An effective social media campaign

August 25th, 2009 4 Comments

It’s not all that often that an advertising campaign grabs my attention and actually gets me curious – it’s even less often that I see a campaign that makes effective use of social media.  Even more rare than both those things, a campaign I actually feel compelled to blog about – today these things happened.

The campaign I noticed was for the Samsung “Tap and Take” digital camera.  There are a couple of major reasons that I think this campaign is effective and a sensible use of social media.

The right demographic

The first and most important reason that I think this campaign is effective is that social media users are actually going to be somewhat interested in a new, shiny, yet to be released digital camera with some interesting features – especially if they are given the chance to win one.

Unobtrusive

This campaign is unobtrusive.  I’ve seen a few social media campaigns recently that in summary were just tedious to say the least.  This particular campaign did not require me to follow/friend anyone, nor did it require me to register, sign up, provide any details at all, just a single tweet.  Brilliant.  Why not do it?

Social media is all about participation and interaction – without that, it is just content being blasted at people, who probably don’t want it.  This seems to be most often the case when advertising agencies add a social media aspect to a campaign just because they think it’s trendy.

Viral

I saw a few tweets this morning from various people I follow, entering this competition – and I was curious, so I checked it out.  It was unobtrusive – so I entered.   This is a perfect example of leveraging the viral aspects of social networking.  If you’re not planning to make use of the viral aspects of social networking in your campaign, why are you even using a form of social media in the first place?

Minimal participation

This is another key factor.  I use twitter a lot because it’s convenient.  I don’t have to pay attention to it, and when I do it’s for very short bursts of time.  There was no entry forms or details to get bogged down with in this campaign, it was as simple as twitting anything I liked and including a hash tag.  I entered while I was at work, and while bored a little later on, had a browse of the other entries – spending a total of about two minutes interacting – which is all it needs.

Along with the effective core use of social media as the platform of the campaign, the agency (I assume) responsible for the campaign have also used a few traditional methods to support the core campaign, including banner advertising – I haven’t seen any of it myself – which in my opinion is the best banner advertising.

Well done to whoever came up with this simple, yet incredibly effective campaign – especially for actually managing to get it backed and out there without a panel of marketing “gurus”  turning into another all-singing, all-dancing, gets in our way and irritates us style campaign that we’re used to seeing from most of these type things.

You can find this campaign at http://www.twitter.com/tapandtake

Disclosure: I am currently doing freelance web development and social media integration for a digital creative studio.  However I have no connection to, nor do I even know which agency is responsible for this excellent campaign.

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This ain't no fad

August 22nd, 2009 2 Comments

Recently I’ve noticed a lot of commentary on Social Media/Networking being a “fad” -  however watching and participating in the development of electronic communications over the last twenty years, it’s pretty obvious to me that it is in no way a fad.  I believe the current trends in social media are the logical progression of digital communications.  It’s the next evolutionary  step.

Electronic communications have been with us for quite some time.  My first experience with electronic communications was way back in the late eighties – when I first discovered the electronic Bulletin Board System (BBS).  The BBS allowed users to dial in and exchange electronic mail, both privately and publicly, share files and play text-based games against each other – I even ran a BBS for a while and still have a soft spot for good ASCII art and ANSI colours.

These systems were designed with one thing in mind – communication and collaboration – and they served the purpose well for the time and what they were.  The BBS tended to be a fairly location centric creature – due to long distance phone charges,  and therefore became fairly social.  The first “tweetup” style event I ever went to was in-fact a BBS based picnic (I just can’t remember if it was the Megalink TBBS or Lake Macquarie BBS who hosted it!). The BBS however gave way to the next phase in the electronic communication evolution – Internet E-mail.

It was the beginning of 1990,  Tim Berners-Lee had yet to put the finishing touches on the very first web server and browser combination that would later popularise the Internet.  It was the days of the Australian Academic Research NETwork (AARNET) which linked together Australian universities.  As part of a small enthusiasts group in Newcastle, we secured ourselves access to this network which facilitied the supply of our e-mail and Usenet news.   The remnants of Usenet news can still be found in Google’s Groups along with a lot of old archived content.  Usenet was again about collaboration and communication – it was about publishing thoughts and ideas to a larger area and recieving feedback, comments and responses.  It wasn’t real-time, but it was distributed and popular.

The World Wide Web changed the nature on online communication, turning what had previously been a collaborative communications mechanism into a stream of primarilly one-directional content – creating online content publishers and the user, or consumer.  Something which has been slowly, but gradually changing since it’s very conception and popularisation.

The shift away from this really started gaining momentum when blogging began to take off, however blogging was still largely about the content publisher to consumer interaction, still primarily one way – with fairly limited means of response.

Enter the social network.

I first really noticed the phenomenon with LiveJournal – LiveJournal was blogging becomming social.  The concept of building networks of friends either due to interests, geography or however they determined to be grouped together.  LiveJournal also turned blogging from someone writing content to every day users sharing there thoughts – primarilly for the benefit of their friends.

The rest is fairly recent history – Facebook, MySpace, Twitter.

The big difference now is that companies and marketing experts have now seen the power of these communities and communications tools and are adopting them en masse.   I certainly don’t see it as a communications or marketing fad – quite the opposite in fact.  I believe Social Media/Networking is here to stay,  it’s the logical step in the history of electronic communications and can only continue to grow and evolve from this point.  Where it takes us, is going to be as interesting a journey as it’s history.

The challenge for business however, will be to select and utilise these tools effectively and in a way that the existing user communities are not only willing to tolerate, but embrace as a valid way of communicating back to businesses.

… Reading this article again, I’m feeling a little old :)

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Waving Web

August 15th, 2009 No Comments

This article is primarilly a response to the article by Anil Dash, entitled What Works: The Web Way vs. The Wave Way.

What is Google Wave?
Google itself says “A wave is equal parts conversation and document.”. I’d personally prefer to think of it as a live document, and not psuedo-live. It is live because a Wave can be edited by multiple people, simultaniously and all changes can be dispersed to all users – it also handles changes made to documents that are out of sync with the rest of the wave. This multi-user shared editing however is not the only way a wave can be used.

However, before we get too carried away, an important point I’d like to make is that a Google Wave is not a single thing and seeing it as a single peice of technology in my opinion is entirely incorrect. Google Wave is a collection of technologies.

Google Wave is made up of some core components:

  • Operational Transforms (OT) – This in my opinion is where the real magic of Google Wave happens; the reliable updating of document state to and from any revision in a coherent and guarenteed way. OT has been around for a long time in many different forms (see Wikipedia: Operational Transformation)
  • Federation Protocol – This is the underlaying transport mechanism that Google Wave uses, it’s built ontop of XMPP (Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol) – another stable and well adopted protocol which you’ll find on the back end of Jabber and Google Chat amoung other things. (See Wikipedia: XMPP)
  • User Interface – Google have built a very Google-like interface for Wave, it runs in any modern browser. This isn’t the exciting bit, Google esentially popularised the AJAXy/Web2.0 interface revolution with web based applications.

I’ve intentionally left out the Robots and Gadgets bits, to me these are inconsequential, and really are “implementations” of the underlaying technology, not part of it.

Why it’s not a war between Wave and Web

The first major point I’d like to argue from the Web vs Wave article is the focus on upgrades and compatibility that part of the article has. Infrastructure or upgrades aren’t necessary to fully adopt Google Wave Technology. Anil goes as far as saying that:

“But the fundamental Wave protocols are, I fear, a bit too complex to ever be fully and correctly implemented by anyone other than Google.”

Wave technology infact builds directly ontop of protocols and technology that are already here, and useable by the vast majority of web users. Infact “Wave technology” could be embedded in websites without even being noticed by the user – this I feel is where it’s real inherent value is.

Anil says as a reason for Wave not being well adopted, that:

“XMPP is way too complicated for any normal human to deploy.”

I just do not see the need to implement XMPP anywhere to achieve the benefit of Wave. This is something that will be done for us – Google will be doing it for sure, and plenty of other companies out there will want to be delivering “Waves” (at the protocol level) at developers and users – potentially an interestingnew digital arena to compete in.

Another point Anil makes:

I literally wouldn’t even know where to start with the Wave developer documentation if I wanted to integrate it with my site or any of the little apps I like to hack on during a long weekend.

It’s still early days for Google Wave – it’s not a complete product or solution ready to deploy, it’s something that Google’s put out there for developers to take an early hold of and develop with.

The “developer” documentation is for people who want to implement Wave infrastructure, services or tools – for serious developers to look at what Google have come up with and start developing products and tools around that, that will simply plug in with existing content management systems and web technologies to bring the wave experience transparently to the user on almost any web page they happen to visit. Once these things happen and mature a little more you’ll probably find a plugin for your CMS or a library for your favourite scripting language that does the implementation, Fed protocol and OT for you, and all you need to do is point it at a chunk of content you’d like to Wavetize!

Looking forward to watching where this Wave takes us!

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Using irssi with libnotify over Secure Shell

September 25th, 2007 1 Comment

Note:

I originally wrote this back in September 2007, however I get many requests for the content (any many 404s still for the location it used to live on my previous blog).  I haven’t used this in several years.  Please submit any patches/changes as required.  You should also check out foosion’s version of this.

I’m an avid IRC user, sitting 24×7 usually connected to 5 server and 12 regular channels, and the only client I’m completely satisfied using is irssi. I run irssi on a remote server so I can easilly connect to it via ssh from wherever I am. I run it under screen so that I can re-attach to the same session from where ever I am and even have the same session shared across all my home PCs so i can look in and see whats happening whenever I want.

Recently I began playing with dbus alot, including libnotify. I found some irssi plugins for people running irssi locally to integrate with libnotify, but all the solutions by people for doing this remotely involved re-establishing ssh connections for each message and various other overheads that I was not comfortable with. The solution was obvious, to me – ssh needed dbus forwarding support. Well I don’t have the time nor experiece with the ssh code base to do it, a workaround was needed.

It didn’t take long for one to become apparent.

Nobody I know uses a relatively unheard of terminal capability known as terminal printing. This allows control characters sent to your terminal to turn on/off a locally connected printer. The content isn’t displayed by your terminal, but captured. Excellent, we could utilise this functionality for carrying a payload to the local machine, the connection is already there and the facility should be available in most terminal emulators (I’m a purist and use basic xterm which supports it).

What do I need?

  • You need a terminal emulator that supports local printing. I’m using xterm 229
  • libnotify and libnotify-bin, this includes the notify-send package
  • a libnotify daemon (I’m using notification-daemon-xfce)

Obviously you’re already using irssi as an IRC/IM client, and you’re probably running it over ssh (and hopefully screen too if you are). But that is outside the scope of this article.

How is it done?

First thing we do is install the local handler script. This is the script that we configure xterm to pipe the content to be “printed” to.

Here is the script:


#!/bin/bash
cat - | {
nt_icon="gtk-dialog-info"
nt_time=5000
nt_head="Notify"
nt_text="Error Occured"
nt_type="Message"
while read k v
do
case $k in
TYPE) nt_type=$v;;
ICON) nt_icon=$v;;
CONTENT) nt_text=$v;;
TIMEOUT) nt_time=$v;;
SUBJECT) nt_head=$v;;
esac
done
notify-send -i "$nt_icon" -c "$nt_type" -t $nt_time -- "$nt_head" "$nt_text"
}

Grab notifier.sh and put it somewhere sensible and make it executable.

The next thing that is needed is to configure XTerm to locally print using the script above. I use X resources for this. Infact I define a class in my Xresources called irssi and start xterm with a ‘-class irssi’ option for my IRCing.

If you don’t want a seperate class for irc, you can use the following lines. If you do want a class specific for your IRCing replace XTerm with the class name you like. The printer command should also point to wherever you put the script above.


*XTerm*printerAutoClose: true
*XTerm*printerCommand: /home/jared/bin/notifier

The last thing you need is the irssi plugin. I’ve uploaded it and attached it to this document, you need to download it and run it with /script load notify.pl inside irssi.

It is written by Luke Macken and Paul W Frields, i’ve adapted it deliver it’s payload to STDERR wrapped with ESC[5i (turn printer on) and ESC[4i (turn printer off)

libnotify.pl

Happy IRCing!

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