SmartSymbols^tm

Stock traders use a term “market melt-down” when stock market takes a decisive plunge. The alternative of this is “melt-up”, which happens when stocks prices skyrocket in a short period of time. Melt-ups happen when a collection of unexpected good news is released in a short period of time, producing panic among the traders who fear that they need to buy stocks in anticipation of a really big move up. In other words - it’s a snowball effect of good news that in turn produce an anticipation of good news.

The beautiful thing about Permission Marketing approach is that it is a complete win for all involved - it’s a bull’s eye of marketing. It simply works the way marketing supposed to work - it’s a question of efficiency; and efficient things tend to win over time. It works for marketers because they provide information they want, it works for consumers because they get the information they are actually looking for. It also works for product makers, because they don’t need to spend money chasing dead leads - direct connection to the target market that is actually interested in the product being marketed. Win/win/win combinations like these tend to create a snowball effect of positives because when everyone wins - everyone wants to continue this mutually beneficial relationship.

But there is a technical difficulty.

The difficulty is communication: product marketers want to know what customers are really interested in (hence the utilization of focus groups), and customers want to tell product makers what they would like to see and hear about the product - is it specs, is it colors, is it how other customers use the product?

So, how does SmartSymbols fit into this picture? One of the benefits of SmartSymbols is that it actually facilitates a two-way conversation between product consumers and product marketers. It’s simple: as shoppers are investigating and researching a product via SmartSymbols, they are effectively telling marketers what they are really interested in, just by spending time on this particular area of interest (read more here). Knowing what people want is critical information, knowing what captures customer’s curiosity could be just that tipping point that could produce the snowball effect of positives.

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Tags: Permission Marketing

A way to find out what readers are interested in is to look at the Icon Usage chart in SmartSymbols Analytics. (See picture below).
To get to the chart, simply login and then select the SmartSymbols set you are interested in.

Icon Usage Chart: January 2010, click to enlarge

(Click the chart to enlarge the picture)

This simple pie chart shows some pretty valuable information: people who were researching this particular sample book spent most of their time on Author Information (over 12 minutes) and almost equal amount of time on Social Networking buzz (about 9 minutes). The Book Content captured their interest for half the time of either Author Information or Social Networking buzz.

There is another interesting data point in the chart: people spent almost as much time researching the location of the plot of the book (Location/Compass icon - read more on Compass icon usage here) as on the contents of the book. In fact location seem to be of more interest then Reviews and News.

It could be that adding illustrations from the book to your SmartSymbols, as well as pictures of the places where the book is taking place could become a tipping point in the sale process of this particular book.

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Tags: Analytics, Author, Author Icon, Books, Visualization

Celebrate Green - Valentine's Day

Lynn Colwell & Cory Colwell-Lipson’s book Celebrate Green has a unique quality: it’s useful year round. Unlike typical abstract ideas about how to have a more eco-friendly lifestyle in general, the ideas in their book are practical. They are also specific to a particular holiday that’s coming up on the calendar.

Check out their suggestions for the Valentine’s Day for example: “one high quality organic chocolate bar instead of a handful of conventional candy on Valentine’s Day”. It turns out, that organic chocolate bar also tastes a lot better than typical candy, as testified by people who know best - kids.

You can also explore SmartSymbols for Celebrate Green book above. To buy the book simply go here: http://www.celebrategreen.net/buy/

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Tags: Author, Author Icon, Benefits, Books

Here is an example of why SmartSymbols is  a perfect case for book promotion.

1.  Big Dead Place is a book about life in Antarctica from a grunt-contractor point of view.

2.  The book also has an associated website - BigDeadPlace.com, which is a great resource for people who are considering getting to Antarctica as contractors.

3.  Encounters At the End of the World (Discovery Films) is a film by famous director Werner Herzog, about life in the Antarctica from the point of view of people who work there from all walks of life, including scientists, programmers and backhoe operators.

Werner Herzog and His Camera Man

(Image from: http://www.bigdeadplace.com/herzog.html)

4.  BigDeadPlace.com has a review of “Encounters At the End of the World” by Bill Jirsa person who has actually been interviewed by Werner Herzog in the movie.

Now, these four different pieces of information are completely invisible if you just look at the book in an online bookstore (or a physical one for that matter).  Also, as the book publisher, I would probably want people to know, that one of my site contributors have been interviewed by Werner Herzog in a famous movie.  Lastly, if you were to look at those 5 links separately, you cannot see how they can be related to one another.  And the important thing here, is that the book is not at all a stand alone item - the author is truly plugged-in into all things Antarctic and obviously is a true authority on the subject.

This is a perfect case where SmartSymbols could shine and bring forward all the wonderful things that the book and aggregate all separate pieces of information into a coherent and powerful marketing message.

Can you think of another book that fits this profile?

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Tags: Antarctica, Books, Movies

On Wednesday, December 9th, at 6:00 MassInnovation is throwing a party for MA innovators.  A number of cool companies will present there.

MassInnovation Throws us a Party

Here is the list:

• Smart Symbols
• Blank Label
• Socrato
• HEET

Yup, we are there, and we are hope to you there too.

Here are the directions: http://massinnovationnights.com/event-rsvp/google-map

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Tags: Events

NYC BigApps - SmartSymbols

This morning we have submitted our entry for the NYC BigApps Competition; you can also get to the entry directly here.

The premise of the competition is simple: use data provided by NYC DataMine (government data feeds) and use it the best way you can.  Naturally, we felt that SmartSymbols would be a good fit.

We used a DataMine data sets to for 3 examples:

1.  The NYC Public Library

2.  Department of Transportation

3.  Map demo with a  Library symbol set

It was somewhat surprising how much interesting data produced by the City of NY produces which is essentially hidden from the locals and the visitors: from tree locations to exhibitions at the library to traffic reports, to low bridge information.  Hopefully we will be able to bring this information out in a visible and easy-to-access way.

In addition, we combined a number of data feeds from the city with the usual set of web buzz - Twitter, blogs, etc. - the usual set of information we add to the symbol set.

There is a number of interesting apps participating in the contest, take a look when you get a chance.

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Tags: examples, NYC BigApps, Permission Marketing

“Sweet Poison: Why Sugar Makes Us Fat” is a book by Australian author David Gillespie.  The book is an interesting research into how sugar contributes to the wight problem, as well as to the overall health problem.  David has done a lot of research and has been interviewed by many news organization on the subject.  He has Facebook fan pages, Twitter followers and up-to-date blog.

We are fortunate that David chose to use SmartSymbols for book promotion on his blog: http://www.raisin-hell.com/, he uses the vertical version of SmartSymbols because it fits neatly into the sidebar of his blog platform.

An interesting side-story has emerged while we were working with David’s book information. It turns out that it is not easy to buy his book in the US, but at least we can benefit from some of his research if we listen to his interviews and read people’s comments on various social networks - SmartSymbols presents this information in one place in an easy-to-find way. “Sweet Poison” also a has personal side to it, but I don’t want to spoil it here. Check out David’s blog and his book site, and of course - explore SmartSymbols to learn more about “Sweet Poison”.

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Tags: Author, Author Icon, Books, Permission Marketing

We have officially released a symbol set for books: “SmartSymbols Offers Advanced Marketing Solution for Book Publishers and Authors“. It looks like this:






Here is the excerpt from the press release:

“This new industry-focused symbol set organizes real time social network and social media content, book reviews, interactive maps of the story’s geographic locations, calendar of events, video based author bios and both written and audio book excerpts for display across any number of Web-based environments including: ecommerce sites, publisher and author Web sites, blogs and mobile devices.


SmartSymbols™ social media marketing support includes real time feed capabilities from Twitter, Facebook and blog/RSS. SmartSymbols™ is the only author and book publishing marketing tool to combine traditional internal marketing material with external social media marketing strategies, bringing the total book community experience to all points of distribution.”

You can see a full demo here: http://www.smartsymbols.com/demo.html

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Tags: Author, Author Icon, Books, Engagement, examples, News, Publisher, Publishing

“Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.” -Steve Jobs


Boris Evelson from Forrester Research wrote a great summary on “How to differentiate advanced data visualisation solutions“. It’s clear, specific and to the point - great resource and a check list.

Also, I recently saw a great presentation by Stephen Anderson, “Eye Candy IS A Critical Business Requirement“. It explains, very convincingly, why design details are so critical not only to how the product looks, but how it functions.

These articles, combined with Steve Job’s famous quote and the teachings of Edward Tufte always make me stop and think every time I create any kind of chart, picture, or any type of data visualization.

Source: Edward Tufte’s Website

All this reminds me that it is so critical to have our diagrams, icons and fonts created in such way that they are just fun to look at and explore. This is critical - they have to be fun to explore. If they are not - it does not matter how efficiently we compress data into the diagrams, charts and dashboards: if people don’t explore our visualizations, they will not find that data, thus rendering our efforts useless.

Do our data visuazations convey a simple message or are they just fancy-looking but useless? In other words: “what would Tufte say?”. Although he probably won’t say anything good, I found this exercise useful. It makes me do three things. First, it makes me ask other people to review my visualizations. Second, it makes me do more research on how a particular problem has been solved before. And third, it forces me take another look, and try to simplify or even re-work the diagrams again and again.

I think this is one of the rare cases when doubt is good, it makes you better while pursuing simplicity and clarity.

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Tags: examples, Visualization

In “How to Build Twitter-worth”, I wrote about the process, the details of using a specific permission-based broadcasting technology - Twitter. The questions and the comments that article provoked however, are mostly related to a larger question - what’s the underlying, technology-agnostic approach?

New Venues for Old Wisdom
Twitter and Facebook, as well as other permission-based broadcasting systems, allow us to utilize the wisdom of super-networkers and communicators more efficiently. I am talking about the likes of Dale Carnegie, and Cicero, while using the laconic approach that, luckily for us, is forced upon us. Why luckily? One - because short entries (emails, blog-posts, whatever) are more likely to be read; and two - it forces us to (at least to some degree) craft our messages before broadcasting them.

Image Source: Wikipedia: Dale Carnegie

OK, What Does it Mean?
As Robert MacNamara told us - “You Can’t Change Human Nature“. In other words, if you learn how to work with human nature, that knowledge is timeless. Which, in turn, means that we can make our knowledge of human nature (as limited as it is) more important and having more impact if we improve the efficiency of that utilization. Translation - leverage technology to utilize timeless knowledge more efficiently.

Image Source: Wikipedia: Cicero

Before Twitter-like systems existed and were widely adopted, we were limited in how we could engage other people and practice what past and contemporary sages have taught us. In other words, there are only so many cocktail parties and sales meetings you can go to. New broadcasting technology allows us to practice their teachings every day, in 15-minute intervals.

Finally
I think at the fundamental level Carnegie taught us to take real, sincere interest in people we are dealing with. Being sincere and truly interested will make us communicate with people in a way they want us to - with respect and appreciation. Maybe that will make us tweet less about us and what we want, and more about them, and what they are interested in.

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Tags: Permission Marketing, Secrets, Twitter