I’ve touched the importance for SMEs and local entrepreneurs presence on the web. And it’s also related to my post about digital communication being, or becoming, the hub of all future market communication. I’m not the person to come with predictions, but on the other hand I can’t see any other way that SMEs and local businesses need to adjust to this future evolvement. Obviously it’s still about the marcom mix; you do the ads in the local paper, the direct marketing campaigns etc. But the consumers media consumption is changing, the patterns, which businesses need to adjust to.

Another (potential) evolvement is within different social media; they’re becoming more specialised, more of niche channels. Also from a local point of view. You need to reach your consumer where they are. And the new ways to reaching out isn’t about pushing; it’s interaction, creating value where your end-user is participating on a voluntary basis.

This adjustment isn’t any utopia anymore. From a technical, and economical, aspect more services and tools are becoming available, which makes possibilities for a lot more businesses to put digital on the agenda.  

We are very excited about a project where we’re going to test our own service, and where it’s going to be integrated in various channels and in a relevant mix of market communications. More about that asap.  

Tags: social media, marketing, interaction, communications mix

Yes, we’re talking digital marketing. First of all, I think the category is slightly indistinct, or rather arbitrary. I’m not entirely convinced that SEO is a way of marketing, but I’ll leave that question and rather put some light the future of marketing (whereas SEO still is a part, but anyway).

Check Paul Isakson’s slide, there’s some relevant, simple and great illustrations of the future of (digital) marketing and branding. Digital is more and more becoming the hub of the marketing. Today and in the future, and the new ways are about interacting, engaging, creating new values etc.

It’s always inspirational reading about all classic and new examples; things seem rather obvious and easy. But if you’re not Coca Cola, where do you start?

I think it’s a matter for both (some) agencies and SMEs to start thinking about digital in new terms. If the digital isn’t integrated; you need to start re-thinking. It’s definitely going to be the future of marketing. And it’s not always about the most innovative ideas; it’s about daring to unleash them.    

Tags: marketing, digital, seo, engagement, yooba,

Following up on Pontus post  and other discussions regarding the increasing importance of a presence in different social networks. You definitely need to keep an eye on what’s happening; what are people saying about you; you need to listen, interact, and learn. You can also be the originator of the interaction, create your own social arena or reach out in different channels that aren’t your own.

You, as in your company that is.

For us at Yooba it has been a really natural thing to do, it’s just so easy. It doesn’t cost you anything except your own involvement and time.

For us it’s initially about creating awareness; we must set our identity, position ourselves – build relations etc. The best way is to do it amongst your peers. Obviously there might be a long leap between having an genuine position amongst early adopters and to actually sell your product on a competitive market. But good products sell, right!? I’m a bit pragmatic here, but you get my point. To evolve your fantastic product you need to listen and, or even better, ask what other think could improve your product and therefore more attractive on the market.

As always I find good stuff over here, and they’re talking about P2P, person to person. Due to all new tools, the general public has changed in a dramatic way. It’s dramatic as it gives us, as a company, new ways to reach out, and it’s dramatic in the way any individual can do it. Some people are talking about a paradigm shift, I’m not entirely sure what they mean, or maybe we just have different notions on the word paradigm. First and foremost I think it’s just technical progression, which in many ways has changed the landscape but the “mediascape” is constantly changing and has been.

You just need to adopt yourself and use it for the benefit of all.

Tags: social media, marketing, blogs

The change in the media landscape has been immense over the last decade. Internet came along to speed up the globalization and created forces that weren’t heard of before. The traditional media outlets have been challenged by millions of fast moving entities like blogs, sites and different social networks.

 

This challenges companies to shift their focus from only covering the major media streams, to also involve all this newly hatched tadpoles that grows to form strong communities.  That information is just as important for you and how you do your business. This also means that you need to find new ways to collect the information to find out what people are saying about your company, or your segment, and you need to cover it more regularly.

 

If you are still sitting there with your fishing rod waiting for the big fish, you need to check your social trawl to get the full picture. The social trawl might include some surprising creatures that can change the way you should steer your boat. Have you checked your social trawl today?

 

Tags: social media, marketing, blogs, media

Last time I spoke a bit about the three probably largest RIA technologies: Adobe Flex, Microsoft Silverlight and Sun JavaFX.
This time, we're going to take a short introductionary look at Mozilla Labs Prism.

As described at the Mozillas Developer Center, Prism is a "simple XULRunner-based browser that hosts web applications without the normal web browser user interface". So, what exactly does that mean? Prism allows you to run web applications (built using XUL) from the desktop, without the need to fire up your regular browser.

XUL is a markup language, used to describe applications made for Prism (or any other XULRunner) and works very much like MXML or XAML. Together with XUL, JavaScript is used to write the application logic, and CSS is used to style the applications. There's a lot Prism has in common with other RIA technologies and I think it's good that we have several options to choose from, even though considering the actual choosing can be a tricky part.

What could speak for Prism is the possibility that applications using XUL could be launched either from the desktop or from within a browser (such as Firefox 3) supporting it. With the Firefox market share growin, more and more users will be able to run these applications.

Marco Casario made a good presentation where you can find more on the different RIA technologies.

As with the prevoius mentioned RIA technologies, I think it's worth keeping an eye on Prism. And, they have a pretty icon.

Tags: mozilla, prism, xul, firefox

The web is your home today, isn't it? I would feel quite handicapped if I couldn't access a browser for a few days since I've got pretty much everything I need on the Internet. A lot of the daily work is web based for me, and it brings a lot of possibilities to the work flow. There are more collaborative possibilities, your work will be available from any computer, there's no need for extra installed programs since you've got all you need in your browser. The future holds more opportunities for having everything available anytime, anywhere. People are using the web today more than ever, and it's not only because of social communities like Facebook. There are many possibilities today for having the web as your office, and more applications will come. New Rich Internet Applications pop up everyday, some more successful than others.

With new techniques there will be new ways of handling things. As stated in our newly released teaser movie, there was a time when the process of creating the smallest campaign took ages, simple things as a banner or a tiny advertisement could take days, and bigger web projects would take months! With Yooba there will be a new era, a change in how things will be created. The use of Yooba Studio will make the creation of interactive rich media a piece of cake. The effort that was needed before will be reduced a lot, and as we've said before: anyone could do this. You don't need to be a Flash master, a master programmer or a succesful graphic artist. Your creations will be terrific anyway, all it takes is an idea of what you would like to do.

We've got the tools, and you've got the creative ideas. Let's combine those and make some really exciting content!

Tags: interactive marketing, rich media, ria

If you haven’t noticed, a new Yooba film is out. It’s on our site as well as here. Our aim was to bring some new light to the service; present some features and capabilities. There’s still more to come.

Enjoy!

Tags: yooba, caliban, interactive marketing, rich media,

On Tuesday night we went to a Q&A with myspace. They now have an office in Stockholm. Apart from introducing their new developer platform, they were talking about the importance of local presence. Even though many talks about the “alarming” decrease of interest in Facebook and myspace, I don’t think we are going to see that. But I think these players need to adjust themselves to the next phases of how we are going to use these social networks. They need to go local, as they are doing. Or rather they need to make it possible to maintain and develop the users’ local presence or community. The ability to act locally is still very important if you look at networking, and actually the possibilities to work in a creative manner. At myspace I’ve been friend now with loads of prominent people, but now I want combine my digital networking possibilities to take part of a real, local, and creative community. 

What about your local presence from a business perspective?

The social networks are definitely excellent tools to evolve your local presence; communicate and strenghten your brand. But they’re still just one small path on the road of marketing communication. But a very effective.

The overall web presence for local companies is still left a bit behind though, and I think It’s very important to try to adjust your channels of communication to the users behaviour; i.e. increase and improve your web presence.

Obviously there might an economical threshold for a small company, but it might also be a case of prioritising your marketing budget and working on the marketing communications mix. If we narrow it down to a campaign activity; isn’t 200 local contacts for the local company, equivalent in value, to 200 000 for the global company?

Tags: myspace, internet marketing, campaigns, web presence, social media,

Of course, we need to stay humble. And obviously we are. But this prooves that if you got good content you will get the attention. To some extent. As a (so far) relatively unknown actor as we are, we still need to do a bit of pushing, especially if we’re looking at new channels such as different social media. Or actually everywhere. So I think it's about the mix of viral and WOM.

I do remember reading about some respected “guru” saying something about; “if you got good content, you’ll get the WOM”.

And, yeah, it does work, but you still need to work hard to make you seen and heard.

Thanks to mydesignaward.com for the recognition.

Tags: yooba, mydesignaward, word of mouth, social media, viral marketing

As with every development project, there's a decision to be made what technology you're going to use to build it and with Yooba Studio things were no different. Since we were building a RIA, the options narrowed down a bit. Having years of experience developing with Flash, the choice for us was Adobe Flex.

That was quite some time ago. Since then other technologies have shown up, and I'm guessing making the decision today can be quite hard for a lot of developers. Inside RIA recently compared the three big ones: Adobe Flex, Microsoft Silverlight and Sun JavaFX.

Silverlight has the advantage of a very mature developing platform (Visual Studio) and a huge developer community. Sun is offering an interesting thing with JavaFX, building on well known technology and with the recent announcement of it being used in the Blu-Ray specification making it even more interesting. One thing that speaks for Flex is the fact that applications made with it can be used by alot of people, without them having to download and install another plugin. Also, the recent release of Flex Builder 3 presents developers with a great tool for design as well as coding.

The choice we made of Adobe Flex as 'our' RIA technology still stands today, but it's going to be very interesting to see what Microsoft and Suns RIA offerings can bring in the future.

Tags: adobe, flex, microsoft, silverlight, sun, javafx