Archive for November, 2008
This past weekend, I gave a presentation at SocialDevCamp East which was held at the University of Baltimore. The presentation was on Industry Specific Social Media Strategies. The format consisted of a presentation, a contest and then an open discussion in the end.
Members of the audience were given an opportunity to pitch the perfect social media strategcy as it pertained to their industry and then everybody voted on which strategy was the best. Mary Hartney from the Baltimore Sun won first prize which was an Apple Nano.
In my presentation, I spoke about 3 specific industries: hospitality, real estate and automotive. I also provide information on social media demographics, campaign measurement and some random tools on how make managing your social media life easier.
Thank you again to everybody who attended my presentation. Feel free to download the presentation.
Thank you for the posts:
Rob Blat, Mark Scrimshire, The Money Shovel
For the past couple of weeks since we decided to submit an application to the Apps for Democracy Innovation Contest we’ve been hard at work. After many sleepless nights, triple caramel macchiatos (or was that a quad) and more QA testing, our app is almost here. I’ve been getting several emails from industry colleagues asking me how things are coming along and I decided to post a screenshot this glorious morning. The tempature is supposed to reach 70 today in D.C. and it’s the middle of November. Wow, who would have known, I would moved up here a long time ago. You’ll all be able to play with the app early next week, until then - sayonara.
Retargeted Advertising is probably the most effective form of online advertising and only a handful know about it. It’s mainly been used by the big guys; Fortune 500 companies were the only ones who could afford it up until now.
My first experience with retargeted advertising was through a media spend I placed for one of my clients through Advertising.com. I was skeptical at first because the minimum buy-in was roughly 30k a month but the results were so impressive they yielded a $10 ROI. Ok, so how does it work and what is it.
BOALT’s submission to the the Apps for Democracy innovation contest, DCHistoricTours.com, will launch this week as planned. Please help us win People’s Choice Award by voting for us here.
The contest is being held by the District of Columbia’s Office of the Chief Technology Officer (OCTO) which is responsible for D.C.’s technology infrastructure and Peter Corbett of IStrategyLabs. The contest just kicked off last month and has already received tremendous buzz amongst technology enthusiasts.
With over 19 million visitors each year to our nation’s capital, DCHistoricTours.com is destined to become a successful planning resource for the city’s tourists. In addition, the timing of the website’s launch couldn’t have been any better with the upcoming inauguration of President-elect Barack Obama.
DCHistoricTours.com is integrated in real-time with D.C.’s data catalog, which provides real-time data from multiple agencies to citizens - a catalyst ensuring agencies operate as more responsive, better performing organizations. The website which is comprised of user generated content allows users to create, view and vote on tours. It is integrated with Yahoo’s Flickr photos, Yelp restaurant reviews and Wikipedia facts.
There is an old saying that cobbler’s children have no shoes. This holds equally true for BOALT, even though we don’t have any children. We tend to get so entrenched in developing social media strategies for our clients that somehow we end forgetting about our own. This seems to be a trend with any agencies self-promotional efforts.
I’ve never been one to cut the line but the other day I decided to make it my mission to focus on our own social media campaign. As I was thinking about the different resources available to me, I decided to take a very different approach. I created an online banner test campaign and pointed it to my Twitter page to see if I would gain any new followers. I hope that I didn’t sell my soul to the devil.
The results were less than impressive. We served 10k impressions on 3 websites just for my own amusement.
- TechCrunch received 21 clicks out of 10526 impressions.
- Mashable received 22 clicks out 10530 impressions.
- Silicon Valley Insider received 7 clicks out of 10528 impressions.
We’ll never know how many of these clicks actually converted and yes I know, 10k is a very small test but it gave me enough insight to know that you can’t cut the line. Back to the traditional labor intensive, time consuming social media strategies that we know work.
Search Marketing has increasingly become more competitive over the past couple of years which has significantly raised cost-per-click’s which in turn raises businesses cost-per-acquisition’s. So what does this mean mean? Businesses are forced to raise their the costs of goods or services.
Your probably saying, “tell me something I don’t know!” O.K., I signed into my Google Adwords account today and Google asked me to raise my bid from $9.98 to over $98.00 in order to be on the first page. I’ve verified this with Google and it’s no error. They claim that some CPC’s for certain industries have already exceeded $100.
So who ultimately suffers? The consumers. Businesses will just continue to raise their prices to offset the CPA. Can you really blame them?
Yesterday, I had the pleasure to meet with Mike Subelsky over a cup of coffee in Dupont Circle. Mike, who goes by “Hacker & Improvisor” in his email signature, has has been involved in quite a few interesting start ups including OtherInbox.com, Subelsky.com, IgniteBaltimore.com and BigImprov.org. The purpose of our meeting was just to kickback and discuss different entrepreneur stories and strategies. After the meeting, I felt real good about some of my contributions to the conversation and thought I should share them.
Mayor Fenty to the left of me.
I just got back from the mayor’s press conference which was held this morning. BOALT is proud to announce that it won the agency 1st prize for its submission, DCHistoricTours.com. This is a great accomplishment for us as we just opened our D.C. office 2 months ago. It was an honor to shake Mayor’s Fenty’s hand and receive the award today!
I wan’t to thank Peter Corbett for all of his hard work and dedication in hosting the contest. I also want to thank Sichon, Phil and Tim from BOALT for their time and effort over the past 2 weeks in building the application.
UPDATE: Thank you Justin Thorp for sending me your video.
Check out the video of the event:
Also, congrats to Travis Hurant, Tim Koelkebeck and Brian Sobel for winning the Indie 1st prize!
After several weeks of hard planning, I’m sure that Peter Corbett of IStrategyLabs is glad to know that the Apps for Democracy was a huge success. I’m glad that BOALT took home the agency 1st prize and was able to build an application that was going to help the community so much. So what’s next for DCHistoricTours.com?
After speaking with D.C.’s Chief Technology Officer, Vivek Kundra, last night, he told me that one of the reasons we were chosen was because they wanted to use our application on main D.C. inauguration website. This would provide the many anticipated visitors this January a helpful resource to learn more about our nation’s capitol. I thought that was pretty exciting so naturally I stayed up last night wondering what I could do to improve the app. (more…)
TravelTalkRADIO Interview
I was interviewed today on national talk radio by Sandy Dhuyvetter from TravelTalkRADIO about our start up RushMyPassport.com. TravelTalkRADIO is syndicated on 1500 publications each week. They also send out a weekly newsletter to 27.000 listeners and resend their programming through eTurbonews who in turn sends out to 255,000 travel experts around the world.
Click here to listen to interview.
Screenshot from TravelTalkRADIO website:
