Attention! New Blog URL.

Thanks for visiting Attention! We’re still updating, of course, but we’ve got a new and improved home for our blog -

http://blog.attentionusa.com/

Please find us there for current updates and all our thoughts on social media, marketing & PR. If you have a chance, be sure to update your bookmarks and blogrolls as well. See you over there.

How much is your tweet worth?

Last week TechCrunch reported on Be-A-Magpie a new service that automatically inserts ads into a twitter stream (something that the Icon Factory has been doing with Twitterific for ages).

What’s most interesting about this service is that it puts Twitter into the same situation that Facebook recently went through. When Facebook allowed third parties to create applications they realized that RockYou, Slide, and Social Media were monetizing relationships that Facebook hadn’t been able to. So Facebook responded by segregating applications and widgets out of the main interface.

Twitter founder Evan Williams has repeatedly said that they will not insert ads into feeds, but now that a third party is doing it, will Twitter be able to hold out and if not will users flee?

Tragedy in Mumbai

Our thoughts this weekend were with the victims of the tragedy in Mumbai. One of our clients Flora2000 is based there. Rehan yar Khan, their founder, sent this note that is too important not to share.

Hi everyone, 

I hope you are safe and your resilience not too shaken by these shocking and distasteful events that are now ongoing for 48hrs in Mumbai. 

These attacks by cowards on unarmed civilians at the leisure centers of our city, in the evenings when people were relaxing after working hard, and on those places which Indian & International company executives frequent, have been designed to disrupt Indian business activities and demoralize teams. They are meant to cast fear into the minds of foreign visitors and parents/families of our cities’ workers. And they are meant to breed mistrust. They want us to abandon our work so that we as teams fail, so that investments into India stop, so that our growth fails, so that we descend into chaos. 

Our response to these cowards will be that we will not fall for the fear that they are attempting to create. They do not realise that while we Indians may be an easy going, jovial people, we are not weaklings that will scare and run away. Our response will be that we will get back at these people by growing our country to great heights and making our country stronger. We will leave our opponents frustrated, not by attacking them in return, but by becoming successful and secure. 

With several 100 dead and many more deeply wounded, this is also a time for deep reflection on the India that we are building and why we have been repeatedly subject to attacks, both from within and from external forces. For too long we have built a lawless India where the legal system is in shambles and people cannot get justice, breeding deep frustration; for too long we have built a corrupt India that robs efficiency, leading to unemployment and poverty; for too long we have built a greedy India with a great gap between the haves and have nots; for too long we have built a divisive India where we have divided up each other on the basis of caste, colour, state, wealth and religion; for too long we have built a disrespectful India where we do not value other people’s opinions, always asserting ourselves; and for too long we have built an India befrit of teamwork, so that it becomes virtually impossible to get good results in anything, including basic security. 

Some things thus that we must henceforth pledge:
- we will never ever hinder or criticize any security measure or officer that is undertaken on the roads, malls, airports or offices. We will coorporate fully
- we will not attack each other, verbally or physically, over any issue, big or small.
- we will treat each others’ point of view with immense respect and listen to it carefully
- we will work hard, sincerely and with 200% honestly
- we will strive to become more productive and increase our growth beyond even our own expectations
- we will be united and work tightly as a team
- we will spread the message of sincerity and teamwork wherever we go
- we will never complain when we have to stand up for the national anthem, because the reason we stand is in respect for those who lost their lives defending India. 
- we will work hard to build the legal system
- we will work hard to remove corruption from it’s root
- we will not divide people or get divided

I would like to take this moment to express my grief and sympathy for the families of the security officers and civilians who lost their lives and were injured. My heart goes out to these victims, these brave people and their grieving families. Let us become more dignified, better people and more productive so that their sacrifices are not in vain. 

Regards & Love,
Rehan 

Facebook redesign kills widgets dead

Nick O’Neill at AllFacebook (via ValleyWag) has a post up about how the new Facebook redesign is killing widget traffic by segregating them into their own boxes and off the main page:

Thanks to the redesign all the badges which were “cluttering” the profile have been moved to a “Boxes” tab which most people don’t visit apparently. When the new profile was first rolled out, the traffic to my application actually jumped a little but oddly enough on September 11th, things took a turn for the worse. I’m not sure what happened but my guess is that a lot of the profiles started to get shifted over.

Nick provides the traffic chart for his application:

Nick make an incredibly astute point about the nature of the widgets:

While my application was only build as a joke some applications were attracting hundreds of thousands of daily users. My application was completely a widget though and provided practically no interactive substance. Other applications which actually provide users with a valuable experience in addition to help them share information appear to have survived the shift over to the new design.

There is a real division between these widgets that offer a one-off novelty and full blown applications that give users a reason to continue their interactions after Facebook’s redesign and limiting of incentivizing viral growth.

2001: An Index Odyssey

As part of Google’s continuing 10th birthday celebration, they’ve just released (for one month only) their index from January 2001.

 

 

Some other things we take for granted today that just didn’t exist in 2001:

Facebook

MySpace

iPod

Skype

Gmail

WordPress

Twitter

Bit Torrent

Firefox

Flickr

Del.icio.us

Digg

Gawker

Technorati

Michael Arrington

And despite the 7+ year gap, people still were talking about the iPhone:

 

 

 

HP Drives Sales Through the Blogosphere

A post on Venture Beat this morning examines an upsurge in HP computer sales that left many incredulous.

In August of 2007 HP introduced the Dragon system to little fanfare.  For the first 9 months sales were ho-hum. But in May the HDX Pavillion Entertainment Notebook—the Dragon—started flying off the shelves.  Sales suddenly shot up by 85% compared to the average monthly sales of the previous three months.  And HP’s overall PC sales increased by 10%.

What was behind the boost?  Blogger outreach.

Venture Beat’s Matt Marshall was stunned, unwilling to believe that engaging bloggers could make this kind of impact:

“And how much did HP have to pay these bloggers for them to shamelessly pimp themselves and their blogs to promote the PCs to their readers?”

Marshall became a believer after speaking with the man behind the campaign at HP—Scott Ballantyne, VP and General Manager for Personal Systems Group.  Turns out, HP didn’t do any bribing or conniving.  They simply found the most influential bloggers talking about PCs and asked if they would be interested in running a competition amongst their members.  Each blogger would get to give away one new HDX dragon computer system.  The bloggers were all for it.  And so were their readers.

The contests—held on 31 top PC-related blogs over the 31 days of May–led to tons of posts, conversations, and ultimately an unprecedented upswing in sales for the biggest PC company in the country.

Who would have thought: blogger engagement an effective means of driving sales?
We’re a little less surprised than the general population.

-Anna Brew

Q&A: CNET’s Caroline McCarthy

Attention’s Colin Nagy recently spoke with Caroline McCarthy, Social Media reporter for CNET. She shared her insights on brands getting it right on Twitter, the future of mobile, what not to do as a startup, as well as the tactile merits of American Apparel swag t-shirts. In addition to her news reporting, Caroline blogs at The Social.

Name some brands who you feel manage to convey a tight, concise brand message while communicating across various social platforms (Twitter, Facebook, etc)?

The Obama campaign.  “The Colbert Report” and its green screen challenges.  Threadless.  JetBlue and Virgin America — but I think JetBlue’s winning right now, since I think Twittering fare specials and auctioning off mystery getaway packages on eBay (perfect for the serendipity-and-quirk image that the “Happy Jetting” campaign goes for) is much more lasting than getting BoingBoing to endorse your airline.

Apple, obviously, but my favorite of their social-media campaigns has been giving away free iTunes playlists to college students who joined their Facebook group; what a great way to market to the BitTorrent generation.

The ABC TV show “Dirty Sexy Money” has been tragically disappointing, but I loved that they advertised by buying space in Gawker Stalker last year to put in fake sightings of the celebrity characters.

What do you foresee as emerging trends in digital media for 2009? (Besides lasers)

I’ve been talking for a long time about location awareness on mobile devices, and now that the iPhone 3G is out we have more evidence about what people are willing and unwilling to do.  They’re very hesitant to catch onto location-sharing applications, which most of us didn’t expect; applications like Loopt and Brightkite were supposed to take off like wildfire once all those iPhone owners had GPS in their hands, and they didn’t.  There’s still time, but I think this is definitely an indication of industry predictions not meeting well with the popular audience.  But other location apps, like Yelp’s application that can direct you to the nearest Chinese restaurant or cocktail lounge, are doing great and are proving to be very useful.

Video search is obviously going to be big, too — there’s all this buzz around a new company called Videosurf that’s getting backed by Al Gore and Current Media.  But hype hasn’t always been a great indicator in the video space recently; everyone thought Joost was going to be the revolution, and it thus far has shown few signs of emerging from its post-debut slump, and everyone thought Hulu was going to be terrible but it’s been a great success story.

What’s one piece of advice for early stage companies trying to build awareness online?

Do not try to get your name out there prematurely; this is something that applies both online and offline.  I’ve seen companies sponsor parties, hand out T-shirts, and do other preliminary promotional work months before they even had an invite-only alpha.  Even if they’re collecting e-mail addresses for when they do launch, this doesn’t work.  At best, it’ll make it look like they don’t have their act together; at worst, people will start to label them “vaporware” when the better part of a year goes by before we’ve heard anything.  Some early-stage companies might see this as a way to get a leg up on competitors, but that’s just counterintuitive.  The fact is, if your competition puts out its product before you do and starts getting traction, it’s not going to matter whatsoever that you had some test screenshots on TechCrunch or used a chunk of your venture funding to rent out 111 Minna months ago.

What the best piece of swag you’ve gotten recently?

At genomics start-up 23andMe’s party this week, they gave out T-shirts — those really soft, retro gray ones from American Apparel — that said “I am genetically predisposed to be really, really ridiculously good-looking” on the back.  You will see me wearing it at the gym.  Frequently.

AP O-NO

For those of you who saw The Associated Press reaction to bloggers re-posting articles, it seems they are making the same mistake as the record labels. Rather than try to enforce compliance, they should encourage a dialogue and the spirit of “Fair Practice.” The AP’s long-term relevance hinges on, like many media companies, its relationship to social media. I hope they know that.

Here are some other articles for the curious

Gestures

Steve Gillmor taught me what Web 2.0 means (“users in control of media”) years ago, and remains one of the more enigmatic people I have ever collaborated with (AttentionTrust.org).  You have to read his post from Techcrunch, and determine if it is hyper intelligence or sophistic. (or a combination of both).

www.techcrunch.com/2008/06/21/surviving-the-net/

Transparent Relationships

We’ve talked about the importance of transparency before, right? Here’s a great example of that social media axiom in action. Though we selfless PR folk are much more concerned with seeing our clients in the media than ourselves, it’s always nice to see our efforts towards authentic sharing and genuine relationship-building appreciated publicly once in a while.

See below for an excerpt from a recently secured post on Behind the Buzz, a popular digital marketing and advertising blog written by Rachel Clarke:

The Pitch

I’ve posted about Buffalo Wild Wings before , so the email from Jeff referenced that as a way of affirming the relationship. As well as general information about the campaign, I got screenshots, an offer to talk to the agency and a link to a report about the casual gaming industry , which is nice additional background information even though it’s 2 years old, as a reason for why BWW has done something in this space. Looking at the mentions of this campaign in the press, it looks like AttentionPR does a very good job of getting their clients name out there, but it’s nice to see they’re taking that expertise and using it for blogger relations as well.”

Thanks Rachel! We feel closer already.