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It’s a testament to the times that as a new burgeoning technology is hatched by an “army of geeks” in a caffeine drenched frenzy, I can have a conversation at a party with a lawyer from a completely different field and find that he already has a rudimentary grasp of that technology - Cloud Computing.

Even if I normalize for the natural demographic skew of my location (San Francisco), it is impressive to consider how quickly this phenomenon has progressed towards the mainstream.  Clearly, the message has a lot to do with the rate of transmission.  “Software-as-a-Service”, or worse “SaaS”, didn’t catch the imagination as well as Cloud has done.  Which is ironic, considering SaaS is actually what the consumer/user really touches, and what was originally represented by “The Cloud” - a metaphor for all of the networking, server hardware, storage, and software bits and bobs that no one really wants to know about.  As I said in a previous post, it really does matter what you call something.

So I looked around for some other indicators of “Cloud Computing” crossing the chasm from geekland to consumerland, and didn’t find very many.

• Cloud computing for business goes mainstream
• Los Angeles Moves To Gmail And ‘Cloud’ Computing

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Posted under cloud, marketing

There was a time when everyone was hot about “Location-based Advertising”.  Well, everyone’s still trying to crack that chestnut, and maybe this is a way to do it - Location-based Micro-Blogging.  This is better known as an application called FourSquare, or its closest competitor Gowalla.

Think of FourSqaure as Twitter meets Google Maps with an added gaming concept that reminds me of the old treasure hunts I used to go on as a child with my parents…but without the clues.  Essentially, when you arrive at an establishment, or your home, or your office, or where ever, you use an app running on your smartphone to “check-in”.  That act of checking into that location is then published to the rest of your social network.  You also have the opportunity to receive some points and a virtual badge of honor.  Last, but not least, you can provide a Tip to visitors of the establishment (for more points), or simply post a status update.

Of course, the obvious question is, “Why?”.  But then again, why do we do anything?  Why do we Tweet?  Why do we post videos to YouTube?  Why am I writing this blog?

To be honest, that’s not a very pragmatic question (although it will lead to very deep understanding of what is driving Social CRM, or Social Customer Relationship Management).  Businesses today are trying to get their head around the “How?”, as in “How can I leverage this?”.

Before we delve into the depths of this topic, I think it fair to share some information about whether your business should care.  As usual, we’re at the very beginning of this new technology adoption curve and there’s a long way to go.  Here are some statistics put out recently by RJ Metrics.

As you will see, the numbers are not overwhelming compared to say Facebook, but my guess is that if you’re in the San Francisco Bay Area, this form of market engagement could get very relevant relatively quickly.

Foursquare

• Number of users: 1.9 million
• Number of registered venues: 5.6 million
• Check-ins: 1/3 of venues only once or never
• Most popular venues: Home or fast food establishments

Posted under Social Media Marketing, marketing

The folks over at Ignite Social Media have done us another great service this year - they’ve collated and published their Social Analysis Report of geographic, demographic, and traffic data from various social networks around the web.

Of course, the list in the report is not complete (there’s not Orkut, for example - and I’m pretty sure there’s a network or two in Japan that have incredible stats, but are not listed here), but anyway here they are for your enjoyment.  You can get the full report here.

For those of you that are wondering about which social network to leverage to get into a particular geography, I’ve taken the geographic distributions and mapped them into a table below.

Here are some interesting observations and questions:

• There are only four truly global properties: Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, and Youtube
• The survey appears US centric in its viewpoint and sampling
• What is the dominant social network in Japan?
• What is the dominant social network in China?
• LinkedIn and Plaxo appear to follow the english speaking high-tech population and its dominant outsourcing partner India (although LinkedIn isn’t as strong in the UK as Plaxo)
• I thought that Hi5 was the dominant Spanish speaking social network, but it does not appear to be very strong throughout the diaspora.
• I don’t see a social network with a distribution that falls along religious lines.  Unfortunately, this may happen in the not so distant future.

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Posted under marketing