Since my last post, I joined a software consultancy called Neudesic to help build the Texas region and the Dallas and Austin offices, in particular. As the Regional Practice Director for the Custom Application Development practice, I’m responsible for setting strategic technology direction, cultivating our delivery capabilities, selling and leading engagements, and overseeing all activity within the practice. Now that I’ve had a chance to settle into the role, I plan to revive this blog and start posting regularly. I’ll share my thoughts and observations on the business, science, and art of software development, with a continued focus on interactive media (web, mobile, and social technologies).

For those of you who have been following Mediassembly… it is still alive and I plan to continue developing the company and its products. However, it is going through a substantial transformation from its original form. Mediassembly will be going back into “stealth mode” for a while, as the new strategy and focus is developed. We’ll be leveraging and extending the technologies that have been developed, but with very different focus and product. Stay tuned to this blog or mediassembly.com for more info as things progress.

Click on the image below for a zoomable, interactive version.

There are various opinions and perspectives on what specifically falls under the interactive marketing umbrella.  I’m not a stickler or an academic.  My perspective is based on my experience working with interactive marketing agencies.   Not everything these agencies do would necessarily be considered interactive marketing.  E-Commerce sites may be an example.  (Others are illustrated in gray.) But I think it is fair to say e-commerce and interactive marketing have a reasonably close relationship.

For now, let’s start with good ol’ wikipedia’s definition:

Interactive Marketing refers to the evolving trend in marketing whereby marketing has moved from a transaction-based effort to a conversation. The definition of interactive marketing comes from John Deighton at Harvard, who says interactive marketing is the ability to address the customer, remember what the customer says and address the customer again in a way that illustrates that we remember what the customer has told us (Deighton 1996). Interactive marketing is not synonymous with online marketing, although interactive marketing processes are facilitated by internet technology.

That last sentence makes a distinction between interactive marketing and online marketing.  I consider that an academic distinction.  (It did come from Harvard, after all.) While I do agree with the premise, in practice interactive marketing and online marketing are closely related and usually executed together as part of a holistic marketing strategy.

In subsequent posts I will elaborate on each of the main activities I consider interactive marketing.  These include:

• Content Marketing
• Search Engine Marketing
• Display Advertising
• Social Media Marketing
• Community Marketing
• Email Marketing
• Mobile Marketing
• Affiliate Marketing
• Online Promotions
• Integrated Campaigns

I’ll update this list with links as they’re available.

I’ll also be revising and expanding upon the infographic.  The permanent url for the interactive version will be: http://troysabin.com/what-is-interactive-marketing/.  So bookmark that link if you want to follow along and offer your feedback in the comments.

Amazon Ec2 Reserved Instances with Windows

Amazon SimpleDB Consistency Enhancements

Even though we switched to Windows Azure, I’m still a huge fan of Amazon AWS.  They set the bar for cloud platform providers and few have been able to reach it.  While these recent announcements would not have changed our decision, they certainly narrow the gap between the two platforms for developers building on a Microsoft stack.

I’m looking forward to seeing the competition progress between these and other cloud platform vendors.  As each continues to push the bar, we customers ultimately win.

Back in December I made a decision to migrate Mediassembly from Amazon’s AWS cloud platform to Microsoft’s Windows Azure.  This post explains why.  I’ve been holding this post in draft, waiting for time to add more detail.  But to keep this from getting stale, I’ll just start with the the bottom line, which is this:

Developers!  Developers!  Developers! Developers!

That famous mantra from Steve Balmer is clearly reflected in the combination of Windows Azure platform services and development tools.  If you’re building on a Microsoft stack, Azure offers the most productive solution with a much richer set of cloud platform development tools and infrastructure services.  If you are a business or development team leader, this translates to Productivity, Productivity, Productivity, Productivity!  Since I’m running an Internet startup, productivity (time to market) is a critical consideration.

The key enablers of this productivity are:

• Good .Net Wrappers around the REST Services
  The .Net Azure wrappers are much richer than the comparable Amazon AWS wrappers.
• Tight integration/compatibility with advanced .Net features and frameworks, such as LINQ, Ado.Net Data Services, Entity Framework, etc.
  Developers can easily transition from traditional web application development to Azure.
• The Azure Development Fabric
  In my experience, the biggest challenge with developing for the cloud is dependency on the cloud infrastructure.   The Azure development fabric provides a robust simulation environment that runs on the developer’s local machine.  No internet or cloud connectivity is required, so developers can continue to work wherever they are.   The development fabric includes nearly all Azure services and APIs and allows you to configure and run multiple concurrent web and worker/background role instances – as you would in production.  However, unlike production, you can attach the debugger and step through the code to discover those often extremely hard-t0-find concurrency-related bugs.
• Robust Diagnostics
  Good diagnostics are critical to identifying and correcting problems.  Azure’s diagnostics allow you to use standard System.Diagnostics.Trace APIs and enables you to collect IIS Logs, Failed Request Logs, Performance Counters, Windows Event Logs, and Application Crash Dumps – and transfer the collected data to your storage account either on-demand or at scheduled intervals.

I hope to have time to discuss some of the advantages and disadvantages of Microsoft’s and Amazon’s equivalent compute, storage, messaging and data infrastructure services.   They each have their strengths and weaknesses, but the those had far less influence on the decision than the points above.

The highlights are in the presentation, below.  The full report, including all the supporting data is available at http://feed.razorfish.com/feed09/

While I didn’t present, I did get to talk to several investors about Mediassembly and social media.  You might think that social media, being a very hot topic these days, would naturally be of interest to investors hoping to ride the next big wave.  But many waves crash into rocks.  The investors I’ve met tend to be conservative and skeptical of anything that is overly hyped.  They’re interested in finding companies that provide innovative, yet practical solutions to tangible problems.  The clearer the problem, the easier it is for them to understand the opportunity.

Social media is indeed a phenomenal wave that  is changing the way people interact with each other and the way businesses interact with customers.  And it is tempting to lead into discussions with how social media is changing the world and citing amazing Facebook and Twitter statistics.  But doing so will likely trigger the skeptic’s spidey sense and disengage your audience.   Statistics are important, but only after you demonstrate that you’re offering a valuable solution to a clear and significant problem.   Sell your solution, without incorporating the hype.  The good news is there are plenty of problems to be solved with social media.  You don’t need the hype.

While the context of this post is speaking to angel investors, I believe the advise is broadly applicable.  It seems there are many agencies and social media champions inside organizations who encounter skepticism while proposing a social media strategy to senior management.   I have found that a healthy skepticism is a trait common to both executives and angels.  Angels are often retired executives, after all.

There have been several great posts and presentations recently that address the ROI of Social Media.  Whether you’re talking to investors or executives, you should be well versed on the bottom-line impact of your solution and how ROI will be measured.  This is a good place to start:

6 Must Read Posts about the ROI of Social Media

WOMMA, the Word of Mouth Marketing Association, has provided some good insight on the ruling.  Anthony DiResta, WOMMA’s general counsel prepared a slidecast presentation entitled “Practical Answers to Important Questions on the FTC guides“.  And John Moore, gets to the heart of blogger’s concerns with “Will the FTC come after me?“.  He provides this assurance (emphasis mine):

According to Anthony, the FTC will listen to complaints filed by consumer groups, trade associations, attorney general offices, the Better Business Bureau, and individual consumers about potential abuse of endorsements in social media channels. If a submitted complaint interests the FTC, an investigation may begin and some form of punishment may be handed out if violations are found.

So no … the FTC will not play the role of big brother and track every blogger’s every move. The FTC will, however, pay attention to suspicious activity if they receive credible complaints about potential abuse.

To preserve the credibility of the medium for consumers, bloggers, and marketers, I believe it is in everyone’s best interest to call out and ultimately prevent blatant misrepresentations – which is ultimately the intent of the ruling.

SimpleDB provides simplicity and infinite scalability (relatively), but that comes with some big compromises – the biggest being eventual consistency and no transactional integrity.  Eventual consistency means data updates are not reflected immediately – they propagate over time (usually under 5 mins), which can create some unique challenges for transactional applications.    Without transactional integrity, you can’t be guaranteed that a set of related updates are applied together, which creates the risk of data corruption.

RDS, on the other hand, provides all the advantages of a traditional relational database (MySQL, specifically), but comes with the cost of complexity and scalability.  Amazon does reduce a significant amount of the complexity and scalability issues with RDS.  They provide all the generic database administration services, including backups.  And they provide the ability to scale both CPU and storage capacity with simple API calls.   But there is a limit to how high an RDS instance can scale, at which point you have to manually resort to horizontal scaling techniques like clustering and partitioning – which are not automatically supported by RDS.   While both RDS and SimpleDB have limitations, used together they offer a very powerful and flexible solution.

Meanwhile, in an email to Windows Azure CTP (Community Technology Preview) participants, Microsoft announced plans to transition Windows Azure from a CTP to a commercial offering by February 1st, 2010.

• At PDC 2009, on November 17th, 2009, a number of new features in Windows Azure will be made available for the first time. The CTP will remain open through December 31st, allowing you to experiment with the full feature platform and to give us any final feedback.
• Beginning January, 2010, new customers will have to sign up for an offer to access services on the Windows Azure platform. You’ll receive your first bill with a $0 balance, so you can see your exact usage while still enjoying free service.
• On February 1, 2010, we will begin charging customers for using the Windows Azure platform.

I’ve been surprised how long Microsoft held off the official release of the commercial Azure platform, meanwhile loosing market share to Amazon and others. I’ll be interested to see what is released in November and how their pricing compares to Amazon.

While I am involved heavily in business and marketing activity, I am a tech guy at heart.  I often have to stop myself from being overly influenced by technical concerns and perspective.  However, sometimes that perspective is broadly relevant.  One example that has been on my mind recently is the issue of scale – how to design and extend a solution to support (sometimes massive) growth.

Social media marketing is about dialog, not monolog.  Conversing, not  broadcasting.  It is about engaging at a personal level.  That is probably the most common message shared and passionately propagated by social media marketing experts and practitioners.  And I certainly believe it to be true.   But the implications of this message make the software architect in me uneasy.

In software development, supporting multiple concurrent dialogs (user sessions, transactions, etc.) is the number one factor inhibiting scale.  Content publishing sites (msn, cnn, nytimes) are relatively easy to scale because they don’t have to sustain ongoing dialogs with each reader.  But transactional and dialog-centric sites (ecommerce, gaming, social media) are very difficult to scale.  This is because each dialog requires memory, CPU cycles, and other finite resources.   Twitter is the poster child for the scalability challenges that come with dialog-centric systems.  They have had tremendous growth and success, but not without a lot of pain and frustration for both the company and the users.

I see a clear parallel between the scalability challenges faced in software and the challenges that will be faced by agencies and marketing organizations as they attempt to scale their social media marketing programs.   Brand engagement, at a personal level, is critical to success.  But brand representatives are finite and expensive resources.  As social media usage continues to grow, along with consumer expectations of brand engagement, consumer demand for attention will exceed brands’ ability to connect at a personal level. Brands can’t add marketers as readily as they add servers.  But without those personal connections, the social media marketing benefits are lost. If brands can’t scale their social media engagement and maintain personal connections, they will be perceived as using social media as a broadcasting medium – and end up fostering resentment, rather than affinity.

Fortunately, the consumers themselves are the solution.  Marketing agencies and organizations should include brand ambassador programs as central components of their long-term social media strategies.  The brand ambassador term seems to have many definitions and interpretations.  So, in this context, I’ll define a brand ambassador as a customer/consumer who is an active advocate and has been given some kind of official recognition or endorsement from the brand – usually for their product knowledge and/or passion.  They are part of an exclusive community that have a privileged relationship with the brand, and are recognized by other consumers for that relationship.

Again, I’m really a tech guy, so I’m sure a marketer could provide a much better definition.  But, hopefully, I’m in the ballpark – at least in this context.

One of the best examples that I’ve personally experienced is the Microsoft Most Valued Professional (MVP) program.  Microsoft describes the program as follows:

Microsoft Most Valuable Professionals (MVPs) are exceptional technical community leaders from around the world who are awarded for voluntarily sharing their high quality, real world expertise in offline and online technical communities. Microsoft MVPs are a highly select group of experts that represents the technical community’s best and brightest, and they share a deep commitment to community and a willingness to help others.

The program is run by Microsoft’s Community Support Services group – not by marketing.  While it was not conceived as an ambassador program, it very affectively solves the same problem of scaling customer engagement through social media.  Through this program, Microsoft has extended its reach into hundreds of communities and discussion forums where customers are interacting with and supporting each other.  MVP participants in these communities and forums are recognized and respected because of their relationship with Microsoft and are often sought out by other members.  Some MVPs have more respect and credibility with customers than many Microsoft employees.

While the MVP program is not a marketing program, it is a fantastic case study for the power and effectiveness of using customers to represent a brand and scale social media engagement.  I believe the fact that it is not simply a marketing initiative elevates the credibility of the program and the MVPs.

Sean O’Driscoll was the primary architect of this program.  Since it pre-dates the social media term and social media marketing era, you could say he was doing social media before social media was cool.  I had the pleasure of meeting him while working on Microsoft’s social media marketing platform for Windows & Windows Live.  He has since left Microsoft and is now President of Ant’s Eye View, a community and social media marketing firm.  Definitely a company worth following.

“If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.”  ~ Abraham Maslow

  That golden hammer mentality can be seen in the use of community platforms by many brands.  Broadly, there are three common business goals and uses for community platforms.  (Again, broadly – there are many more specific uses.)

• Support – enabling users to help and support each other.
• Research – gaining consumer insights and feedback.
• Marketing – generating awareness, buzz and word-of-mouth.

Each of these goals have unique requirements.  Yet most companies use the same community hammer for all three purposes.  Many of the community platforms can indeed be used effectively for each purpose.  There are several impressive platforms with both broad and deep feature-sets.  But there is a fundamental problem with existing community platforms when the primary goal is marketing – word of mouth marketing, in particular. 

The problem is these platforms create what I call destination communities.  Users have to navigate to a specific site/destination and interact with other users within the confines of that site.  In the physical world, this is analogous to gathering customers at a corporate campus or conference center.  That is commonly done and is appropriate for support (training), research (focus groups), and the awareness component of marketing.   But, to be effective, word of mouth has to be encouraged and enabled everywhere – especially off-campus.  Otherwise, your members are just preaching to the choir.   

The real value of word-of-mouth comes from influencing others outside the loyal customer base.  You want passionate customers and brand advocates to influence friends, family, peers and colleagues wherever they are having conversations.  Most of those (online) conversations are not occurring within the confines of a brand’s destination community.  They are scattered across multiple blogs, forums, social networks and other social mediums. 

Word of mouth is the most effective and, appropriately, the fastest growing marketing segment.  Unfortunately, it is not well served by existing tools.  Assembling, engaging, and activating a community of brand advocates is an important component of a word of mouth marketing strategy.  In that context, implementing a “traditional” community platform may seem logical.

In fact, most community platforms do provide relevant features to help community managers inspire members and motivate participation.  Usually this is in the form of a reputation system.  Reputation systems are prevalent on many forms of social media because they are highly effective at encouraging desired behaviors.  A great exploration of the reasoning behind this can be found in a research study by Sarah P.W. Sheik and Choon-Ling Sia, of The University of Hong Kong, entitled: Using Reputation System to Motivate Knowledge Contribution Behavior in Online Community.  Ultimately, they suggest that reputation systems play on the belongingness and esteem motivations described by Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. 

Reputation systems are powerful tools provided by most community platforms, but their scope is still restricted to a single destination community.  Therefore, they are of limited value to word-of-mouth marketing initiatives.  Community platforms have attractive features and seem almost right for the marketing job.  But their confined scope is a significant marketing barrier.

Marketers need a new set of tools for building marketing and brand advocacy communities.  They need to be able to assemble, engage, and activate advocates across all the advocate’s communities and social networks and through all social mediums that the advocates use.  They do need features similar to existing community platforms (reputation systems, for example), but that can be applied to a broadly distributed community of advocates.  They need an alternative to the community golden hammer.