I'm pleased to announce the next major gathering of the CIM Technology Marketing Interest Group has been confirmed for the 18th January 2012 in London.

 

Our inaugural event in January of this year was a huge success, attracting nearly 100 key people from the business of creating and marketing technology. You can watch highlights of the first event on the TMIG TV You Tube channel. This second event promises to offer further insights and inspiration.

 

The theme of our second event is how do tech marketers make sense of a non-linear world? Our main speaker is Alan Moore, author of 'No Straight Lines: making sense of our non-linear world'.

Straight line marketing is out. Today's interactive networked world is about the massive flow of people, who are connecting, collaborating, organising and creating in a manner that has nothing much to do with a linear approach. But how do tech marketers achieve business and commercial success in this non-linear world? Alan will be revealing his 'no straight lines' perspective on innovation, communities and participatory culture to give your business the edge it needs.

 

In addition to Alan we will have a high quality panel of marketers working in the start up field, who are operating at the coal face of the 'no straight lines' scenario.

The first 30 tickets to the event are free, and you can find more information and booking instructions here.

Yes, just when you thought you had enough App Stores, this story in Read Write Web reports that Skype have launched one of their own. It offers a selection of 3rd party apps (23 at the moment) that integrate with Skype. Interestingly there is one app in there with a retail price of $350, wow!

In reality it is actually a lot like Evernote Trunk, with has been showcasing apps that have integrated and extended Evernote for some time.

 

 

 

Got an interesting email from iTunes this morning. UK Mobile Operator, Orange, famous for its 'Orange Wednesdays' cinema ticket promotion has announced a deal with iTunes to offer a free movie rental via iTunes every Thursday. Not sure why they couldn't keep Wednesday for the day of the offer, which comes with all the previous marketing investment, but hey nice idea none the less. This kind of deal may also signal a step up in focus for Apple TV. As an Apple TV owner I'd love this, as everything is primed ready to play straight through the living room setup.

Bizarrely there is no mention of the new offer on the Orange Wednesday website.

The importance of social media continues to grow for business, so the subject of measuring the impact and return on investment for social media activity continues to rumble on.

Personally I measure the performance of both our brand (BlueVia) and the individuals in my team. We achieve this by aggregating a variety of data sources; Klout and PeerIndex scores, then blended with coverage, engagement, sentiment, and share of voice analysis.

 

In the past few weeks, one of the more popular social media influence tracking tools, Klout, has added a bunch of new features. Firstly they now track your social interaction across 10 external social media accounts. You can now curate lists comparing other Klout users, making it easy to compare scores, say within your own team or competitors. In addition they have added the ability for you to give people '+K' for topics you think they are influential on.  I'm not quite clear how this effects your or their overall score, but it encourages a little more interaction with the service, as I'm sure 99.9% of users connect their accounts then just check in for their score movements. I know I do.

 

Their latest feature is 'Topic Pages'. Topic pages promise to "Dig deeper into topics, see the top influencers, the most influential content, and the latest activity around topics." They launch in beta in September.

 

PeerIndex, based in London's TechHub, contiunes to grow and currently has a number of openings.

 

For background reading on social media ROI, check these presentions and use your old friend Google search!

A positive story published in Mobile Entertainment today heralds that 14 million American's scanned a mobile barcode in June. Is this really good news? That's a tiny 6% of the US mobile user base or a rather insignificant 4.5% of the total US population. Hardly cause to declare a breakthrough is it? Compare that to comScore's Feb 2011 data which shows 68.8% of US mobile users send text (SMS) messages, 36.6% downloaded apps, and 24.6% access a social networking site via mobile.

Come on QR fans defend your tech ;-)

By the way, I wonder if anyone has checked what that QR code in the story links to. I haven't bothered, guess that says it all!

A quick plug for one of my work based projects I'm most proud of. Like any good marketer I spend a lot of time understanding the market and what my prospective customers want and need. Historically this investment in insight was proprietary and used solely internally. I had a "light bulb" moment about two and a half years ago and thought why don't we effectively open source our market research and share the same data we use internally with anyone that wants it. Next step was to find the right partner, and I have had a blast working with Andreas Constantinou and the team at Vision Mobile ever since. The 2010 edition of the report received wide spread praise and achieved over 10,000 downloads. I'm confident that 2011's edition is bigger, and better. We have doubled the number of respondents, and for the first time we have interviewed over 20 leading brands to understand their attitudes and apps strategies. You can listen to Andreas and I discussing the report here: Introducing Developer Economics 2011 from BlueVia on Vimeo. To download your free copy visit www.developereconomics.com Enjoy! edit: thanks to @adamcohenrose for pointing out the download link was broken! Now fixed

Just a quick update on TMIG. We ran our first two events in January and received very positive feedback from attendees. Thank you to all that made the effort to attend, and share your thoughts with us. It was a small, but dedicated team that pulled off those initial events. One of the positive outcomes of the first event was we managed to attract some new blood and fresh perspecitive to the steering committee. You can watch video from the first two events on our YouTube channel, and of course interact with fellow TMIG members in our Linked In Group. The steering committee is preparing the programme of events for the rest of this year, and working closely with CIM to achieve official MIG status. If you have any ideas for suitable content or speakers for future TMIG events, please let us know. We will update you soon on the next set of TMIG events. In the meantime feel free to download and distribute this PDF outlining TMIG to anyone you think may be interested in joining.