Adventures In Digital Marketing

Tara Hunt from Citizen Agency was someone I was very keen to see speak as her area is probably the one closest to my own in terms of marketing and social software.

So, I have to say, I was a little disappointed with her talk but can completely understand why it was like it was.  Basically, it was a little high-level and skimmed over the community aspects of this thing we call web2.0 rather than go into any detail as such as to how she, as head of a self proclaimed agency which "specializes in developing community-centric strategies around product research, design, development and marketing" feels advertisers and marketers can use the community aspects of the internet as developed during the past few years.

As a big fan of this kind of thinking myself I was interested to see if she thought it was really a viable approach for marketers, and if she could see any major pros/cons or problems in getting clients to grab hold of it as an idea.

But, as I say, her presentation, good as it was, skipped over any real detail about the implementation of the technology and tools, and rather focused on an overview of what’s out there and so forth.  Perfectly fine I guess for 99% of the audience, but not what I was hoping for.

I did try and find her in the (rather packed at all times) lobby of the venue but could only see her to shout a quick "i’d like to chat with you later" at her, to which she probably thought I was a complete muppet :) 

It seems that the agency run a few events here and there, so perhaps I’ll jump into one of those if they do them in London any time soon and see what they have to say in more detail.

Howard
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Probably the web celebrity for the day (sorry Mike), Kevin Rose was truly rock and roll (in a not at all as extreme as Motley Crue kind of way) in as much as he slept in late, turned up a bit scruffy and was drinking wine during his talk.

Taking us through the pros and cons of digg, i have to say he didn’t really, for me at least, go into much detail about what digg could turn into in the future.  I was personally hoping for a little bit of comment about how digg might actually be a new form of internet based communication rather than a site in it’s own right, but that wasn’t really covered.  we saw some graphs which were a little hard to make out.

ok - so i’ve actually not got a lot to say about Kevin’s presentation, but ho hum.  maybe i should delete this post

actually - one thing I heard at the conference about digg was interesting. I happened to overhear a couple of blokes say to each other "do you actually use digg?" "no" replied the other, adding, "no fucker does outside the US".

i don’t use it much I have to say - maybe they were right!

Howard
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Simon Wardley, from Fotango, creators of the Zimki platform, gave an
excellent talk that was not only informative and thought provoking, but
probably the most comedic of the whole two days (who would have thought
ducks would be so funny!)

Focusing on the commoditisation of software and web development
services, Zimki is a javascript platform for web development that runs
on top of a distributed server and database environment in which you
pay for what you use - similar, in oh so many ways, to the Amazon S3
and EC2 tools.

Having a chat with some of the team at their stand, the tools
definitely seem interesting, but what I think they might be missing a
trick with is their reliance on JavaScript so heavily (as Alejandro
pointed out - what do the flash guys do then?) and th fact that right
now, their tools are Mac centric - which is nice in principal, but not
very good in the real world when most people are really running windows.

Worth a look, and I hope to have a chat with them and/or Simon himself at some point in the future as I definitely share some of their ideas about commoditisation and the decentralisation of development.

interetingly, Fotango are owned, or at least have a relationship, with
Canon - and knowing their reliance on a certain data-shy CMS tool, i’m
not surprised by the arrival of this platform independent database
platform.

Howard
–

Simon Willison’s talk on the openID platform was nothing if
not inspirational.  Although i think he correctly points out that it’s
very early day for it, and it’s not really ready for the majority of
users, he gave a really good overall impression that as a system for a
unified login it’s most definitely a good start and something for us
all to start working on.  I think he spoke a little too quickly for my
Spanish friends though, but what do they know about t’internet?

Basically, openID is a system where you no longer need to remember a load of different usernames and passwords for all the different sites you use - but can, instead, can have a single, individual (wel, you can have several if you so want!) login that will let you into all of the sites you use if they subscribe to the openID system. 

Being a distributed system, openID isn’t reliant on any single provider, and if you so wanted, you could actually setup your own openID server to use if you wanted to. 

Seems like there is a lot of interesting stuff going on in this area, and with the recent announcements from AOL, Microsoft and the like about adoption of the openID format (for example, ALL AOL users (and that’s a LOT of users!) now, immediately, have an openID account by default) it looks like openID is about to become a lot more visible than perhaps it was only a week or so ago.

I think the opportunities for advertisers and marketers in the future could be vast in relation to this -  we need to look more at how this would affect our own particular industry, but my first guess is that anything which helps users to trust and feel in control of the information they share with us, and let’s face it, we often get a bad wrap, is nothing but a good thing and I am sure we’ll be covering it some more on this site in the future as more information on openID comes online.

Simon says he will be publishing the slides and a few other things online in the next few days, and my advice is to go check them out.

Great stuff!

Howard
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So the Future of Web Apps, London, conference is over for it’s second year with only the single day of
workshops left to go (which I will not be attending).

So - how was it?  Well, to be honest, I’ve got mixed feelings, which is in some ways how I always feel at the end of a conference.  The actual days were totally packed with speakers from quite a wide variety of the web industry, but in some ways (and I know vincent agrees with me to some extent on this) it felt a little too busy - too much going on with hardly a break to stop, think, mingle or generally relax.  It was pretty much non-stop, and althoug most of the speakers were interesting, it didn’t leave any time to discuss what they had just said.  In many ways I’d prefer a little bit of a breather, or even a multi-layered schedule where you can pick and choose, so that you can take in what was said and work with it.

The two days had a good mixture between a more techy code approach and a business approach, ranging from a hardcore VC speaker through to some things which seemed perhaps a little lightweight (not mentioning any specific names here though).

I was going to blog about the different speakers in this post, but I think i’ll split them off into seperate posts to stop his one getting too long.

I’ve posted my photos (what there are, not many) on Flickr here.

Howard
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• Future of Web Apps
  Second annual future of web apps conference starts tomorrow in Kensington, London. Two days conference and a single day work sessions (which I am not going to). Will be doing a full write up on my blog in the coming days/week
  (tags: future apps fowa london 2007 carson ajax business community design development media programming conference web2.0 inspiration events webdesign web)
• Dell Ideastorm
  One of the first corporate sites to use the Digg style voting system to speak to, and listen to, it’s customers? Another bold move from Dell, who are quickly adopting many web2.0 tools and techniques
  (tags: ideastorm business community entrepreneurship social web2.0 crowdsourcing digg computer dell)

In another bold move Dell have released yet another conversational marketing platform, moving them beyond simple blogging and such, into the world of Digg style posts and voting with their new Dell Idea Storm site.

Running with the line that Idea Storm is "Where Your Ideas Reign", the site allows anyone to sign up and submit ideas related to Dell products and services, with the posts then being promoted and commented upon by the rest of the community, just like Digg itself, except this is a closed system.

Following with the notion of being open, transparent and honest, as Techcrunch point out, "The company fully acknowledges its intellectual debt to Digg, calling IdeaStorm “a combination of message board and Digg.com.”"

I agree with Marshall Kirkpatrick that this can be nothing but a good thing for the way big business like to communicate with it’s audience.  What Digg began, and has (is) taking great advantage of is effectively just a smart way of dealing with and organising information - so for others to adopt this especially in a way for business to be more open and listen to it’s own customers is nothing but a major benefit.  Innovations like this are why we love the internet and connecting people and empowering them to get involved is what it’s all about.

I hope to see other companies being as forward thinking as this.

Howard
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Tomorrow and Wednesday I’ll be attending the Future of Web Apps conference in Kensington, London, as previously mentioned here.

I’m pretty excited about this conference - I was gutted last year when I missed the window to grab a ticket to the event (even though Jonathan kept reminding me about it and then the fact that he had one!)  So, this year, I made sure to get one as soon as they were announced.

The line up of speakers looks pretty good - Mike Arrington and Kevin Rose, to name only two on the first day!

So, if anyone else is at the conference and fancies having a chat over a coffee or two please let me know - always pleased to meet new people and have a geeky chat about how we can digital take over the world!

Alejandro, Vincent - see you in registration at 9am!

Howard
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• How to Change the World: The Venture Capital Aptitude Test (VCAT)
  (tags: Business VC Entrepreneurship startup venturecapital Jobs test career web2.0)
• Zune Phone (nearly) Confirmed
  (tags: mobile)