Louis CK of course, who else?

The comedian appeared on Conan last Friday, sharing what he thinks about social media, Twitter (‘I follow no one’) and the mobile era. And thanks to Hillel for sharing.

Had the pleasure of meeting Orli this afternoon at Caffe Henrietta, one of the many coffee houses in Tel Aviv area. Shortly before arriving I saw the picture Orli took (embed below), which I believe is the 1st long-term partnership a local business is doing with Foursquare (correct me if I’m wrong).

Caffe Henrietta and Foursquare: Join our social club (credit: Orli Yakuel)

The first 5 minutes of the meeting both Orli and I spent facing our iPad/iPhone, respectively, registering for the partnership, at Caffe Henrietta’s website (He). The process is fairly simple, 3-4 steps, to connect you to Caffe Henrietta’s social club (facebook, foursquare, cellphone). Shortly after we received 3 text messages – including a free drink coupon for the current visit!

The text messages I received from Caffe Henrietta

I’m happy to see location based services (He) are kicking off in Israel, with various models in place – campaign based, specials, partnerships, exploring what works and what not. Although Caffe Henrietta saw only $5 from the 3 of us (+ tip), the long term exposure and buzz is much bigger, not to mention customer loyalty – next time I’m meeting someone in that area, it will probably be at Henrietta.

Last month at Nokia World 2010 I caught a glimpse of Foursquare for Symbian, demoed by Foursquare stuff, and have been waiting patiently for it to become publicly available. Earlier October, it has been released to Ovi Store.

The Profile screen

Most Symbian users (me included) haven’t waited for the official app, using the excellent Gravity application to manage our twitter, facebook, google reader and foursquare – but Gravity had its limitations with Foursquare, such as adding/viewing tips and to-dos. After a week or so of using Foursquare for Symbian, couple of thoughts:

Richness of features

Unlike Gravity, Foursquare for Symbian has all the features of the other mobile apps (iPhone, Android and Blackberry) – a big advantage. Now, after checking-in to a place, I can view to-dos, add tips, view nearby twitter updates and much more. I can also approve/decline new requests and add new friends – actions I could do only on the web (or mobile web) until now.

Tips for Ben Gurion Airport

Register new users

A big plus for Foursquare. Although it’s the most popular LBS in the world, it still lags in total number of users compared to giants as facebook and twitter. The ability to join Foursquare from the app itself can ease hundreds of millions of Nokia owners into the location-based arena.

User interface

Something’s went wrong here, not clear why. In both the touch and keyboard versions (see Foursquare demoed on Nokia N8 at the bottom of this post), the actual screen allocated to Places, Friends, To-dos, is too small. The top and bottom include Foursquare and Phone menus, leaving just 2 lines of results to be displayed in each screen (Friends, Places, To-dos, Profile). Symbian is the 4th mobile app to be released (with Android already in V2.0), so the UX/UI was already available. Even on the N8, with its 3.6″ screen, there are too many menus and logos and too little LBS information.

Performance

Get used to this screen, speed isn't its strong suit

I tested Foursquare for Symbian on my Nokia E72, which was installed on the 8GB memory card, running from the phone’s 256MB memory (my actual free memory is under 60MB). Start-up time is awful, about 30 seconds and navigating from one screen to the next also takes too much time (compared to Gravity). An action of checking-in to a place (assuming the app is running) takes about 45-60 seconds – way to much for the mobile worker on the go.

Overall

Foursquare for Symbian was due a long time ago, but it’s finally here. The UI isn’t perfect and I would appreciate the option of changing the default ‘homepage’ (from Friends to Places). Nokia users finally have a free alternative (Gravity costs 9.95 USD) to help them make the first step into LBS.

Foursquare for Symbian

Download via Ovi Store (free)

Compatibility: Symbian S60 3rd Edition, 5th Edition and Symbian^3 (what version do I have?)

One of the applications that were officially introduced to the Symbian platform during Nokia World 2010 is PixelPipe, a content distribution gateway that allows users to publish text, photo, video and audio files once through various ‘Pipes‘, across over 100 social networks, including twitter, facebook, linkedin, youtube, blip.fm, twitpic, yfrog, dropbox, Google Buzz, Google Docs, and many-many more.

I first heard of PixelPipe at the #NokiaMeet gathering organized by Micky Fin at 1000Heads HQ in London. The next day, between the keynote lectures, business sessions, round table sessions and interview, I got a chance to chat with PixelPipe stuff at their booth (embedded video – RSS readers click here).

The feature I love about PixelPipe is the facebook Pipe of course – using the E72 I still haven’t found the application that allows me to share pictures to my wall. True, I often use the #fb hashtag in my twitpic uploads, but it shows the link, not the picture itself. So PixelPipe just became one of my favorite apps! You can download it from Ovi Store, free of course.

Had an interesting discussion this week at Globes event with Ahuvah, a very wise and internet-savvy friend, about foursquare. She asked me – Why? A simple question, complicated answer. Once, not so long ago, people were asking the same WH-question about Twitter, and look were we are now.

But back to me. I check-in at places of interest, usually business-oriented – meaning if I’m at a the Finance District of Tel Aviv, or the Hi-Tech district – where I’m more likely to meet people. But so far, as Ahuvah was clever to ask, those check-ins resulted in fewer random meetings than I expected. So again, Why? I guess convenience has something to do with it, meaning a proper application – Gravity. I’ve previewed Gravity before, saying it’s the main reason for my increased use of foursquare – a flick of the navbar, and I’m Here! Nevertheless, I believe foursquare is much more than just a contest for who’s got more Mayorships. It’s a valuable database of knowledge about people habitts – and knowledge is power. Much like twitter that crossed the chasm, foursquare too needs the same things: celebrity, business, media coverage.

Club Seat - 1st Israeli foursquare-based campaign

Celebrity we have (not many though), media coverage still lagging, but now we have a business. Seat become the 1st business in Israel (Hebrew) to use foursquare in a digital campaign (Hebrew, again), Club Seat, along with 3 known clubs in Tel Aviv – Gazoz, Galina, and Sublet. People are encouraged to create an account in foursqaure, download the app of their choice and visit the clubs. The campaign is three-fold:

• The club that receives the most entries by August 30th (end of summer break) is crowned ‘Best Club in Town’;
• Top 20 people with the  highest number of check-ins at any of the 3 clubs will receive concert tickets;
• The mayor of each club will receive a plane ticket (round trip I hope)

Personally I was hoping the 1st business will originate from the restaurant/cafe/bar industry, much like Starbucks is doing in the US, or FT.com’s deal to attract youngsters in London. Seat, along with Grey Interactive, have taken a leap into un-charted waters in Israeli advertising, as foursquare is still in early-early adopter stage here. Facebook has transformed the digital space in Israel – more than 3 million people connected (about 60% of internet-connected homes), #2 fastest growing country in the Middle East (7%, monthly), top 10 countries in terms of average time spent (globally!), and more. No campaign is complete here without a facebook presence. Twitter and foursquare are still considered ‘geek-only territory‘, although twitter is gaining momentum in celebrities and media.

Club Seat was only launched this week, so the stats are obviously low (Gazoz 9 check-ins, Galina 3 check-ins, and Sublet 4 check-ins), but it will be interesting to see how this pilot evolves and what impact will it have on the advertising industry. Stay tuned.

I remember reading a tweet the other day, which I actually agree with (can’t remember the author though), saying ‘social services like facebook, twitter, myspace, come and go. Flickr has been here since 2004 (!), and is here to stay’. The same goes, in my opinion, to blogs. Other sharing services will come and go, but the web-log, is here to stay.

It’s been 3 weeks since I started working at Inkod-Hypera, and almost 2 weeks since my last post. True, there’s facebook, and twitter, and LinkedIn, and other social services that I update on a daily basis, but those micro-updates cannot be compared to a blog post. Same audience perhaps, different format. And no limit on words!!

Ilan (creative director) and Assaf (VP products) are testing the new helicopter model

Being recognized for your work is always a good thing, and makes one feel good about the things one does. In the 3 weeks I’m here we’ve received dozens of ‘thank you’ emails from customers, the best incentive for any employee. One of our customers, Sparkeo, is a winner at mini Seedcamp Tel Aviv [English post], and are waiting for the Seedcamp results. We’ve been published [Hebrew] in a local news website, and are gaining momentum in the social scene (you’re welcome to join us).

On the work/life balance, we’re doing ok – working hard all day long, finding some time to unwind and always remembering to keep the customer in the center of our business.

But seriously now, we do amazing things here around UI and design. More to come, stay tuned.

I laughed through most of this 4 min clip, as comedian Louis Szekely (Louis C.K) is telling Conan O’brien how ungrateful people are to technology. The monologue (although he’s a guest, but Conan acting smart and letting him speak) is hilarious, and Louis goes over some of the major technological breakthroughs we experienced in the past 50 years. Enjoy!

And thanks to Hillel Fuld for RT Robin Wauters.

Conan O’Brien has some free time, so he is doing a tour across 30 US cities, before his new TBS show kicks-off coming November. Last week he stopped by at Google, part of At Google Talks series.

I’ve been a Nokia fanatic for over 10 years now, and had the chance to review some of the latest cellphones that made it to Israel. Recently, I upgraded my private N95 to an E72 – something I promised to do last June, once the newest E-series will become available.

Nokia App Store, aka OVi Store, is often not mentioned in the same sentence with Google’s Android Market, yet alone Apple’s App Store – both more advanced (UI-wise) and offer a larger variety. Still, there are some cool apps out there, for Nokia, that are worthy a post, or two. This post is the first in a series that will review the apps I’m using on my E72 device, starting with my own favorite Gravity and my first OVi download – SMS Preview. All pictures were taken using another (free) Nokia app, Best Screen Snap.

Gravity [14-day trial, $9.95 buy]

Gravity Homepage

Gravity is the best twitter client available for Symbian today. Although it costs $10 ($9.95 actually), it justifies every cent. First off, Gravity is more than ‘just’ twitter. The latest version (1.30 build 6355) added Foursquare support, which is the best thing @foursquare could have hoped for – without an official Symbian app, Gravity is the only non-web method Nokia users can check-in, add places, see map and shout. Since having Foursquare in Gravity, my check-ins have increased dramatically.

Gravity for Symbian - Browse menu

As a twitter client, it’s a fully-featured piece of software, that allows you to: upload images (twitpic, mobypicture, posterous, twitgoo, yfrog, or img.ly), create/save searches, lookup a user, create groups, favorite tweets and more.  Mobile access combined with geo-tagging is not the future, it’s the present – and foursquare should assign Jan Ole (Gravity author) some stock options for helping them tap the largest cellphone audience.

SMS Preview [Free]

SMS Preview for Symbian

Back when I was previewing Google Nexus One (Hebrew) I was looking for an app that will handle SMS in an easier and more fashionable way. SMS Preview does a similar job for Symbian, by showing a full preview of the message you received, regardless of the app you’re currently in, for a defined period (5-60 sec). Double-click any key to dismiss the preview. Easy and simple solution that saves you time and helps you decide which action to take.

By the time my loyal RSS readers will see this, I’ll be on my way to meeting Biz Stone, co-founder of Twitter, visiting Israel for a quick 24 hours, keynoting The NETWorking event, the Alumni event of The College of Management (where I did my BA). Although Israel is A Start-Up Nation, it’s not often we get the chance to meet in person (along with 1,200 people) a founder of a service that changed the way we communicate with each other.

Since its creation in 2006, twitter has become a force in the digital world, influencing every industry – from IT, to entertainment and film, sports and news. With Oprah, Ashton and CNN twitter hit mainstream pretty fast, growing at an astonishing rate of 1,400% a year (!). However, 2010 will be a pivotal year in twitter’s life, as the micro-blogging service is trying to monetize on the vast amounts of data it holds, trying to prove that unlike facebook or YouTube – twitter can make money (and much more than $4m).

Biz is holding a closed breakfast for CEOs, graduates of The College of management, followed by a press conference, that should start at 10:45am IST (Israel, GMT+2). The main event will be at the evening, at Hangar 11 in Tel Aviv Harbor, as Biz will be the keynote speaker at the NETWorking event. TheMarker Editor-in-Chief will do a one-on-one interview with Biz afterwards, and a stand-up show with Adir Miller will wrap-up Biz’s 24 hours in Israel.

#bizil is the hashtag for keeping track of Biz’s day in Israel.

Mornings are an excellent time to read, write and share. Shortly after the morning coffee and toast I head over to my GReader and start browsing the feeds, in a pre-defined order.
Ahuvah Berger recently joined the Blonde 2.0 team, which means we get to enjoy her super writing skills at least once a week (hopefully more dear.. . After her last week’s post on Engaging the Masses comes this post, continuing where she left off, and linking to a wonderful deck at slideshare by Marta Kagan, What the F**K is Social Media. One Year After. In a long (83p) yet light presentation Marta goes over the basics of SM, adding some cool pictures and stats to back her points and strengthening her bottomline (p 53):
SO PLEASE, STOP F**KING AROUND AND GET SERIOUS ABOUT HARNESSING THE POWER OF THIS THING.

Slide 44 onwards highlights some business insights that are relevant to any company, like ’93% of social media users believe a company should have a presence in social media’ and ’85% of social media users believe that a company should go further than just having a presence and actually interact with its customers’. Innovative approaches, I know..

The entire deck is hilarious (although the language might not appeal to everyone) and the 83 slides are going fast, but all convey an important message, and I only hope that a fraction of the 128,000 views this deck received were made by corporations and business executives and not just by us marketers – we’re already advocating this F**King thing too..
[RSS subcribers: Please read this post at my blog to view the embed deck]

Run into this survey at eMarketer.com in one of my Google Alerts the other day. With all the plethora of information sources, I find it more difficult to focus on topics and trends that interest me, as well as joining in on conversations, so it’s good to know GAlerts still has some benefits..

The survey in hand was conducted between some 1,800 social media marketers in the US, asking them about the effectiveness of their practices – meaning which tactics they used, how effective those tactics were and how accurately can they measure such tactics. The results are not that surprising, but I would like to focus on next steps – how can we make those practices more effective and measured more accurately.

The first issue we’re seeing is the negative correlation between a tactic’s effectiveness vs. our ability to measure it accurately (graph below). The 3 most effective tactics are User reviews or ratings (47%), Blogger or online journalist relations (46%) and Forums or discussion groups (42%). When looking at the ‘Very accurately measured’ column, those tactics are ranked 3rd, 4th and 5th, respectively. With the expansion of broadband and the coming of web 2.0, everyone is a publisher, and thus consumers are more suspicious and don’t believe everything they read online. In the US the FTC are targeting bloggers’ freebies (PDF guidelines), and in the meantime there are some un-official guidelines on how to disclose and authenticate a sponsored conversation. In Israel on the other hand, things are moving slower (article in Hebrew).

The second issue pertains to hooking financial success with social marketing (graph below). It’s pretty obvious that social marketing is most effective for Brand reputation (39%), Brand awareness (37%) and Search engine results (38%). I’d like to point your attention to the Sales aspects of social marketing, Generate leads and Increase online sales. The marketers who were surveyed said that social marketing is not effective at Generating leads (35%) and Increasing online sales (46%). For social marketing to become bigger and better, we have to add revenues to the game, and being able to measure it. Dell are already showing the added value of their social activity on twitter, a new study finds correlation between social media and financial success and George Colony urges CEO to understand that social marketing is here to stay.

If we want social marketing to rock, Sales indicators must be inherent to any social campaign. It’s OK to start small, but start somewhere. Move the conversation from brand (only) to revenues as well. And one last request – be honest to your readers.

The Jewish mind keeps coming up with new inventions and ideas, luring CEOs to the holy land, even in the July sun – no wonder Israel has some 3,500 start-up companies, 2nd only to the US.

My friend Lior Levin joined forces with ROR dude Elad Meidar to form StatusSearch.net, which brings you results from your friends’ updates in twitter and facebook. The idea is improving reliability of course – if I’m searching for Michael Jackson, my friends will provide better results than the general population, or I wouldn’t have followed/friended them to begin with. LinkedIn and MySpace integrations are on the way as well.

The idea is simple, and is a semi-semantic way to filter results. While twitter search crawls the entire user base, statussearch.net looks at your friends only, assuming they know what they talk about..

Couple of things I noticed from a brief use that are worth mentioning/conversing:

• True to the ‘real-time’ reality, the results are 1-paged, no option for ‘more’. You do get an icon to see the source of each result, but if your answer is 2-3 days old, you won’t see it. Also, it’s unclear to me how frequent the crawler works and if there’s any attempt to ‘even’ the results between twitter and facebook (think not). Does the engine displays ‘power users’ results first (because those users are more connected – thus what they say is more accurate/important/RTed/Liked)?
• Size matters? I’m following some 650 people and sport 950 friends in facebook, which makes my pool of knowledge average I guess, at 1,600 minds. There is wisdom in there, don’t get me wrong, but how will a 500-mind pool looks like? or 5,000?
• Memory loss. Sometimes I wish to see stuff I updated, and in that case I go to my own stream at twitter.com. Although I tried several times, no results from ‘me’ appeared in statussearch timeline, but that’s probably because I’m no longer friends with myself…
• Integration points. There are 2, email alerts and a firefox search plugin, both highly welcome. You can create unlimited number (free, for now) of alerts and receive an email once something happen (daily or immediately). The FF plugin (accessible from every page, right-hand side) is most useful – I’m a huge search plugin fan that makes the solution serve you, where/when/how you want, and not vise-versa.

Overall, I think Lior and Elad are on to something. The web is filled with junk data, and everyone, big to small, are trying to come up with solutions that will filter the gold out. StatusSearch is not a semantic search engine, but by tapping your friends’ knowledge instead of the general population, we’re one step closer towards finding that ONE result we want.

Relax, not me personally, my blog got that boost.
With June (and 2Q) wrapping up last week, it’s an excellent time to gather some statistics around my blog, and I decided to make a comparison to the previous period, and maybe identify some trends. The period I looked at is 1H08 vs. 1H09.

Google Analytics is truly a powerful tool, and I was able to go very deep (drill-down) and round up some interesting figures. I wanted to verify 2 assumptions I made since Jan 2008:

• pushing my blog’s content in facebook and twitter actually generated more traffic
• increase my Israel oriented readers (in May 2009 I started writing at newsgeek.co.il)

The results supported both assumptions.
Traffic-wise, the first 6 months of 2009 generated 13,004 visits and 18,660 page views, almost twice than the 2008 period. The increase was expected, but the sources breakdown amazed me. I have a 3-step process for pushing my blog’s content: update my twitter, post to facebook and save to del.icio.us – between those 3 networks I cover almost 5,000 eyeballs (directly). It did the trick, big time!
Facebook generated 5 times more visits – 76 in 1H08 to 480 in 1H09, and twitter generated roughly the same growth – 82 in 1H08 to 490 in 1H09. Direct traffic from Google also increased, by 110%, from 2,800 in 1H08 to 6,030 in 1H09.

Location-wise, I got 3 times more visits from Israel, jumping from 930 in 1H08 to just under 3,000 in 1H09. The US remains my main source of readers, with 4,050 visits in 1H09 (comapred to 2,700 in 1H08). The EU were also loyal readers, with +50% increase in France, UK, Germany, Netherlands and Italy. Australia, India and Canada showed similar increases.

To be honest, I expected those results. With the explosion of new media, facebook, twitter, friendfeed and others, I would be surprised to see a lower figure from those 2 sources, especially when taking into account the amount of self-marketing I did these past 18 months.

Looking into the near future, I wonder what my 1H10 vs 1H09 will look like.. what source will show the most increase in visits? will blogs still rule the world or will we all lifestream our lives? What do you think?

Just got back from the first bloggers’ tour at a news company, as 15 of us visited the offices and broadcasting studios of Channel 2 News (web and web) in Neve Ilan. The tour was organized by Liran Dan, VP Interactive Services and Anat Ginio, who among other things is the ‘voice’ behind @channel2news – thanks guys! One fact I learned at the beginning is that according to Israeli Law, every news broadcast MUST be aired from Jerusalem and Channel 2 News got an approval to shoot at the Jerusalem area – Neve Ilan is midway between the capital and Tel Aviv. Weird law, but that’s for another discussion..

It’s always interesting to visit at a news network, being at the studio and all, but with the Iranian election in the background, and the change twitter is bringing into this medium as well, it’s even more interesting. The goal of the visit, at least for me, was to understand how social media, twitter in this case, can support the on-going efforts to bring the news, as they happen, to the viewers.

Channel2news joined twitter some 6 months ago, and in the past 2-3 months they are putting some 50-100 updates a day, mostly breaking stories, special reports, live coverage and Q&A. Their online strategy includes twitter of course, and they sport a youtube channel as well, but are always learning this medium, trying to figure out the best way to use it. Learning is also about listening and asking for feedback, which Liran was interested in getting. We suggested to open a second twitter account, for breaking news (much like CNN Breaking News), that would alert followers to new stories as they happen, and also raised the option of ‘pulling’ live conversation data from twitter (trending topics or twitterfall) to get the public’s reaction to the story. I’m guessing the adoption of the latter will not happen soon, but our first proposal might.

Still, there’s much to consider when mashing community conversations with journalism, and I for one think it’s wise that Liran is exploring this step-by-step. Only 4 weeks ago they first asked viewers to submit questions to the weekend show (Meet the Press), and even thou they could promote this initiative more, they’re going slowly, for now. Twitter (and other social services) are changing the way we consume (and produce) content, but once you started, it’s almost impossible to undo.

I do believe social services will change the way we view the news, and the recent events from the elections in Iran proves it, but the battle between traditional vs. new media will bring new challenges, that must be solved. Journalists have a tough job these days, as they see/read/hear stories as they happen, but cannot report them until they were authenticated, and thus losing the scoop. The next 12 months are going to be pivotal in the history of the social web and its effect on the way we consume the news, so stay around, we’ll be right back…

Links:
Channel 2 News on twitter
Channel 2 News on mako.co.il and reshet.ynet.co.il
My photos from the tour, Kfir Pravda‘s photos and Yarin‘s photos (on facebook)