I Honor the Place Where the MARK Bookmark and I Become One [Bookmark]
[Yanko Design ]
Monday, November 05, 2007
[Yanko Design ]
Wearable VholdR Palm-Sized Camcorder is Tiny, Convenient and Sturdy [Camcorders]
Airbox CM3 Turns Your Car Into a Wi-Fi Hotspot, Even at 100 MPH [Wireless]
As you might have guessed, the Airbox is powered by a car cigarette lighter, but what is really interesting is the compact size. The weight is comparable to a paperback book, and the dimensions are small enough to place it under a car seat. You can even take it indoors and connect it to a standard electrical socket for home use. Available for a whopping $499 (cellular data plan required.) [WAAV via Gizmag]
Salesforce Lets Loose Digg-For-Ideas
It’s targeted at, and works best for, existing Salesforce customers with a specific community of customers. Unlike the free opensource Pligg, this software may cost you. It’s being release for free to professional, enterprise, and unlimited customers. But anyone off the Salesforce platform using the service has to buy a license, which can cost anywhere from $50-$100 per user per month. I’d recommend (free) Satisfaction’s help and idea board for businesses with larger audiences.
Salesforce is pushing the platform integration because unlike Pligg, Ideas’ will know who your customers are. The system will integrate with your CRM account to let only those users in.
The concept is pretty straight forward and a bit more exciting than a straight idea forum. Yahoo has even launched a similar product for their own use. On Salesforce Ideas Users can post product ideas to a moderated board, which everyone can promote or demote up and down the board. The most popular ideas, based on the frequency of promotions over a period of time, make it to the top of the board. Attached to each idea is a discussion thread, where members can leave comments building on the idea.
Salesforce claims to have used ideas on the board to improve their product, and even drive ideas for some AppExchange startups (AppExtremes, Appirio). After a year, their board has about 13,000 users, 5,000 ideas, and drives 100K pageviews per month. Dell runs an instance of the board on Dell Idea Storm, which it credits with the idea to pre-install the Ubuntu Linux operating system on select consumer desktops and notebooks in the U.S, UK, France and Germany.
BuzzLogic Launches Innovative Advertising Platform - Combining Buzz and Ads
Tonight they launch what I believe is an excellent addition to their service offering. When a company uses the BuzzLogic monitoring service, they can track who is talking about their product/service (the influencers and the conversations) and monitor the buzz. BuzzLogic has their own ranking systems and provide a more rounded view on what's going on. Just because a blog is ranked 1st for a specific term/category does not mean they will rank the same across any topics they cover. I like this because it allows their clients to see everyone who is speaking about a specific product, not just what some top x list says.
Their new offering is an advertising platform build on top of Google AdSense with other ad networks coming in the near future. The idea is simple in description: once you find out which blogs are talking about your product, you want to advertise your product on those sites to reinforce the message. The actual ad creation process is the same as with AdWords, actually it's exactly the same except it's in the BuzzLogic framework. The real difference is the site targeting. You use the BuzzLogic service to select the sites based on the analysis you have completed. Then you buy ads on those sites. You can see a sample screenshot of the pre-AdWords piece below.
I asked about sites that aren't using Google AdWords and basically those sites won't be available for purchase. As I noted above, more networks are coming soon they tell me. What I don't know is if a site has site-targeting off, what happens. I have site targeting off but would like to be included in the ad buys.
It's an interesting way to "join the conversation" - it's not as effective as actually joining the conversation in comments and reaching out to the writer, but it is a way to get a message out to specific sites discussing a specific product or service.
If you remember back to when the iPhone dropped price and Nokia had some keyword buys, this tool would work well for that type of ad purchase - Nokia could select the blogs that are influencers around the iPhone and get quick access to their readerbase.
One of the quotes they sent over after our conversation comes from Lending Club, a company covered many times on CN. Renaud Laplanche, founder and CEO says, "Social media is becoming the go-to place for our potential customers to learn about Lending Club as they seek advice and information regarding personal finance. BuzzLogic makes it possible for us to target our advertising placements in association with those personal finance conversations, creating a greater value in our advertising spend."
Again, this should be viewed as a complement and not a replacement to joining the conversation. But it is a powerful complement.
Here is a sample of the interface for selecting the "influencers":
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