And so it begins, Total Solutions Marketing for the Exhibit and Event professional. As we begin to settle into the cavernous halls of the Pa convention center, an interesting few days of perspectives from all over this industry begins. It should be good as there are marketers, promotional product peeps, industrial designers, interactive folks and more.
While I will try to update here at NMB, mostly I’ll be covering it 140 characters at a time @mleis on Twitter. I’ll also be representing Emerge on Thursday when I present how to integrate games into the tradeshow experience.
And if you’re here at the show, please stop me to say hello. I’m the guy with the massively goofy red badge. With a yellow sticker on it.
Are We Designing for Community Completely Wrong?
Over the past few days, I’ve had the pleasure of carrying on conversations with a few of the forward-thinkers in our industry about community.
Russ Unger and I spent some time thinking about the currency of comments. How valuable comments are now to organizations. Bad one, good ones; they all come with a value.
Later this weekend I received a thank-you note from the delightfully dynamic Whitney Hess for a comment I posted on her blog last week. First, writing that note is a fantastic idea that goes right to the heart of writing: to create an ongoing dialogue with your readers. In the note, she asked if I had any further thoughts on facilitating the dialogue.
And that’s when the thought struck: if creating dialogue and valuing comments are paramount in this age of the social Web, why don’t we give them more importance in the design of social sites? Are current Web conventions completely upside down?
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Visit our main site or check out our social & viral marketing services to learn more about Upshot Interactive. Also, feel free to drop us a line anytime.
MySpace Apps – how we doin’ so far?
Guest post by Emerge Digital President Dave Albert
As someone who’s fascinated by the Social Networking Application phenomena and the insane success of the Facebook Platform, I paid close attention when MySpace announced they would be opening up their platform in May.
We were also fortunate enough to land a client project developing a MySpace application, which helped justify getting our hands dirty in their beta environment (more on that once we launch). Being a completely new platform (despite being based on Open Social), I have to share it’s been a challenge. Trying to avoid speaking in what my wife calls "Moon Man Talk", the API is still underdeveloped, and My Space is built on a hodge-podge of server-side technology. Many of the functions in the API are labeled "coming soon." In addition, you can’t achieve nearly as much social connectivity as you would within Facebook. In short, it’s been a struggle compared to the slick Facebook environment.
Despite this, it’s way too soon to count MySpace out with some 2,200 published applications, and top applications garnering about 6 million installs.
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Visit our main site or check out our social & viral marketing services to learn more about Upshot Interactive. Also, feel free to drop us a line anytime.