Mobile Content Posted by John Assalian on November 22, 2010 With the increased popularity of smartphones and tablets, technology marketers need to deliver their content beyond the web and onto mobile platforms. Market shares of users on mobile devices vary widely among market segment, so it is important to avoid developing for mobile for mobile’s sake. As a marketer, focus on developing mobile content for audience segments that align to your products and services. And don’t forget to leverage your current offerings and content appropriate for mobile platforms. Viewstream’s mobile services leverages digital marketing content across mobile platforms, including iPhone, iPad, Droid, Windows Mobile, Blackberry, and more. Leveraging our expertise in creating content and bringing it together with our strong development capabilities enables us to continue our tradition of expert professional services for technology marketing. Mobile will continue to grow, and Viewstream is building the next generation apps and content as we move forward through another amazing stage of computing. One recent example of our work was an Autodesk screencast, “Autodesk Design Suite Premium” developed for the Apple iPad device. If you have an iPad, click here and load the iPad version to see how well these assets deliver using mobile technology. Or, if you are on a desktop, click here to see the desktop PC version. If you are interested in formatting interactive and rich media assets for mobile, or have an idea for an app you would like to have developed, give us a call. We’d be happy to help!
Viewstream VP on Forbes.com Posted by John Assalian on November 11, 2010 Viewstream VP of Strategy & Business Development Joshua Shane recently published a piece on Forbes.com titled “Giving Value to ‘The Cloud,’” where he outlines the reasons why Cloud technology providers should be focusing on the value of their offerings, and avoid using mushy buzz words that aren’t meaningful. There’s certainly been a lot of buzz over the past few years about “The Cloud”. Businesses, customers, and journalists in the tech industry have been talking about the technology of “The Cloud” so much that its value as a term has been diluted. With so many splintered definitions of “The Cloud” out there, technology pros are losing sight of the actual value the technology can bring. In his article, Shane calls for a re-visioning of the conversations around “The Cloud,” arguing that as an idea, it has been over-hyped and diluted. Cloud Computing, as a term, has lost its hype value and in several areas risks moving to the “troughs of disillusionment.” He also points to several companies that are correctly framing the conversation around the value the technology brings. Shane’s commentary is a new and fresh look at how we engage in conversations around the technology. We’d love to hear what you think!
WordPress Website Development & Consulting Services Posted by John Assalian on September 18, 2010 Viewstream has been listed on Automattic’s WordPress consultant directory for the last two years. The directory, appropriately named “Code Poet”, means we partner with Automattic to provide WordPress consulting and development services for companies that understand the power and elegance of WordPress as a development platform. The directory lists company names in alphabetic order, which means Viewstream is on the bottom of the list :<. Time to change our name to 123-Vieswtream and get to the top of the list :> Given how many names are on the list, we get a small amount of traffic each month, and some inquires. Viewstream is unique in the WordPress website development, design and consulting world as we have pushed the limits of using WordPress as a Web Content Framework or Content Management System. For example, partnered with Ryder Communications (one of the most talented creative agencies) we created a couple of amazing sites for Honeywell, Inc. that if you look at the sites, you wouldn’t even know it was a WordPress engine in the backend. We have also done a large number of corporate blogs – I like this one for ITDatabase not only because the skin works very well with the brand, but also because Travis Van and the ITDatabase team creates amazing, interesting content. At the end of the day, interesting content is what it is all about. And that is another Viewstream differentiator that I am very proud off: we can develop the technology AND develop the content. Those are two very different skills, and it is not easy to do both well. I think we do! And I think our clients would agree! Check out our WordPress landing page here with samples referenced above.
Evaluating Social Media Claims for 2010 Posted by John Assalian on July 14, 2010 Is social media right for your customer? In implementing social media marketing in the coming year, businesses must understand the truth behind all the talk. In this free guide, Viewstream CEO John Assalian takes on the top five claims made about social media and puts them into perspective. From the cost of doing social media to strategies for deployment, it is important to be realistic about the role social media plays in marketing. These seven short pages illuminate why social media itself is not a marketing strategy, but another medium to consider in executing a comprehensive marketing strategy that engages audiences and gets results. “Social media can help you engage and understand your customer, spread your message and information to targeted audiences, and even help customers market for you. But, far too often, social media is promoted with highly unreasonable claims… In the end, Social Media is another communication channel, a set of tools in your marketing arsenal.” -From ‘Evaluating Social Media Claims for 2010’ About the Author: John J. Assalian brings a strategic focus to marketing, honed over fifteen years of customer acquisition and brand building experiences with a range of entrepreneurial and market-changing businesses. As CEO of Viewstream since 1999, Mr. Assalian has built a marketing firm that conceives, develops and engineers content marketing strategies for leading brands, including Autodesk, Microsoft, Sony, HP, as well as a range of startups and SMEs in the high tech industry. To learn more, call (888)404-8686
King Content in the Post-Digital World Posted by John Assalian on March 2, 2010 I believe we are marketing in a post-digital world. By post-digital, I mean a time when the communication landscape is no longer defined by the potential of any particular medium (digital, social, interactive, etc.), but instead by its overall ability to connect with particular human needs. Today, the medium has become secondary to the message. Finding one’s way through this new phase of communication and creating a lasting connection with the audience begins with the understanding that content truly is king. What Content Means for Business Content covers the sum of your brand’s publishing activities. When your company offers white papers, YouTube videos, webinars, XML feeds, and social streams, you are already acting like a publisher. In a post-digital world, the successful company publishes through a complete content strategy created with the customer in mind. Successful content strategy begins with the creation of content that tells a compelling brand story through an engaging user experience. This content is incorporated into the overall customer experience. Great website content, free training demos, how-to PDFs, story driven website copy, micro-documentaries, solution overviews, etc. are just part of the mix to engage audiences. Below this surface, the content must contain an intelligent structure in terms of meta data, search, metrics, and code. Further, content is not just for demand generation, but also for improving customer service and delivering value to current customers. Effective content must be useful to the customer, and be wrapped in the social and made available in communities. Creating such content requires brands to reflect and express what customer’s value, not what marketing departments believe customers should care about. Forget about what you think makes you different and find out what your customers think. Like other business strategies, companies need a content strategy based on customer research and customer service improvement. In 2010, most brands don’t fully employ a content strategy in developing their customer experience, customer service and business process. True, everyone is producing content on some level, but the relationship between actual business process and content strategy is not fully engendered. While companies have social media czars, how many companies have a content king? Organizations may have a UX manager, a development team and a marketing dept, but lack a content strategist or content manager to help bridge the gap between these groups and to forge a concise, cohesive strategy. If content is this important, let’s think about adding this person to our teams or partnering with content agencies. Hail to the King The post-digital world is ruled by King Content. Content is not just what you create, but the overall approach to your brand and what you publish. As we move forward, forget about the latest medium, and focus on your customer: who they are, why they buy from you, and what they care about.
Our event on Microsoft Silverlight Posted by John Assalian on May 14, 2009 We are doing a live event with Microsoft’s Michael Scherotter tonight. Check the invite here for more infomration. During the course of marketing the event, we received several of the “Flash vs. Silverlight” type emails/responses, and so we wanted to mention a couple of things. First of all Viewstream is a long standing Flash Developer — we go back to the Macromedia Director days, the first version of QuickTime, and Flash 1.0. We make decisions about what development tool to use based on our client’s requirements and our client’s clear-target customer. Beyond that, we are completely neutral. Our resident .NET guru emailed me with some notes for tonight, and I wanted to share them with everyone: Silverlight is a contained development environment. It integrates into the Data access layer natively, as it is part of the .NET development. This is a very powerful feature to work with when development web 2.0 or database driven sites. Because Silverlight is integrated in the .NET environment, there is no extra investment of time or specialized debugging methods when developing a Silverlight app in the case of a development house focused on the .NET framework. It uses Visual Studio professional and express editions. Because the Express editions are free, and provide 75% of the tools used in the Professional editions, this mean that Silverlight development, with a fantastic API can be totally free. A myth about ASP.net over PHP is that it’s “expensive”. The only expensive portion about it is when a company hosts their own web servers, or when the host their own SQL Server licenses. However, in a shared hosting environment, it’s the exact same cost as a Linux environment, as ASP.net is always a standard feature along side PHP in said shared hosting. What this means is, you can have a “RIA” web application for a fraction of the price. Once again, take a free edition of Visual Studio, with Silverlight tools and then look at the price of shared hosting. Now take the same price of shared hosting, look at the price of either Flash or Flex development tools. Look at the process it would take having two separate development environments interact (such as PHP), and I think it starts making sense. Anyone who is comfortable in C#, or even Java, can quickly learn to develop highly advanced Silverlight applications quickly.
Beyond Semantic Web Posted by John Assalian on May 3, 2009 This month a new software launches that has trillions of data points and millions of lines of algorithms — it is a new search engine and provides specific answers in a way that any search engine hertofore has NOT been able to do. Going beyond tagging and the semantic web, this is an attempt to provide one of the Holy Grail ideas of the 20th Century: Intelligent Computers that can actually answer questions. These are some big promises, and the nature of the promise makes it worthy of evaluation. Check it out here: http://blog.wolfram.com/2009/03/05/wolframalpha-is-coming/ The engine, which will be free to use, works by drawing on the knowledge on the internet, as well as private databases. The engine, which will be free to use, works by drawing on the knowledge on the internet, as well as private databases. I like the mixture of the private database combined with the public internet. Similar to the model of ITDatabase.com Quotes: “For those of us tired of hundreds of pages of results that do not really have a lot to do with what we are trying to find out, Wolfram Alpha may be what we have been waiting for.” Michael W Jones, Tech.blorge.com “If it is not gobbled up by one of the industry superpowers, his company may well grow to become one of them in a small number of years, with most of us setting our default browser to be Wolfram Alpha.” Doug Lenat, Semanticuniverse.com “It’s like plugging into an electric brain.” Matt Marshall, Venturebeat.com “This is like a Holy Grail… the ability to look inside data sources that can’t easily be crawled and provide answers from them.” Danny Sullivan, editor-in-chief of searchengineland.com “For those of us tired of hundreds of pages of results that do not really have a lot to do with what we are trying to find out, Wolfram Alpha may be what we have been waiting for.” Michael W Jones, Tech.blorge.com “If it is not gobbled up by one of the industry superpowers, his company may well grow to become one of them in a small number of years, with most of us setting our default browser to be Wolfram Alpha.” Doug Lenat, Semanticuniverse.com “It’s like plugging into an electric brain.” Matt Marshall, Venturebeat.com “This is like a Holy Grail… the ability to look inside data sources that can’t easily be crawled and provide answers from them.” Danny Sullivan, editor-in-chief of searchengineland.com
Microsoft Virtual Summit a Success Posted by John Assalian on March 14, 2009 When Microsoft wanted to host a summit for its global enterprise marketing team while keeping costs down, they called us! We created a virtual solution, the Enterprise Marketing Virtual Summit 2009. Over three days, hundreds of Microsoft marketers from around the world attended the event without leaving their desktops! We build this custom site from the ground up, exclusively using Microsoft technology, including .NET programming, SQL Server and Silverlight (Viewstream is an official Microsoft Silverlight Partner). This virtual summit did away with the cookie-cutter 3-D world of many virtual events to take a content-driven approach. Live webinars and on-demand video integrated into an environment designed for interactivity and conversation. All live sessions were available on-demand shortly after they were held. There was event a Race Game, where users gained points for attending virtual sessions and engaging with other attendees via message boards. Microsoft’s Enterprise Marketing Virtual Summit 2009 officially wrapped yesterday, but the event lives on through this site. Attendees can still log in and watch session videos on their own time. We want to thank the Microsoft team for such an exciting project. We had a lot of fun with this one! Sorry – this is an invite only event – but you can see the home page here.
Viewstream partners with Microsoft Posted by John Assalian on March 3, 2009 Viewstream has just become an official Microsoft Silverlight Partner. This relationship gives us direct access to the latest innovations from Microsoft’s cross-platform, cross-browser media delivery and rich interactive application tool. We want to offer our clients the right solution for the job, which means being well-versed in all digital media and interactive technologies. Silverlight has a way to go in terms of adoption, but is a very powerful backbone for database integration and has some incredible features (image zooms, for example). In a matter only too fitting, our relationship with Silverlight will kick off in one week, with the launch of a Silverlight/.NET-based virtual event for Microsoft. (More on that later.) Flash isn’t going anywhere, and we will continue to use it for all it’s worth. But by partnering with Microsoft to offer Silverlight and .NET development, we are prepared to take on the increasingly diverse needs of our clients. Check out more information here.
As MacWorld turns, Virtual Events rise! Posted by John Assalian on December 18, 2008 While people are gearing up for the annual migration to MacWorld (despite the absence of Steve Jobs), truth is such events are on the decline. Costs are high, and planning can be a drain on company resources. As a result, we are beginning to see a rise in virtual trade shows and events. Viewstream has worked on a number of virtual events, for Autodesk, Microsoft, HP and others. Over the years, we have seen the concept of the virtual trade show develop and, to certain degree, mature. We’ve also seen virtual event providers come and go. The biggest problem with these new companies is the insistence on taking the cookie-cutter approach, generally characterized by corny 3D worlds for attendees to navigate. These companies following the same model for every event, creating scalable products for virtual shows. This approach is faulty from the get-go. Users don’t care to have a 3D navigable environment-there is Second Life for that. And that is to say nothing of the lowest-common-denominator delivery. (Sorry, 240×180 pixel videos just don’t cut it!) We all know that success comes from standing out from a crowd. In these similar 3D environments, people loose interest because they’ve seen it before. Viewstream’s approach is a more customized professional services offering. We take the right approach – by making you stand out and by delivering your message to the right audience. We take advantage of all the possibilities of the online world to create true “social” experiences and deliver stunning content. Here are a few of reasons why more companies are doing virtual meetings and events, and the value attached to them: Saving Costs: Bottom line – virtual events are cheaper then flying in customers or team members from around the world. ROI Measurements: Even if you track leads from a trade show, how do you really measure the ROI? And how often does the investment in a trade shows lead to a return on your investment? There is no solid proof of good ROI from external events, particularly when compared to online events. With online events, everything is measurable and results can be tested. In fact, if your ROI measurement tools in the online world are already in place you can easily extend with little cost to virtual events. Content Archives: All content created for online events become mini websites in themselves, and user’s questions, social media elements like blogs, etc., are very valuable to leverage to other marketing arenas. Search: Having a “spiderable” set of world class content is nice, and is surely a consideration for high ROI in itself. Extend Reach: Online events are not limted by geography-meaning more people can attend from around the world.