The N97 is a big leap for Nokia, but a small step compared to the mobile scene and the market’s expectations of the device. I can only hope Nokia will accept my feedback, because I believe the N98 can lead the pack, instead of merely joining it.
And allow me to amend my bottom-line: scratch the N98, give me the new Nokia X6. With the X6 Nokia introduced a phone that can truly lead the pack instead of just catching up. Although the X6 is officially the XpressMusic 5800 successor, its looks and specs are right at the top:
My only complaint still pertains to the CPU, which at 434MHz and 128MB I doubt it can match the iPhone’s 600MHz with 256MB (3Gs). Why not use the 600MHz ARM Cortex-A8 CPU deployed at the new N900? Not clear. And that is really a shame because Nokia has taken a big step with the X6 and introduced a phone that in my opinion can become a true iPhone Killer.
Mornings are an excellent time to read, write and share. Shortly after the morning coffee and toast I head over to my GReader and start browsing the feeds, in a pre-defined order. Ahuvah Bergerrecently joined the Blonde 2.0 team, which means we get to enjoy her super writing skills at least once a week (hopefully more dear.. ;-). After her last week’s post on Engaging the Masses comes this post, continuing where she left off, and linking to a wonderful deck at slideshare by Marta Kagan, What the F**K is Social Media. One Year After. In a long (83p) yet light presentation Marta goes over the basics of SM, adding some cool pictures and stats to back her points and strengthening her bottomline (p 53): SO PLEASE, STOP F**KING AROUND AND GET SERIOUS ABOUT HARNESSING THE POWER OF THIS THING.
Slide 44 onwards highlights some business insights that are relevant to any company, like ‘93% of social media users believe a company should have a presence in social media’ and ‘85% of social media users believe that a company should go further than just having a presence and actually interact with its customers’. Innovative approaches, I know..
The entire deck is hilarious (although the language might not appeal to everyone) and the 83 slides are going fast, but all convey an important message, and I only hope that a fraction of the 128,000 views this deck received were made by corporations and business executives and not just by us marketers – we’re already advocating this F**King thing too.. 😉 [RSS subcribers: Please read this post at my blog to view the embed deck]
Run into this survey at eMarketer.com in one of my Google Alerts the other day. With all the plethora of information sources, I find it more difficult to focus on topics and trends that interest me, as well as joining in on conversations, so it’s good to know GAlerts still has some benefits.. 😉
The survey in hand was conducted between some 1,800 social media marketers in the US, asking them about the effectiveness of their practices – meaning which tactics they used, how effective those tactics were and how accurately can they measure such tactics. The results are not that surprising, but I would like to focus on next steps – how can we make those practices more effective and measured more accurately.
The first issue we’re seeing is the negative correlation between a tactic’s effectiveness vs. our ability to measure it accurately (graph below). The 3 most effective tactics are User reviews or ratings (47%), Blogger or online journalist relations (46%) and Forums or discussion groups (42%). When looking at the ‘Very accurately measured’ column, those tactics are ranked 3rd, 4th and 5th, respectively. With the expansion of broadband and the coming of web 2.0, everyone is a publisher, and thus consumers are more suspicious and don’t believe everything they read online. In the US the FTC are targeting bloggers’ freebies (PDF guidelines), and in the meantime there are some un-official guidelines on how to disclose and authenticatea sponsored conversation. In Israel on the other hand, things are moving slower (article in Hebrew).
The second issue pertains to hooking financial success with social marketing (graph below). It’s pretty obvious that social marketing is most effective for Brand reputation (39%), Brand awareness (37%) and Search engine results (38%). I’d like to point your attention to the Sales aspects of social marketing, Generate leads and Increase online sales. The marketers who were surveyed said that social marketing is not effective at Generating leads (35%) and Increasing online sales (46%). For social marketing to become bigger and better, we have to add revenues to the game, and being able to measure it. Dell are already showing the added value of their social activity on twitter, a new study finds correlation between social media and financial success and George Colony urges CEO to understand that social marketing is here to stay.
If we want social marketing to rock, Sales indicators must be inherent to any social campaign. It’s OK to start small, but start somewhere. Move the conversation from brand (only) to revenues as well. And one last request – be honest to your readers.
By now you’re probably aware that I got the new Nokia N97 for a 1 month trial. I posted an elaborate review of the N97 (in Hebrew) yesterday, and I plan on writing a detailed review here as well, following my initial post.
In the meanwhile, I’ve uploaded some screenshots to facebook, showing some of the N97 features. As I screenshot pretty often, I’m sure that album will expand. If there’s anything specific you’d like to see or hear my opinion about, let me know. Screenshots were taken using Best Screen Snap for S60 (free). Note that in landscape mode some pictures came out distorted. Portrait mode is much better.
The Jewish mind keeps coming up with new inventions and ideas, luringCEOs to the holy land, even in the July sun – no wonder Israel has some 3,500 start-up companies, 2nd only to the US.
The idea is simple, and is a semi-semantic way to filter results. While twitter search crawls the entire user base, statussearch.net looks at your friends only, assuming they know what they talk about.. 😉
Couple of things I noticed from a brief use that are worth mentioning/conversing:
True to the ‘real-time’ reality, the results are 1-paged, no option for ‘more’. You do get an icon to see the source of each result, but if your answer is 2-3 days old, you won’t see it. Also, it’s unclear to me how frequent the crawler works and if there’s any attempt to ‘even’ the results between twitter and facebook (think not). Does the engine displays ‘power users’ results first (because those users are more connected – thus what they say is more accurate/important/RTed/Liked)?
Size matters? I’m following some 650 people and sport 950 friends in facebook, which makes my pool of knowledge average I guess, at 1,600 minds. There is wisdom in there, don’t get me wrong, but how will a 500-mind pool looks like? or 5,000?
Memory loss. Sometimes I wish to see stuff I updated, and in that case I go to my own stream at twitter.com. Although I tried several times, no results from ‘me’ appeared in statussearch timeline, but that’s probably because I’m no longer friends with myself… 😉
Integration points. There are 2, email alerts and a firefox search plugin, both highly welcome. You can create unlimited number (free, for now) of alerts and receive an email once something happen (daily or immediately). The FF plugin (accessible from every page, right-hand side) is most useful – I’m a huge search plugin fan that makes the solution serve you, where/when/how you want, and not vise-versa.
Overall, I think Lior and Elad are on to something. The web is filled with junk data, and everyone, big to small, are trying to come up with solutions that will filter the gold out. StatusSearch is not a semantic search engine, but by tapping your friends’ knowledge instead of the general population, we’re one step closer towards finding that ONE result we want.
This is my personal blog. The postings here do not represent the thoughts, intentions, plans or strategies of my past employers or of my clients. It is solely my opinion.
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