Social Media Archive

Many of you in the travel space will know Kevin from his time as editor at www.Travolution.co.uk

I’ve been fortunate to have presented with the guy in Tenerife a couple of years ago, and like his style.

Well now his much anticipated venture has started emerging as I just got an invite to his new brand’s Facebook Page

Described as “a new, dynamic, global media brand for the travel industry” – they have a new site – www.Tnooz.com – where you can sign up for updates as no doubt he puts the finishing touches to the offering.

Intriguing to say the least!

Could “nooz” be related to “news”, given Kevin’s background as a journalist? 🙂

Update: You can now catch up on all the news and coverage from AdWeek on our social media hub where you’ll find videos, photos, Tweets and blog posts following all the action: Advertising Week 2009

If you follow our Microsoft Advertising Blog you know we’re going to be sponsoring Advertising Week in New York 21-25th of September. IAB MIXX and OMMA are going on at the same time!!

From a social media point of view, we’ll be building on our success at the Cannes Lions Advertising Festival and have put together a madcap plan for running around the 5 or 6 venues in NY with our team, blogging, Tweeting and interviewing people on video to really try and bring the conference to life for those of you who can’t make it!

It’s great that Microsoft recognise the power of social media and invest in teams like ours to go and do this sort of thing.

More next week on what we’re doing as we unveil a very cool resource!

Picked up this canny little piece of kit from Steve Clayton.

Aaron Zinman’s philosophy with personas is:

In a world where fortunes are sought through data-mining vast information repositories, the computer is our indispensable but far from infallible assistant.

Personas demonstrates the computer’s uncanny insights and its inadvertent errors, such as the mischaracterizations caused by the inability to separate data from multiple owners of the same name.

It is meant for the viewer to reflect on our current and future world, where digital histories are as important if not more important than oral histories, and computational methods of condensing our digital traces are opaque and socially ignorant.

Luckily “online” is represented accurately and the “sport” bit must be my incessant talking about cricket.

Did I say I had tickets for the day at The Oval where we regained The Ashes from Australia but couldn’t go becaue I was on honeymoon!?

Check it our for yourself at: http://personas.media.mit.edu

Got interviewed last week by Mr PPC Fabulous David Szetela from ClixMarketing

During the show we discuss:

· The evolution of the Microsoft Advertising Community Team

· The Yahoo! deal?!

· Microsoft adCenter as the one-stop-shop for advertisers

· Microsoft Media Network

· Search and Display ROI Uplift Research

· Microsoft Advertising Intelligence

· Atlas Search

· adCenter Desktop

· adCenter ROI – “2 times to 5 times better than on Google and Yahoo!” says David!

· SES San Jose!

· Microsoft Advertising on Social Media

Check out the interview here: Microsoft Advertising Interview with Mel Carson

Ok so it’s all my fault!

When setting our wedding date Ashley and I didn’t check the conference calendar and so didn’t spot that Search Engine Strategies San Jose falls this year from 10th to the 14th August!

What were we thinking?!

It was only after paying the deposit on the caterers and the DJ, after friends had booked their exorbitant and non-refundable air fares from London, and after securing a super deal on an All American Mobile BBQ that we realised our gargantuan error.

Our wedding date is set for 15th August and as much as I tried to shoehorn a trip to California into our pre-wedding itinerary, herself was having none of it!

I tried to explain that SearchBash is a very sober affair and that I would make a Wednesday morning flight back to Seattle but to no avail………

It seems some things must take precedence over one of the happiest conferences of our lives.

I sincerely hope that you enjoy the week, that Mike Grehan & Kevin Ryan behave themselves 🙂 and that the keynote speeches are much better than my best men’s are going to be!

Do say hi to all my Microsoft colleagues who’ll be there in force, and get a 20% discount by checking out this post on Microsoft Advertising Community!

P.S. Can you believe she won’t let me TwitPic her coming down the aisle?!!!

Got to be a career highlight! 🙂

Well less than 24 hours after entertaining and being entertained by Will Carling post the Microsoft Search Summit – more on that at a later date – I’m in The Palais Stephanie in Cannes having had another of the maddest 24 hours of my career!

First impressions are that this festival is full on. There are people from all over the world here to learn, be wowed and experience some of the most cutting edge advertising on the planet- a lot of which is now digital!

We arrived last night and sped to Marco Polo’s a restaurant on the beach, a bit beyond the town, for a very cool and laid back dinner with the whole Microsoft Advertising Team that’s out here.

The up bright and early meeting the film crew that will help us interview a raft of folks from Microsoft execs to people on the street finding out what their expectations are of Cannes and what they’re looking forward to from the week.

Our cyber lounge at the conference centre is pretty cool! Lots of PCs and internet access and this Microsoft Surface table I spotted with two South Americans firmly ensconced next to with their Apple Macs wide open!

They look happy don’t they!

Jenny and I have started filming with the Media Brands crew and I think we’ve found our presenting feet…..well time will tell!

That’s me with the “I’m an FB” Tee Shirt on!

Now I’m off to the land of nod to dream up some questions to ask Biz Stone!

Check out more photos at Cannes Lions Microsoft Advertising Community and Microsoft Advertising on Facebook.

Myself and other members of the Microsoft Advertising Community team will be in Cannes in a couple of weeks for the International Advertising Festival which we’re sponsoring.

Do check out our Cannes Lions 2009 community site which includes blogs, photos, videos and Twitter feeds – as we ramp towards the event we’ll be adding more content and will be streaming Steve Ballmer live from our business forum during the week!

As Steve picks up Media Person of the Year we’d like to ask him some questions from our Twitter audience so follow @MSAdvertising and fire off some things you’d like to hear!

Any online marketer should be using Twitter to data mine for what’s being said about their brand, product, service or even their competition.

It’s a given!

Twitter Search is great for finding out what’s being said out there and they’ve now integrated the functionality into the tool to make it easier to search and check out trending topics.

Now however, the guys from Mix Online have come up with the Archivist which is a very cool tool for mining for Tweets, saving them and exporting them to Microsoft Excel for reporting purposes!

They point out that Twitter will not keep these nuggets of insight for ever, so it’s crucial you save them somewhere.

As an example – Microsoft adCenter upgraded over the weekend, so I did a search on that found 328 tweets for that keyword.

There are a couple of “views” – the actual Tweets and avatars like above, or a trend line like below where you can see the spike in activity because of the new release.

A simple click of “Export To Excel” and you have a .TXT file you can open in Excel and play around with till your heart’s content!

Nice huh!?

Check out the documentation and download it here!

It’s not recommended and a bit anti-social, but if you do then don’t be stupid enough to Tweet about it!

This guy has now deleted his Tweet but remember your Tweets live on in Twitter Search!