Brandopia

I haven't yet found anyone else claiming to have micromessaged their way to a number with six zeroes. But I did have an interesting conversation recently with a company that used Twitter to drive a 20 percent increase in sales in December, and additional growth in February. Here's the story.

If you are not willing to put up with some shit work, you will never recognize that a good opportunity is staring you in the face. If you are not willing to be humble and repeatedly be a beginner in new areas and learn the details faster than the next guy, you are not capable of transformation

From video and music to shopping and social networks, we think these six firms should be on Microsoft's shopping list

SINGAPORE: From dresses to handbags, diamonds to music downloads, consumers in Asia are taking to Internet shopping as never before, making the region one of the world's fastest-growing e-commerce markets

Given this, I wasn’t expecting much from Mobile World Congress but then I saw the Gizmodo quote “it looks like Microsoft is back in the game”

Yet rather than focusing on building a hothouse for creative minds, Singapore should bring in all the best financial whizz kids and play to its great national strength –­ service. Marry all those under-utilised MBAs to work on a new a strategy that also gives them a little licence to indulge their more artistic side as well and Singapore could be ripe for an economic renaissance

ReTweeting is a rich source of data for this type of analysis: a larger number of ReTweets are posted every day, pertaining to nearly every imaginable topic and Twitter’s API gives us the ability to quantify and map viral behavior in a way that has never been possible before.
When I set out to answer the question of what makes certain Tweets more viral than others I found four factors that I believe have strong impacts on how far content spreads on Twitter.

Pornography has been the driving force behind every significant new entertainment delivery system in the past few decades — the VHS home-video revolution of the 1980s, the satellite TV boom of the 1990s, the internet today. Right now, porn distributors are at the forefront of developing the technology to stream and download video on the internet, and to find ways to make people pay for it.

An undifferentiated thought stream of the masses at some point becomes unwieldy. In order to truly mine that data, Twitter needs to figure out how to extract the common sentiments from the noise (something which Summize was originally designed to do, by the way, but it was putting the cart before the horse—you need to be able to do simple searches before you start looking for patterns). But what is the best way to rank real-time search results—by number of followers, retweets, some other variable? It is not exactly clear. But if Twitter doesn’t solve this problem, someone else will and they will make a lot of money if they do it right.

So the future of online advertising will change dramatically if you ask me. To influence consumer behavior in the future, we will need to start collecting consumer behavior now. So eCRM and database marketing and targeting the right consumers with the relevant and right ads will be crucial

Here is a company that “gets it” GE. Not only are they a pioneer in using the NPS metric to drive their business – but they have clearly understood how to participate in Social Media
Look at their GEreports blog.

Good point from Robert Thomson, Managing Editor of the Wall Street Journal. One solution would be that we create more competitors to Adsense with different pricing systems, no? If only we could roll out Adcenter (remember I work for Microsoft) on a global scale and introduce innovative pricing schemes I think we could make this work.

Like Napoleon marching into an abandoned Moscow, Larry Page and Sergey Brin have led Google's advance into traditional advertising only to find nothing to loot. Now begins Google's long imperial retreat, starting with 40 layoffs

Excellent speech from SteveB.

Very interesting article on Twitter and the possibilities it has.

It is too early to declare Hulu the winner. It “has done a very good job,” admits Joost’s Mr Volpi, but “the die has not been cast yet.” Mr Khan thinks Amazon’s offering may become more compelling, and that TV.com, formerly a provider of television listings and now a streaming site owned by CBS, may yet come from behind. But for the moment it appears that YouTube proved that people would watch videos online—whereas Hulu is proving that advertisers will foot the bill.

Affle, a leading mobile media company today announced a global strategic relationship with Microsoft. This relationship is expected to add significant value to both companies. Affle will be able to leverage Microsoft’s expertise and relationships in the mobile media eco-system to quickly scale its business globally. Affle’s SMS2.0 service will also be able to help boost the usage of many of the Windows Live services and MSN content on mobile, and also create a large volume of new mobile advertising inventory. As part of this working relationship, Microsoft has also become a minority shareholder in Affle.

"Microsoft has picked up a minority stake in Singapore- based Affle Holdings. This investment will help us leverage Microsoft's brand and expand to countries where we still do not have a presence," Affle Chief Executive Officer Anuj Khanna told media.

Brilliant presentation on Obama's internet strategy. A must read for each marketer!

Some figures of Buddypoke’s success: over 1 million installs on Netlog and 17.8 million visitors (February 5, 2009), 1.1 million active users on MySpace (February 8, 2009), 1.3 million users (16% of total users) on Hyves (February 8, 2009) and listed most popular in the Orkut Application Directory.

Nice campaign

…If Oprah Winfrey, Pope Benedictus XVI and Barack Obama all have YouTube channels and Facebook pages… what would be the brand marketers reason not to understand his target audience?

Microsoft Corp. is planning a series of new programs and services for mobile phones