Jaffe Juice

JJTV #17 - The good, bad and ugly of iPhone Apps

MLB hit it out the park with this iPhone app. Babyshaker on the other hand, did not. On a third hand, interesting implications with respect to Apple's one-sided and subjective selection and curation policy.

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MoSoSo 2.0? Announcing the GyPSii iPhone App

Today, crayon client, GyPSii went live with their iPhone App on ITunes.

I'm excited about the potential for this app, given my belief (and New Year's prediction) that we're going to see a dramatic rise in Mobile Social Networking space. It's a no brainer if you think about it...mobiles connected to other mobiles in real time with an expanded footprint beyond 1-to-1 calling.

Here's a bit of background/marketing information on the app itself:

Whilst the GyPSii application falls into the MoSoSo (Mobile Social Software) category, it's different from the rest of the MoSoSo apps (Loopt, Brightkite, Foursquare, etc.) insofar that it's a mobile app for creating and sharing experiences.

It’s for anyone that wants to capture their life’s experiences. That includes travelers, urban techies and families — anyone with a story to tell.

• Embrace the lifestyle: GyPSii’s iPhone app delivers a new mobile lifestyle experience that allows you to capture your life live and on-the-go
• Instantly narrate your life: Write about your experiences on-the-go, marking the GPS location you’re visiting and uploading related images and text
• Decide how and when you share: You have full control of your privacy and can share with the world, go invisible or reveal selective information with certain friends in your network
• Stay connected: Your friends can see what you’re up to no matter what device or network they’re on In addition to downloads, we should encourage honest and frank reviewing of the app. Ratings and reviews — positive or negative — demonstrate usage to Apple, which will bump up the profile of the application in the app store. Plus ratings and reviews only make the next version of the application better.

Actually, I think GyPSii incorporates the best of the MoSoSo space i.e. capturing/tagging live events, finding local events, connecting with friends based on location.

So give it a download and if you're so inclined, give it a rating and/or review. And don't forget to friend me :)

Oh and here's a brief video which gives you a walkthrough of the app:

Other things you might find interesting:

• gypsii integrates into both Facebook and Twitter
• gypsii is on twitter if you want chat with them
• Ditto with Facebook

JJTV #6: I heart Charmin

I'm a two-ply guy myself...especially when it comes to marketing.

Hats off to Charmin. This is the kind of stuff we need to be focusing on, not 30-second spots, newspaper ads, banners and buttons and interns to manage our twitter accounts.

• You can now subscribe to this show directly from its new iTunes page
• Retweet this why don't you: Check out @jaffejuice's new episode of JJTV on Charmin - http://bit.ly/7Aa7j 
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Where's MY friggen' royalties???

3 years ago I was consulting for a company who will remain nameless and I suggested to them that the songs from American Idol should be readily available for purchase on iTunes.

It was a no-brainer to me that consumers en masse would rather purchase Idol hopeful renditions of contemporary, classic and even forgotten songs than the originals (which we KNOW are not selling based on continued declining music industry CD sales etc)

Take Donny Hathaway's A Song for You, brilliantly sung by Elliot Yamin, for example. How many Elliot Yamin teenybopper fans even know (or care) who Donny Hathaway was.....until now!

Talk about the Long Tail in action.

Anyway, it was just announced that this is now going to be a reality.

You're welcome.

A picture's worth 1,000 MP3's

Last September, I spoke at the iMedia Brand Summit and had the opportunity to chat to The Podfather himself before he addressed the brand marketers in the audience.

My iPhone snapped a photo of Adam Curry adjusting his fly (he said it was ok) and until this weekend I never did anything with it until I showed it to CC Chapman at Podcamp Nashville who said, "Dude, there's about a million captions for that one."

Indeed.

I'll give a copy of "Join the Conversation" to the best caption submitted for this photo. Audio submissions welcome as well to +1 206 203-3255

Give me Radiohead till I'm dead

Radiohead's landmark experiment has certainly got people talking...

Some feel duped by Radiohead...but for the most part people participated at an average price (or tip) of $8.

British website http://www.Gigwise.com has reported that Radiohead sold 1.2 million copies, a figure thought to be largely based on the pre-orders of the album placed in the 10 days between when Radiohead announced the release and the day it went on sale: Oct. 10.

I'm not sure if this is referring to their CD sales or purely the digital downloads, but either way it shatters the 300,000 from the band's previous release within its first week of sales.

There's also a cool leaked e-mail (who doesn't like those) from EMI's Chairman, Guy Hands.

Delivering a new podcast and a new partner!

On Friday of last week, I recorded my last "Across the Sound - The New Marketing Podcast" ever. The podcast I began 2 years ago with Steve Rubel, named "Across the Sound" as Steve lived in Long Island and I, in Westport, CT, hit 93...falling 7 shy of the big 100.

...or did it?

Starting today, Across the Sound is rebranded and renamed as....Jaffe Juice (ta-da!) Sounds simple enough...and it is. For all the right reasons, it made total sense to bundle and consolidate both social media assets (blog and podcast) under one umbrella brand.

I'm looking into forwarding/redirecting the feed (I believe that's possible) which seems like the obvious solution. Another one is just to subscribe to Jaffe Juice in iTunes (or your favorite podcatcher) - the direct iTunes link is here. Also, if you're not a listener, take this opportunity to subscribe and give it a shot.

And so, if you want to get the Juice, you can in its two forms: text and audio (and who knows....shudder...and some point soon, video as well...which is a bad idea as I've been told I have a face for radio) Jaffe Juice - the New Marketing Podcast will continue where ATS left off as JJ #94.

Part of the timing is to coincide with the launch of my book, Join the Conversation, and part of the reason is to celebrate a new partner. As of today, I'm thrilled to announce a 12-episode partnership with Deliver Magazine, an innovation-focused web and print magazine,

published by the United States Postal Service. The press release is here

The partnership will last roughly 12 episodes and will take Jaffe Juice through the 100th episode (as many of you will recall, I set out to find a sponsor for this milestone...and I did!)

Each week, the editorial team at Deliver will send in an audio vignette, which will focus on a common area of interest in the field of innovation. I will respond to the question, comment, and/or meme and then invite the Jaffe Juice (ATS) community to do likewise. I'll also be contributing 6 articles to the magazine and 6 thought leadership pieces to Deliver's website over the next 12 months. To kick off the association, I'll be signing books tonight at a USPS reception.

The folks over at Deliver Magazine, USPS, Campbell-Ewald (USPS' agency) and myself have worked hard at this and I'm really proud of where we ended up. It's further proof that podcasting is real, substantial and valuable. To be honest, I never thought I'd be on this side of the equation, but irrespective I now have my own example (from the inside-out) of a podcasting sponsorship outside one of the anemic handful of ones usually brandished about.

It's a strategic and integrated initiative and I truly hope (I have a say in the matter) it "delivers" (sorry) the goods and the value that is being sought from this conversational experiment. One thing that is also very cool is how open everyone is to this being an evolving association i.e. letting it unfold and grow naturally.

fyi - check out Deliver Magazine and give it a trial (the subscription is free) It will surprise you big time. You can also subscribe to the feed. Nice!

JJ #94 is available for your downloading pleasure here

RadioHead & The Honor System

As Keanu Reeves might say in one of his signature one-word lines, "Woah!"

Radiohead has done a Dell and cut out the middleman BIG TIME in what I would call "direct-to-consumer". They're essentially leaving it completely up to their fans to determine what they should pay for the band's new album.

They even remind people that there are no strings attached:

NO REALLY. IT'S UP TO YOU.

Whether you believe Radiohead's new album, In Rainbow is worth UK 1p (or US 2c) or an exponential multiple thereof, ultimately that's your choice and your decision.

Woah indeed.

No iTunes. No Limewire or Kazaa. No SpiralFrog. No HMV. No Virgin. No problem. No way!!!!

I'd like to see this go one step further i.e. let listeners go back to the original transaction and - based on their level of satisfaction - increase or decrease their original offer. Now that's what I would call "satisfaction guaranteed"

It's a totally original spin on true market forces, no?

Hat Tip to Greg Veerman.

PR in less than 140 characters

A mainstream media article on Twitter, which is fairly rare to see (as well as the fact, it's not calling its users lunatics)

Considering their proximity (both in San Francisco), one wonders whether Linden Labs shouldn't share its PR secrets with the folks over at Twitter, but then again...perhaps that's the goal i.e. stay somewhat under the radar and build up a loyal and solid base of "followers".

I've been using Twitter for some time now and don't regard myself as a raving lunatic. I've been using jaffejuice as my primary handle, and shortly will introduce a new one for my book, "Join the Conversation" - http://www.twitter.com/jointheconvo

"blogging about twitter right now When I'm done I'll twitter about my blog post :)" (with 59 characters to spare, I might add)

Twitter is definitely still growing and improving, for example...when one is on the road and tweeting via mobile, Twitter becomes decidedly one-way/communication based, as opposed to conversational insofar that the Tweeter will not get to see all the responses to their tweet. This is mainly because of a) the volume of incoming tweets and b) the cost of text messaging  en masse.

A suggestion to improve this might be the ability to create an mobile-rule which allows any tweets with the tweeter's name preceded by an "a" sign i.e. @jaffejuice.

The above point is less of a shortcoming and more of an opportunity (in fact Twitter is starting to make some interesting progress on the mobile front...an essential component of its strategic recipe for success, no doubt)

It also points out a very interesting consumer insight about Twitter, namely the seeding of syntax into our social media vernacular. The naming convention i.e. @jaffejuice or @Scobleizer (the handle of well-known blogger, Robert Scoble) has successfully infiltrated blogging as a nifty way to respond via the comment thread to multiple people at the same time.

A nice cup of Joe to start the day

A huge part of Twitter is the immediacy of it all. The company was founded on a simple insight, "what are you doing right now?", but as the article above suggests might be evolving to a more aspirational platform i.e. capturing life in 140 characters or less.  To be sure, the former might have led to some of the earlier negative PR

What's so special about having a cup of coffee to start the day and who cares that Joseph Jaffe is about to have a cup of coffee to start his day?

Maybe so, but I will say 2 things about the randomness of things like "on a train into the city with my daughter for the day," it led me to meet up with Derek Mehraban, who was in town with his daughters on vacation. The same Derek Mehraban, who approached me to speak at Arb Camp in Ann Arbor on October 27th. Socialdipity my friends.

What Twitter now has to figure out is how to literally capture the essence of that immediacy and extend it's value accordingly.

With automatic feeds from blog posts (still haven't figured out how to do that myself), seeding announcements, thought leadership, beta invites and events is incredibly efficient. Google is already capturing tweets and many people have been surprised to find tweets in search results and/or in Google Alerts. I've also finally (thanks to Mitch Joel) figured out how to update my tweets automatically in my Facebook profile.

All in all, it's "IM meets social networking" (that's my 26 character elevator pitch) and  will present intriguing possibilities for marketers and brands as it - along with brands - continue to explore the future (hopefully together)

iPhone for an episode - fair trade!

On ATS #83, which I uploaded on Sunday morning, I spoke about an interesting experiment regarding the monetization of podcasts (or blogs for that matter). I don't have this confirmed, but I'm sure one of you will verify this, but according to Technorati, only 8% of bloggers have monetized their blogs. That's troubling.

Besides joining the large podcasting and blogging networks, which skew unfavorably towards the very large of the large, how else can a podcaster for example make money?

I tried something different on Sunday. I basically "wished" for a new Apple iPhone, and in exchange I offered up sponsorship of one episode of ATS. I wasn't entirely sure anyone would bite, but I figured this could be a novel twist on the old barter arrangement to assign a value to one specific episode of my podcast.

Within an hour of the episode going live, I had my offer. Chip Griffin, CEO of Custom Scoop, responded (actually, I had two offers) and on Monday, 24 hours after I made my offer, I purchased my iPhone (this picture of the iPhone box was taken with my iPhone), which Chip will reimburse.

Chip will most likely come on ATS as a date to be determined to co-host the show.

Custom Scoop and myself put out a joint press release. You can view it here

As an aside, Greg Verdino told me he bumped into Steve Rubel last week who proudly displayed his iPhone that he waited for hours to purchase. It's ironic that it is Across the Sound - the podcast that Steve and I launched together that ended up being responsible for myself getting an iPhone.

So where to from here? I'm going to try for a fully-loaded MacBook Pro or a Vaio (I'm going to let the barter sponsor choose) in exchange for a full month's sponsorship of the show.  Alternatively, if I receive a second iPhone, perhaps I'll trade it up for the MacBook Pro or Vaio...think of this as One Red Paperclip meets Ad Sales :) Oh, the possibilities...

I really think this could be seminal moment for podcasters (and bloggers) to be able to monetize their sites and content with brands - and smart marketers - as the heroes. There's an explicit value exchange present, which allows sponsors plugged into the conversation to validate specific podcasters and connect with their audiences in a fun and transparent way.

PS I LOVE my iPhone and will give a detailed review of it soon