It seems like just yesterday that I was in Syracuse speaking before the wonderful group of Communications Professionals within the State University of New York college system.

The subject was "Mental Telepathy? Staying Ahead of the Curve: New Communication Techniques"

Kreskin, Uri and Houdini couldn't make it, so it was up to me to present the latest technology trends and how to use them for Branding, Bonding and Best Communications Results.

For a moment I was a rock star, but that was then and here I sit today, trying to catch up again.
I've mastered the blogs, wikis, social networking, interactive telecommunications and virtual worlds only to discover that the next new things are widgets: portable chunks of code that can be installed and executed within any separate HTML-based Web page by an end user .

Since I've been usings MAC computers forever, I'm totally in love with my widgets. Here's my list:

Cheapest Gas on Long Island

Where to find WiFi

Weather
Ad-Ology (the latest advertising news)

Technorati pings

Leo Horoscope

(ok, you caught me, the Tarot too!)






Dave Morgan, Chairman of the Behavioral Targeting advertising network Tacoda believes that over the next three years, widgets will change online advertising as we know it today.

Here are his reasons:

• Personal media. Widgets are all about people -- content creators, content modifiers, content critics, critics of content critics, content distributors, content trackers, content viewers, and content engagers. Widgets are to media what Transformers were to children's toys. Widgets puts content -- and ultimately advertising -- in the control of people that use them.

• Lots of "widgetable" content. Widgets are just ways to display or distribute digital content. We have a massive World Wide Web of digital content. There is no shortage of content out there for everyone and anyone -- from professional publishers to content creators to archivists to users -- to put into widgets.

• Lots of distributors and lots of places to distribute. Everyone is getting into the distribution of widgets. The television companies, from NBC/U and Fox to CBS, are doing it. Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and AOL are doing it. Almost 2 million folks have downloaded WeatherBug's various widgets and gadgets, including those built for Vista, Google, Yahoo and Apple. Widget enablers like Brightcove are doing it. MySpace and Facebook are doing it, and so are millions and millions of their users. Millions and millions of blog writers are doing it. The Web is already awash with widgets, and they're all just getting started.

• Desktops are valuable pieces of marketing real estate. On the desktop your brand is constantly displayed, whether it's a permanent home for your logo in the system tray, the toolbar, the start menu, etc. For every minute customers are using their computers, they're viewing your brand in some fashion. And as Eluma's Joe Lichtenberg noted, "a desktop community provides you with a constant connection through which you can stream relevant information, messages, alerts, and offers."

• Sight, sound and motion. Most of the widgets out there today are Flash-based, which means that they can carry video. Video means sight, sound and motion, which is music to the ears of advertisers. Mix that with lots of highly attractive consumers who are deeply engaged in viewing, distributing, modifying and interacting with widgets, and you have a recipe for a robust ad-supported media platform.

• Highly measurable. Where consumers go, advertisers follow with their money, if they can track and measure it. Of critical importance here is that widgets and user interactions with them are highly trackable and measurable.

• Portable to mobile. Finally. While widgets are just starting to explode on the Web, lots of folks are already porting widgets for mobile usage, and Apple's iPhone introduction certainly won't slow that down.

According to my search on indeed.com, there were 344 openings for widget developers so he might be right.

Looks like I'll have to get myself on the SUNY guest list for next year with an update on Mental Telepathy......

I'm thinking of a wonderful marketing communications agency.....

Labels: Online Advertising, recruitment technology, technology, widgets

I'll be skipping up to Syracuse next month to speak to 300 SUNY (State University of New York) (Yes, this is a global blog) Communications professionals on using Technology Trends to increase Student Enrollment.

Since I happen to own my own 16 year old, I've been cheating and looking at what she gets online and in the mail in the way of College marketing materials, just to see if there is anything great and new going on that I might find interesting. Out of the pounds and pounds of letters, postcards and brochures from College hopefuls looking to bring her on campus for the next 4 years, only 1 thing caught my eye.

It was a postcard from Wesley College with her name on it. It invited her to go to a special website like jody.ordioni.wesley.com. Nothing speaks to me like me, so I went on her behalf.

When I got there, I found an invitation to receive more information about the college and a form with her name and address already pre-filled out. All she had to do was hit send.


Personalization is critical to capture the eye of anyone familiar with web 2.0: They're saying "Talk to me!"

In this small example, I've written about a personalized postcard --> leading to a personalized web page with a personalized form already filled out. That makes it ever so easy to hit submit. It got my attention. And my action!

Being the sleuth I am, I have uncovered the requisite talent to enable me to put an integrated marketing campaign like this together for anyone who so desires.

Call Jody.

By the way- yes I am through playing around with my blog template and yes, the new website is closer and closer.

You can check out the home page at www.brandemix.com if you don't believe me.

Labels: Integrated Marketing, Personalization, Student Enrollment, technology

First of all technology--
If you're techno-sexual like I am, you can see who' s been visiting your website and why and where they've come from. For instance, if someone went to google and typed "support with employee communications", and a BRANDEMiX paid search ad appeared next to the search results, and the person clicked on our link and I went to our website (being redone as we speak...really) stats checked the logs, I would know from the IP address who is in need of our services and I could follow up with the appropriate person about how we could help them.

So, that's the technology part. And I mention it because I just did that and saw that someone had shown up on our website from a link from Entrepreneur Magazine so I went to Entrepreneur Magazine and found a whole story about Employee Referral Programs that featured You Know Who (me)! Read it now. You_Know_Who.pdf

That's the PR Part.

So, now you know that in addition to Entrepreneur, Blogger-Phenom and Senior Communications Strategist -- I am also the expert authority on Employee Referral Programs -- always at your service.

And, by the way, the best employees in BRANDEland have come to us as Employee Referrals.

and that's the truth part.

Labels: employee referral, Human Resources, PR, technology

$700 million in sales from a sales force of 2.7 million. But the turnover is pretty high! Not that impressive until you realize that I'm talking about Girl Scout Cookies.

Those delicious Thin Mints, Peanut Butter, Samoas and name your favorite have, like everything else, moved from traditional to the high-tech sales techniques and have become a study of individual entrepreneurship and achievement.

From where I sit, I'm reminded both of The Apprentice and the way technology and Buzz have changed the way we do business, attract business and succeed. And how some people, in this case Sara Cain just use their head to rise above everyone else.

It began with networking- call on friends and family to help succeed in a good cause- and get great cookies in return.

But, according to an article in yesterday's New York Times, Leah Koch, 14 has been using email as a CRM tool. The results-- she went from selling 700 boxes a year to 1,000. Over 40% increase. Expanding her efforts again last year saw sales increase more than 50% to 1,510! Her success is attributed to the fact that email lets customers order on-demand.

Social networking is in vogue as well... check MySpace, YouTube and Friendster. Don't go buying them on Ebay though, because officially, as a price-fixed item, they are not allowed.

And yes, although the internet has brought many new options, there's still something to be said for community activation and great business sense.

That's where Sarah Cain comes in. She looked through the phone book (what's that?) and came up with the idea of offering Car Dealerships the option of giving away a box with every test drive.

But Sarah was not content. This year she developed a Powerpoint presentation and is making sale pitches aimed at the hotel industry. Her goal? Doubling her sales from last year. Her pitch? Everyone needs a box of familiar cookie comfort. Her incentive? The idea of doing good for the organization and a T-Shirt.

There are so many lessons here.

Labels: community service, Girl Scouts, recruitment technology, sales, technology, Word of Mouth marketing

The topic of the day is Technology 2.0 and I'm preparing a speaking presentation on the subject and doing a lot of research. I came across a great article today on a subject that I've been getting a lot of interest in. That is-- setting up a MySpace site for B to B.

Hopefully you've seen the BRANDEMiX site on MySpace. Been there. Done that. We don't get a lot of interest and we don't have a lot of friends, but on the other hand, we don't invest a lot of time in it so I guess that's fair.

For those of you who are interested in buying banner advertising on MySpace -- there's a $25,000 minimum for a campaign. I sent in a request about 2 weeks ago for a client and haven't heard back yet so I guess there's a waiting list.

But this article I read talked about doing a viral campaign where you can offer an incentive for having people place your banner on their site. The article said that traffic increased from 200 to 9,000 hits in one day.

That sounds great. Suggestion- make sure your website is where you want it to be before launching anything like this. But don't be afraid to have fun.

Call me with your questions and if you're doing anything of interest in the tech recruiting arena, I'd love to hear from you before my Prezzy next month.

Labels: MySpace, Recruiting, technology, Trends

According to an article by David H. Freedman in Inc. Magazine: "Computers will be able to react based on the sum total of all available data--in other words, on the same information that informs a human being's decisions today." In turn, today's new executives may be "every bit as clever as your old ones," even if "they may not be human."

Thanks to new software, computer systems are "on the verge of making a quantum leap in brainpower" that enables them to "take action" based on years of data compiled. One company leading for this to happen is the California-based iSpheres, which specializes in "complex event processing systems." Presently this technology carries a pricetag around $100,000, although that price is anticipated to "drop over time."

Says iSpheres CEO Deepak Gupta: "People think real-time decision making is only important in transaction-oriented environments like the stock market, but you might want to know when more than four customers haven't had their calls returned. Or if the humidity inside one of our trucks is rising. If you wait until a problem has escalated, then you may already be dealing with actual losses instead of potential losses."

Less costly are "text-mining engines," which Spanlink CEO Brett Shockley encourages the use of: "Most information today is not in any kind of structured database." Of their specific model, Shockley notes: "Our technology can crawl all that information, parse sentences down to words, and compare the words with a lexicon of the English language."

The Massachusetts-based Cymfony has an engine of their own in development called Orchestra. It "not only finds answers to users' queries, such as 'What do people think of blue soda?' but also points out patterns or trends within the results--for example, that people who live in big cities are more likely to want blue soda, or that people who want blue soda tend to hate pink soda." Cymfony CEO Andrew Bernstein explains: "We can do market segmentation to show who the new users of a product are."

From my standpoint, this sort of article raises many more questions than it answers. As some examples:

- Will experience matter to the hiring process when the needed answers may already be there?

- Is all of the information compiled and made available on this software useful and effective?

- Will most companies be receptive to the idea of asking help from a computer?

- Could this technological advancement become useful to other facets of work beyond Management and Marketing like Human Resources?

- When answers and advice are presented with immediacy, what will happen to needed worker assets like creativity and spontaneity?

All of that said, what do YOU think about the idea of a computer guiding your company's decisions?

Labels: Consulting, Management, technology

See the Future As It Is Happening

This was the view from late 2006 as the ball dropped in the middle of Times Square.

It's a brand new year and promises to be a very excited one at BRANDEMiX as we work with wonderful new clients and create and implement exciting programs aligned with their goals.

Other goings on:

We've recently achieved moderate success with our PR efforts and I'm proud to say that I was featured in the NY Times job section last Sunday and will soon appear in Entrepreneur Magazine talking about Employee Referral Programs and their positive effect on business.

As readers know, we're also hard at work on the new website and should be unveiling it soon.

There are several speaking engagements coming up where we'll be discussing the newest technologies and how to put them to work for your company. Regular readers know this to be a Fav topic of mine and when I'm not hard at work, I'm usually surfing the internet for the next new thing.

Without giving away any secrets, I'll just give you one sample of how Domino's is using Ebay to generate some interest and sales.

They are auctioning off iPods, flat-screen TVs and other high-priced items as part of a new promotion for its $9.99 pizza deals.

For the promotion, set to start Monday, Domino's will place the items for sale for $9.99 on eBay. But people who wish to purchase one of the items will have first have to participate in an online scavenger hunt by visiting another Web site, www.anythinggoesdeal.com. There, they can obtain clues directing them to location of the eBay items by playing a short game or puzzle.

Now, in my mind, the possibilities to use variations on this are endless. If any brave soul would like to explore this for your own purposes, give me a shout out.

Otherwise, best wishes and may all your dreams for the year unfold.

Jody

Labels: employee referral, muse, PR, technology