Does this timepiece go beyond expectations?

Tell us what you think of this timepiece?
Would you buy it?
What do you think?
Are you feeling it?
Just interested in learning more about how you guys vibe on this product?

discuss amongst yourselves….we’ll check in every so often….

txwatches.com

This defines listening, learning and being rewarded…

Of course it’s coming from the minds at Forrester again, but we at Nostrum know talent, aren’t afraid to acknowledge great work, and yield to them (and any of their offspring) when it comes to these types of insights.

Check out the simplicity and insights gleaned just by listening to the people you already serve!
Ad Age: Dog Treats

Robert (aka berkeley) is going around the country giving presentations on social media / Web 2.0 to C-level types.

In “berkeley” speak “the corporate level execs totally get it.”

Friction (and confusion) happens at the execution level.  So why don’t people want to listen?

A few reasons he’s heard:

• Not every thing said is good.
• Its hard to manage that much information.
• There are rants ABOUT MY PRODUCT.

Here’s what’s true:

• Social media/web 2.0 is NOT an on-line presentation of print media like we’ve been seeing for the last decade. These on-line ads, catalogs, white papers and sell sheets are comfortable to the marketing managers. They don’t talk back except in ROI.
• Social media/web 2.0 is an on-line conversation between people. A party, conference, or high school that’s happening 24/7.
• All sorts of things will be discussed, just like any other place that people get together.
• Some of these conversations will be about things that interest you, that are about your product.

If you know about these conversations, you can learn from them.  So do you want to know what’s being said?

Before even heading down that path everyone must understand the following:

• Yes, some of these things will not be nice to hear, just like in high school.
• Yes, sometimes people have an on-line tantrum, like a little kid in a supermarket.
• Yes, all the time and energy that you put into this project doesn’t resonate on the same level like it does to you and your team - and that’s ok!

Sometimes you can learn a lot from a rant or a tough post….Nostrum can help you understand them further…

• We can coach you through filtering the negativity to find the real problem.
• Finding the problem can lead to improvements in your product and communications.

So, why not listen and let us help….you’re already here??!!

French Revolution

I implore you all to reads this recent post from Bryan Appleyard of the Times UK Online.

In the article he speaks to how the Web 2.o Lifestyle is nothing more than a California Cult-like phenomena and is “destroy(ing) institutions and structures that can do so much more than the individual.” He also speaks to an “inverse correlation between technological speed and intellectual diversity” as it relates to the excessive “individualism which leads to an astonishing rapidity to slavish conformity.”

In my opionion this is just another “established publication’s” take on what they never forsaw and just cant believe in because it goes against everything that buisness and established entities fought so hard to maintain.

We here in LA LA Land do believe in this cult and are extremeley passionate about maintaining this new approach to business: Sharing and Collaboration.

I’ll leave you guys with a post from the Appleyard article from Willem out of London.  Cheerio Willem Cheerio

Interesting article, but mindless cultists aren’t specific to the web at all; they’re the kind of people that threaten anything they get interested in anyway. Good to question everything, but I’d like to point out the web also encourages collaboration, not just individuality at all. - Willem, London, UK

Let us know what you think as well.  We are keen to hear your take on us cultists!!

I was scouring the blogosphere like I do on a regular basis and found a post by someone we follow all the time and I wanted to expand on what they say as the “stuff they do.”  This is this company’s community manager’s take on day to day life and I have to say except that I do more in the presenting aspect of the business and strategizing early on, this is alot of what my day is like.

We get alot of questions here about how do you do this and what is that for - and this listing is probably the best accounting of the “types” of things that we encounter on a daily basis.  If Danya or Tim want to chime in here feel free, but to me this answers alot of it.  So have at it peeps and hope this clears up some of the “magic” (your words not mine) that we do….

Like I said above this is someone else’s take on the job with a sprinkling of my 2 cents interspersed, but i honestly couldn’t have said it better myself…..robert

The Gig:

Listening for mentions of our brand across the web , and when appropriate,  engaging the people and discussions. For the most part, that’s blogs and Twitter for us, but occasionally a forum or other social network becomes an important place to chat.

The goal: Building a strong network of relationships across the web based on trust, familiarity, and professional insight.

Acting as a liaison for “ourselves and clients” on the front lines of communication across the web. It’s related to above, but sometimes I’m not the best person to answer a question, so I can help act as a conduit to our internal team members and make sure our customers are supported at each point in their relationship across our company. I’m both ambassador for our brand, and advocate for our customers.

The goal: Streamline communication between our customers online, and our backstage “teams here at the home base”

Writing for the nostruminc blog, focusing on topics that are relevant to our corporate and agency clients, and the social media space as a whole.

The goal: Sharing thoughts, best practices, and generating discussion about topics that are important to people working in social communications.

Framing out and executing a community strategy to empower and engage our customers, both with us and among themselves . This is community building at its core, including supporting user groups, creating online destinations, sharing best practices, and connecting people within existing communities.

The goal: To make being a nostrum inc client and team member a truly valuable experience. We want to create a network among our clients, get to know them as people, and tap the insights of our users to continually improve our platform and our role as thought leaders.

Internal education with our business development and other team members to discuss the web 2.0/social media landscape and how it works, as well as trends and issues that are cropping up among our own community.

The goal: Helping everyone inside and outside the company understand and feel comfortable with how social media and community outreach relates to their job, as well as carry feedback from the community back to our team.

Contributing to all of our content marketing efforts, and including media creation and community outreach efforts. That can include press releases, online content, podcasts, case studies, you name it. And we work hard to listen to what people are asking for, rather than what we think they need.

The goal: Be a source of information to the community at large about our industry best practices, what we’re up to, and what we’re planning next.

Participating in the communities we cultivate. I can’t stress this one enough. Our job is not only to listen to the community, but to be an active and engaged participant on every level. Otherwise, what kind of credibility do we have or the agency as a whole ? This also entails my getting on lots of airplanes to go to events where our customers and prospects are. Being available and accessible offline and face to face is important, too.

The goal: Lots of connections and relationship building, both online and off.

The Challenges:

Read the rest of this entry »

Lakers haters take your seats and embrace yourself.  Maybe you should just take a vacation because not only is the premiere of Kobe’s documentary this Saturday, but the Lakers are going to crush the Rockets on Sunday.  It’s a big weekend for a few NBA teams, with some Game 7s determining who will move on and a unique feature on one of the NBA greats.

I have faith the Lakers will demolish the Rockets at home on Sunday  and that Orlando does the same to Boston. But before all this happens, the premiere of Spike Lee’s Kobe Bryant documentary, “Kobe Doin’ Work: A Day in the Life” airs tomorrow, 5/16 at 5 PST on ESPN.  The footage was taken in April of this year at the Staples Center when the Lakers were matched up with the Spurs and it was one impressive Lake Show.
On another note, did anyone tweet with Derek Fisher in Game 3  when he was suspended due to a foul in the previous, very physical Game 2?  Great use of Twitter by the NBA, but if you check out his page now, he hasn’t tweeted since then.  Although his last post is “This is the 1st and last in game post…” it will be disappointing to Twitter members who find D. Fish on Twitter only to see his last tweet was May 8th.  I don’t blame Derek, he’s part of the Lakers and they are all great…except for Walton but that’s another post. Someone needs to figure out the purpose of his page now. Should D. Fish be more active on Twitter, remove the page soon, leave it as is or cancel the account?  What do you think?  You don’t need to let us know that the Lakers are going to be the 2010 champs, we already know this, but what do you think should happen to Fisher’s Twitter Page?

This may be the coolest thing I’ve ever blogged about. Astronauts are giving us poor earthlings a taste of what it’s like to travel in outer space. Mike Massimino is a mission specialist on the Atlantis Space Shuttle mission to repair the Hubble Space Telescope. And he’s using Twitter. In space.

Massimino is tweeting as @Astro_Mike. Granted, his tweets are very few and far between, because, well, he’s kind of, you know, busy. But the principal of the thing is still really exciting. And besides, NASA is keeping us abreast of how the Hubble repairs are going.

More talkative, in terms of Twitter, is Mark Polansky, who will be going up shortly on the STS-127 launch on June 13th. He’s doing a great job of keeping the curious abreast of what it takes to be an astronaut, and the grueling preparations you have to go through to get in on a shuttle launch. Follow him @Astro_127, and send him a YouTube video of yourself asking him a question, and he might just answer it from space!

Maybe it’s nostalgia in the face of the fact that we’re looking at some of the last shuttle launches ever, as the Shuttle is going to be replaced by Ares carriers, or maybe it’s my childhood desire to be an astronaut, or maybe it’s just the universal human obsession with wondering what’s out there, but I can’t help feeling that these tweets from space are the most exciting thing I’ve ever seen come out of social media.

Kind of puts the Ashton Kutcher-CNN contest in perspective, doesn’t it?

Social Media Lesson Number One: NEVER put page hits over content.

A lot of people think that social media only exists to get the maximum number of eyes on a page. It doesn’t matter what you put on your website. It doesn’t have to be good—hell, it doesn’t even have to be interesting, as long as people are looking, right?

The answer to that one is a big, thunderous, resounding NO. It’s all about content. Don’t expect to get page views without having a quality product (and by product I mean anything from an actual retail item to a personal blog)—the social media world is very altruistic and people stay away in droves from sites that aren’t authentic. The web community is a lot smarter than they get credit for, and they can tell when all you care about is getting hits.

San Francisco journalist L.J. Williamson recently tried a fascinating little experiment at the San Francisco Examiner (examiner.com). The Examiner uses a pay-per-click business model to compensate its writers (much like Google ads—the more people click, the more you get paid), and Williamson received frequent emails from her “channel manager” exhorting her to focus on raising the site’s profile in searches and drawing more visitors. He told her, “Examiners should avoid obscure references, no matter how ‘clever.’ Search engines don’t recognize cleverness.” Read the rest of this entry »

I haven’t been a big fan of Old Navy’s new campaign that utilizes mannequins in place of models titled ‘SuperModelquins’ (cheesy), but I do like the hidden coupon idea in their weekly e-newsletter and their use of integrating social media into the campaign.
OldNavyWeekly.com promotes hot deals and items of the week, while offering various coupons, which the user must find by clicking certain things (i.e. an animated crab running along the sand) or answering a question about the campaign (i.e. what is x mannequins name?). I don’t even shop at Old Navy, but being the competitive person I am found this to be a fun game that I wanted to win by finding all the coupons. The catch is you can only use one coupon that you find, which is good for one week starting from the release date of the weekly, and to retrieve it you must enter your email address and name. Also, there is only a limited number of each coupon that can be retrieved each week.
This is a great promotion implemented by Old Navy because it provides a fun way to interact with the brand, keeps you looking at every corner of the site, collects user emails for future use, makes it easy to share the site with it’s “email to a friend” link and social networking icons to post the site to a user’s profile, and provides a track able metric. You can even follow the ‘SuperModelquins’ on Twitter, who already have almost 2,000 followers!

How many times have you heard: I don’t understand twitter?  Or, I have an account and i tried using it but I just dont get it, so I gave up on it?

Well if you’re like me or you work in the new media biz - a hell of a lot of times.  But that doesn’t mean that just because you don’t understand something you give up.  I use twitter all the time for both work and personal things.  Yes I will admit some of it is for  mundane things like updating Lakers Scores while sitting at Staples or just tweeting out where or what i’m doing at some random time.  But that is only one small facet of what i use twitter for.

The main purpose of my twitter usage is for research and connecting to the best and brightest of the digerati set in real time.  Tapping into the minds of people like david armano and charlene li is something that the most privileged only got to do during their stints at Harvard or hearing them on the lecture circuit.  With Twitter, I can literally cherry pick thoughts and concepts and interact with them on a second by second basis.

Do they know me - Not from Adam.  Do they care about me - not really.  But does it build a relationship - most definitely.

Its a hard concept for people to truly grasp but i do believe the more you explore and participate with Twitter (or other Social Tools) the more you will see their true value.  Look at this to see how ” real people” are opening the twitter-universe to make it work for their lives.

Tweet us your insights and let us know how you use twitter: @nostruminc

Dance has been used for quite some time to promote new products, events, places, brands and elevate campaigns with a different artistic approach. I decided to visit a few of my favorite commercials and ads I have enjoyed, both old and new. Below is my first compilation of those commercials that have incorporated the art of dance in a unique way. Various styles can be seen and some have mixed in humor to generate laughs. It seems you can’t go wrong with dancing and music - it is usually a winning combination that’s fun to watch, appealing, and for me, triggers my outgoing perspectives. Read the rest of this entry »

I felt people may need a bit of break from constant barrage of information overload.

So I decided to post something that was shared to me by a good friend and previous Nostrum Employee: Alice In Wonderland Re-Mixed.

Check it out: the site blends electronic music and technology with a disney-fied twist….

A must see and view….

Seth Godin makes simple things even simpler. In a recent post of his, he discusses marketing in the current climate and the changes people naturally make when “selling” to friends. I totally agree with him in his notion that as long as you have enough friends, there is no need to sell to strangers.

While Twitter and other social media entities are trying to figure out metrics that make sense to those more versed in traditional marketing, digital marketers should just use Godin’s logic. Whose opinion would you value? your friends’ or the mishmash of celebrity endorsers, flashing lights, and half-naked models traditionally used to sell you stuff while insulting your intelligence?

Let’s start by introducing you all to an artist i just discovered on Imeem, named Jamie Lidell with a song to lift up the Monday spirit.

Another Day - Jamie Lidell

I barely listen to the radio now. I honestly don’t know when I started to tune out the radio stations but in the past years, I’ve transitioned to other sources to provide for my listening enjoyment. Pandora and Imeem are common music sites I go to when looking for new music to play and unwind to. Pandora is great, because it uses the GENOME effect in which it finds music based on your current favorites, styles, influences and sounds. It literally pick pockets artists and songs catered to your taste. Imeem was also a great discovery for me as it introduced me to more new music and artists that I had never heard of. The more I search for music on these sites, the more I get addicted to discovering and researching new talent not typically found in the mainstream scene.

I also realize that this generation is all about the iPod and the iTunes. Don’t get me wrong, I admire and use both but sometimes I find myself staying true to my old fashioned roots with CDs (but not THAT far to when i collected maxi-singles and albums on cassette tapes). I do purchase CD’s of artists that I fully support and enjoy. Plus buying songs on iTunes does not get you the fancy CD booklet of pictures! But in regards to iTunes, it is also a fulfilling way to discover new music, as well as re-discover old tunes you grew up to which can now be easily purchased through the web with the click of a button. Read the rest of this entry »

Take a second and listen to this man. If you dont know who he is, you probably were born after 1980, live outside of LA or are not basketball fans but that’s ok.

This leader is a 98 year old genius and is considered the GREATEST COLLEGE COACH EVER! He led the UCLA Bruins to a staggering 10 NCAA Championships in his 12 year career - a feat that no one has ever even come close to and most likely will never happen again. But it’s not the basketballl or the sports that i truly care about, its the simplicity of the rules that he structured HIS life and in turn his team around. All these simple steps can be weaved into our daily lives on and assist when helping clients and staff in truly understanding the time, energy and patience it takes to get a job done.

So as a favor to me, Nostrum, Inc. and as a courtesy to the most amazing person on the planet take 3 minutes to watch this clip and let us know what you think….berkeley

Although I would prefer the closet full of shoes, the most memorable commercial of the year so far has got to be Heineken’s “Walk-in Fridge”. This is one commercial I wouldn’t mind seeing over and over.

Two beers up for Heineken who hit the mark with this one by providing a clever concept and enjoyable laugh for both sexes by portraying a difference between what makes most men versus most women excited. Multiple spoofs were even created, one user-generated and multiple brands, which don’t compare to the original but only help to draw more attention to the Heineken brand and show how successful the concept is. Dutch beer brand, Bavaria and the Cleveland Cavaliers are two brands who have spoofed the original. So sit back, crack open a Heineken, or a shoe box, and enjoy!