Famine City

Meet the New Digital Native

In full disclosure, the child in the video is one my children. While he is my child, my hope is this post does not appear narcissistic. 

Meet Brady. 

Brady is 4 years old. 

Brady knows how to read. 

Brady knows how to do basic math. 

Brady knows how to use Facebook. He doesn't have a profile, but he likes to play Fishlife on Facebook.  

Brady plays games on the Wii.

Brady knows how to use the Tivo. He also knows how to skip your commercials using the Tivo. 

Brady knows how to watch his favorite cartoons via Netflix.  

Brady likes to watch movies on YouTube.  

Brady knows how to use Google.

Brady knows how to use an iPhone.

Brady is a digital native. 

As a reminder, Brady is four years old and he knows how to use a variety of digital technologies. He is the new testing standard if an application is designed well. If someone needs to explain how to use your application, tool or website, you might be in trouble. And Brady isn't alone. 

Our little digital natives are raising the bar on digital design, whether on hardware or on your website. I was discussing with a colleague at another company and we were exchanging thoughts about how our four year olds use technology--desktop computers, websites and mobile devices. We were discussing the question of usability, especially around the Apple devices. Has the usability of the devices become so good that our digital natives can figure it out without prompting? Or might it be they don't have any "ghost rules"? Meaning they don't have preconceived notions about the way things work. Therefore they aren't annoyed when things don't work the way they expect them to and hyper-learn around any usability issues. Welcome to our future consumers.

How can a four year old child use the applications and devices that still confound many adults? After much thought on the subject, I'm going to borrow the thinking and approach from Malcolm Gladwell's Blink, it's rapid cognition. Our little digital natives have been exposed, actively and passively, to so much digital behavior that the usability of technology, hardware or software, they are able to rapidly deduce the usability of our devices without thinking. They don't deliberate on how something works or why it should work in a certain way. They simply find the critical pieces of information and try something else, but without actively thinking of it. If it doesn't function one way, they apply the other hundreds of other ways to use/consume the information. They no longer actively "think" about the technology or usability. They simply act with critical pieces of information. Our digital natives may grow up to be the most transactional users we've ever seen.  

In the new world of applications and devices, they have to work like you'd expect them to work or so easy that a four year old could use it. Perhaps we need to stop testing with all of our target markets and bring in legions of pre-schoolers. Then ask them if they can find or locate a desired result on our applications or website. See what happens. While this is partially tongue in cheek, get ready for the new users of our applications and websites. Our little digital natives are going to be more transactional than ever. With so many digital tools at their disposal, they'll navigate around whatever experience you want them to take--obvious implications for marketers everywhere. You'll get two clicks on your website, if you're lucky. Be usable or be forgotten. 

Our digital behaviors are having major impacts on media consumption as a whole. Little digital natives no longer need to watch television, though they will. They can find their favorite shows on YouTube, Netflix. Sure we can still market to big audiences on the big tube, but gone soon enough will be the days of channel surfing. It will be channel searching. The most important screens won't be the ones in the living room either. It will be the ones in their hands. Transactional behaviors and omnipresent media will be the expectation not the exception for these little folks. 

Where to start? Easy. Make sure your apps and sites are so easy a four year old could use it. Ask the adults about brand impression or favorability. Ask the kids about the usability of it. They don't think. They use. Start there. 

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Comment: I expect some feedback about my kid's use of digital technology from a parenting perspective. We are probably more conservative than most about the information they consume, it's a constant conversation in our house. We are a digital household, my wife and I are both into technology for work and play. Our kids will be digital experts. I appreciate comments about the core point of this piece. However, if you are thinking of leaving a comment about parental education or proselytizing to us about how we're raising our children, please don't bother.  

follow me on twitter @marty_b

Location based services: please suck less

Last year, Gartner reported some strong potential of location based services. Gartner even claimed the users would more than double from 41-million to over 95-million while revenue would top over $2.2 billion. Being an early integrator, I love the thought of what location based services could and might supply, but I just have one message today: suck less. 

For background, a location based service or LBS, courtesy of Wikipedia A location-based service (LBS) is an information and entertainment service, accessible with mobile devices through the mobile network and utilizing the ability to make use of the geographical position of the mobile device. LBS services can be used in a variety of contexts, such as health, work, personal life, etc. LBS services include services to identify a location of a person or object, such as discovering the nearest banking cash machine or the whereabouts of a friend or employee. They are an example of telecommunication convergence.

Every year a group of friends and I head out to Las Vegas a week before the Super Bowl. It's a tradition now that we're on a third year. It all started as a hallway conversation and the next thing you now we had 7 guys heading to Vegas the following weekend. On our third year, our group has grown around 20 or so. At twenty people, it becomes harder and harder to manage who is with who and where in Vegas. It's pretty typical for a group to go one place while another goes someplace else. This year we've been trying to plan more than ever since the group has grown. A number of us have been testing out location based services and it as the titles says, sucks. 

What makes this technology near unusable or at the very least very unreliable in Cincinnati? I'll just bullet point a few thoughts here (I've heard my blog posts are too long). 

• It's accuracy is less than perfect. I can be sitting next to my wife, both with iPhones and Google Latitude whipped out. According to the application, we're miles apart. This happens with many people on my friend list. 
• You may say, try another app. It's not the app. Most LBS services on mobile phones, where the real potential lies, typically use the Google Maps technology/algorithm. This includes most of the popular applications like FourSquare, Loopt and Google Latitude. Note: if someone knows this to be untrue, please let me know as I could not locate it from a quick API scan. 
• There are numerous locating methodologies from AGPS (assisted GPS) to WiFi positioning to triangulation, all available on the iPhone. However with my friends and I trying the different apps and phones, the HTC phones seemingly are the worst offenders (thinking they are triangulating). If you're interested in such fanaticism (as I am), you can find a trilateration model here, the suspected iPhone location modeling and a comparison of the locating models here.

Warning: bout to get geeky. 

There is hope. It might not be the technology or the phones,  AGPS or HTC. It might be the cellular network here in Cincinnati for AT&T. This has been the one consistency between everyone that is trying the service with our group of friends. Because of the nature of transmitting that much data, most celluar phone companies use a bit of triangulation on top of the GPS signal. It keeps the cellular provider from having to provide that much data to the phone/network. It also explains why a regular car GPS, which may use between 5-7 satellites is more accurate. The more satellites, the more triangulations and points to do some math, ergo a more accurate location. Therefore, perhaps the accuracy problem for the phone's GPS is the cellular networks. Cincinnati notoriously has one of the worst cellular networks ever. My hope is that Vegas will be more accurate, at least for our trip. 

End geeky explanation. 

If you are a typical consumer, you just want this stuff to work. You don't care how it all works underneath. Just live up to your expectations. You are right. Just work as you intend. Simply put, you want it to know where you are and tell you where your friends/services are located in direct proximity to your existing location. Now that you expect things to know where you are, there's a real service and growing reliance on these services. In other words, it's a burgeoning channel for communicating with consumers. Albeit less than perfect one today, still a growing model for all intent and purpose.

Because of that potential, it would seem to me that mobile phone carriers would be upgrading their networks systematically. Especially in large cities with big companies that spend millions and millions of marketing dollars. One could say that they should prioritize such locations, one such might just be Cincinnati. If they can prove the quality of these services, they will grow their potential opportunities by providing value added services back to the consumer. This means for higher adoption, more profit and more data gathered on mobile consumers they can sell back to big companies.

LBS, please suck a little less next year. Mobile carriers, please upgrade your networks. Vegas, please have a great network ready for me. 

follow me on twitter @marty_b

Do you adopt or integrate?

In technology and marketing, we often talk about early adopters, innovators etc. when describing our user base or target market information. For a reminder about the specifics, visit Wikipedia's entry on Rogers' Diffusion Model. If you have followed this blog, I have poked and prodded at the diffusion model for some time and will continue today. 

I don't care about adoption any longer. I care about integration. The audience that integrates is my target market not just those who purchase the technology. 

Adoption is yesterday's news. Integration is today's most important aspect around a marketing or technology market. Let me go on to explain what I mean.  

• Traditionally adoption in the past means that you own a technology and may have tried it. However, it does not imply or require that you are actively engaged with said technology. 
• Integration means (at least to me) that you own the technology and it's a vital part of your life. Said simply, you can't live without the technology or you rely on it to a degree where it causes pain if it is not present. 

Why such an important distinction? Simple. Adoption isn't a channel and should not be a target audience until there is integration. My pet peeve in this area are people that own HD televisions, but do not have HD programming. I would argue they are only adopters, but not integrators. Sure, they have this great big screen with pixelation all over the place. When considering target audiences or adoption statistics, especially as it pertains to new technologies, it comes with some surprising math. Let's look at target numbers for mobile adoption for North America: 

• There were 254 million US mobile subscribers in Q1 2008, according to CTIA, the wireless industry trade group
• According to Nielsen, 144 million (57%) US mobile subscribers were data users in Q1 2008 (defined as those subscribers who used their phone for any data use, be that SMS text messaging or accessing the mobile Internet)
• 95 million (37 percent) US mobile subscribers paid for access to the mobile Internet, either as part of a subscription or transactionally
• 40 million subscribers (15.6 percent in May 2008) were active users of mobile Internet services, using those services at least once on a monthly basis

Numbers courtesy of Nielsen Mobile (this report is from July 2008). The numbers aren't perfect, but they illustrate the point: 

Now when you consider that you're building an app or a mobile application above, who is your target audience? Is it the 254 million people? The 144 million people that sometimes text or might use the mobile internet? Or are you thinking of the 40 million people that actively use the mobile web? My estimation here is that these numbers are considerably higher today. You can follow that mobile internet usage has followed Moore's laws.  However, this piece isn't just about mobile. It's about technology and marketing in general, especially digital. 

Let me provide one more example. I an a Wii adopter. However, I am not a Wii integrator. I play on the Wii a few times a month (at best). My four year old plays on the Wii almost daily. He is an integrator and, frankly/sadly, knows how to play it better than I for most games, sans Tecmo Bowl. If you were trying to reach me via a Wii channel or the like, probably not a good way to reach me as a marketer. 

Integration is an active opportunity for marketing. Adoption feels like a false number today. Though I recognize that this is a numbers game and audience segmentation exercise. I believe it's worth the effort. More importantly, you might be able to development something more meaningful for that respective segment. 

The next time that you are presented with technology adoption, ask the question how many people have integrated the technology to the point of "they can't live without it". When they say they can't live without it, you know they have deep integration.

follow me on twitter @marty_b 

Quick side note: Been enjoying the holiday season. Ready to get back to blogging at least weekly, not weakly. Sorry for the delayed posts. 

If social media connects the NFL, Chad Ochocinco is the poster boy

Before I start the point of this post, I have to admit, I’m a Bengals fan. I have been a Bengals fan for a long, long time. However, this post has nothing to do with the Bengals or with me as a fan. It has to do with one man’s plight to humanize the face of the NFL. Chad Ochocinco may be the future model of a player creating a link with their community. There is a lot we can learn from Mr. Ochocinco. 

I cannot say that Chad has such a benevolent goal, but all the same, he has humanized a once off limit side of the NFL, the personal side. There is not an NFL Films team to spin his story. There is no intermediary. It’s just one guy with a phone, camera, internet connection and social media at his disposal. He makes the most of connecting his life, thoughts and the in between to the game. The NFL should follow him, not to fine him, but to learn from him. In the face of a potential NFL labor dispute, aka cap free season, Chad’s actions could not be better for the game. He is providing fans a reason to connect to their team. 

The first thing you have to notice is Chad is posting a LOT of content. A ton of content. My first question is why is this Chad Ustreaming, Tweeting and posting more pics than anyone else that I know of today (star or not)? I cannot delve into the psyche of the player or person, I am simply not qualified to do that. I'll leave that for someone else. However, I can simply look at the content. If you look at the volume of what he produces, it is amazing. He is producing a lot of content. For those of you that post blogs, tweets or anything with regular frequency, it’s a job posting that much content. A real job. It takes technical proficiency, desire and dedication. If you follow him at all, I’m not sure that he sleeps. I genuinely admire his drive to post that much about his life. 

It's not just about his life that he has impacted. He has impacted his fans and the City of Cincinnati positively. Esteban has endeared himself to Cincinnati really well. He shares where he is eating, a quick pic with Jay Cutler at Morton’s the weekend before the Bengals played the Bears. Chad does Friday night movies in Northern Kentucky. He tells people that if they give him a ticket to the opening Monday Night game at Dallas, he’ll sit next to them. He’s amazingly personal. Want to know where he eats around town? Check Twitter. Watch his Ustream shows. He’s at the local movie theatre having a good time with the fans. While at the end of this, Chad certainly has an agenda and I would encourage anyone to not assume too much through his social media exploits, he still has done more than any other player to personalize the life of a star. Even though he is a star, we all know that we can eat there, go there and be part of the larger experience that is Chad Ochocinco. 

Chad may be the poster boy for using social media to connect to the community, but social media connects much of the NFL. Start running through Twitter and you’ll notice throngs of NFL players, both active and retired. It’s a brotherhood in the league. Obviously these guys all share a common experience, the “league”. They follow each other, link to one another and use it to promote their post-NFL efforts, ala John Thornton. I think the more important Tweets are those that are simply the personal side of their life, the trials, tribulations and sheer havoc that game plays on their life. If you began to put together all of the content in a book, it would be an interesting read. Steve Smith’s recent Tweet simply read, “gotta get better”.  On the upside of great game, Robert Smith sent Chris Johnson a Tweet, “@ChrisJohnson28 good shit yesterday homie!! Keep ballin!” Donte Stallworth, the suspended receiver, shows his love and passion for the game on his Twitter feed while watching last night’s game, “@davelilc yea but essentially it's still on the QB bc he threw it to where it could be tipped... nice play by Saints defense”. Active and retired NFL players are a brotherhood and social media helps connect them to each other, plus the fans.

Social media has transformed, even personalized, the face of a league that is all business on the outside. You get to see content, quips, pics and personalized experiences that in aggregate form some fairly interesting insights to a once off limit portion of the NFL, the personal side. Chad is using the medium at its best; connecting to fans, building the OCNN and endearing himself to the community. Just a year ago, Chad was trying to talk himself out of Cincinnati. Today he is the poster child for the NFL and social media. In the face of a potential cap-less season, the NFL better welcome Chad and those like him, because he is the link between the fans and the league.  

~marty follow me on twitter @marty_b

DroidDoes Not

My only estimate for this commercial is that Verizon and Google could not come to an agreement or they were caught in a time crunch. With that said, I cannot believe that the DroidDoes campaign made it out of the gate. Here are Verizon and Google ready to take on the iPhone, coming out of the gates with guns blazing, calling out the iPhone for everything that it doesn't do. Showing a super-sexy futuristic television promo and then telling you to head to the website, www.droiddoes.com. When you get there, you are met by a remnant of the television piece, once you move past this, you come upon an email box where you can enter more information to be sent to you via email or text when it is ready. Again, my guess is they could not agree or it was caught in legal. Nevertheless, let me give you five solutions that would have been better.

1. Join the revolution. Start today, friend us on Facebook where we'll give away a phone for every {insert number} people that join the revolution.
2. Find us on Twitter...
3. Want to see more, Google Android Video to see what pre-release footage is out there (of course legalese it).
4. Show your own videos. Something that you shot, forget video, how about the anatomy of a droid in a cool Flash piece? Beyond just meta and description tags, you should have some content that is getting indexed behind the scenes for search.
5. Want to hit an iPhone with a donkey punch, show a planned coverage map.

Look, these are not the best ideas by any means. However, sticking a 2001 coming soon email box for a release like this falls into the lame spectrum. I'm excited about the phone. I actually own a G1. I also have an iPhone. I'm a pretty solid voice of reason in this case. I went to the site with tons of expectations, but was let down. I'll leave this post with this: if you are going to compete with the iPhone and the kids at Apple, I think you're going to need to step up your marketing efforts.

follow me on twitter @marty_b

Can Goliath be David? Mint & Intuit

If you haven't read the news on Intuit's acquisition of Mint, you can find the details via their press release. Are you surprised that the Goliath decided to purchase the David of personal finance software? This seems like a perfectly natural move for Intuit. Big Goliath sees something that they haven't been able to quite do for some time and it's easy to purchase than to build. Equally important here is that it's easier to create a new brand than "rebrand" yourself. 

Mint has been a small upstart online personal finance software around for a couple of years, growing press and fans quickly.It's software as a service at its finest. I think this is important because Mint has been able to develop features and functionality methodically and organically, sans the worry of 48 previous editions of the software that Intuit has to consider. How many computers did not come with some form of an Intuit product on it in the last twenty years (it seems)? This one acquisition squarely can help leave the desktop legacy behind for Intuit. Then they can focus on taking the best features of their existing product base and rolling them out systematically to the online product, Mint. FINALLY they will be leaving the desktop software category, something I'm sure that Intuit has trying to do for years.

Mint improved on things that Intuit had not been able to improve for years, namely categorization and capitalizing off the consumer insight from all of the data they have been acquiring (advertising). The poor categorization was actually one of the insights used to help make Mint successful--see my other blog post on Mint. Revamping categorization would be a daunting task for a huge Goliath like Intuit to build. Instead with a single purchase and they have a much better solution out of the box.Mint had also discovered a way to make money from all of that data. Intuit now has a path to monetize all of that data they collect and a software as a service model, all ready to go for the price tag of $170-million. That's cheap.

The real insight is that big "old" companies will find that it is easier to buy than build. Borrowing brand and consumer base, not technology, is easier than changing years of heritage. Integration is easier than building from scratch. Intuit can learn from what the upstart Mint created, borrowing their software AND brand to move personal finance software into the millennial market. It is easier to create a new brand sometimes than change your stripes. We saw Toyota do this with Scion. The Toyota is aimed for forty-somethings and the Scion is aimed at twenty-somethings. I expect that many brands from coffee to jeans will be doing this in the coming years. A digital millennial will have an easier time accepting a new brand than appreciating older brands in many cases. Intuit just bought their way into the twenty-something market, rather quickly. It's up to Intuit to figure out how to be David, rather than acting like on old-Goliath. Time will tell. Congrats to the Mint team as this should be an interesting acquisition. 

follow me on twitter @marty_b

The future of the small screen: Part IV

This is the fourth part of a series of blog posts. You can find the previous blog posts at:

• Birth of the small screen
• Birth of the small screen: Part II
• Triumph of the small screen: Part III
  

At this point within this series of blog posts, we're going to take a look at the future of the small screen. The modern day catalyst has been the mobile phone. However, the beginning started in the 1950's with the transistor radio delivering choice of content, convenience and portability. It is these three principles that continue to dominate the core principles of the devices. Soon enough, the transistor radio was followed up in the 1970's & 1980's with the Walkman, then gaming devices. However, the modern day addition to the core three principles has been personalization. Now that we've caught up to today, it is time to look at the future of the small screen?

First, the most important thing to take away from the series of posts is this: The screens where we consume the majority of our media aren't going to be on the screens that at the most beautiful, HD capable or anything like that. The screens that will be the most important to our lives will be those that are the most convenient. Instead of focusing on the devices as we know them today, I will just call the future screens of convenience because these will continue to change in the future. 

The hardware changes.

We are seeing major advancements in hardware all the time. I really believe some of our most valuable advancements are going to be in the area of display technologies. In terms of size, portable screens are probably going to net out somewhere between the current iPhone size and a netbook. These are probably just about the largest portable, yet useful screens. Meanwhile,  I do anticipate that we'll see similar advancements like the Kindle's screen technology, which may be used to handle portable reading and for preserved battery life. However, the real advancement that I'm anticipating is projection and eyeglass wear with screens. Check out these devices from Wowwee, amazing. Connecting to larger devices is going to occur, but experiences will originate from the small screen. 
 

Consumer behavior is already changing. 

Consumer behavior is already heading to the small screen and we may not have even thought about it. For example, my kids, which are seven years old and less, will never have televisions in their bedrooms. Their main source of content will be the computer and mobile phones. Unknowingly, their adoption has already began. Think the portable DVD player in the car that is already smaller than a netbook screen. Yes, both of my children know how to use my wife's iPhone to access content or play games. And our digital millennials are already connected to their iPod touch, mobile phone or computer. In a conversation with another 30-something friend, he tells me that he seldom watches the television with his laptop in hand anymore. He's traded it for an iPhone, a behavior that will continue for many more of us. 

The television won't die. It will transform. 

Television will still be around, it simply is transforming and will be more of an event based medium. Families will gather around the television to actively watch a movie, sporting event or live events (think American Idol). However, passive engagement on the television will go down. We'll set our Tivos in the house and stream content to our convenience devices. If there is programming from television that we want to watch that may not already available on hulu, Fancast, YouTube, NetFlix or peer-to-peer file sharing services. 

Confluence will continue. 

Up to this point, we had separate devices for separate utility. The devices, especially those of the small screen, are advanced enough to handle multiple applications and utility much more gracefully than just a few years ago. Phone technology is simply an application. YouTube is simply an application as well. As our phones are getting more complex, with memory, bandwidth and processing power, the more functionality that will be available to us.  The advancement is eliminating the time that we spend with other devices, this is a trend that is here to stay.    

Globalization will continue. It will explode in the coming years. 

The small screen will connect our globe in ways no other technology yet to accomplish. If we thought the television was a game changer, watch out because devices of convenience will dwarf the reign of television. Most importantly, the entrance into the global market is the mobile phone. Mobile phone penetration has already dwarfed internet penetration by upwards of 2.5 billion. People that make less than $2 a day are adopting mobile devices. Simply upping the ante with better devices is a much simpler proposition AFTER the devices are in their hands. They will have the internet, social networking, mass media, communication devices AND entertainment in their hands. This makes the possibility of true global brands a much better reality. 

The guiding principles are already in place. 

Throughout the series of blog posts I already cover the defining characteristics of success. They are choice of content, portability, convenience and personalization. However, I think there is one  more principle driving force outside of these. Compression. 

Our lives will continue to compress. 

As you begin to create new markets, opportunities and increase information globally, our lives are going to continue to compress. Competition increases and with that the amount of information we need to consume then rises. Compression in this case simply adding more content into our lives. The need to do this requires us to ignore more, do more and consume more. Screens of convenience are the perfect compliment for this task and compression is the key to driving adoption of the small screen from a convenience to need. The need will be that quick moment of content, entertainment, escape or extra-work that we need to fulfill one of our human needs, as it relates to Maslow's hierarchy. It is this human condition that will continue to transcend cultures and economies. Ultimately, being the final key to driving us to the small screen and why it will triumph. 

As a marketer, what to do? 

Don't stand pat. You can consider what happened in the last ten years with the internet and consider what you would have done different to get your message in the right place today. 

• Be global: realize your audience and growth of your brand is going to be global. Do you focus your time and effort on getting people to switch to your product or people that never have experienced your product.        
• Be mobile: audiences around the world are going to experience the internets and all of it's offerings on mobile devices well before traditional media. You may say hey, they aren't buying products today. However, what did Microsoft do when they realized that they were getting ripped off in China?
• Be opportunistic, adopt early: Don't try to create the magic bullet. Follow trends and hedge bets early, like with the iPhone apps for example. 
• Think long tail: Placing your flag in many internet services and outlets may be the winning model at first. There simply isn't going to be a magic bullet for every society globally. However, information, much in text form, may be the first step for most. Simply having your content available might be the most important first step. 
• Follow human needs: Human need transcends culture. We have a need to communicate, connect and safe. This is the basic building block of the mobile phone. It is also why mobile devices will continue to flourish. 
• Keep an eye on soft product industries: Soft product industries, those like software or music, will be required to figure out the small screen and global presence first for survival. Learn from them. 
• Untapped minds: Perhaps the biggest brain trusts on earth will be interconnected via the small screen. How should you take advantage of it? 

Summary

I cannot believe what started as a lunch conversation has occupied so much of my time the past three weeks. Throughout this process, I've done a lot of research and may publish a more formal paper with research citations as well. For the non-reading types,  I'm going to evolve this into a presentation on SlideShare. Clearly, I'm excited about how the majority of our content consumption will be on the small screen. There are many opportunities and implications abound. I love the unknown. To think that it started with the transistor radio, but was propelled into worldwide penetration by the mobile phone is an astonishing consideration. However, the real driving force simply is a corrollary of all of modern technology, compression. It is this need, a human need, that crosses borders, economies, and language. Human need fostered by technical evolution will continue driving us to the small screen on a global basis in the future. It isn't what we've done in the past that is so exciting, it's where we're headed in the future. 

find me on twitter @marty_b

Quick guide to video on the web

Below is something I did to begin to categorize all of the video services on the web. The main thing it is designed to do is really serve as shorthand for helping people organize all of the services that are out there. By design, this is supposed to be a 5-minute presentation, but you can imagine it needs a speaker to give it justice. Nevertheless, the idea at its core is simple there are more video services emerging all the time, but as they pop up, it seems as though you can categorize them fairly simply according to their business model. If you are in the space a lot, you'll recognize a few omissions, porn, p2p apps, and live streaming. Those in particular fell outside of the radar here. 

I'd love to get any type of feedback or improvements to this as I've yet to present it. 

Sorry for the delay in blogging, it's not the ideas that I'm lacking to write about, it's the time. Follow me on twitter @marty_b.

Mobile technology winner: LBS (location based services)

I'm a big fan of mobile devices and technology. Outside of pure interest it's also my career as a tech guy at an advertising/interactive agency. Simply put, I'm an enthusiast in my personal and professional life. One of the questions that I get most often is this: "which (mobile) thing is going to stick?" If I were a bettting person, I'd say location based services are here to stay. In fact, this technology is exploding. 

LBS defined (Wikipedia): A location-based service (LBS) is an information and entertainment service, accessible with mobile devices through the mobile network and utilizing the ability to make use of the geographical position of the mobile device. 

I started giving this some thought over the past weekend. My family and I were driving to Lake Cumberland for some much needed respite. As I was driving, I was noticing during our drive to see who was using a GPS device in other vehicles. Overall, through about 100 cars and counting, I was about 35%. That's not hard science, but directional enough for my purposes and in case you're wondering, yup, I'm a dork. So overall, I will say that GPS and location aware devices have began creating the connection between location and service for consumers over the past number of years. My TomTom is filled with tons of useful information aside from maps, but it's in a passive way. In other words, it's providing much information simply based on location. I think this is important as just a few years ago, people may have believed even that was too big brother'ish. In other words, I believe the influx of smart phones and GPS only hasten our acceptance as consumers being OK with our devices knowing where we are. That was perhaps the most important hurdle to cross. 

After the initial penetration or hurdle of users being aware that you're tracking has occurred, the challenge is value back to the consumer--there isn't a shortage on our location based needs right now. There are tons of these apps growing everyday, ranging from G-Park (locating your parked car) to Virtual Graffiti via Graffitio, all immediately available from the App Store. Simply said, we've broken the seal seal on location based technologies. There's nowhere to go but up in my mind and if I'm going to place my bets people are going to adopt this technology by leaps and bounds because off direct value they provide in our lives. You can often replace many of the things your GPS did with a phone, though I believe dedicated devices serve a need much more efficiently. 

My dream, please give me a map of your store. Any store. Any mall. Any grocery store. Then allow me to Google what I'm looking for in the store. In fact, let me know which aisles each of my list of stuff is in and I will be your patron for life. I was looking for pearl sugar the other day for Belgian Waffles, no luck. Though three separate people swore to me they had it, I'd rather Google than go on the disgruntled employee hunt. 

Obviously, outside of the iPhone there are far more challenges to getting applications deployed, but developers are smart. They'll figure it out. Meanwhile while everyobe is trying to figure out how QR codes, bluecasting or location based services get rolled out, remember you heard it here, location based services will be a huge industry and has the most upside for all of us. 

follow me on twitter @marty_b

Top ten reasons your brand should not be on twitter

It is almost a defacto standard that just about every brand in the world thinks, or perhaps their agency is recommending, that they should be on Twitter. Generally this means that the company or brand is being told they should interact with their consumers via the channel. I'm going to go out on a limb and share the top ten reasons you should not be a brand on Twitter.

1. You are not committed. Like any endeavor where you expect a reward, you must put forth effort. This comes in the form of dollars and time to discover its value to your brand. You must also be comfortable with discomfort. You must also be ready to change your approach quickly. At the very least, you must be willing to commit to a year of time to produce results (in my opinion). If you are wondering, creating a Twitter ID does not mean you are on Twitter.
2. You think of Twitter as a push medium. It's not a banner ad channel (yet). It's a two-way medium. It requires pushing out content and responding to it. You have to appreciate the community and respect the medium. 
3. You're going to create a personality on Twitter. If there isn't someone that personifies your brand within your organization, I think you'll be hard pressed to create an authentic personality for your brand.
4. Your legal department will ding you if you say H2O vs water. Why would that come up? Two extra characters, it's 140 character response mechanism. Be ready for your branded expression in that length. Be ready for misspelling, abbreviations, etc.
5. You have not found out what people are saying today on about your brand. If you aren't listening to what people are saying about your brand on Twitter, start today. Check out Twitter's Search and TwitScoop, create RSS feeds and follow what the community is saying about your brand. Start there and monitor for a couple months. If you can then see a clear way to add value to your consumer's lives, consider it an option.  
6. You don't have a strategy. Seriously, you probably don't. Are you going to use it to communicate stuff that people want to hear? Are you going to use it to handle consumer complaints? As research? Better have a clear idea about what you want to achieve with the channel.  
7. You are unwilling to cross-promote your other endeavors with your Twitter ID. This is is the "let's keep it in the closet" and just see how it turns out approach. I don't think this works so well. Be ready to pepper your existing communication(s) with follow me @yourbrandname.
8. People in your organization are not using Twitter. If your organization isn't using the medium, you probably shouldn't be either.  
9. You are not willing to allow consumers to co-create your brand. Your responses, retorts and consumer interactions are all subject of the user community. Get used to it.  
10. You don't have a sense of humor. If you can't find a sense of humor lodged in your corporate ethos, it's just not going to work. Don't try.   

The genesis of this blog post is simple: people/agencies try to shoehorn Twitter into something it isn't. If you monitor, you can find out if your demographic is present and detail out the next steps. Before you get there, realize Twitter is not a solution for every brand. If you can get past that, you're one step closer to finding a medium you can exploit to your (brand) benefit. 

~marty follow me on twitter @marty_b