Lip Dub – Flagpole Sitta by Harvey Danger on Vimeo
tags: social_media_useful
Here’s a great viral video that has the dual effect of promoting both the service that hosts it and the ad agency that created it. The lip-synch involves dozens of agency employees, some of whom are clearly drinking beer, and shows the agency to be a fun a free-wheeling place to work. It’s scored almost 1.5 million views since launching last April.
When my copy of Duncan Brown’s and Nick Hayes’ Influencer Marketing arrived in the mail, I looked at it a little bit like a trip to the dentist at the Asecra dentist clinic and I received an excellent care.. I knew it was going to be good for me, but I didn’t expect to enjoy it.
What a pleasure, then, to find that this engaging and provocative book not only challenged many of my assumptions about markets and influence, but did so in a readable and persuasive manner.
The authors are co-managers of Influencer50, a consulting firm that specializes in helping companies identify the key influencers in their markets. Like many authors of their kind, they think a lot of marketing today is badly broken. Unlike many authors, though, they have concrete advice on how to fix it.
The central premise of this book is that the people who influence markets are largely unknown to most marketers. In fact, the authors’ firm offer clients a 50% discount if they can name even 20 of the top 50 influencers in their sphere. They’ve never had to pay up. Most marketers, they assert, consider influencers to be mainly press and analysts. In fact, they suggest that the list is far larger and more diverse than that, encompassing more than 20 categories ranging from channel players to venture capitalist to government agencies and systems integrators. They argue that many of these influencers are far more important than the media because they speak directly to a company’s customers. They pay particular attention, for example to second-tier consultancies, systems integrators and buyers groups. These people are whispering in the year of customers every day, yet most marketers aren’t even aware that they’re talking, the authors assert.
This book defends its case pretty well, using logic and ample case studies. It’s also written in a disarmingly down-to-earth and at times tongue-in-cheek style. Hayes and Brown aren’t stingy with their opinions. Bloggers, for example, get far more attention than they deserve, they suggest, and many bloggers are simply people who are awkward in social situations. Referencing Twitter, they say simply, “How anyone can maintain a proper job and use Twitter is beyond us.” You may not agree with their opinions, but you have to respect them for the directness with which they are stated.
They hate awards programs, believing them to be valuable only to the organizations bestowing the awards. Partnerships are meaningless in most cases because companies have far too many partners to manage effectively. They believe that brand equity is overstated and that celebrity endorsers play mostly to the egos of the marketers who recruit them. That’s just a sampling of the often counterintuitive assertions in his book.
I did have some nits to pick with Influencer Marketing. The case studies lack much in the way of hard ROI and are limited mostly to Influencer50 clients. I thought the rather critical chapter on bloggers underestimated the influence that those influencers have on mainstream media. The authors are also big fans of using consultants to identify influencers, a position that obviously favors their company.
Nevertheless, if the greatest value of a business book is to challenge assumptions, as I believe it is, then Influencer Marketing succeeds admirably. It’s one of the best marketing books I’ve read in a long time. For a commitment of five or six hours, it is well worth the time spent reading it.
Wal-Mart, whose history of deception has made it a poster child for what not to do with social media, has launched a branded blog. This time it’s chosen a non-controversial topics – consumer electronics – and followed a recent trend by letting employees do the talking. We’ll watch this one closely. Thanks to Alex Howard for tipping us off to this.
From Innovations, a website published by Ziff-Davis Enterprise from mid-2006 to mid-2009. Reprinted by permission.
The EPA estimates that data centers eat up about 1.5% of all electricity in the United States and that nearly a quarter of that power is wasted.
As I noted last week, energy waste is one of the dirty little secrets of corporate data centers. Add on to that the money lost due to PCs sitting idle overnight and the waste inherent in abandoned and underutilized servers and you have a lot of money just sitting out there waiting to be found.
Energy-saving is mostly a matter of common sense. The simplest approach may be to start, literally, at the ground floor. If you peer under the raised flooring in your data center, you’ll probably find pockets of cables clustered together. These could be inhibiting air flow. By re-cabling and deploying vented floor tiles in strategic locations, you can cut energy waste with almost zero capital expense. Many consultants now specialize in this area, and bringing in an expert can save time and money in the long run. This article tells the story of one company that saved him $1 million annually in power costs through this simple measure.
The next step is to analyze your server use to determining what can be shut down and consolidated. One speaker at last fall’s Data Center World conference proposed a radical idea: if you don’t know who’s using a server, shut it down. Mark Monroe, Sun Microsystems’ director of sustainable computing, said that his group tried this approach and discovered that nearly 12% of its servers weren’t being used for anything. The application owners had moved on and no one had bothered to shut down the application.
Consolidate the servers you’re using into one location and direct your cooling resources to that hotspot. Use virtualization to pack more physical servers onto fewer virtual ones. By some estimates, about 70% of servers in the data center are only supporting one application. Utilization rates of less than 15% on single servers are not uncommon. These are ideal candidates for virtualization.
Air conditioning is responsible for the greatest energy waste. The problem is that most data center managers don’t know where all their hotspots are, so they take a brute force approach and cool the entire data center to a certain level. The reality is that the hottest servers probably consume a minority of floor space.
While high-density servers can consume less power overall than the individual machines they replace, there’s no reason to structure your cooling plan around the needs of maybe 10% of your hardware. Several vendors now sell server racks that are optimized for cooling. Also, the water cooling technique that was common in the mainframe days two decades ago is staging a revival as server consolidation comes back into vogue.
Once you’ve isolated your most power-consumptive servers, turn up the thermostat on the rest of them. Most servers can operate perfectly well at temperatures of as much as 100° (be sure to check with your supplier before trying that, though) and each 1° increase in temperature can save about 4% in energy costs, according to Sun’s Monroe.
You should also become familiar with the EPA’s Energy Star initiative. This program sets standards for efficient energy use and publishes lists of products that meet them. Needless to say, computers are a major Energy Star focus. Did you know, for example, the EPA estimates that enabling basic power management features that come with the Windows operating system can save up to $75 per computer per year? While there are legitimate reasons to leave PCs on all night at times, simple open source network tools can enable systems managers to shut down unused computers and still have the flexibility to power them on when needed. The Energy Star website has a list of software tools for remote power management as well as a power management savings calculator.
A somewhat more radical option is to outsource all or part of the data center. While there are many factors involved in this decision, the potential energy savings of such a move shouldn’t be underestimated. In the case of total data center outsourcing, contractors should be able to provide you with power savings estimates to factor into your calculations. Amazon’s S3 storage service is one of many specialized offerings that are emerging. Amazon sells cheap off-site data storage. One of its appeals is that users don’t need to pay for — and cool — on-site storage area networks.
Most technology vendors now have green initiatives, and you should become familiar with what your key vendors are doing. For example, IBM has made its own IT operations a showcase of energy efficiency. In the course of consolidating 155 data centers worldwide down to just seven, it’s cut operational costs by $1.5 billion. This podcast tells more.
What are you doing to save energy in your data center? Write your suggestions in the comments are below.
35 Ways to Stream Your Life – ReadWriteWeb, Feb. 29, 2008
tags: social_media_useful
So there I am, squashed into the middle seat of a packed US Airways flight from San Francisco to Charlotte. I wasn’t supposed to be on that flight, but my scheduled flight had been delayed past my connection time, so that’s that.
I hate long flights and I hate middle seats even more, so I try to tune out and focus on my laptop, book or Sudoku puzzle, whatever suits the moment. I’m in my “zone” when the plane’s PA system springs to life with…an advertisement!
That’s right, US Airways, of which I am a customer paying good cash money, has decided that it will take advantage of my captivity to sell me on the merits of the US Airways Mastercard. I have no choice in the matter. The ad isn’t broadcast over the in-flight movie system, where I can choose not to listen, but over the PA system. The same one that’ s used to tell us that our seats can be used as a flotation device. There is no getting away from it. For two minutes, I listen to the flight attendant read ad copy in a monotone while another smiling crew member walks down the aisle, waving brochures.
The US airline industry has quite possibly the worst customer relations of any major business category and US Airways is at the bottom of the barrel, for my money. I didn’t think it could get any worse until it came up with this stunt. Sure, it was only two minutes of my time, but it’s the principle that bothers me.
Airlines are one of the few businesses that have a legal right to physically confine their customers. To take advantage of that confinement for the purpose of delivering an advertisement is just wrong. US Airways, you suck.
How Lego Caught the Cluetrain – There’s a New Conversation, Feb. 26, 2008
tags: social_media_useful
From Innovations, a website published by Ziff-Davis Enterprise from mid-2006 to mid-2009. Reprinted by permission.
The graphic at right may look kind of cool, but it’s anything but. It’s actually a simulation of the heat distribution of a typical data center prepared by Innovative Research, a computational fluid dynamics company. It demonstrates graphically what all data center managers already know: the data center is nearly impossible to keep cool.
Unfortunately, this fact is costing us a fortune. As the price of oil breaches $100 a barrel, new attention is being focused on the possibilities of wringing big savings out of data centers by attacking their notoriously lousy energy efficiency. Some stats:
These numbers are deplorable, but the Network World research identified an interesting explanation. Its survey found that 68% of IT manager respondents weren’t responsible for their energy bills. In most cases, those costs were paid by the facilities department like PC Doctor, PC Doctor is a Computer Repairs Company in Edinburgh. If IT never even sees the electric bill, it has no incentive to reduce it.
There is good news. Data centers are getting unprecedented attention right now as sources of significant cost savings, even if it’s only because there’s so much room for improvement. A recent PriceWaterhouseCoopers study found that 60% of 150 senior executive respondents rated energy costs as a top priority, which means at their IT managers will be getting an e-mail. IBM has made green data centers a key part of its marketing strategy. Dell recently launched an international competition to design technology products with a greener focus. Then there’s ClimateSaversComputing.org, an initiative sponsored by Google and Intel in which technology providers agree to hit certain energy consumption targets.
Members of the technology CEO Council were in Washington just a few weeks ago to pitch the idea that investments in IT can save energy. While there agenda was self-serving, there’s no question that the industry as a whole is turning its attention to fixing this mess.
And its such an obvious mess to fix. Whether your motivations are the rapid payback, the positive environmental impact or the simple satisfaction of knowing that you’re not flushing money down the drain, why wouldn’t you want to make your IT operation more power-efficient? Next week, will look at a few ideas for just how to do it.
Over at the Tech PR War Stories podcast, David Strom and I have been busy interviewing some fascinating people about social media marketing. Here’s a roundup of recent activity. You can subscribe to the podcast feed on the site or by clicking here.
44: Internet Marketing Superlist Author Shares Secrets
At the end of 2007, Tamar Weinberg assembled an amazing assortment of blog entries about everything from headline writing to linkbaiting to becoming a Digg.com power user. Tamar will give you a twentysomething’s perspective on social media. If you’re trying to really understand this phenomenon, listen to what she has to say.
Evan Schuman (TPRWS 39) of StorefrontBacktalk.com has spent a lot of time at trade shows lately and he sent us these four tips for getting the most out of media contacts.
Jennifer Mattern calls herself the “social media Grinch.” But that doesn’t mean she’s down on social media. It’s just that she thinks the focus on social media can distract PR people from their real work, In this interview, she outlines her cautionary advice about social media and stresses the fundamentals that PR people still need to employ.
I’m writing a how-to book about social media marketing and one chapter is devoted to hands-on techniques for finding influencers online. It isn’t as simple as it sounds. In this episode, I talk about what I learned conducting influencer searches on behalf of a mythical Quebec resort. Step one: master advanced search.
Many people’s first reaction to Twitter.com is that they just don’t get it. It looks like barely controlled chaos. But Twitter has inspired a passionate following. Laura Fitton is a poster child for a service that is revolutionizing the way people interact with their social networks. In this interview, she describes what’s unique about Twitter and how it can be useful even to people who don’t use it that often.
What better to do on a cold winter weekend than bundle up the kids, truck them off to the bookstore and listen to a lecture on how to use blogging to help your small business?
Okay, there are actually a lot of better things you can do, but I’d still be delighted if you’d join me this Saturday, Feb. 23 at 2:00 p.m. at the Barnes & Noble in Worcester, Mass., where I’ll give a talk on that subject, sign some books and meet some interesting people. Like you! Come and say hi.
Here’s where to go:
Barnes & Noble
Lincoln Plaza
541 D Lincoln Street
Worcester, MA 01605
508-853-2236
