wave-is-the-future-google-buzz-is-the-present/

 I watched the Googlebuzz launch vid and it all looks great but I may be missing something - not all my contacts are on googlemail (by a long way) so facebook or twitter will still be the way to share photos / videos or external sites. Or maybe I've missed something in that.

Buzz was launched with some degree of pushback from the 200 million (I think?) Gmail users who were concerned about how to control posts / published contacts etc.. but Google seems to have quickly made privacy settings changes or at least clarified options for users, which is laudable.

"We've been getting feedback via the Gmail help forums and emails from friends and family, and we've also been able to do something new: read the buzz about Buzz itself. We quickly realized that we didn't get everything quite right. We're very sorry for the concern we've caused and have been working hard ever since to improve things based on your feedback. We'll continue to do so."

I'll spend more time noodling with Buzz for a while but I can feel the urge to abandon it as I did for Wave .. which could be a it premature perhaps!

When you hold up a promotional pack of Doritos (in Brazil) to the webcam, the AR code printed there then initiates a little cartoon character which is active within the Orkut community. Orkut is big in Brazil (bigger than Facebook or Mypsace I think, so that makes sense as a platform for extending the campaign).
And with lots of different AR codes on packs, I assume that the purchase volume would go up as consumers look to see which other monsters they could reveal...

The campaign started last year and I can't see (via googling) how it has gone but everyone is a sucker for cartoon monsters (just me then?) and it would be interesting to see what impact this has had on brand metrics, sales and of course recycling / retention of crisp (chips) packets!

I tried to interact with the site, but Brazillian defeated me:

The Doritos Brazil site didnt have an English option , as you can tell!

I was at the first meeting of the Augmented Reality Mancheter Group last night and it was an interesting meet.
A mix of design , tech and client services folk interested in the growing-technology and applications of augmented reality.

I've only got one app on the iphone at the moment (Sun Seeker) but that itself demonstrates how useful the technology can be.
How it can boost a Brands reputation or increase sales for a client is of course another matter. But the technology itself looks really interesting and its role in marcomms / campaign strategies will no doubt take off very soon.
I'll add in some examples like the GE Energy App that is shown a lot, soon.
The ideal would be for us to start prototyping Apps  for clients as part of a wider campaign response.

But commercial / ROI usefulness of any new platform or technology is the acid test : Which is why this post is called fabric or fad, in that unlike (say) 2nd Life and virtual world technology - I think AR could be part of the fabric of Marketing communications , whilst virtual worlds (in that context - not for other instances e.g in closed-group education) is / was a fad.

What do you think?

It’s of David Cameron and has him staring out, with a slightly far away looks saying something like “I'll cut the deficit, not the NHS." Which is a poor line in that its about “I” not ‘We’ so not a great party line and reads as negative, not commanding or upbeat.

But what struck me most was the stare and also the unsettling plastic look of the photo.

It transpires that it was heavily airbrushed (actually digitally reworked but that old school term still applies).

Pretty much all public / fashion / Advertising portraits will be cleaned up in some way, of course.. But this looks like it could be Dave’s 2^nd Life Avatar.

I’m not Tory bashing here (ok, a bit), the thing I wanted to note was that with social media and quick-to-build web technology what would have stayed within the realm of dismissive articles in the Press, the chip wrappers of tomorrow, has taken on a viral life with the launch of http://www.mydavidcameron.com/.

 The Original Poster

One of the Spoofs created on mydavidcameron - this one by the very funny http://www.bbdo.co.uk/blog/

Satirizing pompous or ill-judged political grand standing or false portrayal (literally) isn’t new but now you don’t just laugh once, you laugh at every new user (citizen) ‘s take on the subject and for much longer. 
The democracy of scorn, as a cynical Brit I’m all for it.

It struck me that only about a year ago I was very sniffy about twitter but would say now that is really is a great piece of technology and is shifting how we interact and behave : personally, locally and globally.

See some of the earlier posts related to my reserve nay scepticism about Tweeting. Even the term annoyed me ;-)

BUT .. I found myself at some quiet times over the holidays reading tweets that were filtered by the lists I've been curating.. social, tech, photography etc.

To be able to pick up as much of-the-moment info and enteraining / stimulating  thinking via a stack of magazines or newspapers or through sitting and searching / browsing on my mac via Google wold have taken for ever.

With the lists I've set up I was quickly absorbing some really interesting stuff from clever people and making the occasional note of an expanded thinkpiece (via a link they cited) for a deeper read.

To that end, I just read read an article by David Carr in the NYT about similar views he had. It expands beyond my point on lists curation so have a full read, it's a great article.

Twitter isn't a fad and is now part of the plumbing (I think it was Steve Johnson who Carr cited for that analogy - it's very apt).

My first is that SETI will pick up on a cosmic twitterfall, revealing a universe of digitised conversations.

A universal sign of intelligence will be the ability to share scientific knowledge across disparate communities, enrich cultural experiences and build commerce across vast distances. Whilst at the same time (as da youth say), chat shit about anything and everything.

Okay, lame joke over..

I was going to do some serious predictions for 2010 but after a twitter search (I’m using twitter rather than google for quick filtering) on ‘marketing predictions 2010’, I stopped.
Because many people, more insightful than me, have a plethora of sharp predictions out there.

That said, I did have a couple and some of my own quick-fire thoughts are :

> lists will continue to grow, everywhere, not just in twitter. Lists become more valuable as we try to cataegorise the enormous ocean (universe?) of content, data, knowledge out in the connected world.

> Paid for  / paywalled news media won’t take off as much as the professional media creators and broadcasters  would want, if at all.

> Apps will rise in importance in the marketing repertoire. Not just on iphones but across all devices.

> Google Wave will slowly take off..  But only when Google push the adoption harder and tweak the interface and functionality.  And only if conversations / collaborations don’t get hacked/ spammed / phished to death

Have a great holday / Christmas break.