Digital Sherpa

Let me be your Digital Marketing Sherpa!

[10101sherpa]

Next Big Thing: Live-streaming

Live streaming your world is on the cusp of becoming the next big thing. 

Twitter today announced the launch of Periscope, an app that lets you broadcast live to the world... from your cell phone. And with that the next big thing looks like it has arrived. 

Twitter delivers real-time conversation. With Periscope, they now offer real-time video that feels more immediate than anything Snapchat or Instagram can deliver.

Of course, early efforts like Justin.tv, Ustream, Livestream, YouNow have been with us for some time, but never really caught on huge with the general public. 

But now, it looks as if the time has finally arrived for live streaming in the same way that cord cutters have been with us for some time (roughly 2% of the US market) but look about to takeoff in 2015. 

If you believe the pundits and the venture capital folks, people are finally taken with the idea of live broadcasting from across town or across the world with nothing more than a smartphone and a data connection. 

One more thing for parents and educators to worry about. Brace yourself for the coming deluge of debate that will follow the ability to live stream discretely from any smartphone. Think about the implications of this technology for personal privacy, for public safety issues (think voyeurism of all kinds), not to mention the inevitable attraction of the platform to purveyors of porn. 

Better 3G and 4G networks, larger bandwidth data contracts, the quality of our smartphones, their video recording capacity, not to mention social platforms to notify people of your broadcast, have helped make 2015 the potential takeoff point for real-time video. 

And, seeing the opportunity, tech big boys like Twitter are pouring money into live stream video — Twitter bought Periscope for US$100 million last month — hoping to lockdown an early head start in market share.

Meerkat — Periscope’s most obvious competitor — has been all the rage among early adopters of new tech for the past week. The creators of Meerkat are said to be in the process of raising US$14 million in VC funding. Meerkat uses the Twitter API to deliver live streaming via the Twitter infrastructure, giving users the ability to notify followers of an upcoming live feed via tweets. Not surprisingly, Twitter recently started blocking Meerkat’s access to its social graph.

Twitter’s Periscope ups the game on Meerkat by letting you not only stream live to the world, but also make your video stream available for replay up to 24 hours later. Meerkat’s live streams are ephemeral. While you have a local copy of your Meerkat live stream on your phone, Meerkat doesn’t make your video available for replay. For now.

Another advantage for Periscope is that the lag time between the video stream and the ability to comment on it with Periscope is better for the moment than with Meerkat. This ability to deliver high quality real-time video, and the ability of the audience to respond to the broadcaster in near real-time, is the game changer with these platforms.

The possibilities of these live-stream platforms are legion, from impromptu captures of one’s everyday life, to first-person breaking news citizen journalism, to broadcasting public events of all kinds to the world, as well as all the more sordid potential applications of unfiltered real-time video. 

And wait until the digital marketers get a hold of these channels for promotion, as they are already starting to. 

Get ready for live-stream spam choking up all your social media feeds.

For the moment, Periscope and Meerkat are available only on iOS. Get the apps on the iTunes Store via these links— Meerkat and Periscope.

[10101sherpa]

Digital Marketing & The Lean Startup

At the heart of Eric Ries’s “The Lean Startup” is a simple idea: the products built or produced by a startup should be seen as experiments.

From that provocative starting point, his book advances a novel framework, founded in the lean manufacturing and agile programming movements, for turning product and service ideas into sustained innovations.

At the heart of his thesis is the argument that building sustained long-term change requires immediate experimentation and continuous, incremental improvement, moving as quickly as possible through successive Build —> Measure —> Learn development loops.

The framework emphasizes driving to the build phase rapidly by focusing on a minimum viable product to be tested with early adopters in decisive split-test experiments. These experiments should produce clear, actionable, baseline metrics – as opposed to “vanity” metrics – that permit validated learning, allowing entrepreneurs to make the key decision to persevere or to pivot in the direction of a new strategic hypothesis.

In practice, however, implementing the loop above actually requires reverse planning: figure out what needs to be learned, use innovation accounting to figure out what needs to be measured to know if validated learning is occurring, and then figure out what minimum viable product needs to be built to run that experiment and get that measurement.

Digital marketers would be wise to take stock of this approach as they build out their content marketing initiatives. 

Want to more insight into Ries’s lean startup framework? The book is available on Amazon here: The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses.

[10101sherpa]

The Dataclysm is Upon Us…

"Data has a long head start — Facebook was collecting 500 terabytes of information every day way back in 2012 — but the analysis is starting to catch up."

Just finished Christian Rudder’s engaging and well-written book, “Dataclysm: Who We Are (When We Think No One’s Looking)”.

Published in the fall of 2014 by one of the founders of the dating site, OkCupid, the book delves thoughtfully into the insights that can be gleaned from big data’s analysis of the breadcrumbs we leave behind as we move through our increasingly digital lives, traverse the internet and engage on social media websites.

Here’s a taste of Rudder’s observations on what sifting through the constantly growing store of human yearning, opinion, and chaos captured in those databases can yield:

On the merging science of “social physics” … “We, the users, the producers, the consumers — all our manic energy, yearning to be noticed, recognized for an important contribution to the conversation — are the problem. It is fueled by our own increasing need for attention, validation, through likes, favorites, responses, interactions. It is a feedback loop that can’t be closed, at least not for now.”

On big data companies like Acxiom… “These corporate data marketers, with reach into bank and credit card records, retail histories, and government filings like tax records, know stuff about human behavior that no academic researcher, fishing for patterns on some website, ever could.”

On the new social billionaires… “Twitter is very much the world of the One Percent. Its most precious resource, followers, is distributed far more unequally than wealth. In my sample, the top 1 percent of accounts has 72 percent of the followers. The top 0.1 percent has just over half. It is much, much harder to get to a million followers than it is to make a million dollars. There were 300,890 people who reported over $1 million in income to the IRS in 2011. Right now there are 2,643 Twitter accounts with 1 million followers, worldwide. Perhaps half are in the United States. Being an American with 1 million Twitter followers is roughly equivalent to being a billionaire.”

On Zipf’s Law and language… “This counterintuitive relationship between the popularity of a word (its rank in a given vocabulary) and the number of times it appears is described by something called Zipf’s law, an observed statistical property of language that, like so much of the best math, lies somewhere between miracle and coincidence. It states that in any large body of text, a word’s popularity (its place in the lexicon, with 1 being the highest ranking) multiplied by the number of times it shows up, is the same for every word in the text. Or, very elegantly: rank × number = constant This law holds for the Bible, the collected lyrics of ’60s pop songs, the canonical corpus of English literature (the Oxford English Corpus).”

This is a genuinely engaging book written by a talented writer, and should be on your 2015 reading list. The book is available on Amazon here: Dataclysm: Who We Are (When We Think No One's Looking).

[10101sherpa]

2015 Digital Marketing Trends

What are the top ten digital marketing insights for 2015? According to Ryan J. Davis (article), the top digital marketing trends to keep in mind this year when building out your tactical plans are: 

Content marketing, notably video — Content is king

Growth of local — Offer local, relevant experience

Social campaigns need to be omni-channel — Translation, think cross channel

Pay however, wherever — Facilitate payment

Expansion of messaging app usage — Think Snapchat, WhatsApp

Personalized marketing — Target audience of one is coming

Mobile majority — Think about mobile first

Influencer marketing — Connect early with influencers

Realtime marketing — Get ready for “always on” digital marketing

Pay to play social — No more free lunches on social

[10101sherpa]

Google Keep - Fantastic, free note-taking application

Google Keep is a note-keeping application that runs in any browser or as an app on an Android phone or tablet. With Google Keep, you can record short notes, create lists (think groceries), save pictures with notes attached, or record voice notes on the run. Within the app, you can even dictate those notes and see them very accurately transcribed on the fly.

Notes can also be shared with other or have reminders set for them based on time or location. For example, you can share your grocery list with your spouse and be reminded of what needs to be picked up when you are at the supermarket.

Any notes saved within the app on your phone are available to you immediately within the browser of your laptop or tablet at http://keep.google.com/ and vice-versa.

All this is extremely useful and means you don’t need to scribble down notes on bits of paper, and hope you find them stuffed in your pocket down the road. Plus, all your notes are fully searchable within the browser or the app, right down to the text in images, and you can even organize your notes by colour coding them if that floats your boat.

And, happily, Google continues to expand the feature set in a way that keeps the application simple and streamlined.

I don’t know how I lived without Google Keep. In fact, I use it dozens of times a day to keep notes on books and articles read, write down things that need to be remembered, keep to do lists, save images of menus, jot down quick notes for sorting later, and record random brainwaves.

For some of you, this might sound remarkably like the beloved Evernote app. In fact, there is a lot about the two that is similar, except when it comes to price. Unlike Evernote which comes with a monthly usage fee after a point, Google Keep is free.

One desperately needed update, however, is a Google engineered iOS version of the application so iPhone and iPad users can experience the full Keep goodness of Android users. (The third-party apps I’ve used haven’t worked terribly well.)

[10101sherpa]

Dockboss Air to the rescue

I bet you or someone you know has one those sound docks from Bose, Logitech, Sony or iHome, to name just a few, that came equipped with the old, larger iPod/iPhone connector similar to the end of the cable below. Remember those? If you have a third-generation iPad or iPhone 4S or before, you may still be using one of those cables to charge the device.

The sound dock was probably picked up at Costco or Walmart and filled your house with music until you got a new phone that couldn't dock with it. Now it is collecting dust in the garage.

Well, time to pull it out of the garage and dust it off because CableJive has a device about the size of a matchbox that will repurpose your sound dock, and let you broadcast to it wirelessly from any Bluetooth-enabled device. It's called the Dockboss Air and it is available from Amazon for roughly $35-40. 

It doesn't need batteries, you just connect the Dockboss to your dock as you would an old iPod, link your Bluetooth-enabled phone, tablet or laptop to it and, presto, your sound dock is back in business. And, the good news, is the sound is remarkably good.

Pick one up here and get some more life out of your old tech. 

[10101sherpa]

Already awesome, Dropbox just got a whole lot better. If you have a paid ($99/yr) account, congrats: your storage space just grew 10X to 1TB. Now you can password and expire shared links, fine-tune user access (think "view only" on a folder) and even perform a remote wipe of your Dropbox files on a lost device. #GottaLoveCompetition

[10101sherpa]

TrueCrypt audit finds “no evidence of backdoors” or malicious code.

[10101sherpa]

Ever had someone trying to email you a large file or wanting to share a set of photos or media files with you, but found that email choked on it? Well, dbinbox.com has come to your rescue with an inbox for your Dropbox.

This free service let's anyone upload files to your Dropbox account without having a Dropbox account themselves. Head over to dbinbox.com, create a username for your "Inbox" and a passphrase users will need to upload files, connect it to your Dropbox account and, presto, you're done. Now, when someone needs to send you a large file (up to 50 MB), you give them the link to your new "inbox", for example, dbinbox.com/your_user_name and your passphrase. They can then simply drag a file onto the landing page and that file is quickly uploaded to your Dropbox account. No need to email large files again. The way things should work.

[10101sherpa]

Join the cord cutters. Drop your home phone but keep the number.

Got rid of my home phone a few years ago and have never looked back. Couldn't see why I should keep paying the phone company $50 to give telemarketers a direct line to my house at dinner time. But, as the number had been ours for some time, felt like it would be good to hold onto it by "porting" it to a web service. I'm sure there are lots of ways to do it, but, if you live in Canada, here's how to do it very easily. 

Create an account (free) at freephoneline.ca (see here)

Port your current Bell # to freephoneline.ca for a one-time fee of $25. (see here)

Freephoneline.ca will email you once they've ported the number -- it usually take about two weeks. Call the phone company to cancel your service. In my case, the freephoneline.ca transfer of the number triggered the cancellation without my having to anything else. Nice.

Get free voicemail. Login to your freephoneline.ca account online, go to the configuration panel and, in about two minutes, setup the service to email you an audio file of any message left when someone calls your old home number.

Insert ING guy's voice saying "'cause it's your money" ;-)

You can even setup the number to ring on your cell phone. That is, your cell phone will maintain its main number, but can also be set up to ring when someone calls your old home phone number. 

Pay freephoneline.ca a one-time $50 fee to buy a VOIP unlock configuration file for your ported # (basically a SIP server + username [your phone #] + password) (see here))

Setup your phone to ring when that number is called by configuring the phone for a SIP server. Simple to do on Android phone. On iOS devices, you buy a SIP enabled app like Bria (see here).

Freephoneline.ca says you are free to port your number to another phone service down the line.

[10101sherpa]

Ever needed to calculate a tip and divide between a number of people? Google to the rescue! Simply type "What is the tip for $XX?" into Google on your phone and the first result will allow you to set the tip percentage and the number of people to share the tip.

[10101sherpa]

Are you or your kid struggling to learn French, Spanish, German? I highly recommend Duolingo. Free, crowdsourced, innovative language learning in a gamified environment. Designed by Carnegie Mellon professor, Luis von Ahn (inventor of Recaptcha) and his grad students, Duolingo currently has Portuguese, Spanish, German, Italian and French learning platforms. Really quite awesome. Available for iOS, Android and desktop computers. Oh, and did I mention free? Seriously, check it out and start learning a new language — it’s apparently good for you.

[10101sherpa]

Upgraded to latest Mac OS X. Multiple display handling and notification center are really well implemented, and alone are worth the upgrade.

[10101sherpa]

It's time,  folks, to stop using the same,  lame password for all your logins. That's just a disaster waiting to happen. Read the article and check out LastPass.

[10101sherpa]

The Future, Now: Run Android Apps on your Mac or PC

Ever wish you could run Android apps directly on your Mac or PC? Well, a great little company, BlueStacks, has developed an Android App Player that lets you do just that. And it works seamlessly. 

Download the installer for your desktop platform here:

(For Mac) http://bit.ly/bstkmacbe

(For PC) http://bit.ly/bstkdnldpage

[10101sherpa]

Encrypting your Gmail is as easy as 1..2..3..

Like me, I'm sure, you have nothing to hide, but don't see why using the internet requires you to surrender all privacy to the prying eyes of the NSA.

Just discovered an open-source plug-in for Chrome that gives you the option of encrypting an email you send via Gmail with an agreed upon password.

It is dead simple to install and easy use. So, here goes...

Head on over to https://www.streak.com/securegmail, click on the Install SecureGmail button on the landing page (it installs an extension for your Chrome browser) 

Log in to Gmail and click on the new Lock icon that will now be shown beside the usual "Compose" button 

A few things to note:

Draft your email as usual and now, when you click on Send, you are asked to enter a password, and off the encrypted email goes. As the makers of the plug-in state, "the unencrypted text never reaches Google servers". Sweet. 

Your recipient will also have to have the Streak plug-in installed and they must be using Gmail.

Agree on a secure password offline with your correspondent: "SecureGmail uses symmetric encryption to encrypt and decrypt each message. The password is decided by the user and assumes the recipient already knows it. SecureGmail is only as good as your password, pick an easy to guess password and it will be easy to break ... Remember to never email or IM your password for others to intercept." 

"SecureGmail works on personal Gmail accounts or accounts provided by your organization, school, or business", that is, on email hosted on Google's servers via a Google Apps setup.

Happy Secure Gmailing...

[10101sherpa]

Netflix gets its act together. Finally.

Tired of firing up Netflix only to be greeted by movie recommendations reflecting all the cartoons your kids have been watching? Netflix finally listened to its customers and recently rolled rolling out user profiles. You can create up to five profiles, one for each member of your household, your moods, or days of the week. Login to Netflix on a computer to create your user profiles and assign them and avatar. For more info, check out this video.