Hi, I'm Antonio Barimen, aka skribe Forti. My background is in the film and television industry but about 15 years ago I began building both virtual and online communities. Now I use that experience to provide professional consultation to business, from SMEs right up to Fortune 500 companies.
My philosophy is simple: improve the lines of communication by establishing strong, engaging communities. And then build from there. It works for both B2C and B2B
Recently I was asked to do some consulting for a company. They were developing a strategy for their online presence and wanted some assistance. The strategy involved a lot of social media and made some fairly bold claims about the returns on their investment. Upon seeing this, the first question I asked was where was the research to back these claims. There was none, and worse there was no budget to do any market research. Fortunately they had a year’s worth of web metrics that I was able to analyse and offer some practical solutions.
Metrics are often under-utilised as a market research tool, whether it be the number of hits on a website or which demographic is watching a video. Careful analysis of your metrics can yield a wealth of information that you can then use to help develop your digital strategies. Here are three: Read More
The traditional view of how to advertise on television (and subsequently through online video ) is the mini-story. Usually these are short pieces dealing with one subject in a superficial but psychologically attractive way. Sure, the story may have a dominating, but catchy, jingle and the narrative may be non-existent – but essentially that is what a commercial is to most people. However, online video offers some interesting alternatives that not only move away from this traditional mini-story concept but also allow you to build a dynamic and engaging community.
Following in the footsteps of Nokia Friendview, Google has decided to delve into the world of location-based mobile social networking. Google Latitude is a free addon service to Google Maps Mobile that allows users to add friends and share current location and status updates with them. Of course this requires that the user have a GPS enabled mobile phone.