Digital Connections – 360i Blog, Digital Marketing Agency

Microsoft’s Project Natal demo – specifically its innovation in motion control – stood out at this year’s E3 event.

E3 rolled around again this week. It’s generally pretty tough to sift through the manifold hype around the event and pick out the coolest, most innovative demo at the show. Except this year, of course – Microsoft made it pretty easy, with Project Natal.

Looking at the demo videos, it’s amazing to think that this whole motion control thing began with the Wiimote, and now has grown into something that could revolutionize UIs in general – did anyone else see the demos and immediately begin wishing for something like this? But beyond the possibilities for computing generally, what Natal does for gaming – especially casual gaming – is incredible.

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Google’s new dashboard for local businesses gives marketers key insights into how customers are finding them via search (Image via Google).

The Google Local Business Center, which allows businesses to create free listings within Google Maps, has recently added a new detailed analytics dashboard. The Local Business Center has long provided business owners with the ability to list their store locations for inclusion in Google Maps, as well as in its main search results for relevant queries. This data comes directly from the marketer and thus provides more authentic and verifiable location information than what’s received through Google’s relationships with data providers and its Web crawling.

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In the future, my dad will be a blogger. He’ll create wikis. He’ll have his work translated into languages spoken across Europe, Asia, and South America. He’ll accomplish it effortlessly with Google Wave. I watched the 80-minute developer preview of Wave, and it’s going to make nearly everyone a social media creator.

Seth Godin made the point that “the real next Google” is Google, thanks to what it’s doing with Wave. He contrasted that with Microsoft Bing, a search engine with a few features that Google can easily copy.

One of the problems with Bing is that it’s anti-social. That’s a dangerous proposition for a new digital brand. Microsoft says in its press release, “The explosive growth of online content has continued unabated, and Bing was developed as a tool to help people more easily navigate through the information overload.” But that “explosive growth” is largely due to the proliferation of social media, while the tool is still largely standard search functionality.

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If cats can tweet, why can’t taps? We created an apparatus that tweets each time a beer is poured – and reminds you when it’s time to refill the keg.

This is the story of a tap, who – by the grace of technology – has finally been granted a voice. For centuries he has been humankind’s silent servant, swiftly and adeptly fulfilling our need for cold, frothy refreshment. But no more. We set out to devise a digital bartender of sorts – a tweeting tap that would amuse us with his witty banter, let us know when the keg was getting low and remind visitors to tip their bartender…

At approximately 4 p.m. on May 19, @TweetingBar uttered his first words – and the world will never be the same.

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Steve Ballmer and Microsoft will launch Bing next Wednesday.

Today, while there have been the requisite conversations about Twitter and Facebook, the day’s been dominated by one word: “Bing.”

Yes, Bing.com is here, almost. Microsoft is launching its new engine next Wednesday, but the demo reel is live at Bing.com.

What does it all mean? Here’s a round-up of first impressions. There’ll be much more to say once this comes out:

• It looks very good. The basic layout of the results page is the same, with the exception of the right-hand ‘guided search’ bar (which only worked so well when Ask.com pioneered it). For some kinds of searches, it may even prove to be better than Google.
• It won’t matter if it’s better than Google. What matters is if consumers use it.
• A huge challenge will be promoting something consumers don’t think they need. 360i’s CEO Bryan Wiener told The New York Times, “There is not a perceived market problem with search that needs fixing.”
• The rumored $100 million ad budget, or hundreds of millions if you count partnerships, will help. But this MUST be an experience consumers will tell their friends about. That’s how all of the biggest digital brands have been built this decade: Google, Facebook, MySpace, Wikipedia, YouTube, Firefox… it’s a long list. We’ll see if it’s that good.
• Microsoft’s advertising platform has been strong for some time now. On that basis, Microsoft has been very competitive with the other engines, and they offer some fantastic tools. But again, if they don’t have the market share, nothing else matters.
• With the focus on helping consumers refine results, Bing’s goal will be to keep consumers interacting with the results as long as it’s required. If it works as planned, that should mean there are fewer false hits – the kinds of clicks that lead consumers to press the back button right away.
• One oddity in the demo video: it mentions searching for a French restaurant in New York and seeing if there’s parking. These people have clearly never eaten in New York. As much as I love Salty’s in West Seattle, they really need to pay a visit here sometime – the food’s quite good. Oh, and why isn’t the video embeddable?
• Microsoft’s billing Bing as a decision engine and even registered decisionengine.com. It makes sense if you watch the whole video. If you don’t though, it reeks of being so overly rational and intellectual that it misses the chance to forge an emotional connection.
• The new name should help. Two of the biggest features of Bing are its design and usability. Those are not attributes one generally associates with Microsoft.
• The Twitter buzz was in full force. I opened a Twitter Search window around 11 a.m. ET for ‘bing’ mentions and kept it open. Seven hours later there were nearly 13,000 mentions. While that made it a top 10 trending topic, it was trumped by news of Hulu Desktop (which launched for real) and was trailing far behind a number of other buzzwords and memes. Here’s the top 10 as of 6:15 p.m. ET: #liesboystell, #liesgirlstell, #3wordsaftersex, BGT, #twistory, #thingsmummysaid, #3breakupwords, #jonaswebcast, Hulu Desktop, Bing

Keep coming back here for more Bing buzz.

This April, San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom announced his candidacy for governor via Twitter (image via VentureBeat).

As a former journalist, I can assure you that 99.9 percent of press releases are far, far too long. Contrast the average 750-word beast with this short and to-the-point pitch: “Bcuz I Love U, I want u to be the first to know the title of my new album ‘Memoirs of an Imperfect Angel’ Its very personal & dedicated to u.”

That’s the tweet that singer Mariah Carey used to debut her new album – the latest in a continuing trend of companies and public figures making major announcements through their Twitter feeds and other short-form, opt-in media.

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If you’re not in control of your digital identity, the odds are pretty good that someone else is, or will be if you have any brand recognition at all.

Consider the recent example of Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback Ben Roethlisberger, whose digital doppelganger created false identities spanning a range of social media sites and even claimed he had been diagnosed with skin cancer. ESPN advised in its NFL Rumor Central, “Not real, folks. In fact, if you see an athlete with a Twitter, you should assume — at least at first — that it’s fake. Assume it’s a Twitter twerp.”

What happens to celebrities happens to brands too. Identity hijacking is prevalent in social media largely because it’s easy to set up accounts and find an audience. The potential for the reach is enough of a lure. When I recently asked Facebook’s Chris Pan who Facebook’s audience is, he said something to the effect of, “Pretty soon it’ll be everyone.” He’s not that far off.

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