maggie+media

"Inspired citizens make better brand evangelists than helpless consumers."

Wed, 23 May 2012 09:55:31 -0400

“Inspired citizens make better brand evangelists than helpless consumers.”

- Jonah Sachs, Empowerment Marketing: Advertising to Humans as More Than Just Selfish Machines

Great book excerpt. Go read it.

When your blog post gets picked up by an influential industry outlet..

Tue, 22 May 2012 13:03:33 -0400

99problemsbutapitchaintone:

Yes. This!

A big day. thedailywhat: Facebook Status of the Day: It’s...

Fri, 18 May 2012 14:51:53 -0400

A big day.

thedailywhat:

Facebook Status of the Day: It’s Facebook official — and the status was rigged to post to Zuck’s timeline as soon as he rang the bell to open NASDAQ’s day of trading. BOSS.

[tnw]

fastcompany: INFOGRAPHIC CONFIRMS IT: ADVERTISING PEOPLE ARE...

Thu, 10 May 2012 19:57:19 -0400

fastcompany:

INFOGRAPHIC CONFIRMS IT: ADVERTISING PEOPLE ARE NOT NORMAL

humansofnewyork: “Everyone’s gonna love you.”“Everyone already...

Sun, 06 May 2012 13:38:48 -0400

humansofnewyork:

“Everyone’s gonna love you.”
“Everyone already loves us. We’re the two most adorable ladies on the Upper East Side.”

I can’t believe I just found this blog today. Pure love.

"A socially engaged TV audience is the most powerful marketing team networks have ever had."

Wed, 02 May 2012 19:03:00 -0400

“A socially engaged TV audience is the most powerful marketing team networks have ever had.”

- Mark Guhneim, Trendrr (via AdAge)

I tend to agree.

Rabbit, rabbit.

Tue, 01 May 2012 11:44:31 -0400

Rabbit, rabbit.

Unplugged in Roma

Fri, 20 Apr 2012 12:42:54 -0400

Last week I traveled to Rome for a week of sightseeing, relaxation, and Italian wine. I brought no electronics — no computer, no iPad, no smartphone. Not even a dumbphone. I checked my email a handful of times at our hotel’s computer, but by and large I was unplugged.

As a digital marketing professional and a professional internet addict, I wondered how I would react. Would I be itching for my phone all week? Or would I get over it and have one of those amazing “unplugged” experiences everyone talks about — when you have an epiphany about your electronics use and your time in the “real world” is transformative?

My experience was somewhere in the middle. It was odd to not have any connection to the internet on the go. But I was in one of the most beautiful cities in the world with some lovely travel companions, and honestly, I really didn’t miss the connection. And spending so little time in front of a computer screen was a bit unusual, but not disconcerting. It was a nice break, and not at all stressful.

The one exception? Maps and navigation. I missed Google Maps on my Blackberry quite literally every day — sure, there were times when we were content to simply stroll through Rome’s crooked streets with no destination in mind. But on occasions where we were looking for something specific, it was so frustrating not to have an easy way to navigate to it. (Most maps of Rome don’t include all its tiny streets, which added to the problem.)

What do I make of this experience? That my relationship to technology is still very functional — I miss it when it can help me do something, but I don’t miss it for its own sake. Not at addict after all! Whew. This was my big epiphany. That, and the realization that the pasta in Italy really is as good as everyone says it is.

#SXSoWhat? Who made a splash at SXSWi 2012

Wed, 21 Mar 2012 10:28:51 -0400

Recently Velocidi, the digital marketing agency where I’m a senior account executive, held two events to talk about this year’s SXSW Interactive Festival, and one of the main topics was the question on everyone’s mind. What was this year’s Foursquare? Its Twitter? The new tech or social platform that broke through in Austin?

The most-buzzed about startup was probably Highlight, an app that keeps a log of who you pass by each day. But larger than the app itself was a key trend: serendipity. In short, serendipity is the ability to bring online connections to life offline at serendipitous moments, an ability enabled by a plethora of new apps.

Still, a trend is not a company. It may not be an entirely fair or logical question, but it’s still irresistible to ask: who “won” SXSWi 12? This year, the story might be more about Goliath than David: American Express made a huge splash with their Twitter sync program. This AdAge article does a good job of summarizing AmEx’s successes this year, from its launch of an innovative product to its efforts to be the one of the loudest voices at the festival. And they weren’t the only big brand stepping out in traditional start-up land. Nike also invested heavily in the creation of unique brand experience for visitors, resulting in significant buzz for their brand. Nokia offers a similar story.

What does it mean when big brands are among the most buzzed about companies coming out of SXSW? The lesson seems clear for marketers. As brands are more and more interested in knowing what’s next in tech, marketers need to stay one step ahead of the curve in digital. The gap between what we’re doing today and what comes next is getting narrower, so it’s critical to be plugged in to what’s new and innovative in the digital space — all year round, not just in April.

"When should we add marketing? In the Mad Men era, we added marketing last. Marketing and..."

Mon, 19 Mar 2012 13:46:23 -0400

“

When should we add marketing?

In the Mad Men era, we added marketing last. Marketing and advertising were the same thing, and the job was to promote what was made.

In the connection era, the marketing is the product, the service and most of all the conversations it causes and the connections it makes.

Marketing is the first thing we do, not the last. Build virality and connection and remarkability into your product or service from the start and then the end gets a lot easier. Build it into your app, your book, your movie, your insurance policy, and the red soles of your shoes.

”

- Seth Godin, When should we add marketing?

I <3 NY. Happy Friday.

Fri, 09 Mar 2012 15:58:05 -0500

I <3 NY. Happy Friday.

9/11 Echoes Stronger as ‘Mad Men’ Ads Hit Building...

Thu, 08 Mar 2012 10:25:47 -0500

9/11 Echoes Stronger as ‘Mad Men’ Ads Hit Building Sides Teaser campaign for Season 5 goes big

Such poor taste.

March (Media) Madness

Wed, 07 Mar 2012 21:28:00 -0500

March is one of my favoite times of year. As a college basketball fan, it just doesn’t get much better than this. (Though the rest of the year, when I’m one of the few die-hard fans, is still pretty great.)

It also represents an interesting situation for digital and traditional media. As more people want to cut the cable cord (even if they aren’t, yet), there’s still one category of media where live viewing is critical to the experience: sports.

It’s exciting to see more and more sports events available through streaming. The entirety of the NCAA Tournament will be streamed (albeit not free for everyone), The Superbowl was streamed this year, and ESPN has a whole roster of other content that it makes available online.

This is a great development for fans, but any change in the dynamic between media companies and leagues is bound to be disruptive and full of challenges. As much as we love to watch the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat, sports today are a business, and a high-stakes one at that — perhaps one of the highest in all of television (beginning in 2014, networks will pay the NFL $3.1 billion a year for broadcast rights).

Still, there’s no doubt that, to borrow a phrase, worlds are colliding. A bit more slowly, perhaps, in this corner of the content world, but the day is surely coming when online viewers will outnumber traditional television viewers.

How will this change the sports landscape? Which will be the best-prepared league, network, and provider for the challenges that lay ahead? Interesting questions, and ones I’ll be watching — on my TV and my computer.

Priceless. A cautionary tale for those who want to take...

Thu, 01 Mar 2012 09:29:00 -0500

Priceless. A cautionary tale for those who want to take advantage of the Colbert sponsortunity — and for those marketers who lose sight of reality.

Marketing is Ruining the Internet

Thu, 23 Feb 2012 15:52:07 -0500

No, I don’t believe that it is — this was the title of a Social Media Week event I attended last week in New York. Below I’ve compiled the three most interesting points I took away from the panel discussion:

1. Advertising, Privacy, and Disclosure

There’s no such thing as a free lunch. In exchange for using Facebook free of charge, you offer up your information to advertisers. In exchange for Gmail, you give Google your data. There’s a delicate balance between what’s considered a fair trade and what is not. To keep your media on the right side of that fence, keep these ideas in mind:

Disclosure is critical — no stealth ads
Make your hard sell in paid media, not in social/earned
Make your ads as contextual and non-interruptive as possible

Remember: There’s always someplace else to go online. If advertising exceeds what users are willing to tolerate, they’re gone.

2. Have a Purpose

Marketers need to keep in mind, despite all the buzz around social, mobile, and the like, that their web presence needs to have a purpose. You need to provide value, or be entertaining. Entertaining is hard, but providing value is easy. Think about where you fit in that spectrum and stick to it.

3. Have Courage

With the rise of social media, consumer voices have been amplified. As a result, reactions to marketing campaigns — both good and bad — are much louder, and the prospect of a campaign blowing up in a bad way has the tendency to make marketers skittish about taking risks. However, an important role of marketing is to get people talking. You’re not going to appeal to everyone all the time — you’ve got to be willing to accept some backlash, and that can actually be a huge gift. Go out on a limb.

Thanks, I guess? #advertising

Wed, 14 Dec 2011 16:40:29 -0500

Thanks, I guess?

#advertising

Continuations: Tech Tuesday: Programming (A Start)

Tue, 06 Dec 2011 11:34:13 -0500

Continuations: Tech Tuesday: Programming (A Start):

I’ve been getting interested in learning more about development recently, and Albert’s post popped up at the perfect time! For anyone who’s never written any code, it’s a great introduction to what “writing code” actually means.

continuations:

Maybe I should have started the whole Tech Tuesday series with a post on programming since that’s why computers were created in the first place! In fact, thinking about programming in many ways precedes the availability of actual computers to carry out those programs. At the time that Babbage was dreaming up his Analytical Engine, Lady Ada started to formulate how a general purpose machine would be programmed. That was almost 100 years before the first truly programmable machines were actually built! Much closer to that date but still before he had access to a computer, Alan Turing in 1936 described an abstract machine (the Turing machine) that he then proved could compute anything a computer can do no matter how fast or complex a CPU, how much memory, etc it has (aside: that does not cover what a quantum computer might be able to do if we ever figure out how to make one work).

So what does it mean to program a computer? Somewhat flippantly: programming is telling the computer what to do. But given the pieces that we have put in place we can define programming more precisely as: creating a set of instructions that the CPU can execute to achieve a desired outcome. That outcome might be the computation of a number, the animation of an object on the screen, the manipulation of a text or — and this is the beauty of programming — pretty much anything else one can dream up. In the process of executing the program, the various parts of the computer work together as specified by the program. Data will move around memory and maybe to and from storage. If necessary, I/O devices will be activated. Possibly data will be sent or received via a network.

How does a programmer go about creating the set of instructions? In the early days of computers this literally involved hand picking instructions from the CPU’s instruction set and manually encoding these so that they could be fed to the CPU. But because of the work of theorists and the desire of visionaries we rapidly wound up with programming languages that were more easily accessible to humans and could then be translated by the computer itself into the instructions for the CPU. One such vision had always been to program a computer using simply spoken language and with Siri and Android voice actions we now have that as a reality — people are quite literally telling their phone what to do.

Whenever you program a computer in anything other than the actual machine code (the bytes that represent the instructions and addresses) you are using some kind of programming language. So called Assembly Language is barely above machine code. It is mostly a set of acronyms for the instructions with some ability to refer to program and memory locations by a name as opposed to an actual address. A program called an assembler is used to translate assembly language into machine code. Because writing assembly is really picking instructions by hand it takes a long time to write programs but affords the ultimate control over what code is actually executed which can be important for some cases, such as parts of a device driver.

Anything that’s more expressive than assembly is generally referred to as a higher level language. Among higher level languages there is still a huge range though from a language such as C which is closest to the machine end to a language such as Prolog on the other (Prolog deals with logical expressions). Higher level languages require some form of translation into machine code. This is handled by programs known as interpreters andcompilers. As a first cut you can think of the difference between an interpreter and a compiler as the difference between having a simultaneous translator and a translated book. Essentially an interpreter reads the higher level language as it comes along and figures out what to do whereas a compiler takes one or more passes over the entire higher level language program.

In order for an assembler, interpreter or compiler to be able to do their work, the expressions in assembly or in the higher level language have to follow specific patterns which are known as syntax. That is of course even true when programming a computer in natural language in the Siri example above. If you say something completely ungrammatical, Siri will not know what to do.

I have found programming to be a deeply satisfying activity and will write lots more about it in upcoming Tech Tuesdays. When programming I can spend many hours without noticing the passage of time at all. Part of the satisfaction for me comes from how programming is a craft that combines writing and analysis/math in a wonderful way. But part of it also comes from the amazing amount of control I can exercise over machines which contrasts sharply with the many limits on control in the rest of our lives!

An excellent weekend of friends, fun, and the Badgers scoring a...

Sun, 04 Dec 2011 21:00:06 -0500

An excellent weekend of friends, fun, and the Badgers scoring a trip to the Rose Bowl. Winning.

"I’m grateful for anything that reminds me of what’s possible in this life. Books can do that. Films..."

Thu, 24 Nov 2011 18:14:25 -0500

“I’m grateful for anything that reminds me of what’s possible in this life. Books can do that. Films can do that. Music can do that. School can do that. It’s so easy to allow one day to simply follow into the next, but every once in a while we encounter something that shows us that anything is possible, that dramatic change is possible, that something new can be made, that laughter can be shared.”

- Jonathan Safran Foer (via anorangeinwinter)

Happy Thanksgiving.

Psychic Income

Mon, 21 Nov 2011 15:18:24 -0500

I learned a new phrase last week: “psychic income.” It refers to the intangible benefits one derives from work - the energy and inspiration that comes from doing what you do. I love this phrase because it really conveys the value of passion. It’s not optional - it’s income. It is essential.