Consumers have shifted their video consumption habits drastically in recent years -- from cable to connected TV. That's not news. But advertisers have been slow to catch up, often undervaluing web video commercials in a world where network prime time and Super Bowl ads still command big money.
To illustrate the trends advertisers should be watching, Tremor Video commissioned Frank N. Magid Associates to run a study on consumers' connected TV preferences and viewing habits. The researchers recruited 1,010 video viewers from across the U.S. between the ages of 18 and 54. All respondents said they viewed video weekly on a smartphone, tablet or connected TV.
See their findings below.
… Continue reading...
More About: Advertising, Business, Entertainment, TV, connected tv, infographics



from Mashable! http://mashable.com/2012/07/15/connected-tv-infographic/?utm_source=feedburne...

Spanish-language television network Univision is enticing viewers to light up the web on July 19 for its superhero-themed Youth Awards show with an onslaught of social TV initiatives.
Dubbed Premios Juventud, the show honors Hispanic celebrities and offers several ways for fans' online activity to be featured on the live broadcast, affect who wins or see what's happening behind the scenes.
"What we've done, which some of the other awards shows haven't, is let the fans be part of the content part of show itself," David Beck, Univision's VP and general manager of social media, tells Mashable.
The July 19 social blitz begins on the blue carpet, the show's equivalent of the red c… Continue reading...
More About: Entertainment, Music, TV, celebrities, social tv, univision 
from Mashable! http://mashable.com/2012/07/13/univision-premios-juventud-youth-awards-show/?...
“Let’s make sure that the aerialist is cool with remote control sharks flying around during her act,” I typed into my phone. It was forty-eight hours before our fundraising event, and I was a wreck. We still needed liability insurance. We were short six volunteers. And I needed 1,000 party cups with a biohazard symbol printed on them ASAP.
I am not cut out for this sort of thing. I’m a user experience designer, not a party planner.
Yet, last month my cofounders at LIFFFT (a design-centric product studio) and I threw a fundraiser for Charity Water. Not only am I not an event producer, I’m not even a particularly good logistics person. You’re probably not either. But if you run (or work at) a startup, you’re eventually going to organize a product launch or marketing event. And your budget will probably be less than most high school pizza parties spend. This guide contains my best tips, tricks and hard-won lessons from throwing a last-minute party on a shoestring budget.
1. Find the cool kids and get on their calendar
If you’re using Facebook to promote your event, you have to get over that initial hurdle of “200 people invited … 0 attending.” (Facebook at least had the decency to not show the “declined” count on the event page.) Before I sent out a broader invite, I reached out to a few of my influential friends in the startup and design communities and asked them to respond to what was essentially a pre-invite list. Since Facebook doesn’t let you send a message along with an invitation, I added the following statement to the beginning of the event description:
*** You’re on the PRE-INVITE list ***
Why? We want you to attend. But we also want your help promoting.
Here’s how you can help:
1) RSVP as a “yes” even if you’re not 100% sure you can make it. RVSPs turn into momentum and will bring others on board.
2) We’re going to make it a public event later this week. When that happens, we’ll send around a link to share, encouraging people to donate to the campaign and register for the party. We’re hoping you can help us share that.
This was pretty effective. We got about 45 “yes” replies before sending the invitation to everyone else. When the majority of the invitees landed on the event page, they saw a bunch of “yeses” from cool people they know in real life or follow on Twitter. Instant social proof.
2. Eventbrite > Facebook
In hindsight, I screwed up. As the fundraiser grew in scope (and ambition), I began to realize that I should have used Eventbrite instead of Facebook. Unlike Facebook, Eventbrite shows you how many people actually saw the invite. Eventbrite also lets you send formal emails to attendees. When you want to message attendees on Facebook, they receive it as a Facebook message. Based on anecdotal feedback I received, emails communicate more seriousness than Facebook invites — people are more likely to click through, RSVP and ultimately attend.
Facebook does have one advantage over Eventbrite though — it owns your friends list. However, Facebook makes it really difficult to turn that list into a list of email addresses. Here’s a janky but totally workable five-minute solution:
- Open a Yahoo email account.
- Use its Facebook contact importer.
- Go back to Eventbrite and create a new invitation. In the recipients field, click “import your Yahoo contacts.”
- Voila. You imported your Facebook contacts into Eventbrite.
3. Find real time, collaborative project management tools
We use Asana for managing tasks at LIFFFT, so adding a Charity Water project was a no-brainer for us. Trello, Orchestra or a Google Doc would’ve worked perfectly fine as well. The important criteria is a central, collaborative workspace where everyone can grab tasks and keep them updated as planning progresses.
If you’re not already using a collaborative task management system, I would suggest trying Trello over Asana. Asana’s mobile app may be the worst app (slow/crippled) ever built by frighteningly smart people (and that’s saying something considering how bad Facebook’s app is). Since so much event planning happens on the go, a proper mobile client is absolutely critical. Choose carefully.
You’ll also want a group messaging app for everyone on your core team. We use GroupMe, but iMessage or any number of the competitors would work perfectly fine. The key is application reliability and usage throughout the team. When you’re in the heat of vendor negotiations and need info from another team member, the latency on email is just too long.
In tomorrow’s post, I’ll share my advice on how to best motivate your network to get involved.
P.S. Want to see how the event turned out? Check out the gallery on Flickr.
Donald DeSantis is a user experience designer and partner at LIFFFT, a design-centric product studio focused on disruptive innovation.
Image courtesy of Flickr user thebigo.
Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro: Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial. 

from GigaOM http://gigaom.com/2012/07/14/a-hackers-guide-to-throwing-a-kick-ass-party-par...
Dalton Caldwell, the man behind failed startups Imeem and PicPlz, recently ruminated on what he wished Twitter could have become. Now he’s moving ahead with his own paid alternative that promises to shun advertising and focus on customer trust.
Caldwell unveiled his big venture called App.net in a lengthy blog post Friday and kicked off a month-long Kickstarter-esque pledge campaign aimed at testing his theory about the need for just such a platform. He’s looking to raise $500,000 from 10,000 people, which he thinks will be enough money to get started and also validate his idea. App.net was originally envisioned as a paid service for mobile developers but has been repurposed to tackle this larger goal of creating a paid version of Twitter.
The product will offer a real-time feed and a social graph similar to Twitter available from a mobile application or website. Ultimately, App.net will support third-party apps built on top of the App.net ecosystem. Caldwell said the consumers aren’t given much choice right now in social startups, which are largely dependent on advertising for revenue. That leads to businesses that work to ultimately sell their users and their data to advertisers, he said. He believes there’s enough of a market for another business model that puts customer and their trust first.
Why isn’t there an opportunity to pay money to get an ad-free feed from a company where the product is something you pay for, not, well, you. To be clear: I’m glad there are ad-supported options, but why does that seem like the only option? For example, I have the option of buying a Mac if I don’t want to buy a crapware-infested PC, right? I have no interest in completely opting-out of the social web. But please, I want a real alternative to advertising hell… I would gladly pay for a service that treats me better. (Emphasis Caldwell’s)
App.net promises to never run ads or sell user data to advertisers. Users will be able to export, back-up or delete their data. The service will supposedly provide developers with a predictable business to build upon and will be focused on satisfying paying users and improving the experience.
Caldwell’s proposal follows a Kickstarter project from Penny Arcade, an online comics publisher, who is looking at replacing the revenue it currently gets from advertising with funding from fans. The two projects raise new questions about whether traditionally ad-supported services can build a viable model by charging users up front in exchange for a product that eschews ads.
I’d personally like to see new alternatives emerge though any competitor ultimately needs to get people in the door to work. 10,000 believers might be enough to get started but you have to recruit the masses to succeed and that can be hard when the experience on Twitter is still very positive for most people. People are increasingly aware that their “free” social networks are really making their money off users and their data. But for the most part, inertia, familiarity and data lock-in keep people from looking elsewhere. And App.net ultimately can’t just be an ad-free alternative, it will have to be better somehow, more compelling, with some kind of killer features or such a radically better design, to get people to switch.
So I’m not very optimistic about App.net’s chances. And the truth is, it may be hard for any big social network to become profitable, as Derek Powazek wrote today. But I’d like to see Caldwell take a stab at shaking up the current dependence on ad-supported services.
Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro: Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial. 

from GigaOM http://gigaom.com/2012/07/13/are-you-ready-for-a-paid-twitter/?utm_source=fee...
We are thrilled to announce a brand new addition to our stack of deployment tools! You can now upload files directly from your Git and Subversion repositories to your Amazon S3 bucket, in addition to the already supported FTP, SFTP and SSH servers.

Amazon S3 is a perfect fit for hosting your site or application assets, such as images and CSS. And with multiple servers you can simultaneously deploy your application to your servers and your assets to Amazon S3.
Reduced Redundancy Storage Supported
We have also added support for the Reduced Redundancy Storage option when deploying to S3. It can save you money when deploying replaceable files that are not mission-critical.
CloudFront Invalidation Built-in
And to seal the deal we also implemented support for automatic CloudFront invalidation. When setting up S3 deployments in Beanstalk you can specify the ID of your CloudFront distribution and Beanstalk will make sure to invalidate your deployed files in it after every deployment. One less thing for you to worry about.
You can read more about S3 deployments in our help article. Create your first S3 server in Beanstalk today and let us know how it went, we would love to hear from you.
from Beanstalk http://blog.beanstalkapp.com/post/26978752035/beanstalk-gets-deployments-to-a...
The Intelligent.ly campus recently welcomed back Christopher O’Donnell for an encore appearance following his May class around product management. You better believe he delivered big again, this time with The Ultimate Landing Page Workshop! This class was heavily example-driven, and students were even given the opportunity prior to the class to send in their own landing pages to be judged. For some it was a pedestal. For others, a guillotine. One landing page in particular had several flaws that Christopher was quick to correct and offer advice on—good thing they came to class…
Having a successful landing page is all about give and take. The ultimate goal is obviously to secure and retain a customer. However, the smaller, sometimes underestimated exchanges in between is what can make the difference between building a customer base and chasing your customers away. Deliver Value Value. It’s one of the few things in this world that everyone wants. Valuable commodities, valuable information, valuable time. Your potential customers are no different. What does it take to make someone a lead? Simple. Offer them something of value. It might even be as bartering an eBook for an email address. Make them feel as though they’re getting something for not much at all. Once you get that small piece of contact info you’ve officially gotten a lead, which, with plenty of water and sunlight, should eventually become a customer. All you’ve given up is an eBook fresh off the press. Peg Your Personas Tip: Along with the email, ask “What best describes you?” to help peg your personas. Provide users with descriptive, straight-forward options in a dropdown box. This simple step allows your leads to organize themselves for you. Experiment with Tone There are four basic types of messaging you can employ in your landing page: Fear-based, Descriptive, Promise-based, and Social Proof. Here’s some examples of each.
- Fear-based: “Don’t let this happen to you!”
- Descriptive: “Light, fluffy, and straight from the oven.”
- Promise-based: “You’ll see your waist shrink four sizes, guaranteed.”
- Social Proof: “This class helped me get a promotion!”
Switch Your Lens Sometimes seeing your landing page through your visitors’ eyes is the best way to understand what you’re doing right and where you’re losing people. Some things to consider:
- How did they get there?
- What is their state of mind?
- How well do they know you?
- How well do they know what you’re offering?
- How motivated are they?
This is just a taste of what Christopher offered in class. For access to the slides he used in class, click here.
from BostInno http://bostinno.com/channels/the-ultimate-landing-page-guide/
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