Some great new case studies added to the Social Media Case Study: The Hot List:
Kraft iFood assistant on the iPhone – one of the top 100 apps and consumers pay 99c for it…
Novartis – video compo on YouTube (Blog Council, not much info at present)
Dell, Monsanto, iContact, Sabre 4 very different approaches to internal comms and technology.
IBM – Corporate Culture and Social Media – why the culture is so important for success
Must look at how to organise these better!
Yesterday I downloaded Microsoft’s Live Writer after Neville Hobson gave it a plus. Trouble is it downloaded not only the Blogging tool but a villain’s swag bag of other goodies too. I now need to find a new ’round-2it’ to unpack them and see what’s on offer. As the angel fish are looking fed up and after a big water change I don’t think this will happen soon.
Another big factor are all the WordPress Plugins I’m now using, especially the SEO and Tagging ones. These have now become key factors in my publishing as I try and increase readership and reach (OK get Google to find me) and ensure that my content is tagged right for Calais/SemanticProxy.
And then there’s RSS. The integration between Flock and RSS is the best I’ve seen. The fact I can flip from a side bar of feeds to my RSS summary pages is a big plus for me when I’m writing my Blog. It’s then a case of copying the quotes and URLs from that browser to Chrome. Well that would be OK if there wasn’t a big big problem here.
What I find is that if I run Chrome and Flock simultaneously then the old Dell box I’m using grinds to a halt. There seems to be some sort of resource hogging going on between them and Chrome loses the battle. Chrome is an app I like, but maybe it’s a bridge too far for Google.
Internetnews wonder this too and base this not on the fact that it makes an old dicky PC run so slow it’s in reverse, but on the fact that it is such a new app. Chrome they point out was in beta for just 4 months before going gold. ‘Why so rash for Google?’ they ponder and come up with the answer that Chrome is not only part of Google’s secret operating system, it’s the actual UI for the OS. And perhaps they wonder, perhaps…
Perhaps Google’s browser is a new UI to the cloud.
And they’re not alone here. PC Advisor advise us that Android is already an OS and that Chrome takes us nearer to…?well the cloud:
By so carefully binning the user agent string from its OS, Google has ensured that other, less sensitive data is retained. Or to put it another way, it’s the perfect security setup for an operating system based in the cloud.
What’s more…it’s all Free. Woo Yay for the ‘great unwashed’ say PC Advisor:
Users tend to be a great deal more forgiving of software that’s free, than that they’re forced to shell out a mint for.
CNET are of a like mind and point out that it complments Googles already impressive swathe of freebies. Add to that a canny observation from the Google Operating System Blog that Google are conducting a highly aggressive promo for Chrome. Now it’s out of beta so quickly they point out, it can be bundled with those other freebies that people want such as their toolbar or Google Earth. This distribution as we learned earlier could be done with some crafty fast caching…
Thus in a jiffy, Google have set up all the means to distribute via a 2-tier fast-track, a spanking brand new OS, with a funky UI via the cloud and for the cloud.Let’s just hope it’s ready when they release it.
Internetnews.com have a nice little piece on Twitter’s potential power What Keeps Twitter Chirping Along that’s attracted the attention of VentureBeat: Twitter has made Dell $1 million in revenue. The peep is this quote:
some businesses have discovered that Twitter is an effective way of communicating with consumers. Dell (NASDAQ: DELL) says Twitter has produced $1 million in revenue over the past year and a half through sale alerts. People who sign up to follow Dell on Twitter receive messages when discounted products are available the company’s Home Outlet Store.
VentureBeat speculates on Twitter’s business model and possible premium accounts in the future. Over at Mashable they’re less convinced: Twitter May Have Made Dell a Million, it Doesn’t Mean it Can Be (Easily) Monetized. For Mashable’s Stan Schroeder the problem is keeping the shabang tweeting while delivering potential high value ads. I think there’s a bigger problem and that’s that to be effective it’s bloody annoying.
Go back to the Internetnews piece and there’s plenty of quotes from people saying how much it annoys them. Their journo David Miller even recommends Googling “I hate Twitter” which is worth the sport. He also quotes Discovery.com’s Trisha Creekmore as saying “I find Twitter incredibly annoying, both as a user and bystander…” which I must admit I can sympathise with, especially in twhirl form.
twhirl makes me jump. It pops up and surprises me. Which is all sad justice as I used to torment an entire theatre of sales guys with an even more annoying rich media pop-up device a few years back. But at least we didn’t send them John Cleese, but maybe we should have done.