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ESPN Joining Social Gaming Party

Written on May 19, 2010 by admin

Filed Under: book, marketing

While I realize that many of our readers are not sports fans (your reactions to some of my sports themed posts in the past are a clear giveaway on that front) I feel it is important to share with you that ESPN is joining the social gaming fray.

Why is it important? As far as brands go, ESPN is one of the strongest ones on the planet. You don’t have to watch SportsCenter to know what ESPN does. It’s just one of those that things that can either make people react with excitement or a full roll of the eyes. Either way, ESPN is a business and everyone knows about it.

So why would a brand that is cemented in the American psyche turn to producing games for social networks like Facebook and others? I suspect it’s because they are smart. Mashable reports

The sports brand has inked a two-year deal with social gaming company Playdom to build the games, the first two of which should launch in Fall 2010. Other platforms for the games will include Bebo, Hi5, MySpace and Tagged.

In addition to launching on social networks, mobile apps will also be available.

Raphael Poplock is ESPN Digital Media’s VP for games and revenue strategy and development. He said today in a statement, “Our deal with Playdom marks ESPN’s first major presence into the social gaming space. The sports genre for this category of games has gone virtually untapped thus far, and through this agreement, we have an opportunity to be in front of a highly engaged audience and at the forefront of what is currently the fastest growing games category out there.”

Face it. Sports nuts are, well, nuts. They eat, drink and poop this stuff so why not take that to the next level and get them even more involved? Sports games on Facebook pretty much ensures that there will be no real exercise happening for the sports themed couch potato. Now ESPN can have mindshare not only on TV, radio and print but in social media as well. Of course, convincing these folks that they actually are athletes by playing a game online is enough to make an advertiser giddy with promotional ideas.

Personally, I am not a big game person. That’s just me. But one thing I will say is that if these sports games are any good at all I will be in there trying them out because it’s something that interests me. I still don’t get the idea of virtual farming being a good use of time but considering the money it is generating I just have to say more power to ya, Zynga! When you find a way to tap into someone’s real passions you have a social winner. Sports people are passionate. You see where this is going?

For marketers this is a clear signal that you should not be resting on your branding laurels. ESPN really doesn’t need to do anything else to lock down its brand. That has been done over the past 30 years. They are savvy enough, however, to make sure they are getting involved in where the foreseeable future is for all brands in the social networking world we now live in.

The point is that all brands regardless of your recognition or lack of it need to be growing and moving in the rapidly changing online landscape. Even ESPN is susceptible to letting a competitor in if they simply choose to not get involved because they are ‘set’ as a brand. Ask the newspaper industry how that attitude has served them.

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ESPN Joining Social Gaming Party

Verizon and iPhone in 2010?

Written on October 28, 2009 by admin

Filed Under: marketing, seo

It’s a slow news day so we’ll just enter into the realm of ‘what ifs’ and ‘maybe, kinda, sortas’ for a minute and imagine a world without barriers. Sounds nice doesn’t it? Imagine a place where you would be able to have the best possible smart phone device for you personally regardless of who your carrier is or is not partnered with. Imagine there’s no dropped calls …. it’s easy of you try. I think I may be channeling John Lennon ……

Anyway, what I am imagining based on a report from All Things D is the ability to possibly have an iPhone even though I am a Verizon customer for the foreseeable future. That’s an interesting prospect for sure but one I will have to do a ‘wait and see’ on.

Apple has a lot to gain by ending iPhone carrier exclusivity in the U.S. and signing up Verizon as a second carrier partner.

….such a deal could more than double U.S. iPhone sales in the near term. That said, it does have some noteworthy downsides, top among them, the end of the estimated $450-per-iPhone carrier subsidy AT&T (T) has been paying.

That’s the word from Broadpoint AmTech analyst Brian Marshall, who believes Apple (AAPL) will bring the iPhone to Verizon (VZ) in the second half of 2010 and forfeit AT&T’s “sweetheart” carrier subsidy as a result.

With the number of iPhone apps growing at the current rate of ‘really fast’ and the B to B marketing crowd seeing the value of building apps for branding purposes this is a great bit of speculation that I hope comes to fruition. While I have thought that going “droid’ may allow for me to have the best of both worlds I have to admit that having two devices now (BB Storm or phone, e-mail etc and iPod Touch for music, apps etc.) is a pain. I am not so convinced now that having a droid device and the iPhone is a good thing because carrying two separate devices is just not a good thing.

As this plays out marketers are going to have to make some hard choices as to which platforms they tie their marketing budgets to. While many look at the number of devices that Apple will sell if they were out from under the AT&T deal as weighed against the smaller subsidy the real money is in the apps. If twice as many people have an iPhone then the app sales go through the roof and Apple has a license to print money.

Well, one thing this whole aura of uncertainly has created is one less droid device sale. I’m holding out to see if this Verizon and iPhone thing happens. Until then I’ll just suffer. Actually, I can’t seem to make up my mind on this one. Maybe I’m channeling Brett Favre ……

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Verizon and iPhone in 2010?

Why Blogs Aren’t Dead

Written on September 24, 2009 by admin

Filed Under: book, marketing, searchengineguide

by Mike Moran

Image by tstadler via Flickr

For the past couple of years, people have been asking if blogging is now dead. Now, as you read this blog post, you might expect that if I took the time to write it, I probably don’t agree. And I don’t. But the “blogging is dead: crowd does have a point–I just don’t think the situation is as extreme as they say.

Now, I could go ahead and list all the reasons that blogging is not dead, but truthfully, that misses the point. The reason that people love to declare things dead runs deeper than some analytical look at the pros and cons. What’s really happening here is simple human nature’s interest in finding the answer.

We all do it at one time or another. In our need to simplify, we tend to make things a bit too simple. So we veer from, “Everyone needs a blog” to “Blogging is dead” in less time that it took to put up an averaged-sized building. Our planning horizons in marketing seem so short nowadays that we don’t have a minute to put things in perspective.

So, yes, Twitter and Facebook status updates have made blogging less essential than it was just a few years ago. You no longer see blog posts that riff off someone else’s post, because people just link to that post on Twitter. For people for whom blogging was too long a form to stick with, Facebook status updates are more manageable.

But blogs aren’t “dead” any more than TV is dead. And TV didn’t kill off radio either. As each new media form comes along, it makes all the previous forms somewhat less important, because each of us has only so much time in the day to create those forms and (more importantly) to consume them. So we probably watch less TV than before the Internet came along, and yes, we probably read fewer blogs now that we monitor Twitter.

So, now that 140-character updates are all the rage, we’ll actually have to have a reason to write blog posts. We’ll need reasons to read them. We won’t just be doing it because it is the new new thing. We’ll have to figure out what they are really good for.

So, rather than blogging being dead, I think it just emerged from adolescence, where instead of being the thing that “all the kids are doing,” now we need to find the true business purpose for our blogs so they are used when needed, just like every other kind of media. Here’s betting that blogs do find an important place for years to come.

If you have a business that depends on providing expertise, it’s hard to beat blogging as a way to show off what you know. Contrast the impact that a blog has to influence opinion over a 140-character tweet. That will certainly keep some people (including me) blogging for the foreseeable future.

What other purposes for blogging are there? That’s what we all need to figure out now. Because if your business can benefit from blogging, it makes sense to keep doing it, or to start doing it, even if blogging is no longer the flavor of the month.

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Why Blogs Aren’t Dead

A Billion Reasons for Twitter to be Happy

Written on September 17, 2009 by admin

Filed Under: book, marketing, seo

So it looks like Twitter has entered some rarefied air for sure. According to ReadWriteWeb and TechCrunch the micro-blogging juggernaut is moving into an exclusive club by securing a new round of funding ($50 million) based on a valuation of $1 billion (yup, it’s a b). No doubt, this will begin to stir the supporters and detractors alike. Unless we have ridiculously short memories or just think that this time will be different one has to wonder how a company that no one can figure out revenue wise can be valued at that much.

While I am not an analyst I did think about staying at a Holiday Inn Express over the past year so I qualify for jumping into the fray, right? Let’s hear what the RWW folks had to say first though.

While it’s unlikely that Twitter CEO Evan Williams was wearing a Dr. Evil costume when he delivered the news, he had the pleasure of announcing his company’s $1 billion dollar valuation today at an all hands meeting. According to TechCrunch, the company has raised a $50 million dollar funding round and the money will be in the bank shortly. Given the fact that Twitter turned down an offer to be purchased by Facebook earlier in the year, it appears the two are about to tango.

So of course, this conversation wouldn’t be nearly as much fun without bringing Facebook into the mix. Facebook is starting to look almost like IBM compared to Twitter. What with actual revenue generation plans and actually having the audacity to be cash flow positive one begins to wonder if Facebook is going to actually merit its own valuation. Master of the Universe, Mark Zuckerberg, has something to say in the Facebook blog.

We’re also succeeding at building Facebook in a sustainable way. Earlier this year, we said we expected to be cash flow positive sometime in 2010, and I’m pleased to share that we achieved this milestone last quarter. This is important to us because it sets Facebook up to be a strong independent service for the long term.

So is Twitter in for the long term? They certainly still have the buzz going and now there appears to be a a real Facebook faceoff looming for the foreseeable future.

In the past, ReadWriteWeb has looked at Twitter’s platform potential. The service has already been used to create meme trackers, emergency alert services, news feeds and brand monitoring tools. As the infrastructure and search have improved, Twitter has become the go-to site for real time media. But can the company make a Facebook-like leap?

Facebook has added Twitter like features so why not? So what’s your take? I bet there at least a billion opinions on this one.

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A Billion Reasons for Twitter to be Happy