Pebble first smart watch, now shipped!

Today first Pebble smart watches are shipped.

The project, funded by crowd funding site kickstarter, has successfully raised more than $10M.

The funding has been launched on April 11th and closed on May 18th last year.

Pebble connects to iPhone and Android smartphones using Bluetooth, alerting you with a silent vibration to incoming calls, emails and messages. It displays caller ID and SMS messages (android only). 

But  the most important feature is that it can be customizable to meet an infinite variety of use through downloadable internet-connected apps.

Check out this video :

The pebble app is still pending approval on apple store while annouced for Jan 24th on google play store.

Social Media Marketing

What is Social Media?

Social Media is a term that you would come across a lot these days.
Since Web 2.0 have emerged, people kept sharing ideas, thoughts, facts via every means possible on the web ; text, image, video ... .
Simply social Media is any website or platform that makes possible interactions between people in order to share, co create, discuss user provided contents.
You can see that this definition applies to social networking, social video and photo sharing or wikis platforms.
Examples: Of course facebook, youtube and wikipedia are the well known ones. Blogger is also a social media which i am using to share with you knowledge and ideas.

What does it have to do with marketing ?

Benefits

Having access to what interests people, what they like and share right on your finger tips has always been every marketer's dream. But today, thanks to social media this dream has come true.
This is a major benefit but it is not the only one. Social media serves the whole marketing chain.

Social media are so important for marketing with regards to many apsects :

• Social media are an excellent tool to watch trends but also to get feedback.
• It is also a modern way to build a relationship with an audience (become a page's fan)
• Social media is a tremendous vector for word of mouth (recommandations)
• Campaigns impacts are now easily measurable almost in real time mode (number of likes, shares, tweets, ....)

You might think this is it, but there is more :

• Social Media is engaging and interactive
• Social media serves inbound marketing

Cool but be carefull

You can't have your cake and eat it too. Going on social media requires precautions.

Word of mouth gets exponential on social media  and this means bigger crisis with written statements.

Well, that is too scary and extreme. The fact is, going on social media requires adequate means to listen to customers and process their feedback, and investing in resources to work on this, in order to properly deal with crisis management and exposure to the public. 

Going on social media just for the fun of it or just because everybody is there, is just a big mistake.

Social Media and Traditional Marketing

Social Media in the marketing mix

A product always fullfils a customer need. In the bascis of marketing, the four c's has to be set.
Social media is then a component that influences a lot the promotion part (old 4P's) or the communication part (customer centric 4C's).
Customer habits and attitudes evolved a lot with internet. As internet is your fastest track to get information about anything you want, it is sure that being on the social media gives a lot more visibility to the business and the offers. We are all "GOOGLE"'s children.
Looking for info, building knowledge, asking for advice or getting a best practice all these needs flicks  in one's mind as a reflex just google it.
Then if you have a space where customers with precise needs, can find all the information they need and better, get access to peers' opinions and  even better other customers recommending your product, then that place would be a store, and on the internet nothing else than a social media.
Now in the same way, your store has to be where your customers are, you have to choose the social media platform on which are your customers

Social media marketing approach

Sharing ideas has never been easier with social media.
Sharing interest has never been easier with social media.
Sharing desires has never been easier with social media.
Sharing Actions has never been easier with social media.

Than you would say enough with this annoying repetitions, it is just what all marketing is about, cultivating  in this precise order :

• Awareness
• Interest
• Desire
• Action

You would then recognize here the purchase funnel in a social media community. This why social media is so important in marketing , nowadays.

Social media does not really revolutionize marketing, it is just a way, a potential to consider in marketing.

Social media facts

Talking about potential, how come?

Recent studies have proven the following :

• Time spent on social media is by far longer than the time spent on any website:

Over 20% of the browsing time is spent on social networks/blogs.
Over 47% of the streaming time is spent on YouTube

• focus on social media is competing with mass media. It is very commun to watch TV and have a tablet on your thighs connected to a social media.

Over 40% of people visited a social networking site during a TV program or a commercial.

• The number of social media subscribers compared to the population is showing an interesting ratio going up year after year with a steep growth curve.

(figures source: Nielsen Digital Consumer report 2012)

Clearly a potential not only according to these facts but also because  it has to be used with relevance.

Social Media and Marketing

Cloud Computing

Definition

Some would say that the cloud is still being defined. In some extent this is correct provided the evolutive aspect of the concept. The thing is, many of the Internet users are already cloud users without knowing it. Webmail service is a perfect example of cloud services.

Let's first look at the definition given by the National Institutes of standards and Technology (NIST) :

"Cloud computing is a model for enabling convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction."

We can already see that this applies to one's gmail, yahoo, hotmail, ... account used through the web.

You get an access to the service by your self through your Internet browser, just with few clicks and it is operational.
But do you know where your data are actually stored. That could be anywhere but you don't care. This where the whole cloud philosophy lies in.

History

It is not by chance that cloud computing has been developing considerably over these past few years. The cloud is actually the 5th generation coming in the IT landscape. The cloud find its essence in the past 4 generations:

1rst generation: Mainframe

In the 1960's, mainframes were the solution for bulk data and back office processing. As this technology was very expensive, it has been first used by both corporate and governmental organizations for critical tasks like batch billing and census operations. Users where generally connected to the mainframe through passive terminals to execute jobs.

Later on modern mainframes were used for their powerful performance with the development of e-business.

2nd generation: PC

The PC is intend  to be used by the end user with no intervention of a computer operator. Reduction in size and sales price made this technology accessible for individual use. Desktop computer spread in the corporate environment and workgroups networking developed to address the resource sharing in offices.

3rd generation : Client/server architecture

Client server/ architecture addressed again the resource sharing and data centralization issues.

However, the spread of automation and process application through corporations raised a new issue: System integration. IT systems needed to communicate with each other in order to fulfill actions engaging multiple departments each using it is own business supporting application.

ERP was a concept answering this need however such solution is out of reach of mid size businesses.

4th Generation: Dynamic Web, Web 2.0, SOA, Virtualization

the 4th generation comes with four major concepts that revolutionized the web and the IT landscape within corporations.

• Dynamic web made possible the web page generation or change on the client side according to the interaction of the user.
• Web 2.0 made it possible for me as web user not only to consume content made available but also to put in and enrich with my own content and to interact with other users. More generally web 2.0 allows the use of the web site as content sharing and social media interaction platform.
• SOA this concept made even the interaction between multiple application as simple as web querying of published services.
• Virtualization made it possible to run application on different OS but simultaneously on a single server

5th generation Cloud computing:

Here comes the cloud as the 5th generation taking its essence from past evolutions and evolving needs and concerns.

The spread of computers and last evolutions like virtualization and SOA contributed to the development of the cloud concept to adress the need of fast deployment and resource pooling: 

• Most of businesses perceive their IT department as a cost center and not able to keep up with fast changes induced by the rapid market mutation and harsh competition. 
• Needs in terms of capacity may vary over the year and according to the activity nature so that investments in additional hardware are most of the time used at 100% only on a limited period of the year

The following presentation gives a quick overview of what is cloud computing and what are cloud services.

Cloud Computing Eng Sept 2012