Interactive Marketing is EVERYWHERE

I just finished taking my first class at Georgetown and I have to admit it was pretty amazing. I didn't know what to expect in my interactive marketing class because I wasn't sure what "interactive marketing" really was. Come to find out, not only does my work in social media fall into the category of interactive marketing, but it something that touches all of our lives on a daily basis.

The internet has revolutionized the way we communicate, how businesses reach out to each other and consumers. These days anyone can be an information news source and making plans over social media outlets is the norm. I've heard of concepts like pay per click (PPC), search engine optimization (SEO), search engine marketing (SEM), social media, mobility, email etc. But I never understood how many of those concepts fell into the grand scheme of communicating a message to a particular audience.

The biggest thing I learned from my interactive marketing class is that research is pivotal to the success of an interactive marketing campaign. Understanding why your audience wants a particular good or service is one thing, but understanding how they search and locate the information they need is vital.

Keywords and terms can make or break a companies ability to market themselves. Even today, Facebook and timelines.com are going head to head because timelines.com is scared that the "Facebook timeline" will destroy their business. In the past, I would look at a story like that and just say why all the fuss? But it's a major deal when you understand the power of search terms and words associated with a brand. If Facebook does succeed with the usage of the world "timeline" it will have a significant impact on the timelines.com brand. It will affect search results, social media metrics and even their ability to reach consumers.

In the field of work that I do within the nonprofit sector, I believe it would be good to use a lot of the email concepts I learned in class like understanding how people respond to the from and subject lines. I do it all the time, I ignore unfamiliar emails, frequently deleting emails that I signed up for because they end up sending an excessive amount of irrelevant emails otherwise known to many of us as spam.

Nonprofits do a lot of email marketing not only to share information, but to fundraise, encourage a call to action, e-commerce, etc. Social media is also a great tool in the nonprofit sector. Understanding how to cultivate and sustain an audience on the web is crucial. What you do on Facebook does not easily translate on twitter considering there is a 140 character limit.

Overall I'm glad I took this class, it broadened my perspective as a communications professional and now I know that a lot of my work involves interactive marketing. Whether you like it or not, interactive marketing is everywhere and considering that budgets for digital communications are increases across all sectors it's safe to say that it's here to stay.

MB

How to Catch a Predator: iPhone Edition

People are hungry for money these days and after the statistics about the poverty rate going up in America, I'm not surprised that theft is increasingly becoming an issue.

This Friday, my iPhone was stolen. The last time I remembered seeing it, I put it in my bag. Whether it fell out or it was taken out of my bag isn't the issue at this point. The fact that someone found it on metro and took it home with them is what baffles me. In 2011, you must be a flaming idiot to think phones don't have GPS on them.

Find My iPhone App searching for a location

Which brings me to the post. Folks, protect your stuff. Why? Because other people want what you have and they are willing to take it and make a profit off of it. In my case I had a pass lock on my phone. Not because I thought anyone would steal it, but because people are nosy as hell and I'd prefer to give people access to my phone than have them all up in my business. I also had Apple's Mobile Me- Find My iPhone app.

Find My iPhone App finds the location of my iPhone 4

If you own an iPhone and you don't have a pass lock or the Find My iPhone app installed, you're a flaming idiot. Those two things will protect your phone from losers who like to steal iPhone 4's and sell them for $400-500 on Craigslist. Not to mention, it protects any sensitive information you may have on the phone. In the event that the phone is stolen, you can get the phone's location whenever it's turned on, send a message (usually prompting the thief to call a number and return the phone), it sets off an alarm for 2 minutes and you can remotely lock and/or wipe the phone. Now if you wipe your phone, it will disable the app and you'll be unable to locate it, so only do that if you're 100% positive that you're not getting the phone back.

The Craigslist posting that the kid had up (found it doing some personal detective work)

In my case, I was lucky. Blessed really. Some kid was planning on selling my phone and luckily his mom found out about the phone, told him he would not be selling it and she saw my message which had her name on it (after I did some detective work online). She ended up calling my dad and he went over there to retrieve the phone and gave her $40 as a gift ($40 that I now owe him which is WAY better than $500, I'll drink to that).

Police need to do their jobs. 

Needless to say, the app got my phone back with no help from the stupid police. I'm sorry if your friends or family are in the police force anywhere, but those bastards don't do anything. It was an open and shut case and no one wanted to deal with it. Not only did people give us the run around, they sent us to different police forces and no one was of any help. The thing that pissed me off the most was the fact that they basically said, yea if you don't see someone take something from you it's not theft. What the hell is wrong with this freaking country????

The only people that saved my phone were APPLE (thank you, I'm officially your customer for LIFE) and that lady who was probably told by God to give the phone back to me (thank you for having a conscience). It was my first experience really trying to use government services and they failed us. No wonder republicans are over "big government" and don't want to pay taxes. Y'ALL DON'T DO ANYTHING. They wasted our entire Saturday honestly.

Needless to say, I got my phone back within 48 hrs. I hope the devil is keeping score because every weekend God keeps showing off with touchdowns and field goals. I'm just saying...

MB

PS: I definitely appreciate my phone now more than ever. Don't ask to touch it for awhile, I'm bonding with it again. LOL. (not kidding)

Mac OS X Lion Review

Before I begin, I just want to say that I'm not a techie or a person that uses my MacBook Pro (late 2009 model) for heavy creative assignments so this review is coming from a consumer perspective. I also want to point out that depending on what you have on your Mac and what you use it for, you'll probably view Lion differently. Apparently a lot of Adobe creative tools aren't fully compatible with Mac OS X Lion yet.  I was definitely hesitant to make the switch, so much so that I actually made the purchase on July 29th and waited until last night (August 12th) to install it. I heard a lot of bad things about it so I wanted to give it a few weeks to see if developers would make updates, etc. Anyway, after making the switch here are the things that I noticed differently on my computer:

-Runs faster. Not sure what people were talking about regarding the rainbow ball of death aka that color spin wheel that pops up when it's loading something, but my Mac actually brings programs up faster than it did before. No issues thus far and no rainbow ball of death. Sorry to disappoint.

-Spaces is gone, but mission control takes care of that. I really never cared for spaces and I doubt i'll use mission control. I'm a beast at multi-tasking on one screen, which may be insane to some of you but I make it work.

-Launchpad makes my computer look like an iPad by bringing up all the apps. It's basically a shortcut for the Applications folder. Makes life easier I guess. LOL. No real noticeable change there.

-Gestures: this is probably one of the bigger changes. The scrolling can be set to the regular way or how scrolling operates on an iPhone or iPad (I own an iPhone so either one doesn't bother me). If you hate the new scrolling go to system preferences and change it. There's a lot of swiping of three or four fingers going on...lol all shortcut functions. I enjoy the zoom pinch with two fingers or the smart zoom where you tap the trackpad with two fingers. Kinda nice.

-Name in upper right hand corner: not sure what prompted them to do this, but whatever username you're logged into, that will appear in the upper right hand corner next to the time. I don't mind, it makes it easier to get to the login window if you ever want to logout, etc.

-Front row is gone. I tried it once before running Lion and honestly I didn't care much for it, it was just a video viewing function. Whatever.

-Scrollbar disappears just like on the iPhone and iPad. If you have one of these products you won't even notice. Also, there's auto spell check. For those who have apple products, this can be the devil. Just be aware to double check your work when typing because if you spell something the Mac doesn't recognize it will change it but you can always go back or "x" the change spelling and have your Mac learn the spelling.

-iCal, Photo Booth, Mail are different, more efficient in my opinion. I don't use mail on my comp tho, I rather log into gmail directly or get mail on my cell since I'm always on the go. Some people were complaining about photo booth, I just used it, works fine.

-YOUR COMPUTER WILL FEEL HOT WHILE INDEXING. People were going on the App Store trying to scare the crap out of people. Look your comp is indexing. It's trying to organize your life, shut up and put it on a cool surface, perhaps that invention called a table and not on your lap and let it work.

Ultimately, the changes aren't all that significant (if you are an Apple user who has an iPhone or iPad). I don't do heavy gaming or creative stuff so I can't speak on that. I heard that developers are still working on testing compatibility with the new OS so if you are a heavy gaming and creative person, I'd wait until the developers for those products roll out updates or upgrades of the apps and creative suites. Besides that, go ahead and make the upgrade. Make sure you check for updates on your computer BEFORE installing Lion and check afterwards before using anything. I ended up having updates for Photo Booth, iTunes, Skype and Java immediately after downloading Lion but I had to manually check for them.


MB