Design Sherpa brings 100 design enthusiasts closer to a dream trip to Paris

Design Sherpa, our Digital Sherpa product for the home design and remodeling industry, is hosting the What Inspires You? contest.  In this contest Design enthusiasts are competing to win $10,000 and a 10-day trip to Maison & Objet in Paris.

Phase 1 has ended, the judges have spoken and narrowed down the field to 100 winners which are announced daily on the Design Sherpa blog.

Each winner submitted a photo and up to 100 words telling us what inspires them.  Below are a few of the images submitted.  You can view these, the 100 word design inspiration messages and the rest of the 98 winners on the Design Sherpa blog.

Phase 1 winners will now move to the second phase of the contest.  In this phase each contestant will enter a 350 word blog post about an interior or architectural design topic that communicates both his or her unique passion for design and writing style.

Health and Fitness just went digital with HealthFitSherpa

The time to get pumped up has officially arrived. Digital Sherpa is growing, and building a new brand around, well, body building. The NCI company dives into the health and fitness market with the release of HealthFitSherpa, a fixed-cost monthly subscription service aimed at industries focused on health, fitness, beauty, wellness, cosmetic, spa, nutrition and diet.

Following the lead of other successful Digital Sherpa ventures – such as DesignSherpa for the design industry and CommunitySherpa in the apartment community market – HealthFitSherpa offers health industry businesses a chance to expand their digital footprint with an original blog, Facebook page, Twitter presence and more.

The custom-branded approach means to improve search results, increase referrals and leverage social media tools to deliver fresh content and will ultimately impact a company’s bottom line. It’s a proven approach that offers measurable results.

“Social media marketing requires expertise, management and focus,” said Bill Pryor, business development director for HealthfitSherpa. “NCI has successfully created over 1,000 social media programs for local businesses in a variety of industries. HealthfitSherpa will now serve the health and fitness industry, which has natural communities ideal for this type of client and community engagement.”

Learn more about HealthFitSherpa here.

It’s Not About the Tablet, and Everything About the Experience

A few  things that Robert  Scoble expects from Steve Jobs Apple presentation today, differnt form Steve Ballmer’s recent pitch

The use cases I’ll be watching for are:

1. Classroom. Steve will tomorrow show off a textbook of the future. One where there isn’t just text and photos like in the textbooks that I grew up in, but ones where there’s augmented reality. Where 3D objects, maps, and videos pop off the page ready to be interacted with by the user. A company named Metaio has already shipped a book that does this, but Steve Jobs will bring these capabilities to the masses.

2. The Couch. TV is about to radically change. Imagine sitting on a couch, looking at a new virtual TV guide like the very cool Clicker, seeing a cool video on YouTube, then flinging that video up to your big screen. Or, let’s say you are watching what your few hundred Facebook and Twitter friends are sharing tomorrow morning from the Apple keynote in real time and you point at one of the videos to play it. Using a service like Redux you can already do that tonight! No need to wait for Apple to show it off, but Steve Jobs will make this integrated media experience cooler and easy for non-geeks to do. Tonight look at Boxee, it has been shipping for months what Apple will bring to the masses with the new tablet.

3. The car. Yeah, you can’t text in the front seat of the car in California, but come on, if you had an always connected slate wouldn’t you find a way to mount that to read Tweets to you like Buzzvoice does, or show you a Google Map, or use Waze to report traffic conditions to others. But put the tablet in the back seat, and it becomes an entertainment device for the kids. I already see how valuable that is. This is where Jobs will bring out a few new games that will let tablet owners play against each other, so my kids in my car could play against friends in their cars on a long road trip, or on the way to school, etc.

4. The coffee shop. OK, most humans still love visiting their local coffee shop, checking in on Foursquare, and then sitting down with a magazine or a newspaper. But watch as Jobs makes those things come alive and do stuff that a Kindle just can’t do. Videos, augmented reality again, games, graphics that move and flow, charts that show up-to-the-minute info from Skygrid, which already is way better than any financial newspaper printed on dead trees.

5. The airport/airplane. I flew in a rich guy’s private plane a few weeks back. What did he have in the cockpit? An Amazon Kindle. No, not to read newspapers or Tweet or anything stupid like that. He had all the airport charts loaded on his Kindle. But, he showed me how weather maps use color and he wasn’t able to display those on the Kindle. OK, OK, there aren’t enough rich guys in the world for that use case to matter, but what about those of us who sit back in coach? Well, how about showing off how Tripit will help you find a better seat when you buy your ticket, or how it’ll warn you if your plane is running late, etc? Yeah, not to mention that watching a movie on a Tablet will be a lot more comfortable than watching it on a laptop, and there’s lots of game scenarios, etc, that would be fun to see him demo here.

6. Healthcare. Tablets make a HUGE amount of sense in healthcare. Remember Epocrates, the iPhone app that Steve Jobs’ own health team helped influence? Now imagine they came out on stage and showed off their new version which has much better integration with your entire health chart.

Yelp Ratings Virtually Showing Up on Your Door

So, If you are thinking you can avoid those Ratings and Reviews, think again, they are now showing up literally on your front door. John Jantsch penned an article over on his blog titled Yelp, Changing the Local Game Some More

The image below is a screengrab from my iPhone as I am pointing it down a street. The phone is using an augmented reality feature of the  Yelp! iPhone app called Monocle. What your seeing is that as I point the camera at a location Yelp! reviews pop on the screen. I can click through or simply choose to skip that shop I was going to go into based on the slew of two star reviews. If this image doesn’t get your attention that reviews on sites like Google Maps and Yelp! are important then nothing will.

Yelp! also added a “check in” feature so people using the app can note when they visit a location. At some point this information will become very valuable and expect Yelp! to build advertising opportunities around check ins – on your 10th visit to a coffee shop you get a free drink coupon, for example. This could be bad news for location games  Foursquare and Gowalla.

So How Do You Feel About That

So, now anyone can see those reviews and ratings pasted virtually on your property, building and place of business. And, You can’t remove them or do much about it. How does that make you feel. If you have a crappy business model, I would guess you are worried.

But what about the shop thats is doing it right, be it an apartment community, a restaurant, a baker or an auto mechanic, this is like having virtual customer testimonials. Take advantage, get involved with Yelp, start to build your Digital Footprint, Why would you wait any longer?

ApartmentFinder.com has recently launched a new cool social media integration feature where any of their advertisers can have their Yelp reviews displayed on their property details pages.

Talk Directly to the Top Gun at Yelp

In an effort to dispel some of the fears Geoff Donaker, the COO at Yelp, has agreed to participate in a joint webinar with NCI on February 5th  for anyone to hear directly from Geoff and the team at Yelp about how their product works and their understanding of how rental prospects use their site

This webinar is FREE, and you can sign up here, Don’t miss this one friends. We are expecting a big turnout for the event and most importantly to see what kind of questions our industry has for the guys at Yelp.

Social Media Marketing: facebook news

One of the things that make the digital world so fascinating is the ability we all have to Share Content with our  Community of Interest Sharing can consist of our own content or others content we finding interesting, engaging and of value.

Facebook Makes Sharing Easier

As reported by Mashable on their blog titled Facebooks Version of the Re-tweet has Arrived

It appears the feature is live for everyone. To try it, just go to a friend’s posted item in your news feed, click “share,” and you’ll see a “via [your friend’s name]” (with an option to remove it). Once shared, the item will appear on your profile, with a via link that points to your friend’s profile. Your friends will also see the item in their News Feeds, creating the viral loop that is the Twitter retweet.

It will be interesting to watch how this unfolds, and we will keep you posted of what we see and hear, and how it affects your Internet Marketing Strategy. We sure would like to here your comments on this too.

Tweexchange…Easy Branding for your Twitter and Web Presence

Social-marketing media today is lightning fast. Dream up a business venture, a blog, a political action committee…well, anything? Then you better get legit. And on the Web, that means a Facebook account, a Twitter handle, and a website with media and a great blog. But creating a brand–the name and image you project to the public–requires a seamless transition across social-media networks.

That’s why Tweexchange is such a cool idea. It’s the latest Twitter app from Long Island’s Blast Applications. Tweexchange used to operate outside the Twitter TOS as a black-market bazaar for buying and selling Twitter handles. Now, this speedy site instantly checks whether the username you’ve picked out for your new Twitter account is still available. If it’s not, the site will offer up a list of similar alternative names. The coolest part? Tweexchange has joined with GoDaddy.com, so you can also see which website domain names related to your username are available.

I decided to try it out myself, imagining that, one day, Ashley_Urbane could launch as a Twitter feed/website dedicated…well…to me (I’ll come up with a brilliant idea later). So I typed Ashley_Urbane into Tweechange. Whoops…it was taken already (by me!). But a ton of similar names were available…Ashley_Urban, Ashley_Urba, Ashley_Urbanes, Ashley_U (maybe I’ll open an online university?)…you get the idea. Right next to my potential Twitter names, the Tweexchange linked up all of the available GoDaddy domain names. AshleyUrbane.com?! Sounds like a winner!

If someone is selfishly hoarding the Twitter username you covet, you can opt to be notified when it becomes available (Twitter deletes usernames 60 days after their suspension). As the Washington Post notes, the notification service costs $5–chump change if you’re branding the business of your dreams.

CoolTechZone.com says, “Clever is one way to describe Tweexchange utilizing GoDaddy’s desire to built up their existing customer base.” That’s true, but it’s also a fast and easy way for the tech-fearful in America to brand themselves in the blink of an eye.

Blast Applications, the founder of Tweexchange, was just accepted into the Apple IPhone developer program. Their last application, Tweact, flips text so it’s mirrored upside down–a fun way to freak your friends out online.

Follow the Money; Social Media Spend Shifts

So, No Pepsi at the 2010 Superbowl! Wow, what do you think about that?

As reported by the good folks at Mashable;

For the first time in 23 years, Pepsi will not have any ads in the Super Bowl. Instead, the company will be spending $20 million on a social media campaign it’s calling The Pepsi Refresh Project.

Such a large move is noteworthy for any company, however Pepsi’s symbiotic relationship with the Super Bowl makes this shift to new media that much more seismic. ABC News notes that Pepsi spent $142 million on Super Bowl ads over the last decade. Pepsi’s ads are often some of the most iconic, and the company has historically pulled out all the stops for the Super Bowl.

We believe that The Directional Flow of Marketing Has Changed If you are following what the big brands are doing, it is pretty clear that they are waning from traditional marketing more and more in favor of Social Media Marketing.

Will they find the payoff?

Well, that has yet to be seen.  But one thing that we are seeing with Social Media Marketing, both from our own experiences with our small business and what others are doing that isn’t talked about is that it is largely about Marketing Within. What we are seeing is that many times the most successful social media marketing campaigns are about the brands customers.

Compound Effect

We penned a post a year or so ago over on Search Engine Guide about the Compound Effects of Social Media Marketing, and received almost sixty comments. The point of the post though can be seen in what Pepsi is doing.

This is an interesting strategy, especially for a company that continues to spend much of its advertising budget on television. Like other social media campaigns, execution is key. If Pepsi can effectively orchestrate the Pepsi Refresh Project, the company can build brand awareness while also helping out communities across the world. On the flip side, if not executed properly, the company could wind up spending $20 million on philanthropic causes (which is to be commended), without getting the benefits of a buzz-generating ad campaign.

So, an opportunity to create brand Awareness AND Philanthropic Causes sure seems to be an excellent leverage of marketing dollars. This will be an interesting experiment to watch.

2010 Social Media Marketing Predictions

Dan Zarrella is an award-winning social, search, and viral mar­ket­ing sci­en­tist and author of the O’Reilly media book “The Social Media Mar­ket­ing Book”. He has a back­ground in web devel­op­ment and com­bines his pro­gram­ming capa­bil­i­ties with a pas­sion for social mar­ket­ing to cre­ate appli­ca­tions like the social URL short­ener Votrs.com, Link Attrac­tion Fac­tors key­word tools, as well as Tweet­Psych, Twit­ter­Brand­Spon­sors, Tweet­Backs and Tweet­Suite.

His Link Attrac­tion Fac­tors report helped read­ers deter­mine which top­ics, days, times, and key­words attract links in social media sto­ries for seman­tic con­tent opti­miza­tion, while his Viral Con­tent report details the moti­va­tions, pref­er­ences and habits involved in online con­tent sharing.

Here are Dan’s 2010 Social Marketing Predictions;

IRL

One of the most pow­er­ful poten­tials of social media is for it to not only con­nect peo­ple online, but facil­i­tate con­nec­tions offline as well. 2010 will see an increase in loca­tion aware apps and games that blur the line between the web and the real work with tech­nolo­gies like Four Square and aug­mented real­ity. Dri­ving this will be con­tin­ued inter­est in and improve­ment of mobile web tech­nolo­gies like smart phones and net­books. The real world be impor­tant again.

Micro-Targeting and Personalization

Every­one actively engag­ing in social net­work­ing is shar­ing a ton of data about them­selves and in 2010 com­pa­nies will lever­age this infor­ma­tion in increas­ingly sophis­ti­cated ways. Micro-targeting and per­son­al­iza­tion will take advan­tage of infor­ma­tion on indi­vid­ual peo­ple to deliver highly cus­tomized mes­sag­ing and con­tent to small and smaller seg­ments. Opin­ion min­ing tech­nolo­gies will begin to mature, allow­ing researchers to uti­lize the entire social web as a global focus group for any brand, prod­uct, ser­vice or idea.

Small Busi­ness Social Media Marketing

In 2010 small busi­nesses will con­tinue to real­ize the high bang-to-buck ratio of social media mar­ket­ing and will get into it like never before. Social media is a great equal­izer in that it allows small com­pa­nies to com­pete more effec­tively with large ones. They’ll take a strong do-it-yourself stance and will demand account­abil­ity and effec­tive analytics.

The Real Time Web

We’ve been hear­ing about the emer­gence of a real time web for a while now, but 2010 is the year when it will really come into its own bol­stered by advances in mobile tech­nol­ogy, micro-content pro­duc­tion and the recent inte­gra­tion of Twit­ter with Bing and Google. Tra­di­tional link pop­u­lar­ity search is too slow so it will be aug­mented or replaced by instant real time based search. Trend spot­ting will hap­pen min­utes or hours after some new fad starts, rather than days, weeks or months. And you’ll hear about break­ing news faster than ever before.

Social Media Campaigns Build Strong Community Preference

Consumers are engaging with businesses and brands they follow through social networks and media platforms. A recent study by Razorfish entitled “FEED: Digital Brand Experience Survey” polled users that were active “friending” businesses as summarized in a recent report.

The research showed a dramatic increase in awareness or inclination to consider the brand when in the market to buy, and then to ultimately purchase or recommend the businesses’ service or products for consumers following those businesses through their online social communities. Here are some of the highlight results:

DigitalSherpa programs allows companies and brands to integrate social media into their marketing plans by simplifying the process and doing all the heavy lifting at an extremely affordable monthly cost. Just email us at ajapko@nci.com and let us help you put the social web to work for your business.

Social Media Equals Powerful Internet Marketing

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