Andrea Vascellari, Author at AndreaVascellari.com

Flip the Funnel – Book Launch

Episode: VMC #219 – Flip the Funnel – Book Launch

“Retention can become the new acquisition” Joseph Jaffe

Last week Joseph Jaffe officially launched his new book ‘Flip The Funnel‘ at the Roger Smith Hotel in New York. I had the chance of having a glass of wine with Joseph a few days before, during social media week. We had a nice chat and he gave me a few insights and a copy of the book with a special note… (Thank you Joseph).

Nope, this is not a sponsored post. I chose to blog about it because I’m more than happy to share with you the inspiring thoughts of a great marketer and a good friend. I’ll review the book so stay tuned.

Andrea

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What Could Lead Google’s Empire to Crack

Yes that’s the first thing I thought yesterday morning when I got Google Buzz running on my gmail… Google is losing focus.

I watched the live presentation, but I still wanted to play around with it a little bit before sharing my thoughts.

“Google Buzz is a new way to share updates, photos, videos and more…” What? Who needs that?!

Do I want to say and share something when I’m on the go? Yes, but I’ve been doing it on Twitter since 2006. Google feels a bit like a late comer.
Want to stay tuned on what people near me are buzzing about? Ok, but I’m already using Foursquare for that.
Status updates? Sure, but Facebook is where many of my friends live and even though it could be fun getting them on buzz not everyone uses gmail.

My take? Google is feeling the pressure from Twitter and Facebook. And you know what? It’s ok. It’s fine to have someone in the space that takes care of sharing micro updates and connecting with others.

Google should do what it is really good at doing…Google’s goal is to organize the world’s information. Google’s Social Search? Amazing. Google’s Real Time Search? Fantastic… so stick with it Google!

Google is huge and keeps growing. From this point on losing focus is what could lead Google’s empire to crack.

Your take? Share it in the comments or via Twitter @vascellari (remember to link to this post, it will make it easier for me to track the conversation).

Andrea

Super Bowl XLIV on Rocketboom

Rocketboom.com is a daily international news program based in New York City that covers and creates a wide range of information and commentary from top news stories to contemporary internet culture.

Earlier this week Leah D’Emilio (Director/Producer at Rocketboom.com) and Rocketboom host @mememolly recorded a Super Bowl episode with Ryan Hunter from Poykpac (http://youtube.com/poykpac) and guess what… they had an extra role for me as an ‘American’ watching the game. It was great working with everyone to make this episode! + It was really nice to meet Neal Bledsoe with whom I had really nice chat on the evolution of traditional media.

This Sunday I’ll be in New York and of course I won’t miss the New Orleans Saints VS Indianapolis Colts for Super Bowl XLIV so let me know if you are in for it and we’ll meet up! (drop a comment or reach me via twitter @vascellari).

Andrea

UPDATE: all backstage photos here!

Molly goes to her first Super Bowl party. This week’s Casual Friday was written, directed, and edited by Ryan Hunter. MemeMolly, Jenn Lyon, Taige Jensen, Neal Bledsoe, Brett Haley, and Andrea Vascellari.

[Report] for February 3rd 2010 – AndreaVascellari.com

Do you want to get these report-updates in real time? Subscribe to the live-report RSS feed! This feed includes only report related items. It’s not a substitute but a complement to my main RSS feed which still remains the official one that brings you all my blog posts.

Procter and Gamble embraces Facebook – When the world’s biggest marketing firm, Procter & Gamble, says it’s making a huge marketing move with a massive online presence, you really need to sit and up and pay close attention.
Major brands sceptical of social media – Just 22% of those surveyed said that social media forms a major part of their promotional strategies. Meanwhile, many marketers are confused about the role the channel should play in their company’s plans.
2010 Nonprofit Social Media Benchmarks Study – An analysis of growth and social engagement metrics for nonprofit organizations.
Context is King: How Videos Are Found And Consumed Online – An incredibly detailed post by Ashkan Karbasfrooshan.
Rethinking the Value of Social Media to Online Shopping – This research implies that the promise of Social Media for eRetailers should be carefully balanced by logistics and understanding of what customers actually want, otherwise mutual disappointment is sure to follow.
Active Business Blogs Draw 6.9 Times More Organic Search Traffic Than Non-Bloggers – Blogging, which is equivalent to content building, helps attract more site visitors. The rationale is similar: more blog articles mean more chances to create something that grabs readers’ attention and indirectly build up a company’s reputation.
Harvard on foursquare – Harvard is the first university to use foursquare to help students explore their campus and surrounding places of interest. “…this represents a smart use of FourSquare — which still has plenty of doubters — by an organization. I’m certain organizations of different natures will find a way to leverage the service to achieve their own business goals.”
Social Media Marketing: How Pepsi Got It Right – Social media marketing campaigns are proving to be goldmines rich with customer engagement and insight that companies wouldn’t likely have otherwise. Companies like PepsiCo are going to extensive lengths to foster this type of collaboration with fans, and the payoff has been big.
National Lady Gaga Day Draws 100,000+ on Facebook – How social networks can unleash community power. Still wondering if there’s any return on social media investment? Get your “social media embassies”, now.
Themeleon – Twitter Profile Designer – Nice tool to easily customize the way Twitter looks for you and how your profile looks to others.
Baby Boomers Get Connected with Social Media – Stats: 77% of millenials, 61% of gen X, 46% of Baby boomers maintain a social network profile.
Engagement on Social Networks Top Priority for Marketers – The “2010 Digital Marketing Outlook” report found that 81% of the brand executives surveyed expected an increase in digital projects in 2010, and one-half will be moving dollars from traditional to digital budgets. Further, more than three-quarters think the current economy will push more allocations to digital.
Ikea’s Easy to Assemble video series breaks new ground in branded entertainment – “Easy to Assemble is a wacky online video series created and written by Illeana Douglas and sponsored by Ikea. According to Advertising Age, Easy to Assemble has racked in 5.1 million views since first going online last year and the numbers are still growing. Ikea had the vision to give Douglas the creative freedom to place entertainment ahead of marketing”.
Digital Marketing: Facebook Ads Not So Annoying – It turns out users find ads on social networks no more annoying than any other ads on the web.
Google – Search is getting more social – Google is pushing the feature to beta status and turning it on for all signed-in English Googlers. Google Social Search is a standard search results page add-on that displays socially relevant content from people in your online social circle, as determined by your Google Profile.
Content Curation: Why Is The Content Curator The Key Emerging Online Editorial Role Of The Future? – What is content curation and why is it so important for the future of web content publishers…the next emerging disruptive role in the content creation and distribution chain.
20 Most Important Social Media Buzzwords for 2010 – The most appropriate buzzwords to describe our curious stampede to the social media and mobile future.

How Does the Internet See You

Episode: VMC #218 – How Does the Internet See You [right click to download ‘Save the link as…’, video-player available below]

“Personas scours the web for information and attempts to characterize the person – to fit them to a predetermined set of categories that an algorithmic process created from a massive corpus of data. The computational process is visualized with each stage of the analysis, finally resulting in the presentation of a seemingly authoritative personal profile”.

How to use it?

Run ‘Personas‘ before and after a campaign, product launch, news realease, etc. and you’ll notice how the digital portrait will change. This is a great tool that can help you in defining how a brand, or personal brand, is/can be perceived online and whether your communications plan got the right message across or not. Remember: this is a complement, not a substitute to your strategic communications plan.

I mentioned Personas in my report last year in August 2009 and I kept playing around with it for the last 6 months. It’s a valuable tool and I’m still using it so I thought to show it in action with this video. Enjoy it!

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Show Notes & Credits: Personas, Music by Dennis Logan

All this is nothing without a plan! Please keep it in mind.
The focus of this post is more at tactical level. Don’t forget your strategy. Your analysis must support, focus and be related to your overall strategy. If you have no idea of what I’m talking about I suggest you to have a look at a couple of other posts I wrote and that you might find interesting:
Communications Planning Guide: A step by step road map that will help in crafting your plans at strategic and tactical level.
Communications Plan – Strategy & Tactics: Helps you in understanding the difference between strategy and tactics. Way to many people still confuse or mix the two.
7 New Marketing Tips for your Organization: What new marketing does and why it works. List of basic tips that you can take into action in your business/organization.

Had a look at Personas? Got some inspiration, ideas, suggestions? Go on! Share them in the comments or via twitter @vascellari (in order to help me and other readers to monitor the conversation please remember to link back to this post!).

Andrea

[Report] for January 27th 2010 – AndreaVascellari.com

Do you want to get these report-updates in real time? Subscribe to the live-report RSS feed! This feed includes only report related items. It’s not a substitute but a complement to my main RSS feed which still remains the official one that brings you all my blog posts.

Forrester’s Social Technographics: Conversationalists get onto the ladder – Two and a half years ago, Charlene Li and I introduced Social Technographics, a way to analyze your market’s social technology behavior. The big addition this year is “Conversationalists”: people who regularly post status updates to places like Facebook and Twitter. This re-design by Mike Arauz makes the findings a little bit clearer, and also compares 2009 to previous findings from 2008 and 2007.
The Maturation of Social Media ROI – The debate over measuring social media investment inspired many brands to cannonball into popular social networks and join the proverbial conversation without a plan or strategic objectives defined. At the same time, the lack of ROI standards unnerved many executives, preventing any form of experimentation until their questions and concerns were addressed.
Led by Facebook, Twitter, Global Time Spent on Social Media Sites up 82% Year over Year – According to The Nielsen Company, global* consumers spent more than five and half hours on social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter in December 2009, an 82% increase from the same time last year when users were spending just over three hours on social networking sites. In addition, the overall traffic to social networking sites has grown over the last three years.
Ten Ideas for the New Decade – An Edelman Digital White Paper – Downloadable PDF + Video.
Video Interview: @Scott Monty Ford Motor Company (via @SteveRubel) – In this four and a half minute video, which I shot yesterday, Scott talks about what he does in his day job, how social media is integrated into Ford’s communications engine (pun intended) and how he works with his executives.
Why The Agency Of The Future Looks Like My Fantasy Baseball Team – Clever.
World’s First Computer to Human Marriage: London Girl Weds Laptop – My friend Hermione is getting married. I wish them the best.
5 Top trends in online PR for 2010 – Online PR enthusiast predicts the next big thing after Twitter.
The 5 Reasons You’re Failing In Social Media – Short and spot-on.
Healthcare Marketing: 5 Social Media Examples – More than ever, it’s essential for hospitals and health providers to rethink their healthcare marketing mix to include social media. The proof is in the numbers: 34% of consumers use social media to search for health information, according to research data from How America Searches: Health and Wellness.
WooRank Screens Your Website, For Free – WooRank is a brand new service designed to let website publishers and marketers evaluate the SEO-friendliness and other aspects of their Web sites on the fly.
Uploading any file : Uploading and exporting – Google Docs – Now you can upload all your files without converting them to Google Docs. You can use Google Docs to open these files anywhere and share them with anyone.
12 Surprising Things Holding Back Online Video Advertising – Few things to keep in mind if you do online video.
Twitter’s Answer To Facebook Connect – Twitter is preparing to launch a new set of tools that will let third party websites easily integrate Twitter features directly into their web sites and services, multiple sources have confirmed. In a nutshell, this is their response to the massively popular Facebook Connect.
10 Musts for Marketing on Facebook – This post was initially wrote to target women only, but I think that some of theses tips can apply to other audiences too. Facebook has done a great job of giving marketers a powerful tool with its Pages product, but like most things in life, it comes down to execution.
18 Online Productivity Tools for Your Business – You may have occasion to bring your work home with you, or require frequent access to your to-do lists, notes and documents on the go…I do, always.

Richard Edelman on Trust Barometer 2010

The Edelman 2010 Trust Barometer survey of trust and credibility in business and government has just been released.

According to Richard Edelman (President & CEO Edelman) business has stabilized and trust has risen in few countries such as the US but generally the picture is much more solid.

However trust in business is very fragile and business has to learn that the biggest drivers of corporate reputation are no longer an outstanding CEO and having terrific financial results.

Today the main reputation drivers are:

Quality products & services
Trust in the company
Transparent operations

That’s the new normal for corporation.

Downloads & Coverage

Trust Barometer report pdf – 1,415kb
Press release pdf – 130kb
UK Highlights pdf – 1,771kb

Andrea

Smart Use of Google Calendar

Productivity – Google Calendar is more than a simple calendar. Here’s how it works for me.

I create different calendars and use them for different purposes like:

Do/Done list: In this calendar I write what I have to do everyday. What I can’t accomplish in a certain day is moved to the next one or to a different date. At the end of each day I have a list of tasks that I completed and a list of upcoming tasks that I’ll have to take care of in the next days/future. I usually mark the entries in this calendar as ‘all-day’, I don’t set specific time or place.

Meetings: In this calendar I save all my meetings – virtual (via Skype, Adobe Connect, Cisco, Google Hangout etc.) and in the real world (face to face). All the entries have detailled information about place (for virtual meetings I mention a specific URL or on which platform they’ll run), time (including the corresponding time for participants that live in other countries. Here’s a handy tool that can help you setup your meeting time) and alarm notifications.

Use hastags (#): Google calendar is searchable. By using hashtags in your calendar entries it will be easier for you to search and keep track of certain items/lists over time. I use #tags for all sort of activities in my calendars (work, sport, shopping, etc.)

As you probably noticed in the first screen-shot (above) some of my calendars are named as ‘project…’. In the next post dedicated to tools I’ll share how you can use Google Calendar to help you with your project management. Stay tuned by subscribing to this RSS feed!

Did you know that you can manage and sync all your calendars on the go? You might find interesting:

Why and How to Sync Google Calendar – iCal – iPhone

How to use Google Calendar as Project Management Tool

How do you use Google Calendar? Share your tips and ideas in the comments or via a quick “comment-ready-tweet” @vascellari!

Andrea

2010 Blueprint

This is a blueprint of what I’m planning to share on my blog in 2010. I created it few days ago during my flight to New York keeping in mind who you are and what you need (remember Tag Yourself?).

The tool I used is mindnode and as you can see it’s still a draft that I intentionally left incomplete because I wanted to hear your thoughts about it. The aim is to ultimately add value to what you’ll read/watch here on my my blog in 2010.

What would you add or change?

share your ideas, requests, suggestions in the comments below or via twitter @vascellari (linking back to this post)
or add a flickr note directly on the picture (click here if you don’t know how to do it 😉 )

Andrea

UPDATES:

draft #1 here.
draft #2 here.
the one you see now is the 3rd version and it’s based on the ideas & feedback you gave so far. If you still feel to add something feel free to share.

click on the pict to enlarge

[Report] for January 16th 2010 – AndreaVascellari.com

Do you want to get these report-updates in real time? Subscribe to the live-report RSS feed! This feed includes only report related items. It’s not a substitute but a complement to my main RSS feed which still remains the official one that brings you all my blog posts.

Global Study Reveals Proliferation of Consumer-Based Social Networking Throughout the Enterprise and a Growing Need for Governance and IT Involvement – Cisco released the results of a third-party global study designed to assess how organizations use consumer social networking tools to collaborate externally, revealing the need for stronger governance and IT involvement. The new study is based on extensive interviews with 105 participants representing 97 organizations in 20 countries around the globe.
10 Gorgeous Social Media Infographics – Enjoy… 😉
Ad.ly Analytics – Understand Your Followers – Good analytics for your twitter account.
tweetcloud – what’s being said? – The goal is to quickly show users “what’s being said” across the Twittersphere or from a specific Twitter user through an intuitive interface (a cloud).
CMP.ly – Need to disclose? – Provides bloggers and advertisers with a simple disclosure solution.
ShoutEm – Roll your own Microblogging Social Networking – Handy. I love to use it for internal communication but it’s great for public too.
Ushahidi :: Crowdsourcing Crisis Information (FOSS) – The Ushahidi Engine is a platform that allows anyone to gather distributed data via SMS, email or web and visualize it on a map or timeline. Their goal is to create the simplest way of aggregating information from the public for use in crisis response.
Just because you only met social media idiots does not mean that everybody is one … by @nicolesimon – Nicole comments on comment so called experts. Well written post.
How to create a music video clip 2010 style – So this is how you produce a Music Video Clip 2010 Style. You ask your fans to turn on their webcam, mimic a frame they get presented and upload it. One frame at a time and together with other visitors you become part of the latest video of C-Mon & Kypski.
Mike Arrington interrogates Mark Zuckerberg – Where the privacy on the web will go in the next couple of years. “Public Is the new “social norm”.
The 10 Stages of Social Media Business Integration – Full social media integration often happens in stages — it’s an evolutionary process for companies and consumers alike.
10 on 10 – Ten consumer trends for 2010 and beyond from Edelman.
Google – Internet Stats – Collection of the latest Internet stats – This Google resource brings together the latest industry facts and insights.
What Is Engagement And How Do We Measure It? – Did you get something from your audience that can make your business better? That can mean profits, ideas, referrals and recommendations, digital merit badges…
How Saatchi & Saatchi’s Toyota social media disaster unfolded – Toyota’s now disastrous foray into social media offers a demonstration of what skills an agency needs to play in that space.