Posts Tagged ‘Marketing’

Facebook Throws its Weight Behind OpenID

Friday, February 6th, 2009

Openid_card Facebook has joined the board of the OpenID Foundation, the company has announced. The move is a ringing endorsement of OpenID, which already has the corporate backing of Google, Microsoft, IBM, PayPal and other web heavyweights.

In a blog post Thursday, Facebook’s Mike Schroepfer (formerly of Mozilla), said, “It is our hope that we can take the success of Facebook Connect and work together with the community to build easy-to-use, safe, open and secure distributed identity frameworks for use across the web.”

Prior to the announcement, Facebook was seen as a sideline player — and even a disruptive presence — for the open-source single sign-on technology. Late last year, Facebook launched its own trusted authentication technology for letting its users log in and participate on other websites. The company’s system, Facebook Connect, has since been implemented by around 4,000 websites, including numerous high-profile destinations like CitySearch and TechCrunch.

With Facebook Connect, the company came up with an elegant, easy-to-use experience that effectively solved several of OpenID’s problems with user experience, trust and security. However, Facebook Connect was built with proprietary code, and was therefore largely incompatible with competing open-source technologies like OpenID.

The resulting effects of this partnership on data portability are unclear. And whether Facebook and the rest of the internet are now part of the same big happy family remains to be seen. But for those worried about Facebook Connect derailing OpenID or causing it to die on the vine, this is huge.

Certainly, we can expect OpenID’s public profile and reach to get a boost. Also, a post on OpenID’s website trumpets Facebook’s dedication to improving OpenID’s user experience.

More from Facebook’s Schroepfer:

The future of an open and social web will be measured not by protocols, but by how much we collectively improve the standards and technologies that enable us and others to give people more powerful ways to share and connect.

There’s even an OpenID design summit being planned for next week, to be hosted (where else?) at Facebook’s offices in Palo Alto, California.

Facebook Throws its Weight Behind OpenID | Epicenter from Wired.com.

Davos is all a twitter with Wen and Vlad

Saturday, January 31st, 2009
Davos town

Davos town: not the most accessible venue Photo: Reuters

Preparing for the World Economic Forum – aka Davos – is such a stress. Not for me, but for my wonderful colleague Jane who spends weeks fixing, and then re-fixing, meetings so I can get the most out of it.

The beauty of Davos is that one can meet large numbers of the world’s most important/interesting/powerful/egotistical people in the space of four days. Interviews that would otherwise take months to arrange, and hours to travel to, take place in a small Swiss ski resort. It’s a journalist’s dream – and a PA’s nightmare.

* It being a ski resort, Davos is not the easiest place to get to. The flight to Zurich is fine, but then you have a choice – a train journey during which you have to change twice, or a two-and-a-half hour car journey with cartoonish icy mountain road bits thrown in free at the end. I plumped for a car this year, and used the time to start “tweeting” (ie micro-blogging on twitter). With no more than 140 characters to put in your email-cum-blog, it takes a while to get used to.

An innocent attempt to pass on a story about how Lord Levene (chairman of Lloyds of London) was impressed with the Davos hospital – after slipping and whacking his head on a ski – backfired. I ran out of characters and had to split the message in two, giving the impression that I had been pleased that the noble Lord had taken a tumble. I can only hope he dismisses it as a twitter schoolboy error on my part. And quite how interesting “traffic in Davos is bloomin’ awful. Worse than London/Atlanta” is to people, I’m not sure. But there is something quite compelling about it – I can see why Stephen Fry has become an addict.

* Americans have dominated Davos in all the years I have been attending. But they are nowhere to be seen, enabling the Chinese and Russians to flex their muscles. Chinese premier Wen Jiabao was a big hit with the business and media crowd at Wednesday’s private session. Knowledgeable and confident, he hit most of the right notes – including references to his recent re-reading of the work of Adam Smith. Warm applause from an audience including Henry Kravis of private equity house KKR, Sir Martin Sorrell of media conglomerate WPP, BP’s Tony Hayward, and Stephen Green of HSBC.

Davos is all a twitter with Wen and Vlad – Telegraph.

Marketers face pressure to deliver with Super Bowl ads

Saturday, January 31st, 2009

Lizards perform Swan Lake with NFL players in a 3-D ad for PepsiCo's Sobe Lifewater.

For most Super Bowl advertisers, there’s one sure thing about being in the game: the pressure.

And thanks to the imploded economy, this one on Sunday may be the all-time pressure cooker. The decision to spend $3 million — $100,000 a second — to air a 30-second Super Bowl ad seems almost indefensible.

It is a particularly sticky wicket after a week in which 70,000 layoffs were announced and labor statistics set a couple of firsts: Unemployment was up in every state in December, and people getting unemployment benefits has hit a record. The quiet question: How many jobs could be saved by not running a Super Bowl spot?

“This is the first Super Bowl of the Great Depression 2.0,” says Steve Hayden, vice chairman at Ogilvy Worldwide perhaps best known as the co-writer of the “1984″ Apple ad that set off the Super Bowl ad frenzy 25 years ago. “Being on the Super Bowl this year is like driving around in a Duesenberg in 1929.”

Don’t tell that to 30-some brands that bought the 33.5 minutes of ad time in the NBC game broadcast, including veterans such as Budweiser, Pepsi and Coke and first-timers such as Kellogg’s Frosted Flakes, Pedigree pet food and Denny’s.

The common goal: $100,000-a-second worth of ad buzz. Buzz means Web hits after the game and, in good times anyway, that translates into sales.

There’s no telling what it means in the worst of times, which is why NBC had two ad slots left Thursday. “I’m not going to tell you it hasn’t been a tough slog,” Dick Ebersol, chairman of NBC Sports, said early this week. “But we have not crashed price in any way, shape or form.”

Advertisers who bought in are rethinking what to air. They’re doing more research. They’re focusing on hallmarks such as heritage. They are even alluding to the economy — some seriously, some with a chuckle.

“The biggest danger every Super Bowl advertiser faces is being ignored,” says advertising research guru Don Bruzzone.

More Below:

Marketers face pressure to deliver with Super Bowl ads – USATODAY.com.

Connect to Customers with Twitter

Thursday, January 15th, 2009

Either your customers already use social networking tools or you have an untapped, online audience. So get out there and network on Facebook, MySpace, and any of the other popular destinations. But do it on your own terms with whatever feels right; everyone can see through a business trying to co-opt new media. Here’s how to make the most of one of the current favorites, Twitter.

Be yourself. Twitter lets you post blurbs of up to 140 characters; it’s good for a quick note about what you’re doing. But you can also use it to build buzz within a fanbase by referencing things that aren’t quite public. (Or let customers track your sales.) People will follow you on Twitter if they think you’ll reveal news first, and that audience is likely to blog about it somewhere.

Connect to Customers with Twitter – Business Center – PC World.

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  • February 7
    “In a passionate age enthusiasm is the unifying principle, in a passionless, very reflective age envy is the negatively unifying principle.” ——————————————————- ~Source: The Journals (1845) Author: Søren Kierkegaard Filed under: Blooms Tagged: The Journals (1845) […]
  • February 6
    “Imagine a gathering of worldly-minded, timorous people whose highest law in everything is a slavish regard for what others, what ‘they’ will say and judge, whose sole concern is that unchristian concern that ‘everywhere they speak well’ of them, whose admired goal is to be just like the others, whose sole inspiring and whose sole […]
  • February 5
    “And are there not many people who are like that, who own nothing except in the moment when they show it to others, who grasp only the surface, not the essence, who lose everything if this appears…” ——————————————————– ~Source: Either/Or (1843) Author: Søren Kierkegaard using the pseudonym Victor Eremita Filed under: Blooms Tagged: Either/Or, Victor […]
  • February 4
    “All ironical observations depend upon paying attention to the ‘how,’ whereas the gentleman with whom the ironist has the honor to converse is attentive only to the ‘what.’ A man protests loudly and solemnly, ‘This is my opinion.’ However, he does not confine himself to delivering this formula verbatim, he explains himself further, he ventures […]
  • February 3
    “It is not impossible that it might occur to man to imagine himself the equal of God, or to imagine God the equal of man, but not to imagine that God would make himself into the likeness of man; for if God gave no sign, how could it enter into the mind of man that […]
  • February 2
    “So they sat in their quiet sorrow: they did not harden themselves against the consolation of the world; they were humble enough to acknowledge that life is a dark saying, and as in their thought they were swift to listen to see if there might be an explanatory word, so were they also slow to […]
  • February 1
    “But when it is a duty to love, there no test is needed and the insulting stupidity of wishing to test is superfluous; since love is higher than any proof, it has already more than met the test, in the same sense that faith ‘more than conquers.’ The very fact of testing always presupposes a […]
  • January 31
    “Why did Kant begin with quantity, Hegel with quality?” ——————————————————– ~Source: The Journals (1842) Author: Søren Kierkegaard Filed under: Blooms Tagged: The Journals (1842) […]
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