PhotoSketch is an “Internet Image Mashup” project by Chinese Computer Science and Technology students at Tsinghua University and the National University of Singapore. It is an advance program that allows you to take any rough sketch, with the shape of each element labeled with its name, find images corresponding to each drawn element and judge which are a better match to the shapes before seamlessly merge it all into one single image.

PhotoSketch’s blending algorithm are able to analyzes these images, compares them with each other, and decides which are better for the blending process. It automatically traces and places them into a single photograph, matching the scene, and adding shadows.

Here is how it works:

Step 1. You start by drawing the outlines of the figures you want in your picture – It could be anything from cats and dogs to cars and trains,

Step 2. Add labels to each figure as well as the background.

Step 3. PhotoSketch will then source for real-life images to match your skteches and put them together in a stunning Photoshopped image that will fascinate you.

Sketch2Photo: Internet Image Montage from Tao Chen on Vimeo.

If you are looking forward to try this program out,  I am afraid you’ve got to wait a little longer. Due to the high interest, they have taken their site down. Personally, I can’t wait to see what people build with this thing.

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Animoto is a new online mash-up tool that allows you to create fantastic slide shows with your images and music. The service would look like any other slide show creator, but what Animoto have done is use a patent pending artificial intelligent technology to make the slide show more eye catching, more unique. Like a professional editor, Animoto will consider every picture you submit and create a video mash-up. End result? It will be more like a movie trailer than your regular slide show.Animoto have integrated all the social sharing tools such as Facebook and Twitter so that you can share your newly produce video to your contacts with ease. They even allow you to download a web quality video or if you want a DVD high quality one, it will cost you $5 per video.  Last but not least, with a simple click, you can upload the video on to Youtube for all to see.

Certain professionals will find Animoto very useful, especially those who deal with pictures and video clips, for example real estate agents, photographers, interior designers etc.

Free or Paid?

You can sign up for a free account and try this platform with your interesting images. The only drawback is that the free account allow you a 30 sec trailer (limited time, unlimited video). If you want to upgrade to a full length version, it would cost $3 per video or $25 for a year membership (I believe it’s worth it if you are doing slide shows all the time).

Below is a slide show I produce for the South Asia Disaster relief effort. Enjoy!

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I believe everyone were motivated from Anthony Robbin’s ‘Unleash Your Power Within’ seminar that ends today.  Regrettably to say, I did not go for all the four days. However, I can imagine how much fun and excitement the participants were during his sessions.What I am sharing in this post though is not about how good he is (yes, there is no denying that he is good) or how much I had learn from the limited time I was there but what I have learn from sharing this event with others in my social network one week before the event.

I remembered seeing the first message Miss Elim Chew of 77th Street put up on her status update was “Get Free Anthony Robbins Tickets With 77th Street”. Intrigued, I went to see how i could get the tickets too. It was mentioned that in order to get the free tickets, you are either a member of 77th Street  or you sign up as a member before the event.

The replies came in fast and furious with many people requesting for more details and one Facebook member even mentioned that he will post a status update on his network to share with his friends. That gave me an idea of sharing this offer on my Facebook Note and tag some of the friends I believe will be interested. (I don’t think tagging anyone with no good reason is a very good idea). I did and here is what I got at the end of the day.

Privacy protected

So, did I learn something after sharing this offer? Indeed. This experience increases my knowledge of what social media can really do and how it can actually help you strengthen your brand within your network.

You Must Understand Your Target Audience

My clients always ask me if I actually chose whom I befriend with online or do I just add whoever I came across. The truth of the matter is yes. I do chose whom I befriend with. Not that I have any alternative motives but because I want to understand only one segment or one group of target audience.

Understanding your target audience brings you alot of advantages. For example, once you know your target market well enough, you will know what to share and what not to share. What will intrigue them and what will make them lose interest. What will make them engage in conversation or what will slam you as a spammer.

Therefore, I am aware that this offer will definitely bring the expected results I am hoping for,  and that is engagement.

Another thing I want to note is that if you ever share anything, remember to share to those closest to you first (that is where I only tag a couple of people I know will benefit from it). This is because they already trust you as a friend and they will increase their level of trust in you if they find that you were sincerely sharing something good with them.

You Must Have The Attitude of Sharing

People or corporations sometimes find it hard to build their branding on social media platform because they lack the attitude of sharing. When I said sharing, I am really talking about sharing content outside your area of business. Like funny videos, interesting pictures or in this case, valuable offer.

Once you have cultivated the attitude of sharing, you will notice there are alot of opportunities lying around in the social web that you can pick up and share with your network. Always ask yourself: ‘Would my target audience be interested if I share this?’ If the answer is yes, share it.

You Must Have Something Really Valuable to Share

I realize content that got shared most of the time are of higher value. It could be an entertaining clip that make them laugh their hearts out or an interesting picture that is hard to take. Whatever it is, it is valuable in the eyes of your target audience and they want to share it. In this case the value is worth $1000.

If you ever wonder why no one response to your status updates or other content you upload, bear this in mind. They won’t do it unless they find a good reason to do it. The reason could be because they like it, or it could be because they feel good after sharing it. In this case, the offer cost nothing more than a mere email or a $12 membership fee at most.

So if you or your company is thinking of creating an interesting contest or clip that goes viral, remember to think about the value your participants would get for them to share with their friends. The rule of thumb should be anything above $1000 for it to be effective.

Conclusion

Marketing on social media isn’t just about building a community and generate conversations. That is the easy part. It’s what you do with the community that need more hard work and thinking. Would they trust you more after you have shared something valuable? Would your brand be strengthen after a good campaign? That’s something we all need to work on from time to time.

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Recently I wrote an article about Dell making $3 million dollars using just Twitter alone. To some, this may seem to be a testimonial of how one company can identify social media ROI. However, there is more than meet the eye. Read on to find out what Dell went through to make it’s first million on social media.

First Failure

Before any company decided to listen to their customers on social media, Jeff Javis and an army of unsatisfied Dell customers coined the phrase “Dell Hell” forcing the company to listen to their customers even if they aren’t ready.

Fail Again

Dell launched a blog in mid summer 2006. The name of the blog was changed from One2One to Direct2Dell because of an existence of a porn site bearing the same name.  Minor embrassment maybe, but at last, Dell started to talk to their customers.

Fail Bigger?

In 2007, Consumerist published a post from Dell’s former sales manager named “22 Confessions of a Former Dell Sales Manager“. Dell responded with a legal letter and that generated even more negative attention for their social media efforts. It was only days later that Dell responded through it’s blog.

Keep on Failing

Remember Second Life? It was the Twitter of 2007 and Dell launched an island trying to sell PCs virtually over at Second Life. Though it was an innovative idea, the island was usually vacant and never likely to generate revenue. However, Dell still make some effort to create events in Second Life for it’s citizens and Dell’s customers.

Conclusion

Dell tried a lot of different tactics to find which ones resonated with their audience. Sometimes the results of the experiments with community building might not have yielded the expected results. But these lessons were valuable learning opportunities for the company (as well as for the rest of us) to better understand the model for two way conversations between companies and its constituencies.

From these lessons, Dell was able to better prepare for the social media engagement their customers demanded. The $3 million in Twitter revenue was not achieved just by setting up an account and “following” potential customers. It was part of a strategy rolled out over several years that continues to evolve with the tools and the needs of the company’s community. Relationships take time to build and your brand will make mistakes. What’s important is that you keep finding the right fit, that you listen to your customers, and that you give your customers the experience and attention they deserve. In the end, it literally pays off.

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Facing lawsuits from people complaining of being illegally impersonated, Twitter have decided to implement a Verified Accounts process. Twitter said that the purpose of Verified Accounts is to provide a way to curb legal problems, instill a sense of confidence in users about who they are actually follow and appease to brands and celebs who often complain of been impersonated on Twitter.

Twitter said that “Verified Accounts” shall serve as an official seal of legitimacy on the profiles of public officials, public agencies, famous artists, athletes, and other well-known personalities.

“We hope to verify more accounts in the future but due to the resources required, verification will begin only with a small set,” the Twitter team wrote.

Verified Accounts lwill be aunches this summer. However, it is not immediately evident how accounts will be verified in a way that enables it to scale in a practical way, but at the very least it will lend more transparency to regular users that may (or may not) be posing as brands, companies or prominent personages on Twitter.

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Online marketing channels such as web sites, e-newsletters, email campaigns, and internet advertising are already being used by small businesses to save money on marketing, since these tend to be much less expensive than some older, more traditional methods. But with the popularity of social networking, small businesses are finding yet another marketing strategy that not only saves them money, but is also very effective in getting the attention of customers and the search engines alike – and that strategy is social networking.

1. Develop Customer Relationships

Today’s customers really do expect some level of online interaction with your company; whether they are using your company’s blog, following your Tweets, writing product reviews on sites like Amazon.com, or posting questions and information on sites like LinkedIn. The more you can provide customers with a way to interact with your business, the more supported they feel, and the more positive their experience and attitude becomes. Be sure to also follow the “conversation” by using tools like Google Alerts to monitor how your business is being presented and talked about on the web.

2. Keep Customer Mindshare

Today, customers are using the web everyday. They use Google to find information, Facebook to share information with their friends, Twitter to stay in touch with others during the day, and they listen to downloaded podcasts on their iPods. By having a solid social networking presence, a small business can easily meet the needs of its customers; whether it’s announcing relevant news in a Facebook profile, broadcasting special offers to followers on Twitter, or showing up at the top of the search engine listings so customers click on their web site link first.

3. Build Inbound Links

Most social networking profiles allow you to include links to your web site, which then become new inbound links that point to your site. Depending on the social networking site, you can sometimes use your keywords as anchor text in your profile, and direct these links to specific landing pages on your web site. It can also help drive sales and boost conversion rates by bringing users directly to the landing pages on your web site.

4. Rank Higher in the Search Engines

By providing multiple sources of quality, indexable content on various social networking sites on the web, your online visibility is expanded, giving the search engines more content to discover. When you provide great content in a variety of forms and in a variety of places, you improve your chances of getting noticed by the search engines.

As social networking continues to gain in popularity, small businesses are finding ways to take advantage of it to connect and communicate with customers. Social networking provides a way to interact with customers and engage in a two-way conversation with them and they seems to provide some impressive benefits for little or no cost, which may be the greatest benefit of all.

5. Increase Visits to Your Web Site

The more exposure your business has on social networking sites, the more customers and potential customers have an opportunity to click on links to your web site. If you can also provide good quality content, useful information, and other helpful resources in your profiles, you can often create enough interest to get users to visit your web. Just make sure that you create specific landing pages on your web site that are relevant to your social networking visitors, rather than just sending them to your home page.

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Facebook and Twitter pages are two serious sites in the internet marketing business. They were not only being used by teenagers who just enjoyed spending their spare time messaging back and fore to their friends. These sites were being used by all types of very prominent business people.

Even when I realized that a lot of successful people were utilizing Twitter and Facebook, I still did not understand what they could possibly be getting out of it. So it was time to do a deeper study of the sites. What I eventually found out absolutely shocked me. People were reporting that they were making literally thousands of dollars each and every month by utilizing these two websites.

The first thing I realized was that the people that were getting the most out of these sites were taking it very seriously. It wasn’t something that they did as a little diversion – it was actually scheduled into their business day. There are now courses that you can take to teach you how to most effectively operate your Facebook and Twitter pages.

Newbies usually make mistakes by adding as many friends as possible to their site in a fast time. What you should do is to first build up your friends first and the first 100-200 are the most impactful. You need to make these high level people in your industry. Look for interest groups and reach out to them.

Another suggestion is to add content to your sites on a daily basis. Just spend 5 minutes a day will be good enough. You could update your status, pull up news feeds and comment as much as you can. The search engines love content so try to continually be adding relevant information to your pages.

Facebook is the 5^th largest visited website in the World and it is growing at an immense pace daily. If you want to be part of this new way of expanding your business via Web 2.0, which is social network marketing, then go right now and sign up for an account. It will definitely help grow your business exponentially.

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Google Friend Connect is a process provided by Google for both commercial and non-commercial websites to communicate and connect with one another is an easier manner. It is a tremendous vehicle for delivering direct traffic and it can aid in expanding an online business’ presence all throughout the internet.

One of the most obvious benefits that you can derive from this is the ability to greatly expand your presence online and communicate with many people in a easy manner. This would have the obvious benefit of greatly expanding your ability to promote your online business in a simple and cost effective manner.

The ability to communicate is critical for any online business. When communications can be facilitated easily and to large volumes of people in a short period of time, an online business can reap huge revenues. For example, if an online business were to offer a special deal or offer, it could send the information through its amassed social network. This would allow it to reach untold scores of people within seconds. This can lead to a significant drive in direct traffic from a variety of sources.

Additionally, one could become quite creative with the use of Google Friend Connect’s ability to drive traffic and covert such traffic into sales. For example, an online business could send out an offer for a sale that is good exclusively for those members of the network. There could also be a time limit on the sale such as 24 hours. Such a special offer would clearly drive a great deal of traffic to the business’ websites. Also, the special deal would work wonders for stimulating sales conversions.

Those that are currently running an online business are probably reaping many rewards. Online sales revenues are well into the billions of dollars per year. This makes an online business far more attractive to entrepreneurs than the costly start up fees commonly associated with traditional brick and mortar businesses. Additionally, there are a number of excellent online venues that can greatly aid in promoting an online business. One of these free promotional venues is the newly emerging Google Friend Connect system.

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ZD Net Asia published an article in March about how customers have become involved with marketing and branding of a company. It include an example, ‘Connect + Develop site’ , which Procter & Gamble (P&G) designed to facilitate both inbound and outbound “open innovation”. Read the entire article below as you brace yourself for a collaboration with your very own customers. 

 

SINGAPORE–As consumers proliferate through social networks, companies too have become part of those communities. As such businesses must gear their marketing efforts towards this new reality.

David Rogers, executive director at the Columbia Business School’s Center on Global Brand Leadership, said companies can no longer see themselves as the originator of marketing information because they are not the only ones sending out product messages, and are now part of a larger community that encompasses its users.

Customers, too, want to share their ideas through social media such as blogs, forums, viral videos and social networks, said Rogers, during his presentation on “marketing to customer networks” at the BRITE-Asia 2009 Conference here Thursday. Hosted by the Singapore Management University’s Centre for Marketing Excellence and Columbia Business School’s Center on Global Brand Leadership, the event is part of a series of global conferences, workshops and leadership summits on branding, innovation, and technology.

Rogers noted that companies “get caught up in the latest gizmos in social media”, but marketers need to relate closely to user behavior for effective collaboration with customers.

One such behavioral trait points to the need for customer networks to be sensory and interactive and to provide relevant digital content, Rogers said. “People want rich content and media. Interactive games are very important for companies to understand [for their marketing efforts],” he added.

When companies facilitate avenues that let users share insights on their products, customers feel they have a role in the brand, he noted.

An example is the Connect + Develop site, Rogers said, which Procter & Gamble (P&G) designed to facilitate both inbound and outbound “open innovation”. This includes work on trademarks, packaging, marketing models, engineering, business services and design.

P&G stated on the site: “The world is more connected… There are millions of scientists, engineers and other companies globally. Why not collaborate with them?”

Dennis Susay, Merrill Lynch’s Pacific Rim regional director and head of branding and corporate marketing, advised companies to “have great products based on consumer insights”.

“Don’t just sell a feature. Create an emotional attachment,” said Susay, who was also a speaker at BRITE-Asia 2009.

Source: http://www.zdnetasia.com/news/business/

 

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This story came in a little late. About two days late. On Wednesday, founder of Facebook Mark Zuckerberg annouce on their Facebook’s blog that they have reached 150 million active users. In Aug, Mark annouce that facebook reached 100 million and only 4 months on, that number increase by 50%. We are talking about active users and though I am not sure how they define ‘active’, I believe that they do not include those accounts that are siting idle for a long time. 

One thing worth noting too is that Facebook started out as an all US-only site but now, it has users from over 170 countries and of all ages. At this rate of growth, Facebook is going to cross the 300 million mark by the end of 2009. 

Growing so big so fast have it’s cons too. Facebook will now have to deal with scaling problems such as features (Chat and Live Feed, for example) aren’t working very well, and users are beginning to notice.

Let’s hope Facebook can overcome these minor problems and keep coming up with great features to keep us connected with people who matter most to us.

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