Archive

Today, we are very excited since we are launching our first competition: Xtract Scenario Competition.

If you could see the social connections between your website visitors and find out who are the most influential ones – how could you utilise the knowledge to your business benefit?

Submit a presentation describing how you would utilise insight about your most influential users and the way your user base is networked, for example to improve your online marketing and advertising campaigns.

This is one of a twin pair competition, the other one being a closed competition for certain art schools around the world (opening October 22nd, 2008). We hope that these competitions will give some insight for both the online and mobile communities into the art of social networks and advertising in real social networks.

Any one with good ideas are invited to participate to the scenario competition, as it aims at being a vast brainstorm of scenarios of how to utilise the real social network of web sites.

The first prize is the Wacom Cintiq 12WX, read more on the competition website.

We have a new white paper online on the topic Social Advertising Intelligence: How to reach consumers with active advertising.

Customers are increasingly moving from mass broadcast media to social media, making current advertising processes less effective than before. Until now, the tools for planning and buying online and mobile advertising have been lacking.

In the white paper, we analyze the four main challenges that advertisers face with online and mobile advertising, that is:

1. Measuring the full impact of the ads
2. Lack of tools
3. Ads cannot be bought in a unified way
4. Lack of information on online users

The white paper also presents, how Xtract Social Advertising Intelligence can be used to target campaigns effectively, solving some of the challenges with multi-channel advertising.

Did you find the white paper useful? Was there something missing? All feedback is welcome!

Around one month ago I moved from the research team here at Xtract to marketing. This change is an interesting one, since often people consider research and marketing to be opposites: marketing deals with presenting concepts to customers in a concrete fashion as quickly as possible, while researchers work on abstract concepts which might take years to develop into something useful.

What is surprising is that marketing and research are in many ways quite similar and even many of the skills required are the same: in both jobs, one needs to be able to innovate, present ideas effectively and communicate by writing. Also, in both jobs one has to have a vision on where the business is moving and how we can help our customers with our tools and skills.

Now I just need to get some grasp of the marketing speak, which is quite different from the technical jargon I am more familiar with. Instead of “mixture models”, “bayesian inference” and “functional programming”, I now need to be able to talk fluently about “permission marketing”, “value propositions” and “behavior targeting”. In a way, this is like learning a new languge.

Tomi Ahonen has really an interesting post in Communities Dominate Brands blog. I agree very much with him. Anyway, I would like to emphasize that these digital identities work also on profile levels, so that you don’t have to know individuals or their phone numbers, but you can know customer profiles and then link or predict to which profile each individual belongs to. And this we have implemented many times.