Sam Dwyer

Will Microsoft beat Apple and Google to make Connected TV work?

Microsoft and Comcast recently announced that Xbox Live users will now be able to stream on-demand Comcast Xfinity content through their gaming consoles. It’s been insinuated by some that Microsoft is making some form of payment to Comcast for the deal.

This doesn’t seem outlandish. The 20 million paying Xbox Live users (out of 66 million Xbox 360 units sold) now spend slightly more time streaming content than they do playing video games. Microsoft will keep stoking this trend, pushing its hardware further into the profitable mainstream of entertainment content consumption.

But, will the Xbox grow up to become a more dominant mode of delivery?

by Sam Dwyer 30 March 2012 15:24pm 9 comments

“Citizen CoSponsor Project” brings Republican Congress inside Facebook

Republican House Majority leader Eric Cantor launched the Citizen CoSponsor Project today, a landmark digital application that allows conservative activists to “cosponsor” bills on Facebook, share the activity with their friends, and track legislative progression through Congress.

While other services such as the non-government affiliated govetrack.us and the Library of Congress’ public resource Thomas have enabled web browsers to monitor the congressional process in the past, this is the first time that bill tracking has been integrated directly into the Facebook media matrix.

by Sam Dwyer 20 March 2012 20:17pm 7 comments

New report: the social shift in internal communications

Econsultancy's latest Smart Pack: The Social Shift in Internal Communications is about the trends in internal communication that are not just affecting how your customers navigate their social relations and the marketplace, but will determine your working future as well.

The fact is that no one quite knows what revolution is going to happen next in the field of communications, which makes enterprise-level investments a significant risk.

Large corporations that build their own centralized internal social nets often find that obsolescence comes quickly.

Smaller teams who are encouraged to discover and implement their own ad hoc solutions using mass-market products like Yammer, Jive, Google Apps, or Facebook Groups may not routinely share best practices throughout a larger parent organization. In the words of Catherine Glover, Director of Social@Ogilvy, and a featured interview in the new report, "nothing seems to stick".

by Sam Dwyer 08 March 2012 16:16pm 3 comments

Q&A: Catherine Glover, Director of Social@Ogilvy, on knowledge management in the social age

Rapid knowledge sharing is vital for marketers producing cutting edge technical and cultural products. The social environment these goods are intended for is evolving constantly, and production methods have to evolve with it. The goal of knowledge management is to extract the best knowledge of all employees, and redistribute it throughout an organization.

Social media is terrific at this. However, all of the approaches, methods, and tools used so far have often had a limited technical shelf-life. Econsultancy spoke with Catherine Glover, the director of social@ogilvy, about the rise Truffles, a centralized in-house knowledge management system and its eventual obsolescence and replacement by team-level adaption of ad hoc solutions.

This interview is an excerpt from Econsultancy's latest Smartpack: The Social Shift in Internal Communications.

by Sam Dwyer 14 March 2012 15:49pm 4 comments

Planning for site-specific marketing, and how to get it right

Whether you’re doing a print ad with a QR code, updating your brand’s Facebook page, or rigging for SEO, all of the instances of marketing that you create will ultimately be seen in a unique location by a unique viewer.

People always encounter marketing in a specific context. Subsequently, marketers need to anticipate what that context is, in order to engage and connect more deeply with it.

Campaign and brand experiences can and should be integrated across physical space and multiple objects - the impact of multiple brand engagements has been proven to deliver positive results. Strategists need to make certain as best as possible that the chosen medium and messaging tactics accommodate and compliment people’s unique identities, activities, and location.

How can marketers get this mix right? By thinking it through.

by Sam Dwyer 22 February 2012 18:21pm 0 comments

Michael Graves on putting people first

The world-renowned architect Michael Graves spoke this morning at Social Media week about the frustrations of inconsiderate hospital room design.

Struck low by a virus in 2003 that has left him partially paralyzed, Graves described his rehabilitation as a constant encounter with awkward, uncomfortable, and downright ugly products and interior layouts that appeared to have been created by “experts” who had never actually imagined themselves having to use them.

by Sam Dwyer 13 February 2012 23:27pm 2 comments

Five emerging revenue strategies for digital content producers

Free digital content has broken the revenue mechanisms for many media production companies. Nothing is fixed, and increasingly it appears as though few paths are exactly alike.

How are people making money with digital media? These five examples are newly emergent models of revenue generation being pursued by organizations.

by Sam Dwyer 07 February 2012 20:47pm 0 comments

Five big ideas about discounting

Q: Why have there been so many cataclysmic stories over the past year about digital discounts-gone-haywire?

A: Because too many people had no idea what they were doing.

Marketers are almost guaranteed to get discounting campaigns wrong if they don’t understand a few underlying strategic concepts about what a discount is – and isn’t. Aiming to forestall any repetition of this maladaptive behavior, Econsultancy is pleased to share a few points from our latest Smart Pack, The Fundamentals of Digital Discounting.

by Sam Dwyer 25 January 2012 11:15am 2 comments

Consumer psychology: what makes for a good gift?

Gift-giving, like having an opinion, is something that theoretically everyone knows how to do. But the fact is that most people are terribly, terribly wrong.

Moving towards the final stretch of the holiday season, we reached out to Professor Kit Yarrow, consumer psychologist, to ask her the important questions about magic, marketing, and youth culture that will help keep you and your brand from passing out the literal or figurative equivalent of an inedible fruitcake.

by Sam Dwyer 14 December 2011 18:43pm 0 comments

Is the New York Times getting comments right?

November 30th, 2011 was yet another monumental day in digital media history that will swiftly fade from memory: the New York Times changed its comments section.

In the past few years, while the development of video content, photo galleries, and other interactive features raced ahead, the comments section continued to resemble something from the pre-iPhone days.

No longer!

by Sam Dwyer 05 December 2011 19:10pm 1 comment