The Millennium Marketer

At the risk of being wickedly evangelical, I decided I needed to figure out what kinds of mobile apps are out there for my Palm Centro to stay social. Most apps seem developed for Blackberry or Windows Mobile platforms, although there are easy workarounds.

My tolerance for a 4 lb Dell form factor has been reduced to a spoiled few ounces in a Palm Centro, a small sacrifice to a tinier screen just so that I can be more impulsive and share “of-the-moment” thoughts and keep on top of the latest news where ever I am. Like, yeah, I need to be more ADD.

The best will be during huge events where I can Flickr with the camera, Tweet, e-mail blog while on a train or other moving vehicle, and remember stuff without searching frantically for wireless networks or pray for battery power.

My posts may be much shorter and more frequent after this one, and here’s how:
Flickr
The Centro’s specs say that the camera phone has 1.3 pixels

When I go to Flickr Mobile, it tells me I can email my photos to a designated address.

Your subject line will be the title of the photo, and the email body becomes the photo description

Tweet
Yeah, I know. I can easily receive text messages on my device and I don’t have to worry about downloading program clients. But what is the fun in that?!
So, MoTwit is the application for Palm users.
Anyone have any thoughts on this?

E-mail Blog
WordPress has a workaround to blog posts from your mobile device. The FAQs can be found here. As usual, WordPress claims that the process is easy: set up a dedicated e-mail address for blogposts and then configure your settings.

The disappointment for the average user sinks in when I see things like:

When you are done creating the new e-mail account , return to the Writing Options panel and fill in the name of the mail server and port number your web hosting provider uses.

Oh damn, I don’t know what that means. WP, can you give me an example?

7/10/08 Update: Setting up a new e-mail address is easy, but I wasn’t too clear how to get WordPress to synch with the new e-mail address.

Remember Stuff, or I mean, the Milk…
Oh and most important, here’s another use for Twitter that is rarely mentioned. Productivity. So, now I can send Tweets to my calendar and tasks to Remember the Milk. That’s uber-social and fun, too. Makes me want to put tons of stuff on my tasks list, although it would be nice to SEE what is on RTM. When RTM gets around to developing a Palm mobile app, then I will be in heaven–Girl Geek heaven.

07/04/08 Update: Tweeting to Google Calendar turns out to be a really nice way to make quick reminders on-the-go since the Google Cal Mobile doesn’t have an update function.

Since this is just the start and I am only learning about all these apps, I’ll say it’s about time to have some discussion on this from more advanced users. What apps have you found really useful for mobile?

While there’s nothing absolutely new about it (since it was announced on TechCrunch earlier today), Drop.io and Scribd today announced integration of iPaper and Drop.io.

Anything you put in a Dropio box will be easily opened up in Scribd, and there is no need to sign in or sign up for an account. Interesting–it addresses the issue that is most often complained about, which is having to register for an account yet again on another application.

Dropio’s PR says that the drop box has been historically used to share photos from family events and auctioning farm animals.

It’s like mailbox meets online library. While I like the Scribd function to see all files in PDF, which avoids storing things in my cache, I would stay tuned to see if this has changed anyone’s life yet.

This and other apps like Box.net are good indicators that storage is moving online as well, which can quickly make 2 GB USB pens obsolete. This is also good news for the server and storage folks, as data clustering in the cloud becomes the upcoming trend.

I’ve been away for the Memorial Day weekend getting engrossed into a new dimension of social media that I had not considered before. These days, I’ve been doing less writing and more listening, so if it seems like I’m a little bit silent, it’s probably because I’m silently listening.

Twenty five dollars last weekend got me Charlene Li & Josh Bernoff’s latest edition of Groundswell, and I am so excited!! This is money well spent.

To do this, you can start by searching through keywords and tags on De.li.ci.ous, Digg or StumbleUpon and find out what people like. De.li.ci.ous has so far proven to be the best search engine, and StumbleUpon is also good for sending messages and coming across random websites that you wouldn’t really know about otherwise. This takes a lot of time, so be prepared to take out about an hour, and commit to limiting this time and coming back to it later. Otherwise, you will find yourself entangled in the Information Spider’s web.

Social bookmarking sites aren’t just another form of ratings and reviews, and it really boggles the mind that there is such a fine detail in understanding your target audience. You can actually see who is digging, stumbling, delicious by checking out their profile, their gender, age, and where they are located. Of course, I knew this was true for marketers, such as those who target profiles on Facebook, but it hadn’t really occurred to me that bloggers could use this in the same way.

For example, I found Divedi on StumbleUpon. He lives in Bulgaria and he is a huge fan of social media. I now know what he is interested in which confirms my thoughts that people do want to know more about social media marketing. Thanks, Divedi!

These days, I am doing less writing and more listening. Who’s out there and what do they want to know? After all, there’s not much point in me speaking if it only contributes to the noise. This is a gap that is not often addressed on the web. Social media bloggers often say, “listening is the first step to blogging.” It’s often been a vague concept for those unfamiliar with the context that social media is a “conversation.” Plus, they don’t tell you how to listen.

Go out there, listen and let me know what you find! I’ll be sharing more on the Groundswell when another poignant moment strikes me.

Addendum: Wrapping It All Up

Three benefits to social bookmarking

(Just remember this is not the end all be all without a compelling message to broadcast)

Listening Power
You know exactly who likes what, what’s hot and what’s not. Sometimes people like videos that are outrageous and silly.

Will It Blend is hypnotic: it turns things like granulated sugar into powder sugar and beats credit cards into a fine powder.

Hunting & Gathering Power
In a traditional tribe, everybody works together to get what they need to support the tribe. This is the Information Age and now you can get others to work with you to get the information you want or need.

A friend, Travis, sent me a link from StumbleUpon that I would have never even found myself. Another blogger friend sent me a bunch of cool links, such as this smartmouth one for blog critiques, called Ask and Ye Shall Receive. After a study abroad year in the UK from 2004, and my trained British sensibilities are ruffled by the Blogspot title.

Friending Power
This is the potential to make friends out of strangers, and this can be super important! Sometimes it’s not the masses that matter, but the quality of the conversation. (There’s that word again. We now need new words in social media.)

Stumble It!

I was on Mashable and apparently MapQuest, which I think gives really bad directions for a map service now has a traffic report service. Maybe they will rival Google?

One thing that is cool, which does not rely on directions is MapQuest’s Gas Prices feature. Good to see a brand name associated with this kind of service. It looks like in my area we are up to $3.50 for regular gas at the low end and $3.60 at the high end. It won’t be long before we reach the $4 mark, and even if there is such thing as inflation, gas prices are just ridiculous.

OK…this is a bit of a gripe. But I have to say since Facebook is announcing an IM program, just how many IM programs do we need to have, how many blogs and how many microblogs à la Twitter do we really, really need just to connect to the people we care about?

Sure, there’s a great potential for competition in this market space, but at some point, it has to scale enough so that the consumer feels like he/she has enough buying power. Most people have no idea that these technologies exist at this point.