Internet Strategy SEO & Web Developement

Communication has always been used by marketing people using medias to make us buy and think in a certain way. Nothing new here, and yes its a good thing as we now live in a time where basically everyone can be a media outlet. With industrial media also referred as traditional media, marketers were able to control the production to get global reach. Media production required high cost and specialized skills and training. Not anymore! with the Internet and social media, its been years we have been saying that, preaching and educating marketers how to fit in that new paradigm. Marketers need to let the information go its way without any control of the end result and more importantly lets the masses take control of the information.

Social media is primarily Internet- and mobile-based tools for sharing and discussing information among human beings. [..] Wikipedia

As one of the hottest buzz words of 2008 I thought it would be great to see how big companies are actually using it in a bad way. Maybe they are just unaware of their web presence, maybe they get bad advice from their web design and marketing department or most likely a mix of both.

Let see how it turns out for Mercedes Benz Canada with their micro site for the Bluetec campaign. It’s should be pointed out that I barely know anything more about this Bluetec thingy…

NOT using the tools effectively

Internet Marketing is too often see as a stack of technical tools on top of marketing strategies, I’m tired of that. This isn’t about technology to get the right information with a good reach or whatever, using technical tools won’t get you the magical twist to take advantage of the word of mouth. The fact that everyone can be a media and use it to get heard is mainly because we have come to a point where the entry level skills are low and the hardware and tools are available for everyone. In fact most of the people are creating media and information without knowing what a RSS, Twitter or even a blog is.

Despite this fact, some big brands with high profile web agencies are making huge mistakes. This example, with a Flash based micro site with barely no content at all, they figure that to get their campaign a social media twist was to add a Digg button. Wrong.

This is just one of the many sites trying to use site like Digg but without taking a minute trying to understand whats it’s all about, a shame. So I submitted to Digg with a nice title as every submitter to Digg know they can write whatever title and description for the news site. And remember this micro site is currently linked from the Mercedes Benz Canada main site and the submit to Digg button will lead you to :

Why they think people will submit to Digg a flash advertising site !? Somebody must explain to them what exactly is Digg. Why not a real site ? Something that lets user comment on the product and interact with it. But come on ! A send to a friend link in the footer isn’t a big interaction feature. Nor is a “Digg this” button.

Any thoughts on that ?

Originally launched on July 11th, the App Store have reach the 10k applications that can be downloaded. With around 25% of them for free this is plenty of them to fill your shiny iPhone. That’s pretty amazing taking into consideration that the iPhone hardware limit you to 144 applications… which I wont rant about, its pretty decent for a 600mhz machine (under clocked around 440mhz).

As I said in July the Application are the killer app (literally) of the iPhone and it success can’t be denied as it’s now the third most sold cellphone in the US. The future of the iPhone is exciting, not only a cellphone or even a smartphone but a new platform

Appstore Application Analytics for November 30th 2008

Top5 iPhone 3G App

My humble top applications I’m using almost everyday:

Twitterific: Using Twitter on the field is really what make that conversation system useful and with an always connected iPhone 3G and Twitterific it’s a perfect match. If you don’t use Twitter you should check that out to keep in touch with interesting people. I like it so much that I bought the 9.99$ ad-free premium version.

STM Mobile: A must have utility for the urban montrealer. Very convenient to consult metro and bus schedules.

Tuner & Last.fm: Two must have music application for the music lover on the road. The first one isn’t free (5.99$) but the stack of Internet radio station it offer is astonishing (with all my iTunes fav one :)) The latter let you connect to your Last.fm account and discover music you like with the same quality as on your computer.

Mobile Fotos: Let you browse and upload photos directly to Flickr. The most (and the best!) popular online photo managment and sharing application. Organize and share your photos online has never been so easy.

Shazam & Sonic Lighter: To close my top5 iPhone Applications why not get these two to impress your friends with your fantastic iPhone Shazam let you find any song you hear anywhere. Within seconds Shazam will tell you the artist and track name and even a link to the Youtube video. On the less useful app, Sonic Lighter is hard to beat, a realistic lighter wich you can light up and blow out the flame with your breath… really impressive.

So what about you?

friends : Sam wheres your blog !?
me : huh ?
friends : Get a blog !

First post, I’m giving some reasons why I start blogging (beside the fact that I’ll be able to answer back to that question) and why I’m blogging in english either than french.

English for Cool aid

Why I have decided to write this website in english and not in french ? It take me months to finaly make the decision to go with the english for my blog posts.

First off, english is not and won’t be ever my mother tongue, can’t deny my french canadian roots and you may find sometimes a few post in french. Although my writing skills are way better in french (some people may say not that much better than my english skills…) with this blog I want to improve my english writing skills, thats one of the reasons why I’m blogging.

Personal branding aka Marketing

With this blog I also want to push further my personal branding, I know that sounds selfish, but its true, I can reach a much bigger crowd using the Shakespeare language.

Learning and sharing knowledge

Since a few years, I’m reading blogs, and before that was a board addict, I realized now that’s really the way I learned the most. Maybe except sharing with a few friends face to face. So I finally face it, I need to go to the next step, I’m already writing comments on others blogs about web development, seo, emarketing guerrilla, etc. so why I don’t have a blog… I have been micro blogging since more than 6 months now with Twitter at twitter.com/sammyQc. Micro blogging is nice, easy and one of the greatest way to share new things and start conversations. But now I want more! And I really think I can handle it, of course I wont stop twittering anytime soon.

So this blog is here to stay and I’m thinking of a weekly update, going to see about that.

Hope you’ll enjoy.