RonAmok!

Corporate video doesn’t need to be stiff. There’s nothing wrong with grabbing that Flip Camera and recording something that a traditional would never put on a corporate website.

The following example of online video fits that bill. Featuring Cadence blogger Bob Dwyer, the two minute video demonstrates an iPhone being used to run Cadence software remotely via VPN and VNC. Geeky? Yes. Impractical? Of course. But fun? You betcha! Better yet — Bob offers it as justification to get your boss to spring for an iPhone.

And for those non-electrical engineers out there, here’s some thoughts to explain how silly/fun the video is. The “First Encounter” software that he’s demonstrating is used by electrical engineers to place and route the guts of a chip — just like those that are found in your laptop or cell phone. Back at the office, it’s running on hardware that you can only dream of owning. And the cost of this software with all of the trimmings? Let’s just say that it’s closer to what you paid for your house than you did for that latest copy of Photoshop.

Tags: online video corporate video video cadence synopsys mentor magma ronamok New Media Evangelist eda

Paul Gillin and David Strom have a podcast called MediaBlather. One of their recent guests was Social Media maven Chris Brogan, who I still owe a beer to, BTW, but that’s another story.

The conversation turned to Twitter, a microblogging service that I’ve used, yet never really grasped fully– until Chris offered his always down-to-earth insight. Instead of answering the Twitter-recommended question: “What are you doing?” he suggested answering a different one: “What are you thinking?” Instantaneously I saw the value of Twitter — not only to my followers, but also to me.

My followers wanna know what this New Media Evangelist is thinking about, the problems I’m trying to solve, and the solutions I’m practicing. And for me? I’ve been searching for a note-taking, service — a place to document thoughts for future reference. Through Chris’s advice, I found a way to kill two birds with one New Media stone.

Which brings me to this post. By combining Chris’s question with my post on Brevity, I thought that it might be interesting to document the process I went through to post a tweet:

Question: What am I thinking?:

Answer Number 1: “Throughout the course of human history, corporations have perfected the art of creating content. Unfortunately for them, according to Google, they are good at creating bad content.”

Analysis: Cool, but 40 characters over the limit

Question: What am I thinking?

Answer #2: “Throughout history, corporations have perfected the art of creating content. Unfortunately, according to Google, they’re good at creating bad content.”

Analysis: Better, but still 10 characters over the 140 character limit.

Question: What am I thinking?

Answer #3: Throughout history, corporations have perfected content creation. Unfortunately, according to Google, they’re good at creating bad content.

Analysis: Finished with one (1) character to spare! But can I pare it down even more?

Question: What am I thinking?:

Answer #4: “Over time, companies have perfected content creation. Unfortunately, according to Google, they create bad content.”

Analysis: Now we’re cooking. Completed the thought with 26 characters to spare — a 36% character savings since the original. But did I cut too close to the bone? I think some of the nuances were lost.

Question: What am I thinking?:

Answer #5: “Over time, companies have perfected content creation. Unfortunately, according to Google, they’ve perfected the creation of bad content.

Analysis: Captured the thought with four (4) characters to spare. Time is money, so I hit “send.”

Thanks to Chris, Paul, and David!

Tags: New Media Evangelist Ron Ploof Chris Brogan Paul Gillin David Strom Mediablather brevity twitter What are you thinking?

On Saturday, June 3rd, 2006, Fritz Grobe and Stephen Voltz of Buckfield, Maine, released a clever video demonstrating the effects of dropping 500 Mentos mints into 101 two-liter bottles of Diet Coke. The video propelled the two soda pyro-technicians into stardom, as they performed their magic for David Letterman, Ellen DeGeneres, and were mentioned in the Wall Street Journal, Rolling Stone Magazine, and the New York Times. The two men had become unlikely evangelists for two worldwide brands that they had no official affiliation with – yet.

The story illustrates how New Media is turning the world of traditional marketing upside down. Overnight, Coca Cola and Perfetti Van Melle lost control of their brands. On Friday June 2, 2006, brand managers at Coca Cola went to bed, assuming that they were in the soft drink business. Their counterparts at Perfetti Van Melle woke up on Saturday believing that they were in the candy business. Literally overnight, each company found itself thrust unwillingly into the entertainment business. It’s a lesson that every marketeer must learn in the age of New/Social Media: The only remaining control you over your brand is related to how you react to what others are saying about it.

Viral videos are like the month of March: They come in like a lion yet go out like a lamb. So what happened with this one? What affect did synchronized soda geysers have on these two international brands? Positive? Negative? No change? The great thing about New Media is that everything is measurable. From inside or outside your company, tools exist to track all sorts of things. I’ve found that the hardest part of measuring the effects of New Media is not the actual measurement, but agreeing on the interpretation of the results.

For example, let’s take a look at one of the outside-the-corporate-firewall tools at your disposal. Google Trends offers businesses a way to measure buzz, from two different angles: 1) It tracks what people are searching Google for and 2) it tracks what is found in Google News. Therefore, by typing your company’s name into the tool, a figure-of-merit is calculated that represents how many times people are searching for that term, or how many stories are being written about it.

So let’s perform a Google Trend analysis on “Diet Coke” (in blue) vs. “Mentos” (in red).

For the 125 weeks leading up to June 2006, the average Search Engine Index (SEI) score for “Diet Coke” was 0.74 compared with 0.48 for “Mentos.” One week after the initial release, as the story picked up even more steam, keyboards across the globe drove these SEI figures up 994% for “Diet Coke” and a whopping 3190% for “Mentos” — not because of anything the two international brands did on their own. Rather, because two New Englanders recorded themselves dropping candy mints into bottles of soda!

Both SEIs have finally settled back to an equilibrium point. Over the past 53 weeks, “Diet Coke” has averaged 0.80 (up slightly 7.7%), but surprisingly, “Mentos” is being typed into a Google search 129% more (1.02) than its pre-video score. Put another way, for the 125 weeks prior to the video’s release, the term “Diet Coke” was typed into the Google Search Engine 35% more than “Mentos.” Today, “Diet Coke” lags the search volume of “Mentos” by 27%.

Another way to look at the data is illustrated through the following table:

Two years later, the fun chemical reaction still holds substantial top-ten spots in both Google and Yahoo searches. And Eepybird.com isn’t the only site driving these results. A YouTube search for the term “Diet Coke and Mentos” yields 6870 videos. This story lives on as others record themselves performing similar feats.

Everything in business needs measurement and New Media is no exception. Many tools exist that can provide a glimpse of how the world is perceiving you. Individually they may not offer much insight. But together, by combining their measurements, you can piece together a very interesting picture.

So, what are you measuring?

Tags: Ron Ploof ronamok ronamok.com new media evangelist new media strategist eepybird eepybird.com diet coke mentos measurement youtube google news google trends brand brand measurement tools