Can you really blog from a mobile handset?

I'm about to invest in my third iPhone in the next 45 days. Probably the same day they hit the market, just like I did in June 2007 and July 2008 (by the way, I just saw that the new device may very well house, among other things, a digital compass).

One of the earliest apps I downloaded for my 3G iPhone was BlogPress, one of the first blogging tools for the iPhone and iPod Touch. I thought, "how perfect; now I can blog from anywhere, anytime; while I'm waiting for an appointment or sitting on the train".

The reality is that I haven't used my Blogpress iPhone app once.

I tweet all the time from my iPhone, send text messages, and read & write emails (albeit short ones). Authoring a decent blog post, however, is an exercise that requires some focus, time and...in my opinion...a more robust set of tools at your disposal:

• Fast and accurate authentication to get at the (remotely hosted) blog itself (I will confess occasionally struggling with the login to a system (like my bank) from my iPhone, even though there's a free app for it)
• A decent screen and a keyboard - I'm an outstanding iPhone keyboarder, but I've realized that I simply don't want to type three or four paragraphs on (any) mobile handset if I don't have to
• Fast, easy access to online resources
• Cut & paste facilities to embed links into your post (yes, yes, I realize that's coming with iPhone OS 3.0)

There, I've said it. I'm an avid fan of Apple products (since 1984, when I bought my first of over twenty flavors of Macintosh over the years), and a rabid iPhone fan, but I'm acknowledging that there's certain things a mobile handset just isn't cut out for. And blogging is one of them.

Your thoughts are welcomed.

On Nielsen's "Twitter Quitters"

Nielsen recently published a piece about dwindling retention of subscribers to Twitter's micro-blogging service.

There's much conversation about this lately - detractors are especially pleased to see supporting data because they never saw the utility of such a thing ("it's for narcissists only").

My thoughts:

Micro-blogging takes time and energy, and like enything else, users of this service are getting out of it what they put into it.

Many visitors create a profile, check it out, and quickly depart because they don't take the time to build up connections within the network that can generate value. It's these folks who represent the 60 percent who don't return after a month.

Over the last six months, I've gleaned a great deal of value from Twitter because I'm now "following" some very worthwhile sources of insight and information – customer service value, thought leadership value, brand-building value, and more.

And I believe I'm providing same, because I'm just shy of 400 followers in my network, and my tweets on social media and digital marketing routinely get 're-tweeted' by others.

Good digital karma, in my opinion.

Sometimes the Simpler Solution Is the Best

A centralized repository of reusable media components, or digital assets, can both lower the cost and speed the execution of many brand-marketing strategies. Lack of this centralization and automation will fail to produce meaningful time and cost advantages for businesses. Automation of the management and distribution of reusable media components provides a set of on-demand self-services for internal as well as field operations. This type of management and distribution supports more consistent expressions of brand identities and strategy, both contributing to higher sales and lower operational costs (Michael Moon, GISTICS).

We've been in recent pursuit of a prospective client on the east coast – an organization that would be a perfect fit for a partnership with ours. They have a need for almost all of our integrated marketing communications services, and a robust dialogue with them continues.

They approached us last week with an interesting challenge. Their CMO is on a team that was formed to search for and evaluate a digital asset management solution for their marketing and creative staff.

The current scenario:

• They've created a wealth of electronic image assets, but they're strewn all about the organization, in numerous silos (desktops, servers, optical storage, etc.) and are not easily nor quickly found.
• Many copies of the same file (a logo, for example) exists in several locations, and employees do not know which asset is the most up-to-date and authoritative
• An .EPS only of an illustration exists, yet a user is in need of a .JPG for Web publishing purposes
• A .JPG does exist, but at a 632 x 355 resolution. And what's needed is 120 x 240 pixels for a banner ad
• The right resolution does exist, but only in color, and what's needed is a monochrome version for a print ad

You get the idea.

We're informed that the search for a technology solution has been in place for eight months. They've been exposed to extensive (and expensive) installed solutions, as well as enterprise hosted solutions, both of which are very capable of doing everything they need.

And much more than what they need.

And all the while, this organization continues on with the same information management challenges they recognized last year.

Our prospect expressed to us how big of a deal it would be to get this problem solved, and asked us what counsel we might provide. As we are not a commercial software developer or vendor, they were not expecting anything more than a few pointers or perhaps a recommendation for an additional vendor they'd not contacted yet.

Here's where it gets interesting.

Over the last several years, some of our existing clients have approached us with the very same issues. And our Digital Solutions Group has been able to implement a simple, yet tailored technology solution for them, using an industry-standard, web-based, open-source engine at the core. The system we've put in place for several clients already (hosted by Bader Rutter) supports the entire image asset lifecycle (ingest, index, store, tag, search for, transform, preview, export and distribute) yet can be implemented in a matter of weeks instead of months.

Last week we demonstrated what we've already put in place for existing client partners of our agency, and the response was overwhelmingly positive. They were downright excited. What we showed them was exactly what they've been looking for, and they really appreciated how quickly we mobilized to show them a possible solution. We've already been asked to present a formal proposal for our development and hosting services, and believe we just might have accelerated the development of a long and fruitful relationship.

On the corporate 'awakening' toward social media

The exponential rise in interest in Social Media is pressuring business to sit up and pay attention. And it's happening fast. Not only is there a significant number of mainstream media reporting on this phenomenon, but it seems like the lion's share of bloggers and micro-bloggers with their sights trained on business are also espousing the virtues of facilitating a dialogue with customers. The value of this engagement is now being seen in every aspect of business:

• Brand-building
• Lead-generation
• Research and development
• Product or service launch
• Customer retention
• Partner or channel communications
• Thought leadership
• Internal communications
• Media relations
• Crisis management

And more.

Business is starting to "get it" now – we're starting to understand how transformative this new perspective on marketing can be, if executed properly:

• Business needs to stop talking at customers and prospects and begin to talk to them
• The vaue of these conversations relies on authenticity - soclal media is not a new advertising platform
  
• People congregate around relevance and value
  
• Brands are shaped and influenced by dialogue
• The customer ultimately determines brand value
• Social capital belongs to individuals, and is loaned to brands
• Businesses that don't begin to let go and engage in conversations are neglecting the opportunity to influence and shape the very brands they hold dear
• Not engaging opens up the door to the competition, who may come in and build meaningful relationships with your customers

This being said, our customers are asking for counsel and want to know, "what is the value of social media to our business?", and "how do we proceed?" We believe it's important to push forward and explore the tenets of these new communications channels, but not without a plan.

One of the hallmarks of our organization is strong strategic planning for marketing communications, and we will bring the same level of forethought and eperience to bear on this exciting new medium.

Stay tuned.

On the Growing Corporate Interest In "The Tweet"

I've been a user of the Twitter micro-blogging service for almost a year now. Initially, I regarded it as a silly pasttime, but as its influence grew, and the number of participants grew exponentially (1,200% growth in the past year, surpassing 14 million members in March, according to Compete). I began to see some value in finding and following certain people, industries and companies.

I carved up my interests into three categories: marketing communications (inc. social media, and the impact of technology), general aviation and professional (hell, any kind of) cycling. I figured if I started to pay attention to tweets in these key areas of interest, it wouldn't be long before I'd see some value (or not).

It certainly didn't happen overnight, but over the course of a few months (again, as the number of Twitterers continued to increase), I started to see some interesting and damned valuable commentary surface, in every category I was following.

The most unexpected thing were the insider insights that started coming in, 140 characters at a time, from the professional cycling community, as they trained for and then participated in the myriad events that I used to only be able to follow by reading monthly print or online pubs like Velo News or Bicycling Magazine. Within a few months last fall, I began to see Tweets from the likes of Team Astana, Johan Bruyneel (the Vince Lombardi of pro cycling), Ivan Basso, Levi Leipheimer, Dave Zabriskie, the great Eddie Merckx, and even Lance Armstrong. Lance, by the way, has over 500,000 followers and his numbers continue to grow. Real commentary from these young, tech savvy guys, not their publicists. It's been an absolutely unique and innovate way to get a look at how these guys work and train (and play) when the cameras are not on them.

Along these same lines, I searched for and found some great sources of commentary about the business of commercial and general (personal) aviation - over the course of the last six months, I began to find and follow tweets from USA Aviation News, CFI, author and aviation consultant Max Trescott, the Alliance Aviation Across America, Aviation Today, the renowned publication AeroTrader, and Pilot Magazine. I feel more in touch with and more informed about aviation-related topics than ever before, and the currency of the information shared by these personal and commercial tweeters is astounding.

Lastly, I decided to "follow" some businesses and individuals who are in the same line of work that I am - marketing communications - especially the fast-moving world of technology and social media. I lined up technology pub CMS Wire, local MMilwaukee agency Versant, the Social Media Blog, influential blogger Mike Elgan, local design firm Finn Digital, marketing & PR "curmudgeon" Jeff Cole, interactive agency principal Tom Snyder from Trivera, the very active Social Media Insider, well-networked digital strategist Augie Ray, as well as many others.

Again, I quickly found myself immersed in an invigorating stream of industry insights, shared links, stream of consciousness rants, as well as the occasional pointless tweet about a good beer at the local pub. The powerful thing about the medium is it's immediacy, and how I'm able to select the streams of information that I want to follow and use professionally or personally.

Now....it's taken me some time to figure it out but here's what I think is happening:

1. An exponential growth in usage of Twitter (and to some extent, other microblogging services, like Identi.ca and Jaiku), which is resulting in a dramatic increase in sources of targeted content, and

2. An awakening by commercial and corporate entities in the phenomenon of microblogging, this validation resulting in even more dramatic growth and content, and significant new influences of this channel on branding, customer service, promotion, public relations, and relationship marketing.

More and more of my own colleagues are jumping on the Twitter bandwagon, and of course, you can follow me on Twitter, if you dare.

It's all very exciting to watch, and believe me, I'm a bit of a curmudgeon. I've been "around the block" with this Internet stuff since the halcyon days of 1995, and remember getting funny looks when we used words like, "browser" and "World Wide Web".

I can't wait to see what's next.

On the Impact of New Top Level Domains

Yesterday I sent out an agency-wide link to a USA Today article entitled, "New Web address endings could be start of turf wars".

After I did so, a number of associates replied to my note, asking for my thoughts on what this might mean for our clients. Rather than respond to colleagues individually, I thought I'd post a blog entry on this topic (what better way to fire up my long-dormant blog).

Our clients (with our help, or via their own internal resources) have, over the years, secured a variety of domain names representing their company name, brands, products or services. The majority of our digital solutions for clients revolve around use of the .com Top Level Domain (TLD, or the last part of an Internet Domain Name; that is, the group of letters that follow the final dot of any domain name). This list describes of all current Internet top-level domains [TLDs].

For example, Dow AgroSciences' parent, the Dow Chemical Co., owns approximately 600 domains at the current time, each one requiring an investment of $15 - $100, depending on when acquired, the registrar used, and how long the domain was reserved for. Additional domain names secured (e.g., dowagro.net, dowagro.org) are often used to redirect web traffic to a primary .com domain, but they're also often deployed in their own right to support digital initiatives on behalf of individual products or brands. A 'bonus' advantage to owning a large collection of related domain names is that our clients can protect trademarked or copyrighted property by guaranteeing that competitors can not secure those names for one, five, ten or more years.

Of the 177 million-plus domains in existence today, the .com TLD represents more than 80 million of them while .net and .org respectively have roughly 12 million and 7 million active domain names. While several new TLDs have been introduced in recent years, these have achieved only limited success in attracting registrants and Internet activity. For example, .info and .biz, both introduced in 2001, have attracted roughly 5 million and 2 million domain names respectively.

So what's this all about and why should we care?

After a lot of discussion and planning, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (or ICANN, the organization responsible for managing the assignment of domain names and IP addresses), is proposing new top-level domains. ICANN claims that these will allow for more innovation, choice and change to a global Internet presently served by only 21 generic top-level domain names. Because they're a not-for profit, ICANN isn't doing this to add money to their company coffers. Rather, promoting competition and choice is one of the principles upon which ICANN was founded.

In a world with 1.5 billion Internet users (and growing), diversity, choice and innovation are key. The Internet has facilitated enormous increases in choice, innovation and the propagation of ideas, and expanding new TLDs is an opportunity for more.

Dennis Carlton, Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago, was asked by ICANN to analyze from an economic perspective ICANN's anticipated introduction of new generic top level domain names, and to identify and address the benefits and costs associated with ICANN's proposal.

Dr. Carlton prepared two preliminary reports relating to the introduction of new gTLDs. In one report "Preliminary Report of Dennis Carlton Regarding Impact of New gTLDs on Consumer Welfare", he wrote:

"I conclude that ICANN's proposed framework for introducing new TLDs is likely to improve consumer welfare by facilitating entry and creating new competition to the major gTLDs such as .com, .net, and .org. Like other actions that remove artificial restrictions on entry, the likely effect of ICANN's proposal is to increase output, lower price and increase innovation. This conclusion is based on the fundamental principles that competition promotes consumer welfare and restrictions on entry impede competition."

ICANN and their supporters propose that an increase in the number of TLDs increases the number of alternatives available to consumers, and thus offers the potential for increased competition, reduced prices, and increased output.

It won't be long before we'll be asked by our clients for an opinion on this matter.

Detractors to the current proposal claim that too much is at stake from a user, security, and economic perspective for ICANN's proposal to extend the TLD schema to make any sense. These detractors say that:

• ICANN has not yet shown that the market demand exists for more domain extensions.
• With an almost unlimited number of new TLDs, Internet users will be even more vulnerable to online fraud and brand owners will be forced to defend an even bigger space.
• Few if any of these new top level domains will ever be put to use; most of them will be purchased for purely defensive reasons and it will remain exceedingly difficult to get anyone to go to addresses that don't end in .com, .net or .org.

I have to agree.

Most of our clients have already made significant investments in the acquisition of domain names, the occasional legal defense of those domains, as well as the design, development and ongoing management and administration of a myriad of Web and other Internet properties associated with those domain names. Although it is certainly compelling for clients like Ball Horticultural, Merial or Dairy Management, Inc. to own top-level domains like .horticulture, .animalhealth or .dairy (and to prevent major competitors from doing same), I believe there's a good argument for being patient and watching how things shake out over the next year or so, at least.

Getting a grip on the economic (the currently proposed application fee to own a single unique TLD is $185,000, plus an annual "continuance" fee of $25,000) and branding impact of investing in new TLDs is important - ICANN's VP of Corporate Affairs suggests that "it could translate into one of the largest marketing and branding opportunities in history." We'd be perceived as good stewards of our client's brands if we understand all of the ramifications (pros and cons) implied here and are able to communicate these effectively to our clients.

A Return to the Art of the Blog

Enough micro-blogging for the time-being.

Although the world is all A-Twitter with "conversations" of 140 characters or less, I am feeling more and more compelled to return to the Art of the Blog. It's been 6+ months...my excuse has been, "I'm too busy delivering Digital Solutions to our clients to talk about it".

The funny thing is that the Web Log remains, in my opinion, the most appropriate method of evangelizing and demonstrating one's proficiency in (any) given field, as well as distributing communications efficiently on a global basis.

I've been quite intrigued by the power of the "tweet" and have, in just a few short months, managed to succinctly say enough about technology and marketing, general aviation or cycling that I've generated over 300 'followers' with my short bursts within the Twitterverse.

Nevertheless, I now feel like the Tweet is better-suited to creating a following, but that one's followers, if interested enough, will want to gravitate towards a more substantial source of commentary and insight about topics of interest.