I was recently looking for an iPhone/iPad app that would help me by transcribing voice memos into notes whereby I could quickly store the notes in my contacts file (CRM). After a fruitless (and admittedly short) search, I gave up. Then today I received an invite to Google Voice.

In their own words:

“Welcome to Google Voice. You have now set up your cell phone to use Google for your voicemail. Every time you miss a call on your cell phone, Google Voice will record the voicemail, transcribe it to text and send it to you as an email and an SMS. They will also be saved online just like email. Of course, you can always listen to your messages by calling the access number shown at the top of your account, so you may want to save that number to your phone’s speed dial list. We hope you enjoy Google Voice.”

Sounds almost too good to be true – but I’m going to give it a try.

Loved this insight from Ad Age / iMedia Connection.

How Consumer Attitudes and Behaviors are Shaped in Social Media: 10 Essential Rules You’ve Never Heard
Posted by Taddy Hall

My good friends at Ad Age published a similar set of points on Monday. They seemed to resonate. Look forward to comments and continued discussion…

These days, everyone seems to have advice about how to run your social media marketing program. There are so many tips floating around, it’s hard to know what truly essential strategies you should follow to effectively use social media to build your business. Questions abound: do Facebook fans drive sales? Why should I fund forums for consumers to pillory my products, ridicule my service, and tout the competition? And, whatever I decide to do, how I will I know if it’s working?

In the search for Truth, sometimes Social Media is its own worst enemy. With a self-credentialed guru waiting at every click and blog, finding actionable, fact-based insight is tricky.

So, in a modest attempt to bring a dose of sanity to this intellectual frat party, I’ve reined my impulse to lob more “personal picks” into the fray. Instead, I’ll follow the wisdom of an august data mining colleague to just “let the data speak”.

Our process was to query data from hundreds of our brand clients to see what testable truths emerged – and here’s what we found: 10- rules that hold-up across category and time.

1. The 1% Rule: In category after category, our data shows a small fraction of site visitors are responsible for a substantial portion of total site traffic. On average, the percentage of influential users (defined for our purposes simply as a visitor who’s subsequent sharing actions result in at least one additional site visitor) on a given site is .6% and rarely above 4%. However, these influencers regularly generate 20%-50% of total site traffic and an even higher share of conversion (defined however a site owner so decides). To make social media marketing effective, marketers to identify and engage –and better, recognize and reward — these Super Influentials.

2. The 2-4X Rule: When it comes to conversion, visitors driven to a site by influencers are 2-4X more likely to convert compared to visitors from other sources, such as display advertisements or paid search. That means your landing pages for people coming from shared links and social sites should reflect these visitors’ interests and offer enticing deals that will encourage these social visitors not only to convert, but to share the deals with others.

3. The New Media – New Pipes Rule: In today’s socially-driven internet, it matters far more what consumers do with your content than what you do with your content. What they say about your brand means more than what you say about your brand. Our data shows that content spread from consumer-to-consumer through word of mouth is far more powerful at driving brand preference and purchase intent than content distributed by the brand itself. This has profound implications in Social Media. To illustrate, if a brand puts content on its Facebook fan page, it is far less likely to go viral than if an influential consumer puts that very same piece of content on his or her page or posts it to a relevant community of enthusiasts.

4. The Martha Stewart Rule: Throw your own party, don’t just cater someone else’s! If you base your social campaigns in venues you don’t control – such as Facebook or YouTube – you may get great “attendance”, but data shows it’s hard to convert and retain these partygoers. If your goals are anything beyond building brand awareness, it’s better to have a house of your own where friends can find you — such as your own branded social site, contest site, or customer forum.

5. The Power of “Weak Links” Rule: Influentials generally do have many direct “friends” and “followers”, but what makes them truly valuable is number and relevance of their extended or indirect connections. As Albert-Laszlo Barabasi illustrated in Linked, you are far more likely to find your next job through a friend-of-a-friend than through an intimate contact. These “Weak Links” matter in the “real world”, and they matter even more online. A critical implication for marketers is the need to track the extended social graphs of their content if they are going to be able to understand and activate the dynamics of influence.

6. The Feed the Fire Rule: Consumers love to share relevant, engaging, useful, and entertaining content with their friends. Make it easy for them to find your content and make it easy for them to share your content. >90% of internet pages have fewer than 10 links pointing to them – making them effectively unfindable. Avoiding this abyss of irrelevance requires more thought and effort than just pasting a sharing tool on your pages. It means actively syndicating and curating your content and distributing it not only through your brand’s social graph, but through the graphs of your most influential advocates and fans. Easy ways to do this include following/friending your influential’s followers/friends and retweeting/posting content even if it’s not yours.

7. The More Things Change Rule: Our research consistently demonstrates that email and IM remain popular ways to share content. So don’t throw out your old email marketing methods just because Facebook and Twitter are the newest communication platforms du jour. The tried-and-true methods of getting customers to share links via email and IM are still extremely valuable sources of traffic. Furthermore, incorporating social elements into your email, such as incentives to share, can dramatically enhance an investment you’re already making.

8. Horse before the Cart Rule: Success in Social happens when brands infuse their content with Social dimensions (Facebook Connect, most notably) NOT when they simply stick their ads and content in Social forums. In other words, if you want to succeed in Social Media, your brands and content need to have social attributes – content worth sharing, brands worth talking about, sites that encourage consumer participation and dialog. If your Social strategy relies on advertising in Social, probably better to hang onto your money.

9. The PR Pitfalls Rule: Blogger outreach and content seeding may be popular ways to get your message out into the social world, but our data shows that more than 90% of seeding has no material impact. Up to 5% gets some response, but less than 2% of seeding drives valuable traffic. In other words, if you can’t track efficacy of these efforts, don’t bother.

10. The Customer Service Rule: Social marketing programs succeed when they provide a service to the consumer. Traditional media planning processes that begin with Reach and Frequency targets are largely unhelpful in Social Media. Reach and Frequency – as well as engagement, preference, and conversion – are positive consequences of giving consumers content that is sufficiently relevant and useful that they propagate your message across their own social graphs. Focus on providing useful content and offers to your target audience and they will spread your messages for you.

Social media isn’t a science, but applying data-backed principles to your social efforts provides a structured framework that will enable you to improve effectiveness and ROI over time. And one final note: every rule has exceptions. We live in dynamic times. Find what’s true for you – and share.

Very cool piece from Jerry Levitan, director Josh Raskin and illustrators James Braithwaite and Alex Kurina. Brilliant animation storytelling – pointed out to me by a nice guy named Harry Bernstein.

I’ve now had a dozen clients in corporate communications ask me this question. A social media press release (affectionately known as an SMPR) is a press release but with the added means to share it or read it through Web 2.0 technology. It is a press release with embedded links, tags, tracking, and RSS feeds. Here is a brilliant example template – made by the folks at Shift.

When my clients ask about Twitter and how they should be using it – I tell them that all corporate communications executives should have a Twitter account. Not to tweet (push a message), but to listen to the messages out there regarding your brand or industry.

“…if you’re not responding, you’re not being seen as an authentic type of brand.”

My friend Will discussed this at length last August. He forwarded a brilliant article from the WSJ Theory & Practice column about the impact of Twitter on public relations. It included very tangible examples provided from Ford, Pepsi and Southwest Airlines.

Give http://search.twitter.com/ a try and see what comes up for your brand/clients/products/industry.

Full article here: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124925830240300343.html

Increase the motivation. Make them have fun. This is a most-brilliant way to experience the lesson, by the Swedes, of course: http://www.thefuntheory.com/.

I recently completed another logo exploration (though this one was especially telling, for a Fortune 100 client). My team worked furiously over a very short period of time and presented strategy that included a competitive landscape, graphic differentiation and poignant discussion of “evolution” versus “revolution.”

Each time this has taken place, a different design team member has giggled and shared the same site, called eNormicon.

A priceless satire on where company names, brands and taglines are brilliantly spoofed, the site had a few of us laughing through tears.

I received this email today from Mint, the bonafide online finance management app. While I’m sure I’m not alone in the apprehensiveness I have with Intuit/Quicken, I must say that the simple and friendly content and brilliant design leads be to believe there is hope. And as a Producer of many mergers & acquisitions, this is a great model of “how to do it right.”  Here is the content:

Ready for the next Evolution

Thank you for being a part of what’s becoming a revolution in active personal financial management. I’m excited to say that Mint.com and Intuit are coming together to take personal finance to the next level. Mint.com has entered into an agreement to be purchased by Intuit. Once the acquisition closes, Mint.com will have the opportunity to spread that revolution to more people, more quickly, together with one of the world’s strongest software brands. The acquisition is expected to close by the end of 2009.

What’s not going to change

Mint.com will stay the way you like it: free, easy-to-use and constantly improving.

What will change

As outlined in today’s press release and my blog post, after the acquisition closes, the Mint.com team will contribute to improving the financial lives of tens of millions of consumers and small businesses. I’ll personally be taking on the role of GM of Intuit’s Personal Finance group responsible for online, desktop and mobile consumer personal finance offerings. Joining Intuit enables us to bring our vision of helping consumers understand and do more with their money to millions of Intuit customers. This is a compelling combination of our innovative product, technology, and industry leading user interface design with one of the most trusted brands in software.

I look forward to executing on that vision — for you.

Thanks for your support,
Aaron Patzer
Founder and CEO

mint.com | 280 hope street | mountain view, ca 94041

My latest online gadget obsession is Jing, care of my friend Nik. This appears to be the best screen capture application that works on any computer and is free. I found the user interface to be perfect and the ability to quickly share, unrivaled.

Maybe its me, but I’m only now recognizing the power of Twitter in communication. Its going to be around a long time. Here’s the evolution to me.

At first, I saw it as a cool piece of technology that was more of an abbreviated blog entry, broadcast to your inner circle.

Then, I viewed it as a supplement or replacement for RSS feeds, where a user opts-in to a source, awaiting its next content.

Then (for months) I viewed it as a passive-aggressive channel for narcissists. Well, I still do – especially because most of the people using it are, well, self-centered extroverts.

But now, with the wisdom of the crowd comes many fascinating attributes:

- searching for any specific content on twitter (http://search.twitter.com) gives you an immediate (current) pulse on that subject, right now.
- those people or organizations with an enormous audience (”following”) can broadcast or even command attention and action at a moment’s notice
- monitoring Twitter for a specific phrase or pronoun helps keep a pulse on its sentiment (KEY for PR people and companies: read this WSJ article)
- it is a two-way viral/word-of-mouth “social” marketing tool that can be used locally or beyond

I’m clearly getting old – its getting hard to stay on top of the things that help you stay on top of things.