The Hawks are a business school’s dream case study of transforming a team that played before a measly crowd of 5,000 into a sell-out sensation. Now other NHL teams are trying to take hockey marketing to the next level. To compete with the big three (pro baseball, football and basketball), they’re looking for even more innovative ways to connect with a loyal fan base through social media. Continue Reading →
Earlier today, Google unveiled the next evolution of its search engine. Considering that Google searches account for about 85% of the worlds search engine traffic, even small tweaks are headline news. But Google is calling this latest development “… a quantum leap for search.” So the buzz surrounding this is going to be massive. But some of the doomsday SEO people are getting a little bit nuts.
What is Google Instant?
With the ‘old’ Google, you typed a search query and then clicked the ‘search’ button to begin returning results. Refining your search meant performing a series of individual queries to narrow the results. Google did prompt users with hints, but each query still resulted in its own unique results.
With Instant, Google tries to predict what you are searching for before you even finish typing. The search page is refreshed with dynamic results in real time based on the characters you’ve typed so far. So instead of browsing pages of results, you know in a fraction of a second if your search is on-target. (Google claims to save its users 11 hours every second with the new service.) The effect is almost instant feedback that seemingly reads your mind.
How does it work?
Google has apparently reworked their entire search mechanism to facilitate this feature. A combination of indexed pages and cached searches allows Google to predict what you’re searching for and selectively narrow and prioritize results. Then these results are updated in real time using AJAX.
Illustration by Matt Hamm
Recently, Social Times cited a study showing that 50% of companies entering social media have no plan. It’s sort of like going on a road trip without a GPS. It could be an interesting ride, but it may not get you where you need to go.
Social media are simply tools that facilitate conversations between individuals. What social media you deploy and how you deploy it should really be driven by the goals and needs of your business.
Rather than saying, “We need to be on Facebook,” what you need to be saying is, “Who am I trying to engage and why? What are their needs and interests? What are they saying online and how can I contribute to the conversation?”
There’s a huge misconception that companies need to be on every popular form of social media. You’re told you need a blog, Twitter profile, Facebook page, LinkedIn group, Digg profile, YouTube channel, Flickr account and don’t forget Foursquare! But are your customers there? And do you have the resources to engage and respond to your customers regularly on all of these platforms? If not, you’re better off doing nothing, than doing any of these options poorly. Continue Reading →
Registration Screen from the Times
Not to continue beating a dead horse, or to steal Patrick’s thunder by continuing to rift on the fading glory that is the Newspaper, but there’s been a pretty interesting experiment that’s being going on across the pond that has the potential to change the way we access news online. I’m talking about The Times’ (of London) institution of a pay-for-content scheme, or paywall.
As of July 2, 2010 only The Times’ homepage is available to the public. Attempting to click through to any full story results in an automatic redirect to the registration screen shown above. Current costs are £1 for a daily pass or for a trial month’s worth of access, and could potentially go up over time. Continue Reading →
For anyone following the 2010 FIFA World Cup, the vuvuzela is an impossible-to-ignore aspect of the tournament’s location. A traditional South African musical instrument, soccer fans have turned the now-plastic noise makers into the Jar-Jar Binks of the sporting world – loved by few, hated by most, ridiculed by all. The buzzing noise has gotten so bad that FIFA briefly considered a ban in response to players, commentators and broadcasters complaining about it’s impact on the game. Now, if they’d just stayed in the soccer stadiums where they belong, I’d have nothing to blog about. But the vuvuzela has become an internet sensation as well; that’s right: its trademark buzz has gone viral.
Continue Reading →
Everyone knows that print journalism is in a death rattle, and it’s tempting to wax nostalgic as paper after paper bites the dust. But when you hear comments like those of Tribune Chairman Sam Zell, it’s tough to have a lot of sympathy.
During an interview with CNBC, Zell was asked about the future of the newspaper business. What is his visionary prediction? PDFs. That’s right–the staggering problem of remaining profitable in the newspaper industry could be solved if only we could figure out a way to deliver PDF versions of publications.
“going forward, it’s going to require all kinds of different approaches, including probably most significant, the elimination of home delivery and the replacement of it by PDFs.”
I spent this past weekend attending a Canon HDSLR workshop in Chicago. The three day event was put together by Createasphere and Canon to showcase and teach the many uses for this remarkable camera. Our instructors Nancy Schreiber ASC, and Jared Abrams (HDSLR Expert) trained us on the aesthetics of movie making, and provided the technical expertise on camera operation. Additionally, Mike Sippel, the Director of Engineering at Fletcher Camera Chicago, was instrumental in educating the group on complex menu systems and the “guts” of the camera. If you’ve ever read a manual and wondered what the heck you were looking at, this is the guy that can explain it.
There is a huge surge in the number of adults watching online video and studies show that there is a big explosion in mobile video. Mobile video has the highest growth rate of any mobile application category. A new Cisco study reports that nearly two-thirds of the entire mobile data traffic will be video in just 3 years.
CNN's iPhone App gives users access to mobile video.
Overall video is now one-third of all consumer Internet traffic, and will approach 40% by the end of this year. Cisco predicts that video will account for more than 90% of all Internet traffic in just 4 years. A Pew Research report backs up those numbers. Pew’s survey shows 69% of all adult Internet users watch video online. While there is a big jump in comedy clips, the number of people watching educational videos nearly doubled since 2007. We are seeing online video move beyond skateboarding tricks and cats playing the piano to thoroughly embrace serious communications.
This is not the University of Arizona Mascot. It's just a Devil. And the Facebook logo. Make of it what you will...
Facebook is trying to take over the world/the internet/your life! Or at least, that’s the impression someone might get by perusing blogs, news aggregators and general web industry water cooler discussions. With the implementation of their “Instant Personalization” feature, Facebook basically drew back the curtain on the amount of personal data they’re willing to share with other sites. Couple this with the brouhaha over their almost constant mis-steps and backtracking with regards to their privacy policies and it’s almost like Facebook can do no right.
The end of an era is upon us: floppy discs will no longer be manufactured as of March 2011. Sony, the last real manufacturer of this lovable but decidedly antiquated storage form announced this week that they’ll be halting sales in Japan (the last real market for it), and have already begun shuttering their international sales in all but a few countries.
This announcement really doesn’t affect most of us individual users, as computers these days don’t even ship with floppy drives (Curse you Apple!), but tech blogs around the country (see: cnet, crunchgear, and NYTimes techblog as examples) lit up as geeks everywhere waxed nostalgic about the good old days when awesome games like Oregon Trail and Number Munchers loaded off of 3.5 inchers and every kid was assigned their own disc in computer class…ah those were the days. (Oh okay fine – that was me in the kitchen the other day but still! Oregon Trail RULED!)