Here are a few interesting posts and links for a Monday. btw – Happy belated 4th of July to all my American friends…

1. A New Venture Firm’s ‘Secret Plan’ – interesting short piece on NYT worth a read, be sure to check out Marc Andreessen’s comments.

2. It’s Here! iTwitter: The First Twitter App to do Push – another reason for me to get that iPhone and quick…

3. TrustedPlaces’ CEO on LocalPeople – a short interview with the CEO of UK based TrustedPlaces about the new local search partnership in the UK with a newspaper group. This deal/move looks very smart and I will be watching to see how it goes. In the UK market, I am a firm believer that ‘local’ is still an open space waiting for better services to emerge and that there is still lots to play for.

Also, have to plug the sweet post Greg Sterling did – FB v. twitter -  about our social media marketing case study. Be sure to check out the comments as there useful additional info in there as well.

Here’s a new way to ensure I do some more regular posting. How? Do a short post with three of the more interesting links from my daily or weekly blog scan.

1. Firework 3.5 – top 5 killer features. I like the location awerness. This is starting get interesting and is anothe r step the evolution of the brower as O/S.

2. Pirate Bay sells out – need to digest this and come back with some thoughts.

3. Lessig v. Kelly – round two on the semantics of socialism and maybe Web 2.0.

And, a bonus. This mobile browser looks very very cool.

We will finally get universal chargers for mobile phones. Why not do this for more devices?

In Japan you can already get the 1st solar charged mobile handsets… That’s anotehr about time development (ie, all calculators have it already). But I do wonder how much juice one can expect?

I was reading The Economists special report on ageing in the latest print edition of the magazine (or I should say newspaper) over the weekend. The leader is titled The End of Retirement – not sure I like that tag line. The report as you would expect from the Economist was interesting and though provoking, however it didn’t seem to give any cutting ideas or open a debate on how we might reboot retirement in the 21st century.

Now I am long way from being ready (or wealthy enough) to retire but I am taking a mini-retirement this summer in a style of life hacker Tim Ferris would be proud of. Anyway. lets not gloat about by 8 weeks with the kids and that beach house for now. I am also not clever enough to offer up a 10 point plan on how we should (at least in the developed western nations) look to reboot or rethink retirement just yet. But this is a topic I am interested in thinking about some more. For now here’s what stuck me when reading the Economist report:

More people should look at mini-retirements now. Actually maybe I don’t want to give this one away?! This would go well with the proposal or reality that more people will need to work longer. Anyway, the data says we should live longer if we work and stay engaged later in life. Maybe we can get some sponsorship here.

Work-life balance is not anywhere near where it needs to be – yet. Seems to me if the balance can be smoothed out over one’s lifetime then that would help finance the ’retirement’ phase in people’s live. I think this is an area where some government schemes could come in handy. I am not thinking socialist style but maybe something like a ‘retirement’ credit account that you can tap into early to cover you for certain things and payback later (with all the tax benefits of a pension etc). Perhaps we need look more at how to structure parental and compassionate leave schemes and flexible working with a long term view. Once the kids are gone we can all put in more hours at the office then. Let’s get more thinking going around this area

I am already assuming that any state pension I get is beer money at best and I am pretty sure others in my generation are making similar plans. I am not sure private pension run by bankers are going to be the answer. So would be a good idea for there to be other tax break schemes around in this area. Need some beta programs or even prototypes. Maybe ‘private’ programs to share holiday homes or autos when we retire could help. Let’s get some entrepreneurs thinking about how make that a business.

My last comment is The Economist point out that the prediction is for labor shortages in rich nations in the coming decades. I am note sure I see this. I am more worried we continue to get real good at automating things and that we need less workers overall in the economy. Now that’s scary unless we radically rethink retirement, economics and the wider role government needs to play.

Ok, maybe we are going a little bit social media mad here on MediaViking island. We can’t help ourselves with Twitter growing faster than a Saturn V rocket on the way to the moon. Plus all the good research/discussions going on around how we converse, tweet and retweet as well – and somre more here and here. This all adds to our conviction that we still have a lot to learn about how socia media works and its going to be fun.

So, I was out pitching another social media marketing project to a very interesting high street shop. Well its more than just a shop and it should prove to be a great vertical case study and successfulon social media… But I can’t say anymore yet in order to protect the innocent. As part of this pitch I threw together a very rough and ready intro deck to socail media and an outline pilot plan (note:  some slides have been edited out).

In the spirit of the new socialism I am posting up this deck to share:

Back in March my colleague Simon B and I spent some time promoting a beer festival via social media. We took on this project with the specific goal of experimenting to see if social media, and in particular Twitter, could be successfully leveraged to drive people to a real world event. Cutting to the punch line, yes we were successful.

We have now published a short case study on the results of this social, which you can see below or by going directly to Cheers to Social Media on Slideshare:

One of the key findings was that there is a positive Social Media ROI. For this campaign (or event) we managed to drive:

• 63% of attendees were a result of Social Media Marketing
• £571 revenue per 1 hour spent on Social Media
• £11.41 for each £1 spent (=11x ROI)
• 5.6% total cost of sale for revenue generated by Social Media

We also believe the ROI can be significantly increased by deploying ‘emerging’ Social Media best practices and development of better tools to manage campaigns and review data (ie, a social media analytics work bench).

The primary lesson was that with attention at a premium,  Social Media does indeed provide a great platform to ensure the success of marketing campaigns and in this case a real world event. In particular Twitter and Eventbrite proved cost effective and easy ways to drive awareness and consumer actions (e.g. attendance, footfall, purchases ).

Interesting to note that Facebook underperformed on what we expected. We also found that social media magnifies the value of search, at least for something very time based (ie, event).

For the event microsite we had 3175 unique visitors  during the promotional period and the traffic sources were as follows:

• 61% search (Google 58%)
• 24%-38% social media (*estimated low end of 24% to as high as 38%)
• 4% blogs

As a follow-up – “sort of  real time mini case study” – we are finding that social media again is proving a powerful way to drive awareness and interest in the actual case study!

Cheers To Social Media is currently being showcased on the ‘Business & Mgmt‘ page by our editorial team [slideshare] …

An additional proof point for success if using social media – here’s the screen grab is below.

As we already know the members of The Pirate Bay – the file sharing search engine – were found guilty of:

… breaking Swedish copyright laws and sentenced them to a year in prison and a $3.6 million fine …

Having recently finished reading The Pirate’s Dilemma, it does strike me that this verdict is more of a last gasp of the current defenders of copyright law than a trend. And as Techdirt correctly points out the issue is a business model problem for the producers of music and video content and not a legal issue.

IMHO – copyright is a ‘broken’ model for the digital space and we need new business models. I hope the Pirate Bay dudes have better luck in filling an appeal. I have some good examples of how copyright owners are leaving money (future post coming, I promise) on the table and sites like The Pirate Bay and others are providing a useful, if not valuable, service to end users. Long live the Pirate Party!

Some related posts worth reading:

• Pirates Delima (books site/blog)
• Best Selling Author Actively Pirating His Own Book — Finds It Helps Sales Tremendously

I really liked today’s Google UK logo in honour of Charles Darwin. Respect!

Another Friday and another humor entry… One of these days I will be back with some original conten…

Ben & Jerry created “Yes Pecan!” ice cream flavor for Obama.

For George W. they created “_________”.

Here are some of my favorite responses:

• Grape Depression
• Abu Grape
• Cluster Fudge
• Nut’n Accomplished
• Iraqi Road
• Chock ‘n Awe
• WireTapioca
• Impeach Cobbler
• Guantanmallow
• imPeachmint
• Heck of a Job, Brownie!
• Neocon Politan
• RockyRoad to Fascism
• The Reese’s-cession
• Cookie D’oh!
• The Housing Crunch
• Nougalar Proliferation
• Death by Chocolate… and Torture
• Freedom Vanilla Ice Cream
• Chocolate Chip On My Shoulde
• Credit Crunch
• Mission Pecanplished
• Country Pumpkin
• Chunky Monkey in Chief
• Caramel Preemptive Stripe

There were a few more but I am going to swear in public on my blog not that it’s worth it.

I have no idea if this list is really from the wp (a friend email it me), but it made me laugh and its nice way to head out for the weekend. btw – Happy New Year to all readers!

The Washington Post has published the winning submissions to its yearly
contest, in which readers are asked to supply alternate meanings for common
words.

And the winners are:

1. Coffee , n. The person upon whom one coughs.

2. Flabbergasted , adj. Appalled by discovering how much weight one has
gained.

3. Abdicate , v. To give up all hope of ever having a flat stomach.

4. Esplanade , v. To attempt an explanation while drunk.

5. Willy-nilly , adj. Impotent.

6. Negligent , adj. Absentmindedly answering the door when wearing only a
nightgown.

7. Lymph , v. To walk with a lisp.

8. Gargoyle , n. Olive-flavored mouthwash

9. Flatulence , n. Emergency vehicle that picks up someone who has been
run over by a steamroller.

10. Balderdash , n. A rapidly receding hairline..

11. Testicle , n. A humorous question on an exam.

12. Rectitude , n. The formal, dignified bearing adopted by proctologists.

13. Pokemon , n.. A Rastafarian proctologist.

14. Oyster , n. A person who sprinkles his conversation with Yiddishisms.

15. Frisbeetarianism , n. The belief that, after death, the soul flies up
onto the roof and gets stuck there.

16. Circumvent , n. An opening in the front of boxer shorts worn by Jewish
men.