Last week, I was giving my very new conference during the last event produced by Radian6 in Boston.

That was for me an important day for a few reasons:

1. I think that we’ll have to recognize that we are fans of this Canadian company. We are very proud to have this beautiful start-up in Canada and that has just been bought by Salesforce.
2. With the announcement of Salesforce and the fact it was the first event organized by Radian6 after their amazing 24 last months story… it was an honor to be a speaker.
3. It is happening now! Yes really! The platforms, the tools, the technology, the critical mass, the habits, the business understanding  … everything is aligned to give us the opportunity to get a real ROI through the social and digital marketing strategies.
4. The new trend: 3.0… how to interpret, visualize and use (with real intelligence) the data generated by the use of the web and social media.

For those who could be interested, here is my presentation file for the conference I gave : From Web Monitoring to Data Driven Strategic Management.

My team and myself wanted to give an overview of our vision about this question. We wanted to present the relationship between the community management, the community engagement, the web monitoring (web analytic and brand monitoring) and the whole data that is generated by the use of these platforms.

En effet, en bons petits geeks que nous sommes, nos iPhone, iPad et laptop posés entre les deux oreillers, nous ont réveillés en diffusant les nouvelles du jour. Et les grandes nouvelles pour des bibittes telles que nous sont celles des grandes entreprise du Québec qui commencent à arborer les couleurs de leur propre gestion des médias sociaux.

Quoi de plus gratifiant quand les nouvelles diffusées parlent de nos propres mandats?

Et bien oui! En effet, ce matin, Isabelle Massé, journaliste de Cyberpresse, nous dépeint le portrait de notre client Bombardier Aéronautique dans son utilisation des différentes techniques pour la gestion de sa marque en ligne et particulièrement sur Twitter. Cette gouvernance leur permet d’engager la conversation avec leur public, leurs influenceurs d’opinions etc. Notre équipe, qui est à l’origine de toute la stratégie, la mise en place de la mécanique et l’accompagnement de cette opération, avait donc un grand sourire d’accomplissement ce matin au réveil.

Un gros MERCI à toute l’équipe de Bombardier Aéronautique de la part de w.illi.am/. Votre mentalité d’innovation et votre engouement pour une vision stratégique sont les fers de lance de notre province.

• Article sur Cyberpresse: L’art de soigner sa réputation sur Twitter par Isabelle Massé, Cyberpresse.
• Explications de w.illi.am/ : Pourquoi communiquer autrement
• Si vous désirez découvrir en personne la recette pour une Sainte gestion des médias sociaux, ne ratez pas ma conférence au prochain webcom Montréal 2010, le 26 mai prochain à l’OACI :
  Web social : les 7 jours de la création

N’hésitez pas à nous contacter si vous souhaitez en apprendre plus sur nos services d’accompagnement sur le web 2.0 : matyas.gabor (at) w.illi.am

Bon visionnement!

La suite, la semaine prochaine…

Hot on Twitter : le 1er mars, cette présentation a été placée dans les articles les plus lus sur Twitter.

Voir toutes les photos de la Journée IP

© Copyright 2010 Charles-Henri Debeur.com

Alas, day two of the conference was the source of discussion that kept me thinking about business culture and global culture – both very interesting topics. Here are some inspiring quotes and my thoughts for the day: (Quotes are not verbatim. My comments in italics.)

Online merchandising that inspires

“Whatever you are thinking, think BIGGER…culture, customer service, clothing….we didn’t spend much on Adwords…viral is the best thing to do, as well as building the customer experience online and offline.”

(Tony Hsieh, CEO, Zappos.com)

Quite amazing really, from 2001 to 2008, Zappos’ revenues grew from 0$ to 1 billion. They focus on selling a culture. Almost all their employees are on Twitter, and active on other social network sites. They are extremely focused on their HR department, and ensuring employees are a good fit. Hsieh says they have offered employees $2000 to quit after one week if they thought they had made a mistake. They have two interviews with employees: one classic interview, and one focused on assessing cultural fit. “We want people who will be able to share our culture… the definition of happiness is different for every person.”

His speech was very inspiring. I am motivated to take more time for HR and get better support for recruitment

“Be there before the sale”…let users promote your product…you don’t have to sell directly…”

(Chris Brogan, President, New Marketing Labs, Author, Trust Agents)

I agree; instead of spending thousands of dollars on PPC and Cos, it’s better to make good use of social networks. PPC is to online advertising what traditional ads were a few years ago. Everyone is spending on it but most don’t take the time to optimize it. Costs are rising as agencies are growing – it’s time to react and use social networks instead.

Let them build it for us

In response to market demand and nuances of banking regulations in different countries, Paypal is opening up its payment system. “We need programmers all over the world to work on the development of whatever remains to be done, focused on our use cases…”

(Osama Bedier, Vice President of PayPal Platform and Emerging Technology)

Smart. Paypal is letting programmers outside Paypal develop with Paypal’s APIs to accomplish their goals. I was saying this to my customers just a few weeks ago: invest more money on an API program instead of developing new features that will only be used by a few people.

…let others innovate for you…

Real-world Counter-Culture

(Danah Boyd, Researcher at Microsoft Research New England, Fellow at Harvard University Berkman Center for Internet and Society)

Danah gave a brillant presentation. It was very likely my favorite one.

Danah Boyd does random word searches on Twitter to discover twittering outside her normal comfort zone. …from racist words on Twitter to youth video content… she looks at the power of visibility online, getting a true picture of the real world. Is it sometimes better to be stuck with televised network programming? Not a chance.

Grinda: ‘le retour du succès”

OLX is a new classified site, very popular locally… it focuses on the South-American and Russian markets. 10M$ revenues per year with ad sense only…”

(Fireside Chat with Fabrice Grinda, Co-CEO, OLX, Inc. and Loic Le Meur, Founder, Le Web)

Grinda says “Whatever you do, you have to be within the top 3 leading markets. This could include your local market, but its best to focus on your top three.” I agree but I also think you need to think outside the box…there are other markets besides the US and Europe. I remember UNYK in Quebec, they were number one in South-America! Finally, they were sold to Viadeo (in France).

Russia Roundtable: Emerging Markets: Focus on Russia

Moderated by Jennifer L. Schenker, Founder & Editor-in-Chief, Informilo.com

Sasha Galitsky, Almaz Capital Partners

Bernard Lukey, CEO, OZON.ru

Edward Shenderovich, Managing Director, Kite Ventures

Arkady Volozh, CEO, Yandex

Google is not a leader in Russia which is going to be the largest EU Internet market (Arkady Volozh, CEO, Yandex)

Amazon is not present at all in Russia and OZON  has taken the lead (Bernard Lukey, CEO, OZON.ru)

The blogosphere is not as well set-up as it is in the west…it’s more kitchen conversation. (Edward Shenderovich, Managing Director, Kite Ventures)

There is more US investment in the US. (Sasha Galitsky, Almaz Capital Partners)

I often wonder how it will all play out in Russia. Just like in Quebec, language can protect the market – that is why Russian companies have a lot of success – but it doesn’t last forever…just think of the Berlin Wall… it came down long before we thought it would…

Have a good week-end.

damien

API integration and predicting the next big social networking craze is keeping the debate going. As always, everyone wants to predict what we should expect as the next killer app and who will introduce it?

william is a company that keeps its clients on the cutting edge and integrates next-generation Web 2.0 assets. Being here discussing with the top thinkers in social networking is certainly jump-starting my ideas for the coming year. 2009 was a great year for us, with new departments, projects and clients, but 2010 is sure to be even more exciting, with all the new API’s we see on the horizon. There will be ever-more interesting tools to integrate and collaborations to make. It also makes me wonder who will by first in line to announce an IPO, signifying that the recession is behind us!

I’m gathering great food for thought, and there’s even better food to eat here in France. My mind and stomach are well satiated. Ah Paris! Some things should never change…

Here’s are a few pearls of wisdom and statements I’ve gathered from CEO’s, COO’s and thinkers from cutting edge technology companies from around the world. (Bear in mind they are not 100% verbatim).  I have included my my immediate reactions to some of the key panelist statements. I hope to offer more insightful, lengthy thoughts after the conference.

ON SOCIAL NETWORKS: SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST

“The battle for identity is not over. Myspace ID and Facebook Connect are great tools that are going to have tremendous success down the road”

… “Mark my words: Twitter is dead”

(Mike Jones, COO, MySpace)

Have I missed something?

Open Social is not dead but they don’t have that killer app to make it a success….they are going to stay behind the scene without it…. (Panelists)

“We can’t scale ourselves”… “Community Control is bullshit….the user is in control.” (Chris Pirillo Founder, Lockergnome)

I do agree… mostly… however, the user must be able to remove content!

“Twitter and Facebook will not be around forever”. (Chris Pirillo Founder, Lockergnome)

Of course not; from the Roman Empire to the communist regime….nothing lasts forever.

THE NEXT KILLER APP

LeWeb iPhone App: official web app for the conference.

I have to admit that the signature conference App “LeWeb App” is very useful. Just this morning I used it to get to the conference. No paper needed. Everything is included: Agenda, video, Tweets etc.…

Shazam: has more than 300 mobile carrier relationships in order to distribute (Andrew Fisher, CEO of Shazam).

Shazam is my favorite app, my pick for 2009. I think it’s one of the ones we’ve been waiting for.

Square: (demo by Jack Dorsey, the inventor of Twitter): To be launched in March 2010: After years of talking about it, we may finally be able to use our mobile phones as a payment device. You need to add a small gadget to your phone. Meant for personal and corporate use from garage sales to restaurants.

-I was not impressed by the demo, but it sounds like a great idea.

THE BOTTOM LINE

“Entrepreneur is a French word, we are Entrepreneur” (Marc Simoncini, Founder & CEO, MEETIC)

Okay, okay, sure, you are are entrepreneurs, but I would like to point out that Meetic is a carbon copy of Webseducation, a Quebec dating site that launched several years ago.

“Youtube is not a social network, we leverage social media. “There is no magic formula for revenues… always improve the way to present Ads…Few users have more than 1M$ in revenues.” (Chad Hurley, Co-Founder & CEO, YouTube)

There was also talk about whether Youtube will basically become an online movie rental shop.  There is no clear answer, but that might very well be the direction they are moving in.

Summary of the Day: APIs are keys and Mobile platforms will be everywhere next year….

The jQuery mojo is write less do more, and this is exactly what it’s meant to do. This is an API that help you write better javascript. Unfortunately it is really hard to write good javascript on all browsers. What jQuery does is take your jQuery code and dispatch it to every browser in the more efficient way possible. This enables developers to write faster and better javascript. It adds some functionalities too, like for example animations.

Not unlike Adobe Flash, with jQuery it is possible to animate  objects on your web page, this is however limited. While you can do easing and opacity effects, you cannot rotate or use « photoshop effect » directly from javascript. Well used, you can create nice and clean animation with jQuery, but trying too hard might result in a look that feel like flash but not really as good as flash.

The famous AJAX

This is a common error for non-tech teams to actually refer jQuery as AJAX, in fact this is only a subset of functionality of javascript and not javascript itself. AJAX refers to asynchronous JavaScript and XML, what it means is that you can load external XML or HTML to and from your page. For example,  a form on the web normally sends you to another page when submitting it. Using AJAX, you could submit the form to your server in javascript using AJAX without quitting the page. Most recent websites make a major use of AJAX without the user noticing it to update content or save users preference.

Using it without an API like jQuery is pretty hard because of it’s weird syntax. This is somewhere jQuery really shines, because it enable you to do a lot, without wanting to bang your head on the wall. Because of javascript API like jQuery, using AJAX has been made a lot more easier and also popular, this might have to do with why people often call jQuery as an AJAX technology.

If you want more information on jQuery I would suggest you visit the official website.  There is a lot of information on the website and looking at the documentation might help you understand how jQuery can be beneficial for your website or company.

View more documents from matyas gabor.

Alors voici l’entrevue réalisée à ma sortie d’une conférence webcom Montréal sur le Branding et l’Entreprise 2.0 dans un contexte B2B.

Nous y parlons de la question d’influenceurs de marques et de conception d’identité pour les entreprises qui s’adressent à d’autres entreprises.

Ce  n’est pas forcément la plus réussie, c’est même assurée, mais elle répond à certaines questions que plusieurs de nos clients me posent. En espérant donc que cela pourra vous aider un peu.

bon visionnement!

Le webcom live 2009 est une coproduction de
Christian Aubry, Le Lien MULTIMÉDIA et AgentSolo.

w.illi.am/_at_Google_Lobby

The second day at the Google Analytics Authorized Consultants yearly summit is the first of two days fully dedicated to Google Analytics.  The day definitely started on a high note with a keynote from Avinash Kaushik who talked to us about everything but web analytics tools. Let me explain.

It was both interesting and reassuring to hear that a lot of actionable information does not come from your web analytics solution, no matter what solution you have (Omniture, Coremetrics, WebTrends, Google Analytics, etc.). Why is it interesting? Because we shared tools some of us use for measuring mobile activity and for measuring social media activity.  Why reassuring? Because it confirmed that I wasn’t crazy by using KPIs that are nowhere to be found on our client’s web analytics solution.

Most of the time, we focus way too much on data that is available on Google Analytics (or whatever other tool), on how to interpret it, on how to measure it, how to segment it and so on and so forth.  But there is one very significant detail that is not being taken into consideration: all of these tools work when the user is on your website.  Now think about this, where do users read your content? Where do they interact with your content? Is it only on your website? Most likely not! A significant part of how users interact with your content takes places out of your website, whether it’s Facebook, Twitter, RSS Feeds or whatever other medium.  Now how do you track this in your web analytics solution?  Omniture made an attempt to integrate Twitter in their reports (specifically, how many followers you have) but it still does not provide actionable information which actually means something.  It’s like saying, “I have x amount of visitors.”  Yes, you always want more visitors, but how does it tell you if you are doing well or not?

We as marketers must be creative and define the KPIs that apply to us and to our marketing efforts. These KPIs are most likely not in your web analytics solution.  Is your KPI engagement? Is it conversations generated from your news? There are ways to measure this and tools available to do so.  The fun part is, this is where we get to be creative.

Follow me on twitter.com/Humberto2210 to stay updated on the GAAC Summit