Digital Connections – 360i Blog, Digital Marketing Agency

By the time I was five years old, my parents began to openly wonder about me. I was barely able to Velcro my own sneakers, I still wet the bed and picked my nose. I couldn’t swim. And perhaps most notably, I had already been saved by the Heimlich Maneuver on three separate occasions.

By the age of 10, I had already lost all of my baby teeth, was an All-Star on my Little League baseball team and had won the local Math Fair competition. I could speak four languages (including American Sign Language) and had already held hands with a girl at summer camp dance. For the awkward kid who got off to a rough start, it was not a bad five year stretch.

Via blog.webdistortion.com

Twitter, which celebrated its fifth birthday this week, is also a bit of a late bloomer. Sure, it’s hard to imagine a company that has been valued at anywhere from $3 to 10 billion is a late bloomer, but of the 225 million registered accounts on Twitter, less than 10 percent are active on any given day. And most importantly, it fails the “My Parents Test.” Not only are my mother and father not on Twitter (unlike Facebook and YouTube), but they cannot explain what it is or how it works with any reasonable degree of accuracy.
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For years, we’ve heard about traditional media waiting to be taken over by the “digital revolution.” Last week the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence Journalism released a new study which found that 46% of people now get their news online at least three times a week – surpassing newspapers (40%) for the first time ever.

Now that online sources have seemingly overtaken newspapers, I can’t help but think about what is next. Emerging online platforms can make the publicity and marketing world an intimidating place if you’re not keeping up. Who would have thought that a tweet could provide equal or more buzz – or to put it another way, value to your brand – than an article in the New York Times?

One of the hot topics covered at the Bloomberg Media Summit was the capital of digital media. As some of the biggest marketing and media players discussed how the waning recession is pushing more brands to reinvest in advertising and marketing, I couldn’t help but wonder how much brands are willing to chance in order to stay ahead of the curve. The power of digital media is undeniable, but who owns and is controlling that power is now becoming the more important question.

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As an event that brings together technologists and marketers, SXSW predictably lit up the Twittersphere with comments of anticipation, excitement and general approval. Some of the winners amidst topics of interest included FourSquare, Instagram and GroupMe, as well as events focusing on transmedia trends and technologies, such as the ‘It’s Not TV, It’s Social TV” panel.

Conversations during SXSW were amplified heavily through Re-Tweets and revolved around new apps, and panels and events happening at the time – especially those having to do with social and mobile. While many new apps were launched and talked about, Foursquare flexed its muscle by releasing a slew of sought after SXSW badges. Overall, conversation took on an upbeat tone, with words like “awesome”, “love”, and “party” rising to the top.

Share of Buzz For “Top” Apps During SXSWi

Among the “13 Potential Breakout Apps To Watch at SXSW 2011” pre-selected by Mashable, the buzz was strong around group chat and photo apps. GroupMe’s award for Breakout Digital Trend drove congratulatory tweets, while Instagram took advantage of SXSW to launch an improved news feed as well as a new tilt-shift feature.

App Mentions Above *Instagram mentions here exclude photo-tagged posts, which accounted for 29% of total Instagram mentions. (Based on a 150 post randomized sample).

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Microsoft recently announced that keywords within the adCenter platform will soon be assigned Quality Scores similar to those assigned to keywords within Google’s AdWords platform. But, unlike Google and other platforms, Microsoft says its Quality Scores (QS) will not directly affect how ads are ranked. Instead, the new metric will score a keyword’s past performance within the marketplace.

Screenshot via Microsoft

Historically, QS has been associated with Google and its AdWords platform. The metric has long been associated as a relevancy gauge of a keyword’s qualitative relationship to searchers’ queries that trigger an advertiser’s ads. This metric is important as it is directly tied to Google’s algorithm and thus plays a subsequent role in determining cost, position and performance. AdWords combines a keyword’s QS with set bid prices to calculate the keyword’s position and cost-per-click (CPC).

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Today at SXSW, 360i’s David Berkowitz spoke about how tech advancements such as Near-Field Communication (NFC) and RFID will change the face of mobile forever. You can view the complete presentation below.

For more on mobile strategy, read our Mobile Marketing Playbook.

When Foursquare first started making headlines, back when its users numbered in the hundreds of thousands rather than millions, a lot of people didn’t like the idea of broadcasting their locations to all their friends. The naysayers proved prescient here, as this year’s South by Southwest (SXSW) event underscores how the social focus of check-in apps has died.

The timing is ironic. Last week, I told a friend who’s nominally on Foursquare, “These will be the only five days you’ll find Foursquare useful.” It’s an event where people shift where they’re going based on what’s buzzing on Foursquare and where their friends are checking in. I knew Friday night I was at the best party in Austin solely because every other Foursquare friend was checking in there.

And yet Foursquare chose this event, of all times and places, to launch a program with American Express that offers users $5 discounts at dozens of merchants in downtown Austin. Days earlier, Foursquare allowed merchants to create new kinds of special offers. Points are also now more prominent, offering a form of social currency or bragging rights. It’s not hard to imagine Foursquare later converting the social currency to hard currency, offering better deals to its point-leading power users.

Continue reading over at AdAge’s DigitalNext blog.

Great news for people who love birds and hate pigs: this week Rovio, developer of some of the top iPhone games, announced that it’s bringing its marquee title “Angry Birds” to Facebook, adding in new features to make the game social-network-friendly.

Rovio’s top bird, Peter Vesterbacka, told The Next Web that the release was targeted for May, and that the Facebook version would have a more “collaborative nature” and give a larger role to the villains of the iPhone game, the pigs. “Angry Birds has taken the world of iPhone gaming, and indeed mobile gaming, by storm — Rovio reported last month that 200 million minutes of the game are played every day, and the game generates $1 million per month in ad revenue.

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