Our panel will feature:

Todd Van Etten, Republican National Committee
Paris Dennard, Republican National Committee
Darian Rafie, bep Interactive
Danny Allen, Sensis

The session will be on Monday, March 15, at 9:30 AM in the Hilton, Room C.  It should be really interesting and a lot of fun, so come check it out.

Hash tag for the panel is pretty unfortunate (#digirebrandrepubparty).  I didn’t make it up, it was assigned by the SXSW folks.

This is the first time I’ve been to SXSW since 1991, so I’m really looking forward to it.  If you’re there and want to drop me a line I’m at @dannyallenjr.

In the mean time, the godfather of social CRM is Paul Greenberg.  To get yourself up to speed on the basics, you should read his two posts on his CRM Forecast 2010.  The posts are here at Part I and Part II.

Another cool thing about Wharton BizTech, was that I got to meet MC Hammer, who was the morning keynote speaker.  He is surprisingly sharp when it comes to speaking about social media and the future of marketing, and has a pretty amazing fanbase on Twitter.  Follow him at @MCHammer.

Last week’s Apps for Brands event in New York gathered some top marketers to talk about best practices in developing a mobile app strategy.

The Sensis Take: The marketing of an app is fundamentally the same as the marketing of any other digital property.  Notably:

• You have to integrate both getting and using the app into a user’s natural workflow.
• Apps spread through word of mouth.  With over 85,000 apps in the Apple store, it’s difficult for users to find the signal in the noise without a little help from their friends.
• Keeping that positive word of mouth effect requires you be hyper-responsive to fixing problems with the app.
• Mobile apps are about what’s going on right now. The content can’t be on delay.
• Apps must be integrated into your other marketing platforms and messages.  They should not be about a one-off project, and need to take advantage of your other marketing vehicles.

Other Takeaways:

• Apps must be real-time, no time delayed content.
• Make it easy for consumers to pay.  Put the app into app stores, don’t make them come to your site.
• People will pay for value, but free works to drives sales for your core product
• Utility, frequency and viral distinguish long-term success
• Do not discount the iPod Touch, it is a sleeping giant.

In this AdAge Video Podcast, you can hear an excerpt of MLB.com president Robert Bowman talk about the need to balance an app strategy alongside a mobile web strategy.

Mobile Apps: And Now for a Contrarian’s View: They’re Hot Now, but the Web Will Win in the End

The Sensis Take: While custom apps are a hugely popular tool in the marketer’s arsenal right now, it requires a significant time investment on the part of the consumer to go find and download your app, whereas your WAP site requires only that they visit the site to get the information.

As the mobile web grows, we may find again that platform neutrality trumps the intimacy of a branded app.

STATS: 84% of Social Media Programs Don’t Measure ROI

The Sensis Take: As an organization that has experience in creating and running social media campaigns, we know that there is a strong ROI in a good campaign.  While ROI is not the only metric worth monitoring, the CFOs of the world will start tightening the purse strings if marketers continue to neglect financial benchmarks.

Social Media Policies from 80+ Organizations

The Sensis Take: If you are reading this blog, you are probably ahead of the curve (or looking to be) on the issues surrounding social media use.  Mashable has put together a list of social media policies of over 80 different organizations.   Take a look and see what organizations are doing things that you really want to emulate.

Experiments in Digital Creativity: 87 Cool Things

At last week’s Advertising Week in New York, Google’s Creative Lab gave a presentation on some of the coolest uses they’ve seen of Google technology.  We are more than a little impressed.

-Blair Goldberg, Associate Digital Strategist

The Sensis Take: One of the major advantages to making your direct marketing digital is the ability to easily measure your marketing activities.  If you’re measuring the wrong things, that’s a huge opportunity lost.

“Two fifths of marketers don’t know if their email messages are being successfully delivered, and those aware of delivery failures don’t have the right tools to ensure the email finds its inbox, a new study finds.”

Top 50 June Websites: Facebook Rises, Twitter Cracks List

The Sensis Take: If you want to be where your customers are, Facebook and Twitter are two places that you clearly need to be investing in.

White House uses LinkedIn as a health care focus group

The Sensis Take: While linked in may not be the media darling that Twitter and Facebook are, there’s still a vibrant community at work here.  Be sure you put some thought into what community to target if you’re looking for professionals.

Only 8% of Advertisers Say Twitter is Effective Promo Tool

The Sensis Take: Promotion is about communicating something to the public.  If you still think that’s how Twitter is going to add value to your business, you’re missing the big picture.  There’s certainly significant value that you can create through twitter, but the real value of twitter is in listening.  The Twitter search tool is like turning yourself into a fly on the wall of a room with millions of people who might just be talking about you.

Web Analytics for Social Media

The Sensis Take: While the Cult-Classic will never replace the value of the blockbuster for Hollywood, it is important to not underestimate the long term value of a few devoted fans when performing your analysis.

“Social media is different than transaction, and it calls for a different approach to measurement. Today we look at the quality of relationships, experiences, and, yes, transactions, and we look at them over time.”

JK Wedding Entrance Dance

The Sensis Take: This video, which went seriously viral last week, is just plain charming.  We hope you it puts a smile on your face too.

~Blair Goldberg, Associate Digital Strategist

A little background first.  I grew up in a spacetime vacuum and had no real exposure to many of the cultural milestones and points of reference that many people take for granted.  I had never really heard a Led Zeppelin song before leaving for college and didn’t really pay that much attention afterwards.  Immigrant Song (as featured in Viking Kittens) made them completely accessible.  Buying the single on iTunes has been on my longterm to-do list for sometime.

Returning to last night’s fiasco.  I went to find the video on Youtube and was horrified to discover that Warner Music Group was forcing Youtube to disable the audio because it didn’t have permission.  After balancing the humors, distilling the vapors and cooling the passions, it made me realize just how out of touch WMG and other music labels are with the nature of viral videos.  If it weren’t for Viking Kittens, Led Zeppelin would be as relevant to me as Cat Power (meaning not very).  Viral videos aren’t commercial in nature.  They capture the collective subconscious in a way that is unpredictable, unteneble.  These user-generated videos are about expression in their purest manifestation, not about monetization.  WMG and the labels have it all wrong.

I’m not advocating for publishing anarchy.  To the contrary, artists and music labels should have the right to montize the material when others are profiting from the fruits of their labors.  But when it comes to viral videos, it boils down to free advertising and PR.   Taking the hard line approach with social media ALWAYS backfires.  The labels are desperately trying to impose an old world system on a new world order.  Instead of protecting the material, they are oppressing it.  A simple search in the Twittersphere finds quite a few WMG boycott calls-to-action.  London-based Calvin Harris had his own material muted in WMG’s Youtube silencenacht.  How many more will suffer as casualties of WMG’s mutepogram?

The lesson here:  I was exposed to Led Zeppelin because of “Viking Kittens”.  I started briefly watching SNL again because of “Lazy Sunday”.  My contempt of Westboro Baptist Church grew even more because of “God Hates the World”.  The more you fight the virality of your material, the more isolated and ultimately desperate you become.  A warning to other music labels: don’t let this happen to you (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9yvyDB63f8s)

- Dino Hainline, Associate Digital Strategist

This led me to consider whether LV’s strategy is brilliant or catastrophic.  Clearly, this campaign is aimed at the unwilling inhabitants of geekdom, but they’ve also incorporated ads inside Grand Theft Auto – another placement that seems illogical or irrational.  But really, it’s brilliant.  LV is going after people with money WHEREVER they are.  There are gamers with money.  There are geeks with money.  Monied people come in all shapes and sizes.  Instead of poisoning their brand with the stench of an elite exclusivity, they are actively going after segments within all markets.  In an era where conspicuous consumption has lost its allure, this lunar move feels more down to earth (pun intended).

I’ve never really thought much about Louis Vuitton products, but clearly the strategy worked.  I may not be monied myself, but you can rest assured that when it comes time for me to buy luxury baggage, Louis Vuitton will be first on my list.

- Dino Hainline, Associate Digital Strategist

Description: A talk at the Personal Democracy Forum conference on research into the social patterns of teenagers on online networks.  Dr. Danah Boyd is a Social Media Researcher at Microsoft Research New England and a Fellow at Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society.

The Sensis Take: Not all social networks are created equal.  Facebook’s Ivy League origins and Myspace’s urban hipster roots are still evident in the socio-economic skewing of users.  Be aware of the social divide between users when using social networks in your social media campaign

“As we think about creating public spaces, what’s the meeting point for our conversations? Is it MySpace or Facebook? Twitter or IRC? What you choose matters. Where you and your colleagues hang out matters”

An Anthropological Introduction to Youtube

Description: A talk by Dr. Mike Wesch at the Library of Congress last Year.  Dr. Wesch is the leader of Kansas State’s YouTube Ethnography project.

The Sensis Take: What you do is much more important than how you do it. Hidden by the myriad of social media tools is the fact that there are only four functions to social media:

• User generated content
• User generated distribution
• User generated filtering
• User generated organization

Will My Video Get 1 Million Views on YouTube?

The Sensis Take: The small chance of a video going viral in a big way is more reinforcement that high quality creative is a necessary component in successful social media campaigns.

Online Ad Spending Rises At Double-Digit Rates, Gains Share Vs. All Other Media

The Sensis Take: As uncertainty increases in a chaotic economy, the granular analysis available to digital advertising makes its value to advertisers unassailable.

19 Presence Management Chores You Could Do Every Day

The Sensis Take: Sometimes, all it takes is a few minutes to participate in the daily conversation to keep your brand personal.

The Feed: What the Government is Twittering Now

Description: Nextgov.com just launched a new tool that aggregates Twitter feeds from dozens of federal agencies. See what’s going on across the entire government on one page.

The Sensis Take: Enabling user generated distribution via twitter is just a start to facilitating the democratic process.  The public wants to participate, make sure your agency knows how to crowdsource democracy.

~Blair Goldberg, Associate Digital Strategist

I think Adam is spot-on in his vision of the agency of the future, writing “Interactive, obviously. But more so, I think agencies are going to need to move up the value chain and become true strategic partners for their clients.”

I could not agree more!

Adam also brings up some interesting issues regarding business development. Particularly, the debate on doing spec creative. Adam noted that “[he] just emailed a potential client a half hour ago to tell them [they] wouldn’t do spec work.”

I have conflicting thoughts on that one. One side, doing spec creative cheapens your creative product and is done in a vacuum without actually colloborating with the client (which you would never do in a client working relationship.) On the other side of the argument, spec creative can help communicate a strategic concept in a way that even the smartest strategy or “insights” would miss. We are in the midst of a review where if we had not done spec creative, we would never had made the final round.

I’ll leave you with what I think was Adam’s most salient statement:

“What [agencies] can offer that is unique and invaluable [is] the abilities to uncover insights, to translate them into strategically relevant creative expressions of a brand, and to uncover opportunities to get those messages in front of the right audiences at the right time with the right vehicle.”

Jose Villa

President

Okay first off we declare (create) our MovieClipLoader class object to access our Methods (Behaviors)

var mcl:MovieClipLoader  = new MovieClipLoader();

Declare (create) an empty movie clip, assign a instance name of empty_mc, with a depth of 1 or using the getNextHighestDepth method like so below.

“Doing so will create a target for our swf to load into.”

this.createEmptyMovieClip(“empty_mc”, this.getNextHighestDepth());

We then create our Object listener, to listen for call back functions such as onLoadStart,onLoadProgress, and onLoadComplete.

var mclListener:Object = new Object();

Assign our listener to our named callback function onLoadStart, which will be fired when our swf file is being loaded.

mclListener.onLoadStart = onLoadStartHandler;

function onLoadStartHandler(target_mc:MovieClip):Void
{

Then we do a trace to output a message stating “File being loaded:” and concatenate (add)  target_mc._url property, to display our files name.
trace(“File being loaded: “  +  target_mc._url);
}
Okay so we then want to get an output of exactly how many bytes are being loaded when the swf file is being called from the end-users machine. And a output of the
percentage being loaded!.  We declare the call back function onLoadProgress using a named function as we did before, this function will be called every time bytes are being loaded into your target.

mclListener.onLoadProgress = onLoadProgressHandler;

function onLoadProgressHandler(target_mc:MovieClip, bytesLoaded:Number,totalBytes:Number):Void
{
// We assign our Math.round method to our variable, and then we data type it to a Number which will give our percentage output in our trace.
var percent:Number = Math.round(bytesLoaded/bytesTotal * 100);
trace(“Percentage being loaded: ” + percent);

To give a trace of how many bytes are being loaded we use the bytesLoaded variable that we’ve declared in our onLoadProgressHandler function above. And to display our total amount of bytes our swf contains we declare our totalBytes variable like so above.
trace(“Bytes Loaded: ” + bytesLoaded + ” out of ” + totalBytes);
}
The onLoadComplete Handler will basically be fired when the swf file completely finishes loading. So if we would like to display a message or trace() in our output window stating “Done Loading”.

mclListener.onLoadComplete = onLoadCompleteHandler;

function onLoadCompleteHandler(target_mc:MovieClip):Void
{
trace(“Done Loading: ” + target_mc._url);
}
Make sure you assign the addListener method to your MovieClipLoader class object to be able to fire all callback functions.

mcl.addListener(mclListener);

And finally we assign our loadClip() method to our MovieClipLoader class object to load our corresponding swf file to our empty movie clip target(empty_mc).

mcl.loadClip(“your_swf_file_name.swf”, empty_mc);

I hope this brief tutorial was helpful to you, please feel free to e-mail me at fgudino@sensisagency.com.

I have uploaded my files, below for review.
http://senduit.com/a5698b

Good Luck coding!.

Abel Gudino (Flash Designer/Flash Developer)

·         Establish the desired end result or “action” you want to come from your campaign.

·         Establish how you would like your campaign promoted, what are the typical conversion rates associated with each route and which tends to produce the highest quality of leads.

·         Shop networks.  Anyone can have a nice website, but try meeting some of these people in person and you can find out volumes about an operation.

·         Read the fine print.  Networks are in the business of getting paid, regardless of affiliate activity, so make sure to spell out your terms carefully.

The best thing about taking this leap is that with CPA (cost per action), you dont have to pay if you dont get your end result.  So there are no wasted impressions, or clicks … simply “action”.

Natalie Romero, Account Executive.