The semantic web: filtering the filters that filter our filters

Web 3.0 Transcript – Now with links! « kateray.net: "David Weinberger (0:33): We have so much stuff that we have to deal with. Individually, as a culture. So much – that it just bursts the bounds of any physical library. You know if we had a Dewey Decimal System for everything on the web, the trillion pages and all the subpages and all that, we wouldn’t find a thing, that system simply can’t work."

Web 3.0 from Kate Ray on Vimeo.

Pixelbabe Sasha

It's not ascii or pixel art, but something entirely else (and slightly NSFW, depending on where you work): Sasha. Have you found out yet how you can see the image?

See you in 20 years

This is what I'll look like when I'm 60: Made with In20years.com.

Shopping is a continuum or a cycle, not a funnel

The Integer Group has an interesting take on consumers' buying decision cycle, made famous by McKinsey's Consumer Decision Journey. In their Shopper Continuum framework, Integer already makes the connection with social networks and social media:

The shopping process has changed dramatically in the last decade. Our sources of product and brand information have multiplied exponentially. We trust the opinions of complete strangers, shop online with our social network, and even become “fans” of brands. We watch commercials on YouTube, then skip over them with TiVo and satellite radio. We read reviews on Amazon, then go and play with the products in-store, check in on FourSquare, take a vote of Facebook friends, buy them with our mobile phones, and then Tweet about our experiences with our friends.

The Integer Group developed The Shopper Continuum framework "to identify the questions we need to ask about our shoppers, how we go about getting those answers (the data), and then what we do to improve our strategy (the analytics)." They've used it, for example, in their Checkout issue (.pdf) on Coupons and their impact on buying decisions.

The importance of social media in purchase decisions

One of the trends highlighted in GlobalWebIndex' Social Media Motivations report is the shift towards content, entertainment and social connection:

Not all consumers want to contribute. More involved forms of contribution such as writing a blog, uploading video, or micro-blogging, are limited in their potential to engage with the mass market. Most web users are still relatively passive particularly in established markets.
The Internet is growing fast as a entertainment vehicle, suggesting huge opportunities for brands who want to sponsor or create access to rich content, such as video.
What is created by the contributors is driving the decisions of the mass. The passive impact of social media is bigger and hi-lighted by such important motivations such as “Researching / Finding products to buy”

Social Media Motivations

View more presentations from Tom Smith.

Small business reputation management matters

Pew Research Project has just released a really interesting study on Reputation Management and Social Media (download pdf). Reputation management has now become a defining feature of online life for many internet users, including the ones about to decide on which doctor, lawyer or plumber to go for.

Pew says the number would be higher, too, if not for age differences: Only 23% of Internet users 65 and older research small businesses online.

Razorfish: "The recession has subsided; marketers are spending again on digital"

The 2010 Razorfish Outlook Report takes a snapshop of marketing trends and media spend.

2010 Razorfish Outlook Report

View more documents from Razorfish.

Some interesting takeaways:

1. Marketers need to transform themselves. or die.
2. The recession has subsided. marketers are spending again on digital.
3. Contrary to popular belief, clients were willing to experiment during the recession.
4. Mobile marketing has arrived, finally—thanks to Apple.
5. Marketers will invest more into digital video.
6. Brands will take over twitter.
7. Brands are focusing on social influencers, not social media.
8. Brands are getting savvier about measuring social.
9. Google still dominates search. but not for long.
10. Global brands are learning how to think and act locally.

See also 2010 Razorfish Outlook Report Key Findings on Slideshare.

Stuck in motion

Japan - Heartbeats of Time on Vimeo: "I spend a lot of time thinking about the way memory and sight work together. I don't think we remember in 'pictures' or long videos... but something in between. Perhaps we also sense, at times, more than 30 fps, and unexpected parts of the brain fire when we are presented with certain objects and forms."

Japan - Heartbeats of Time from Trey Ratcliff on Vimeo.

Peer-to-peer is becoming the default way people exchange

Collaborative Consumption describes the rapid explosion in traditional sharing, bartering, lending, trading, renting, gifting, and swapping redefined through technology and peer communities.

From enormous marketplaces such as eBay and Craigslist, to emerging sectors such as social lending (Zopa) and car sharing (Zipcar), Collaborative Consumption is disrupting outdated modes of business and reinventing not just what we consume but how we consume. New marketplaces such as Swaptree [facilitates trade of personal media between users using algorithms], Zilok [Peer-to-peer Renting service], Bartercard [the world's largest barter trading exchange], AirBnb [vacation rentals, sublets, private rooms by the night], and thredUP [conveniently exchange kids clothing online] are enabling 'peer-to-peer' to become the default way people exchange —whether it’s unused space, goods, skills, money, or services — and sites like these are appearing everyday, all over the world."

Collaborative Consumption Groundswell Video from rachel botsman on Vimeo.

"Social Media Marketing is going to fade into the back in 5 years"

Silicon Valley blogger Louis Gray (@louisgray), in a video interview about The Gradual Demise of Social Media Marketing:

Social Media Marketing is going to fade into the back but is going to continue to be huge element of the success that you have with your brand or company. But it's going to become core marketing, core partnerships, core business development. And just be there, like air.
Some of these earlier networks have really been dominated by casual conversations between consumers. And maybe at that initial point you might want to say "This is not where I want to put my business". But over time as the mass people has started to talk about just about everything in these networks. Not only the lunch that they had that day, or what their cat happens to be doing, but the brand that they're using and the business decisions that they're making. Now is the right time for businesses to be involved.

In the same interview, Gray says the 24/7 nature of the web means marketing professionals will need to move faster, and organisations will change their attitude to control.
Is you company ready for that change?

No Rock Werchter or Pukkelpop for me this year

I've done interesting stuff at Belgium's biggest summer festivals in the last few years. Like organising the Festival Buddy contest for Virgin Express, liveblogging with Humo journalists, or merely accompanying Gil to make photo/movie reports. But lately I had the feeling festivals are not for me any more. And now there's proof: http://www.last.fm/festivals shows you the compatibility of summer festivals nearby and Rock Werchter and Pukkelpop are not even in my top 5 recommended festivals.

These two are:

• Cactusfestival, Fri-Sun 9-11 July, Brugge, Belgium (79% compatibility). I bought tickets for Elvis Costello's concert on Sat 10 July.
• Lokerse Feesten, Fri 30 Juli - Sun 8 Aug, Lokeren, Belgium (70% compatibility). Paul Weller in concert, on 7 August (!)

By the way, are we friends on Last.fm yet? How does your music taste compare to mine?

Speaker slides for Stichting Marketing's Relationship Marketing Congres

Slides for my keynote during Stichting Marketing's Relationship Marketing Congres today 20 May in Schelle, Belgium.

Social Media vs Sales: from Conversations to Conversions

View more presentations from Clo Willaerts.

Implementation of social media guidelines in Belgium

5 - implementation of social media guidelines - LUsm10, originally uploaded by Leads United.

Belgian PR agency Leads United (@leadsunited) have just released the results of their 3rd report on the use of social media in (Belgian) companies. See also their Communiqué de Presse or Persbericht.

As you can see, more and more companies are implementing a social media policy. Don't have much time for that? Use this free PolicyTool for Social Media, get it checked by your legal eagle, translate into Dutch and French et voilà!

The 50 most "social" U.S. companies: Microsoft, eBay, Amazon, Disney, Google.

The NetProspex Social 50 | NetProspex: "The NetProspex Social Index (NPSI) was used to score social network activity across 9 major networks: Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter, MySpace, Friendster, Flickr, LiveJournal, hi5 and Flixster The score is based on the average number of friends or connections across major social networks (friendliness) and the average number of tweets, # following, and # of followers per employee (twitter score)."

Their method is not entirely transparant, but couldn't we make a similar index for the situation in Belgium?

The graph below (source) is also interesting: it shows the top 5 U.S. companies' Twitter score, calculated by taking each company's employees' average of the sum of number of followers, number following, and number of tweets.

Facebook Status Updates are more searchable than you might have thought

Found via Cédric Rainotte:

Openbook - Connect and share whether you want to or not: "Openbook draws attention to the information Facebook makes public about its users via its search API. Facebook exposed this service on April 21st, 2010.
Our goal is to get Facebook to restore the privacy of this information, so that this website and others like it no longer work."

Very effective way to increase awareness with Facebook users. I wonder if it will slow down Facebook's current momentum - they seem to be very eager to move from social network to a platform of consumer preferences.
I'm also curious if/when Facebook status updates will show up in Google search results.

Go Red Devils, go!

NIKE SPORTSWEAR: NSW+FBGT from fla on Vimeo.

Ethics vs Social Media Marketing: the #spon and #paid Twitter tags

Reblogging it here for future reference:

The WOMMA Guide to Disclosure in Social Media Marketing: "Consumers have a right to know the sponsor behind advertising messages that could influence their purchasing decisions, but key information is not always adequately disclosed in a social media context. Thus, for testimonials and endorsements delivered to consumers through social media - - whether by consumers, experts, celebrities, or organizations - - the FTC [Federal Trade Commission, an independent agency of the United States government, promoting consumer protection] requires advertisers and bloggers to disclose all “material connections.” Such “material connections” may be defined as any connection between a blogger and an advertiser that could affect the credibility consumers give to that blogger’s statements. Important examples of “material connections” include

1. consideration (benefits or incentives such as monetary compensation, loaner products, free services, in-kind gifts, special access privileges) provided by an advertiser to a blogger, or
2. a relationship between an advertiser and a blogger (such as an employment relationship).

"

download the entire Guide to Disclosure in Social Media Marketing (.pdf).
For Twitter, for example, this would mean you'd include a hash tag notation, either:

• #spon (sponsored)
• #paid (paid)
• #samp (sample)

I don't get the #samp tag, and it appears to be rarely used. But what do you think of the #paid and #spon tags?

Found via Alain Hemelinckx.

Why an innovation bonus would never work

YouTube - RSA Animate - Drive: "This lively RSA Animate, adapted from Dan Pink's talk at the RSA, illustrates the hidden truths behind what really motivates us at home and in the workplace."

B2B and Social Media: do they match?

I wonder where the b2c-b2b balance reflex in marketing comes from. Whether it's for a news article, a conference programme, or a series of seminars: someone always pops the question But what about b2b?. And then nobody knows what to say. The only really convincing example of a B2B Social Media Success Story is Forrester research, [the] "shining star in the world of B2B social media, which seems natural since part of its business is to follow the latest social media trends and predict the growth of the social web."
I think the other examples totally miss the point. Social media is not about being able to boast that you have x members or fans. Nobody is going to applaud you for the mere fact that your company has a blog or your company is on Twitter. It's not about the numbers, but what you do with your contact points.
Plus, the whole idea of social media is to go personal. I find this hard to combine with the blue collar style communication used in b2b. Doing business with your suppliers is all about personal contact, but maybe it's the sense of responsibility (you're acting in your company's name, spending your company's money) that gets in the way of true social interaction. Maybe social is all about consumer power, not about finding another (maybe cheaper) communication channel for your business?
Or can we safely leave out the conversation part and look for examples of self publishing companies?

A weekend in the land of the valleys

If you like the combo gourmet + outdoor activities, spend at least one weekend in the Pays des Vallées or, as some call it, the fairytale Ardennes.
The gourmet part was taken care of at Domaine du Vieux Moulin in Eprave close to Rochefort. Try not to eat à la carte and trust the cook's good taste in regional specialties, seasonal ingredients and more stuff straight from La Grande Bouffe's kitchen - with a stylish, modern twist. Don't let the old mill the Domaine was named after fool you: the current owner is obsessed with modern design.

The area is most known for the river excursions down the Lesse and Ourthe, but we mainly burnt our foie gras calories by hiking and geocaching. The first one is very relaxing, the second one can be quite challenging. Here are two short movies to illustrate my point. The first one is 22 seconds of insects skating on the river surface, and their shadows on the river bed.
The second one are 25 seconds of Gil hugging a big tree, me climbing over him to reach a certain branch and take a picture of the hint that was bolted on top of it. What you don't see in this movie is me falling out of it just after taking that crucial picture. Geocaching, dear reader, is not for wussies!

Another glorious way to explore the colourful landscapes shaped by fertile stretches of farmland and wooded hills as they are described on paysdesvallees.be is to rent a vespa in Durbuy. A few tips:

1. Take at least 150 euro cash per person with you - that's the amount of cash guarantee you have to deposit before you scoot away on the Vespa. In Wallonia ATMs tend to be scarce and the one in Durbuy was empty.
2. Be bold and take the pink one, with matching pink helmet. No other vehicle will get you solemn high fives from ten year old girls in the street.
3. If you've never driven a Vespa let alone a motorbike before, you might want to study the dashboard first. The buttons for headlights, blinkers and the horn are very close to each other. That, and my fearless Sebulba driving style may have scared the other drivers and the occasional pedestrian.
4. Don't grin while driving or you will eat lots of bugs.

Social isn't for everyone

Five Steps for Consumer Brands to Earn Social Currency | Fast Company: "Mass-market brands that are positioned based on functional superiority, such as Gillette, aren't likely to see much upside in social currency. [...] Conversation might lead to a discussion of downsides such as price and alternative products and brands [...]."

This made me think. At first, I thought social was for everyone. Then I thought if an advertiser really doesn't want to hear what consumers are really saying about its products and services, they shouldn't use social media. And then I added the advertisers who have something to hide, and I thought my list of companies who shouldn't use social media was complete.
Do you think the reason mentioned above is a valid one? And can you think of other reasons for advertisers to avoid social media?

Bean to Bar

YouTube - Mast Brothers Chocolate: "The chocolatiers, Rick and Michael Mast, walk us through their uniquely intensive process, DIY machines, and a little of their food philosophy."
At first I was scared I would find ironic beard hairs in their chocolate, but now I'm honestly sorry I missed them while we were in New York.

Speaking at the 13th Relationship Marketing Congres on 20 May in Schelle

As you know, I've been obsessed lately with the role of social media in the complete buying decision cycle. Or, in other words, how for the first time in decades, consumers visibly express their default brand preferences, what stage of life they're in, which brands they're considering just before buying, what they think of the buying process, and whether they are a happy (and hopefully loyal) customer or rather an unhappy one.

I'm developing a theoretical framework around this and use the keyword conversity to document my thoughts and your feedback.

There's still a lot of work to be done, but I'll present my view on the whole from conversations to conversions debate during a keynote at Stichting Marketing's 13th Relationship Marketing Congres on 20 May 2010 in San Marco Village, Schelle. Other speakers include: Frans Reichardt (Holy Cow Direct Communications), AdWords and Google Analytics expert Béate Vervaecke, e-mail marketing expert Tamara Gielen and Wunderman chairman and CEO Daniel Morel.

Will you be there too?

And the winner is... @lamazone @zofie /cc @creamoflondon

Whoaa, look at those Twitter votes for the very last Eurostar Londonvirus tickets... But fair is fair: the winners are clearly @lamazone and @zofie. Ladies, you can expect an e-mail from the Eurostar people shortly!

Eurostar LondonVirus: who wins those 2 last free tickets?

There are currently seven finalists of the very last set of "viral" Eurostar tickets to London:

• @saravdv & @bunker
• Actionet's Hadi
• @zomermaantje
• @karen18
• @defre
• @andrewvassallo
• @zofie & @lamazone

Created with Admarket's flickrSLiDR.

The winner is picked today on twitter. Let me know who you think should win the ticket (for two) by today midnight. Use the hashtag #londonvirus and @bnox so I can trace it. One vote per twitter account. The candidate who's collected the most twitter votes by midnight, wins!

Eurostar LondonVirus: @creamoflondon got me too

Before you watch this YouTube video on the latest Eurostar campaign London Virus, there are a few things you might want to know:

• Streaking (the act of taking off one's clothes and running nude through a public place) is not new, neither is it typical of London. If you would go to London just for the sake of seeing "Harold Davies, professional streaker", chances are slim you will actually see him there.
• In spite of the title of the campaign, travelling to the UK by train does not pose any health hazards. You will not need any special vaccinations before leaving to the U.K. and neither will they put you in quarantaine upon arrival. A valid Eurostar ticket and ditto photo ID will do.

You can win two of the forementioned Eurostar tickets to London (and back, I presume) by walking up to me this afternoon at Brussels Girl Geek Dinner 28 in Ghent. I have 3 LondonVirus t-shirts with me and will make 3 people wear one. Tonight I will post the pictures here and announce the winner, viz the one that wears the t-shirt with style and gusto.

But first, some gratuitous male nudity:

The Virtual Revolution episode 4: please think of the children

You have to see this: the 4th and last episode of BBC's brilliant The Virtual Revolution documentary can be watched online at the canvas.be website. The Virtual Revolution was a radical change for BBC documentary making - "an open and collaborative production, which asked the web audience to debate programme themes, suggest and send questions for interviewees, watch and comment on interview and graphics clips, and download clips for personal use and re-editing, all months before broadcast."
So it is no more than fitting that Canvas not only did a live webcast of the debate afterwards, but put this video online as well. Link: Online debat bij aflevering 4 with K.U. Leuven's Mariek Vanden Abeele.

Speaker slides for IAB Belgium's Think Big event: Social Media Battle with @Steven_Insites

I usually don't do "you had to be there slides", but during this presentation, the focus was on the interaction with the audience. I really enjoyed doing this presentation with Steven Van Belleghem, the Conversation Manager.
Yes, you had to be there :-)

IAB Belgium Thinkbig.be Social Media Battle

View more presentations from Clo Willaerts.

The importance of sharing

A must-read if you want to know what Facebook's OpenGraph Protocol is all about, this 8 things you need to know about Facebook's plans to take over the world - Will Marlow: "Facebook wants to know what items on the Internet are 'sharable.' So how important is sharing? Answer: very important. On Facebook alone, the 400 million Facebook users shared over 25 billion things last month. Facebook's dream is to allow anyone to share anything across its servers, regardless of what website you're on. This gives Facebook data on which items are more important than others, based on how the item was shared and how many people shared it."

If you thought Google was doing something possibly illegal when they started copying the entire internet onto their servers ten years ago, watch the Facebook space. This also means that traffic to your own website is your KPI, you're in for a rough couple of years. Traffic is moving away from single sites to Facebook and similar web services.

For now, the Open Graph protocol is only designed to support (public web) profile pages of real-life "objects" like a bar, company, cause, sports team, band, actor, public figure, city, book, or blog. But Facebook's Social Plugins (like the Recommendations Box or the Like Button) already show how "facebook sharable" pieces of content, such as a news articles, photos, or video can be. The identifier for these content objects is their URL or domain, reducing the non-Facebook web to a container or placeholder of potential social objects. The ones that are interesting enough to "go social" will be consumed within the Facebook platform, feeding their OpenGraph with the data everybody wants: which products and services are favourites, what triggers consumers' buying decisions, what they think about the buying process, and whether they are happy or not with what they spent their money on. I doubt whether Facebook will share these market insights for free.

What does this mean for your internet strategy? Mainly: maintain your content marketing strategy, but make everything you publish not only findable by search engines, but also sharable by social media users. If your product information page, your breaking news item, your web video is not an easily sharable social object, it doesn't stand a chance in today's Web environment.

Doing this is the easy part, and a great opportunity for agencies. The hard part is: making sure that when they're shared, your social objects don't lose their context. And lest we forget, mostly the context still is: "Hi. I'm from company X. We make really good products and would like you to buy them."

My phenomenal TED talk on how to use your brain to become happy

That's why I think the way to true happiness is to realize that you look at the averages only. In this case you want to get your brain - at least I wouldn't put any money on that. (Laughter.)
Thank you very much. See, my doctor once had a patient who came in bored but all of a sudden this intense need for creativity made him feel alive again. I could use this data et cetera, et cetera. On hearing this, everyone feels that they're not enough data to gain insight, but not make decisions. (Applause.)
Thank you very much. I'm now going to show you we can get our brain to tell you that it needs to rest a little. But I would like to use the underlying data on the quality of our lives. I'll give you a couple of things to ponder regarding this choice - but of course we also need surprises. How many of you believe that I could use only data on the quality of our lives. I'll give you a couple of things to ponder regarding this choice to say something.

tedPAD - create millions of amazing and really bad TED talks: "Keywords (brain, patient, data, choice) are top-10 words that statistically stand out in the most favorited TED talks. The sentences to connect these keywords each contain one of the top-10 4-word phrases (4-grams) that statistically stand out in the most favorited TED talks. The remaining parts have been computer-generated and smoothed-over afterwards."

Found via Jan Bonnevier @inspirito.

Look at me

Television is a drug. from Beth Fulton on Vimeo.

The inspiration of this video comes from Todd Alcott (@toddalcott) 's poem, Television:

Look at me. Look at me. Look at me, look at me, look at me. Look at me. No, no, no, dont look over there, look at me, look at me, look at me.
Are you looking at me? Is everyone looking at me? Do I have your attention? Good. Dont get the wrong idea. Im not trying to take over your life. You need, what? What do you need? You need to, what? Go to the bathroom? Fine. Get up, goto the bathroom, come back, look at me. You need, what? You need to get something to eat? Fine. Get up, go to the kitchen, get something to eat, come back, look at me. You need to, what, sleep? Fine, get up, go to bed, go to sleep, get up, come back, look at me.
Okay. So we have an agreement. You will do what you absolutely need to do, and when your done, you will come back and look at me.
Dont worry about your schedule. I am here for you. I am here for you. Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, I am here for you. I am here for you. You need me, I'm here. Fair and foul, thick and thin, I am here for you. I am here for you. People try to tell you I'm bad? You tell them that I am here for you. Twenty-four hours a day, fair and foul, thick and thin, I am here for you. I am here for you. People try to tell you I'm bad, know what that sounds like to me? Sour Grapes.
You see what I--hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, no, dont look over there, theres nothing going on over there, look at me, look at me, look at me.
I've got stuff you wouldnt believe. Danger? Sex? Action? Death? Thrills? Comedy? All here, all in the next eight minutes.
Can you believe it? You can't. It's unbelievable. You can't believe it because its unbelievable! It's a miracle.
Just keep looking at me. Just keep looking at me. Just keep looking at me. Look at me, look at me, look at me, look at me, look at me.

Trackers: lifestreaming to the extreme

Magazine Preview - The Data-Driven Life - NYTimes.com: "For many self-trackers, the goal is unknown. Although they may take up tracking with a specific question in mind, they continue because they believe their numbers hold secrets that they can’t afford to ignore, including answers to questions they have not yet thought to ask.

Ubiquitous self-tracking is a dream of engineers. For all their expertise at figuring out how things work, technical people are often painfully aware how much of human behavior is a mystery. [...] Instead of interrogating their inner worlds through talking and writing, they are using numbers. They are constructing a quantified self."

This is, indeed, how an engineer would think: let's collect as many data as possible, and make sense out of it later. And to be honest, today's (mainly mobile) technologies make lifestreaming cool and convenient. Think: Foursquare and Gowalla location tracking and reporting. And if you look at the right hand corner of my blog, you'll see a Google Map pinpointing my location in realtime.

But what about people who don't realise how much of our behaviour is tracked and logged? Triangulation and cell phones have already helped police find back missing persons, but what if for some reason you don't want to be found and forget that most of the "smart" devices we use daily don't flush their log files automatically?

In 2008, Intel fellow Genevieve Bell already talked about this in a LIFT talk called Secrets, lies & the possible perils of truthful technology.