Like any diehard tech toy junkie, I have been anxiously awaiting the delivery of my iPad. When it arrived on Saturday I wasn’t sure what to expect. My initial reaction was mixed when I saw Steve Jobs’ demo of the device in January and my perceived list of pros and cons had not changed much in the past few months.

As I opened the box, I expected to see a device that would show me a glimpse of the future, but was probably two or three generations away from being ready for main stream adoption. Now that I have had an opportunity to play with it for three days, I still believe it is two or three generation away from main stream options, but I’ve been pleasantly surprised with version 1. Here is a list of things I like, things I don’t and of course, things I want:

Things I Like:

• Display is beautiful. Pictures and video jump off the screen. The larger size greatly enhances web browsing
• Performance – applications open and respond almost instantly
• Great battery life – Working on the device for 8+ hours a day on a single charge
• VGA adapter: This is a big deal if I want to leave my laptop at home when I present at conferences
• Camera USB
• Ability to lock screen directions

The biggest pro is using the device for reading and browsing. I’m not sure it will replace my Nook for reading full length books, but for newspapers, magazines and web browsing, the experience is incredible.

Things I Don’t Like:

• No Flash support. Say what you will about sites being redone in HTML5, but for now, the majority of sites that show video use Flash. At least in the short term this is a big negative and makes giving up your laptop tough.
• No camera: I’m not going to hold the iPad up to take pictures of my family, but a video camera for conference calls is a necessity on the road
• No multitasking
• LCD display is bad in direct sun. As great as the screen looks inside, in direct sunlight it is that bad. Even at the highest brightness, the screen washes out and the glare is so bad it’s easier to see your reflection than the page on the screen (the sun also highlights ever fingerprint)
• Keyboard is much better than the iPhone (just based in size), but still is not great for typing.
• There appears to be some major restrictions with the current version of Keynote available on the iPad. I don’t have it installed, however, based on user reviews, here are some of the issues

No audio

Only supports fonts native to iPad

No ppt export

Importing files (even from Keynote 09) is poor if you have animated slides

• Device is a little too heavy and big to type. It feels great when you are watching or reading, but when you try typing it feels awkward unless you rest it on a flat surface.

Things I Want:

• First, the obvious—camera, flash support, multi-tasking (Hopefully the last two will be addressed in the new OS)
• I know I’m being picky, but the device needs to be lighter. Holding it with one hand on the train to read email or a newspaper is a little more work than expected.
• Improved integration with Outlook. The native applications still lack basics such as setting priority in an email or the ability to forward a meeting request. I was ok with that on my iPhone, but if this is to replace my laptop on short business trips, it needs to improve.
• Better Keynote Integration. This is a must have!
• Make it easier to move between in-boxes if you are managing more than one email account
• Allow the user to control brightness without having to go to the control panel

What I think is really exciting is that we really don’t know what the best use for this device is yet. Apple has provided clay for developers and marketers to mold their own ideas. Will it be a great gaming device? Replace text books in schools? Become the control panel for smarthomes? The possibilities are endless, but one thing is for sure, it’s not going to go away.

Social media is upon us.
It is a fact of life and consumers have made it part of their daily lives.
In other news, brands are still investing small and not so small fortunes creating amazing content for their websites and nobody cares to visit them. On paper, one great solution for this problem is search marketing. You buy keywords, optimize the content on your site for organic search placement, things get better.

Social media can boost a brand even further. And here’s the kicker: it has little to do with the brand website.

The root of the issue is in the following fact: The brand has a website; search marketing looks to drive traffic to that website. If the brand places content in social media, it takes content from brand site and actually puts it, well, away from your website. While you can still link to the brand site, isn’t social media harmful in actually reducing the need to visit that site? If you can get the content on Facebook, where you hang out with your near, far but always dear friends – is it really necessary to go to the brand’s site to get what you are looking for? While intriguing, the answer lies in thinking about what really matters. Skittles, for example, gave up on its website altogether. But three years later, can anyone point out measurable sales increases as a result? What are the key performance indicators (KPIs) a brand would care about? While I personally want the website to be stellar, is it as relevant or important as it was, say, four years ago?

Branding is about searing the name, message or logo of a product or manufacturer deep into your head. Whether the brand achieves consumer impressions on its owned web property or not is immaterial. It is even more important to be able to measure if the brand placement, and the consumer impression it caused, increased the likelihood of a transaction or a purchase. While a brand site can help inform about and portray products really well, social media trumps it on this account. Consumers today trust each other more than they trust their brands. Reviews matter, ratings influence, and if a brand does not track them, it may lose the initiative in controlling its message (Toyota, anyone?). I can probably think up a variety of KPIs but overall the bottom line is this: if you can get the brand online, anywhere, it’s a good thing – and if you get it anywhere other than your own brand website, it’s a very good thing.

So where does search marketing figure out into this? Search marketing at its finest does not just drive traffic to a website, it increases brand impressions. It also reinforces positive brand messages and matches the terms a brand looks to associate itself with, to search keywords. Search engines do not care about your brand website if it has no redeeming quality; it must have content to be interesting and useful to the search engine’s users. Social media has value and content, both searchable and private. Search engines want in and try to extract as much as possible out of social media. If your brand is engaged, search engines will find your content. And by connecting users to the relevant content coming from your brand, marketers get the impressions they so desire.

By now you should be sold. Social media is great. Search marketing helps no matter where your brand is. But how do you measure performance for assets distributed far and wide across social media? One big strength of a brand site comes from the control a marketer has on obtaining performance data about it. Social media sites have no interest in letting you shove Omniture tags into their code. You’re a guest. And in reality, the jury is still deliberating. Snake oil merchants and real scientists claim to have the answer for this need for proof and measurement (eMarketer proves this point). We are getting close to definitive solutions. Due to the resources necessary to successfully measure and track vast amounts of traffic and content, marketers may have to patiently wait or accept less definitive conclusions and research. Until then, there’s always the brand website.

It’s been a busy summer, which transitioned into a busy fall. The Thanksgiving break gave me an opportunity to chip away at the stack of New Yorker magazines that have accumulated on my nightstand. John Colapinto’s “Lunch with M,” from the November 23, 2009 edition, in which he tags along with a reviewer for the New York edition of the Michelin Guide, got me thinking about how brands should be thinking of themselves as as service:

Automobiles were still a rarity on roads in France. The brothers had the idea that a guidebook to hotels in the French countryside would encourage people to climb into a car (equipped with Michelin tires) and hit the open road. The first edition, published in 1900, was a five-hundred-and-seventy-five-page alphabetical listing of towns throughout France and the distances between them, with recommendations for hotels and places to refuel, and instructions on how to change a flat.

At Molecular we are passionate about helping brands provide real, valuable, sustainable service to their consumers. As the Michelin Guide proves, this isn’t a new concept at all. And it seems to have worked out pretty well for them:

Michelin has grown into one of the most successful multinational corporations in the world, a company more than three times the size of Goodyear.

I’ve come up with the following four components that I believe are necessary for a brand to execute a successful service:

1. Deep value: Automobile owners needed a way to find out where to go and how to get there. Michelin provided this for free (initially). The few motorists at the time were given a valuable asset to plan trips, and to maintain their vehicle, and to find reliably good food on the road. As more motorists took to the road, Michelin added the three-star system to denote exceptional cooking. Taking to the road seemed safer with the Guide.
2. Sustainable value: In the preface to the first edition of the guide, André Michelin wrote: ”This work comes out with the century; it will last as long.” There are now other guides, including the survey-based Zagat guide and the crowdsourced Yelp, but chefs in Europe still live by – and die by -  the Michelin Guide. A few years ago, the Guide launched in the United States (in New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco)
3. Edge Business: Michelin’s core competency is in producing high quality tires. The Michelin Guide complemented that business by providing its consumers a reason to drive – it lives at the edge of Michelin’s brand proposition, as opposed to the center.
4. Openness: You don’t need to drive around on Michelin tires to use the guide.

I’m curious to hear what you think – what else makes a brand service-oriented?

Just when you think you’ve got this whole brand experience thing figured out, along comes another form of social media that threatens to shake your grasp on the status quo. Over the past year, Twitter has taken the spanner-in-the-works title from Facebook, which took it from YouTube, which took it from Flickr, and so on. While it can seem daunting to consider managing your company’s image over so many forms of new media, this phenomenon can benefit your company — you have more opportunities than ever to generate positive brand experiences with your customers. Of course, this means there are more chances to make a mess of things as well. So how do you make sure you do more of the former and less of the latter?

1. Be generous
2. Drop the facade
3. Follow through

These principles may be easier for smaller companies to adopt, since they are often in more direct contact with their customers. But just as the web helped to level the playing field for small businesses trying to wrestle mindshare from their larger competitors, social media offers big firms the chance to reconnect with their customers more directly. Perhaps the most appropriate way to introduce the guidelines below is to sum them up in 140 characters or less. Let’s call it the Social Media Golden Rule: Use social media to engage with your customers as you have your vendors to engage with you.

First, be generous
Most of what we think of as social media began life outside the corporation. Flickr, Facebook, Twitter, you name it – they all started as the pet project of small groups of individuals. Lacking corporate sponsorship, these sites relied on the support and contributions of online communities to evolve and to expand. This generosity remains part of the DNA of each of these tools to this day — they are referred to as consumer-generated media for a reason. To engage with these community-driven tools credibly, you must utilize their currency of free information and proper attribution.

While it may be appropriate to announce awards and accolades using social media channels, consider the value of that information to your potential and current customers. Does that announcement entertain, enlighten, or educate your viewers? Think of the difference between sharing the fact that your company won an award versus sharing freely the submission that won the award. To play on the old adage, share, don’t tell.

Self-promotion is a type of sharing, certainly, but it is by definition self-serving (or at least self-centered). The rapid growth of social media tools and sites is due to their ability to convey information with high potential for sharing. One of the best ways to raise your social media credibility, then, is to promote others instead of yourself (or your company). By acknowledging the contributions of others and by promoting their content, you engage in these media’s most definitive act: sharing. Doing so consistently and with relevance to your industry may increase both your credibility and your reach. Your company can become a trusted provider of useful and relevant content, regardless of its source.

The biggest downside to the proliferation of social media is the increasing sense of information overload. While it is to your advantage to share useful information, being an information curator provides an additional expert service to your customers. Any content your company generates will benefit from your reputation as a generous and knowledgeable member of the social media community. You won’t need to promote your company — others will do it for you.

Second, drop the facade
Being authentic does not mean simply representing your company accurately, it means stripping away the pretense. Nothing sets off BS detectors more than when companies use corporate lingo on the blog or via Twitter, or when they share only the most sanitized content on YouTube and Flickr. Press releases are not blog entries. Being authentic means being candid and being real.

You don’t have to air your company’s dirty laundry, but openness and transparency are inherent to the appeal of all social media. Whether they are prospective customers or employees, folks interested in learning more about your company and its corporate culture will look to see how you present yourself via these channels. They can sniff your pretense a mile away — and they won’t like it.

By participating in these media more as a member of the community and less as a corporation, you will be seen as a valued contributor to the culture around each of these tools. The bad news is that letting down your corporate guard is only the first step, if a crucial one. Interacting with your customers on their terms gets you into the game. They will appreciate your effort, but will not forget what you represent: your brand.

Lastly, follow through
Though these media may force you to engage with your customers on their terms, it does not change the fundamental nature of the relationship: They are your customers (or at least potentially so). As such, they will expect you to address their questions (or complaints) with the same attention as you would via more traditional customer service channels. These expectations may seem contradictory or even unfair in light of social media’s more informal atmosphere, but your willingness to accept these terms of engagement can set you apart from other brands.

Twitter may epitomize these competing expectations best, with its simultaneous drive for brevity and immediacy. Customers you please may or may not praise your efforts to their followers, but those you don’t will state their displeasure swiftly and bluntly. Whether broadcast as complaints on your Facebook fan page, or as 140-character open letters, your responses must reflect the same responsiveness and professionalism you would show a customer who has waited too long on hold for customer service. Servicing customer needs in such public forums may not be comfortable, but well-handled resolutions will demonstrate — and broadcast — your commitment to customer service more authentically than any slogan or tag line.

Those of you advocating on behalf of a more formal brand may need to shift your tone of voice when utilizing these media, but you cannot afford to make the mistake of thinking professional customer service etiquette does not apply. Edgy and more casual brands will likely find social media to be familiar ground, but may miss the opportunity to enhance their perceived accountability.

Conclusion
Social media tools like Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, and YouTube encourage candid dialog and responsive interactions. Most people appreciate those qualities in any relationship — not just the one they have with their vendors of choice. When combined with a willingness to be accountable, these elements provide the raw material your company can use to create positive brand experiences.

The barrier for entry to participate with these media is so low that it is tempting to just jump in and figure it out along the way. Some folks may advise you that since these media cost nothing, you have nothing to lose. That perspective forgets the possibility of a company damaging its brand reputation. So while it is untrue that engagement with social media has only upside, it is true that these tools offer potentially huge returns on your investment. Keep the three principles outlined in this article in mind as you craft your social media marketing strategy, but if in doubt, remember the Golden Rule: Engage with your customers as you would have your vendors engage with you.

[Written for and originally published at iMedia Connection]

On Friday, October 23rd 2009, adidas launched the next generation of miCoach – the interactive coaching system that delivers audible coaching while you run. At its conception miCoach was a means by which to allow users to experience the adidas brand in their daily life.

An innovative blend of hardware, software, and web experience – the system empowers users to set and achieve goals – being coached by adidas every step of the way. The system allows a user to manage their active life, and be motivated by seeing their workout results on a highly immersive web experience.

For adidas, the interactions that users have with miCoach reinforces the users relationship with the adidas. In other words, it creates time with the brand. This approach is a more effective investment of marketing money because of the depth and longevity of the interaction with the target audience. Moreover, the interaction creates valuable insights into customer behavior and allows adidas to market to the user in a more relevant way – in the context of the users life.

The service itself has been extended to allow users to take miCoach into the users social realm – namely Facebook. Users are now able to share their latest workout with their personal friends via Facebook or email. The benefit for the user is that they can share an important aspect of their life with friends. For adidas, this is an invaluable manner in which to get trusted referrals for their service (and brand) to a broader populous.

Molecular has been a key part of the realization of this adidas service from its conception. By partnering with Molecular, adidas has a partner capable of pairing insightful user experience design, stellar creative and deep technical expertise to bring miCoach to life. As the nascent marketing initiative transforms into an exemplary digital and business marketing stalwart, Molecular is enabling adidas to push the boundaries of interactions with its key audiences.

miCoach has successfully bridged the gap between the users analog and digital daily lives. By providing hardware to coach you while you run and then parlaying that information to the web where the users transformation is illuminated, adidas is establishing its brand in the users life. miCoach is the future of marketing and branding.

Following up on my post on Facebook fan pages, InsideFacebook’s Eric Eldon broke the news that Facebook is working harder to verify the authenticity of the people behind fan pages on its site. If you are fan of say, Lenovo laptops, there was nothing preventing you from setting up a fan page for the company. If Lenovo decided to launch their own fan page at a later date, they would wake up to the fact that it was already occupied or taken. Brands are left with little options other than join forces with people who do not necessarily behoove to their marketing message, or try and launch a page in parallel, to varying degrees of success. Contacting Facebook for help does not guarantee you action or relief.

We feel fan pages hold great promise. A story on PRI radio show Marketplace tells the story of The Coca-Cola company successfully teaming up with individuals who set up its fan page before its own marketing team got to it. The brand’s strength and its passionate following helped it garner a following that is almost 4 million users strong.

Hopefully the new verification measures will reduce the chances of such brand name squatting on Facebook.

After years of anticipation – the shift from traditional to digital is becoming real. The UK became the first major economy to achieve this milestone – according to the Internet Advertising Bureau of Britain. Internet ad spend accounted for 23.5% of the British advertising market . Print was still in first place, with 30% of the market, but had recorded steep declines.

As the internet begins to replace print as the primary source of consumer news and information, as well as encroach upon television as a deliver vehicle for info-entertainment, this trend will only continue to be more exaggerated.

The industries recovering from the global economic downturn will demand  measurable channels in which to spend their marketing budgets. Internet has an inherent advantage around measureability – although solid practices enabling this are still in its early stages . As he internet transitions into the central medium around which overall marketing campaigns will be based, digital marketers will be tapped to deliver robust strategies to lead the marketing initiatives within their organizations.

Isobar Global’s Dan Calladine is Molecular’s guest blogger.  If you have any questions for Dan, add a comment to any of his posts.  You can also follow Dan at http://digital-examples.blogspot.com/ or on Twitter @dancall.

I was at a media event in London recently when someone from the traditional media side (not my company, I should add) went into a big rant about ‘what is digital?’

I really don’t see where the confusion comes in. ‘Digital’ isn’t an abstract concept, like ‘Girl Power’; it’s pretty easy to define and visualise.

Are posters digital? Yes, if they’re digital posters
Is mobile digital? Yes, almost all mobile is through digital networks these days
Is press digital? Yes, if it’s online… & so on.

The main thing about ‘digital’ is that the content and data is transferred digitally, and this means that you can often collect it and count it. This is what I love about digital media – admittedly I’m a bit of a geek – we’re constantly finding new and unusual ways of measuring actual data, not just surveying people. (& that’s why Omniture, a digital measurement company was sold for $1.8bn last week.)

Some relatively random recent examples:

Video: Services like Visible Measures can track and aggregate the number of views of a video across all the major video platforms in the world – they were able to show that Thriller received 28m views across all sites in the week after Michael Jackson died.

Social Media: While the twitter user base is not demographically representative, the site provides lots of data that can be aggregated and analysed. At university we used to do content analysis on newspaper stories; content analysis on twitter can looks at hundreds of thousands of posts and return findings like 20% of tweets are related to brands or products, or 15% of tweets can be classified as ‘porn spam’.

Mobile: Mobile ad servers can show the direct response rates of mobile ads, and demonstrate that the average click rates on mobile ads are approximately half those of online ads. Of course the click is not the only reaction an ad is intended to create, but it does show that apps and content are likely to be more powerful communications devices with mobile, and luckily you can measure the popularity of different apps.

Finally, you can be very creative about what you measure, and get high-sample size results for the strangest things. The free dating site OkCupid did this last week with this study of the response rates to emails sent on their sites, based on the content of the emails.

“#1 – Be literate. Netspeak, bad grammar, and bad spelling are huge turn-offs. Our negative correlation list is a fool’s lexicon: ur, u, wat, wont, and so on. These all make a terrible first impression. In fact, if you count hit (and we do!) the worst 6 words you can use in a first message are all stupid slang.

Language like this is such a strong deal-breaker that correctly written but otherwise workaday words like don’t and won’t have nicely above average response rates (36% and 37%, respectively).

Interesting exceptions to the “no netspeak” rule are expressions of amusement. haha (45% reply rate) and lol (41%) both turned out to be quite good for the sender. This makes a certain sense: people like a sense of humor, and you need to be casual to convey genuine laughter. hehe was also a successful word, but much less so (33%).

Scientifically, this is because it’s a little evil sounding. So, in short, it’s okay to laugh, but keep the rest of your message grammatical and punctuated.”

That’s the thing about digital – so much is potentially measurable, and you can really start to have fun when you think about what to do with the data that you collect.

App Store search placement is a huge driver of iPhone app downloads and sales, especially if you don’t have a big media buy to support the app. If a consumer finds your offering in the App Store, it’s safe to assume they’re a qualified lead, and they’re literally one click away from converting. 

But what affects how “findable” an app is in the App Store? If one can’t count on getting in Apple’s “Top 25″ or “What’s Hot” lists, what other options does a fledgling app have to gain consumer visibility?

The answer is keyword search optimization, which is like web SEO, but focused on the nuances of the iTunes App Store search algorithm. The following article provides tips for improving the searchability and findability of your iPhone applications and, ultimately, increasing downloads and sales.

1. Downloads are huge.
 The number of downloads is the number one factor in search ranking placement, by a large margin. For this reason, brands should consider launching apps at a low initial price point to help boost the download count as quickly as possible.

2. Ratings don’t matter (for search).
Positive (or negative) consumer ratings and reviews are not included in the calculations for ranking placement (or if they are, it’s a very slight effect). Of course, ratings are still important for conversions, but if your primary objective is search placement, you’ll want to focus your efforts elsewhere.

3. Descriptions don’t matter either.
 Due to the emergence of “spammy” app descriptions that go on and on for pages and mention every keyword imaginable, Apple is changing the way keyword search works.  Instead of matching against both title and description, the company has added a new “keywords” field and will be phasing out descriptions from consideration in the search algorithm. 

According to Apple, “It is important to enter keywords for all applications as soon as possible so your application can continue to be successfully located on the App Store.” Due to these changes, be sure to focus your app descriptions on telling the features-and-benefits story, and not on search placement.

4. Make every keyword count.
 The new keywords field can contain a maximum of 100 characters (comma-delimited). So instead of a thousand-word description, you’re down to around 12 keywords. These keywords can only be entered when you upload a new version of your app; at that point, they’re set in stone until the next version. 

These 12 keywords are the most important decisions you can make for search placement, so it’s critical to develop a strategy. Come up with a prioritized list, and try searching for various combinations to see what comes up in the store. Some strategies may involve picking keywords where there’s no competition; others may involve piggybacking on the competition. 

5. Get creative with the title.
 One workaround for the new keyword limitation is to put a short description after the App Store title. For example, I recently changed the title of one of my apps from “On the Clock” to “On the Clock – time tracking for clients, projects and tasks.” However, like keywords, titles are “set in stone” and can’t be changed until you release a new version. Treat them as an extension of your keywords, and if you touch on a target word in your title, don’t waste a keyword on it.

6. Review text is ignored.
 Textual consumer reviews are not considered at all in keyword search matching. For example, if a review boasts that “This bird watching app sure beats fishing!” that app will not appear in searches for “fishing.” In other words, worry about what reviews will do for your conversion, not what they’ll do for your search placement.

There are over 65,000 applications available on the App Store today. The vast majority of apps enjoy a brief spike of downloads upon release and then quickly fall off as other newly-released apps fill in behind them. 

Optimizing your iPhone applications for search using the guidelines above can help to build and sustain demand for your applications. While these guidelines work for the App Store today, the rules have changed since launch, and they’ll no doubt change again as Apple continues to evolve the App Store. Until that happens, choose your keywords carefully, get creative with the title, and beg, borrow and steal to increase your download count.

When you live in the middle of the digital marketing and media revolution, it is sometimes easy to overlook the problems and changes that many industries are experiencing. Not long ago, Public Relations (PR) was considered the most cost-effective way of getting an organization’s name out to the masses. Here in Boston, there are a myriad of PR organizations, and they are fighting tooth and nail to retain business. I wonder, however, if they don’t see the change that is happening around them. Or perhaps, similar to print media, they see it, but are not quite sure what to do about it.

As I pondered this dilemma, a few possibilities occurred to me. I segmented my thinking in the three ways- short, medium and long term. I also realize that painting in broad strokes affords me liberties that are not true in business.  Oh, the beauty of blogging!

I strongly believe that the goal of public relations has a great deal of value. It is not the value proposition that needs to change, but rather the mechanism/tactics through which it is delivered. Therefore, in the short term, the tactics employed by a classic PR agency must evolve to embrace and leverage social media elements. If you consider the capabilities being offered by many PR agencies today, they still tout old school capabilities like press releases, media tours, messaging, highlighting executives, by-lines etc. These are all well and good, but how many of us read a press release? And if I wanted to learn about an executive, I expect to hear what that person has to say on YouTube or perhaps read it on their blog. A PR agency does not have to change the overall strategy, It simply has to  incorporate these social media elements and tactics.

In the medium term, there may be opportunities for intersection of PR and digital marketing. To this point, digital marketing has been focused around traditional marketing through digital media. The skills and approach that PR experts bring to the table might be key to understand what drives people to organically and virally consume content. Communication strategy has not been the strong suit of digital agencies, but by virtue of being a rapidly evolving space, it may be time for the digital team to drive this strategy. In other words, leverage the experience, approach and thinking that is the corner stone of PR , but apply it to the digital medium and realize that the sum of these parts will be greater than the whole (i.e. PR + digital agency = future)

The long term approach is far more radical. It is anyone’s guess as to where the quickly changing environment will settle. The good people in the print media are having one summit after another to morph their operational and profit models to return to viable businesses. These media outlets have been the main stay of PR – not to mention the bane of their existence. My belief is that the trade of PR relations will begin to focus on experts and consumers. The middle ground of journalists and print publications as we know it will seize to exist. They will be replaced by centers of interest (i.e., think communities or groups), who create and maintain their own ecosystem content creation, commerce, reviews, communities – specific to that interest. This would not only impacts PR, but digital marketing and business in general.

There is a future for PR, but it is irrevocably coupled with the digital medium and digital marketing. The scary consideration is that these PR agencies must act now so that they do not face the same predicament as the print industry.