Microsoft Future Social Experience Labs and Cambridge University have quietly been developing and testing what company and university engineers call a "personalized" news stream by reusing news floating through the social Web. The app, Project Emporia, supports phones running Windows and HTML 5 devices. Users vote on the stories with a plus or minus sign, and the app uses those votes to continually serve up new content. While the project began as a tool for Twitter, now it acts as a personal mobile search engine running on Windows 7. Project Emporia reuses data from social networks, applying the data for other means. Ralf Herbrich, the principal development manager for Microsoft Bing, demonstrated the search engine earlier this month at the Next11 conference in Berlin. A description on the Next11 Web site refers to it as "computational intelligence technologies on large online data collections." Herbrich heads the Bing personalization team that focuses on prototyping and enabling personalized experiences across Microsoft's Online Services Division. Project Emporia relies on two technologies from Microsoft Research: auto categorization and matchbox. The app gets all its news information from shared URLs on Twitter -- about 1 million daily -- and the combined technology works similar to the way marketers analyze the relevance of ads. The auto categorization allows users to personalize interests by category, such as technology or news, and allows them to set up the app to see more of any type of story. It recommends article topics based on content, hosting site and popularity in respect to the Twitter audience. Microsoft FUSE Labs also has been working on a project called Montage, which lets users author stories from friends or a page of news from company news on a mobile phone. It lets people create a Web page within seconds. It also develops crowdsourced news on the page.
Florida's tourism marketing corporation, Visit Florida, is going social with a digital "Sunshine Moments" summer marketing campaign that focuses on geotargeted digital advertising buys on sites like Facebook, AOL, and Yahoo. The organization is counting on the $1.1 million, five-week campaign focused on boosting family vacations to the Sunshine State to generate 315 million online impressions. The bipartite effort comprises an exclusive Facebook buy to appeal to families in 16 of Florida's key drive markets. The effort centers on a sweepstakes promotion encouraging visitors to upload their favorite Florida vacation images. The consumer-contributed photo gallery will appear on Visit Florida's Facebook page, where followers can vote for their favorite photo, which determines a grand prize winner. The winner gets a Florida vacation, a Mazda CX-7 crossover and a Kodak PlayTouch video camera. The second part of the campaign is an ad buy across eight targeted Web sites, including Yahoo, AOL, iVillage and Parents.com, intended to reach family "decision makers" on parenting forums, and sites about family activities and travel. The effort is intended to drive traffic to visitFlorida.com, which the organization says is the top trafficked state destination marketing organization Web site in the country. The organization last year launched an "Insiders" rich content portion of the site where local experts offer tips, videos, blog posts, Twitter feeds, fishing reports, interactive maps and other travel planning content. Earlier this year, Visit Florida launched a public service announcement touting its Share a Little Sunshine program. The ad featured the state's governor Rick Scott, who talks up tourism as a job creator and encourages Floridians to go to ShareaLittleSunshine. org. The Share a Little Sunshine program is a social Web platform intended to allow Floridians to share recommendations, photographs and invitations to visit the state with friends and family. The site features things like digital postcards and videos that include special offers. Those who send the postcards are entered into a sweepstakes, giving them the chance to win their own Florida vacation and other prizes. The state says that in 2010, it got 82.6 million visitors, who spent over $60 billion. According to Visit Florida, in the first quarter of this year, 23.3 million people visited the state -- a 3.3% increase from the same period in 2010. The bureau says the statistics represent a 2% increase in domestic visitors, a 14.4% increase in visitors from overseas, and an 8.1% increase in Canadian visits. Domestic visits were 84.8% of the total. The state says tourism-related employment for the first quarter is up 5.5%. "Florida's tourism industry is rebounding well after several challenging years," said Ed Fouche, Chairman of the Visit Florida Board of Directors and SVP of travel industry sales for Disney Destinations, in a statement. This is the second year the state is running its "Your Florida Side Is Calling" campaign, which has included media placements in snowbird cities like New York. Visit Florida says year one of the push garnered 180,000 Florida trips. The organization's partners include AirTran Airways, American Express, Disney Destinations, Dollar Rent A Car, The Hertz Corporation, SeaWorld Parks & Entertainment and Universal Orlando.
Microsoft Future Social Experience Labs and Cambridge University have quietly been developing and testing what company and university engineers call a "personalized" news stream by reusing news floating through the social Web. The app, Project Emporia, supports phones running Windows and HTML 5 devices. Users vote on the stories with a plus or minus sign, and the app uses those votes to continually serve up new content. While the project began as a tool for Twitter, now it acts as a personal mobile search engine running on Windows 7. Project Emporia reuses data from social networks, applying the data for other means. Ralf Herbrich, the principal development manager for Microsoft Bing, demonstrated the search engine earlier this month at the Next11 conference in Berlin. A description on the Next11 Web site refers to it as "computational intelligence technologies on large online data collections." Herbrich heads the Bing personalization team that focuses on prototyping and enabling personalized experiences across Microsoft's Online Services Division. Project Emporia relies on two technologies from Microsoft Research: auto categorization and matchbox. The app gets all its news information from shared URLs on Twitter -- about 1 million daily -- and the combined technology works similar to the way marketers analyze the relevance of ads. The auto categorization allows users to personalize interests by category, such as technology or news, and allows them to set up the app to see more of any type of story. It recommends article topics based on content, hosting site and popularity in respect to the Twitter audience. Microsoft FUSE Labs also has been working on a project called Montage, which lets users author stories from friends or a page of news from company news on a mobile phone. It lets people create a Web page within seconds. It also develops crowdsourced news on the page.
Nuances in announcements, rather than the news itself, should make marketers sit up and take notice. For example, when IBM announced acquisitions related to marketing and advertising signaled that Big Blue would step heavily into online marketing and advertising services. Then on Tuesday came the news that SAP Ventures led a $20 million venture capital investment round in the ad network OpenX, which includes AOL -- and that the startup called Meteor had developed a suite of products to retarget ads based on social behavior and sharing, rather than search. It turns out that conversions rose more than four times for advertisers testing Meteor Advertise, according to Meteor Solutions CEO Ben Straley, a cofounder along with folks from Bungie Studios, the developer of the Halo video game series. The idea to pull in social data to retarget ads came from the early online scavenger hunt companies such as Microsoft and others. Straley, who touts AT&T, MTV, Microsoft and other large brands as clients for the company's handful of products, said the "tag-and-trace" Advertise platform tracks content passed along and shared online from user to user and site to site. It enables advertisers to identify consumers who spread the word and their content among multiple generations. Microsoft used Meteor to see the content that TechEd attendees discovered and shared. The platform also measured the impact of traffic and conversions on the conference Web site. Meteor Advertise captures data from activity on sharing tools, but also when consumers copy and paste the link from navigation bars of browsers. Straley said that copy-and-paste activity accounts for half of all the content shared. Advertisers tag their Web sites with a Java script tag. A cookie gets dropped in the browser for each consumer who comes to the site, along with an ID that is appended to the end of the URL, which makes the URL address unique to the user. Straley insists the information in not personally identifiable. It helps to build a "multi-generational" graph that demonstrates to advertisers in real-time the role social plays in marketing. Action and conversion tracking tools are also available. The graphs show how consumers can influence each other across generations, Web sites and platforms. The platform aims to answer questions such as whether sharing content makes a difference in campaigns. Apparently it does when it comes to electronic coupons. Research firm eMarketer points to stats that demonstrate sharing has become a major component for success at daily deal sites Groupon and LivingSocial. eMarketer points to JiWire research released in Q1 2011 that reveals the "pass-along value" of coupons is high, with more than six in 10 mobile users who responded to a Wi-Fi study admitting to sharing local deals with friends. Consumers who share content demonstrate their interest in the topic similar to the way searches on Google, Bing or Yahoo engines signal intent. Meteor Advertise is part of the Meteor Social Media Audience Suite. It also includes Meteor Activate, which identifies key influencers and encourages them to share in return for special rewards; and Meteor Analytics, which provides reports on social audiences and sharing patterns.
Florida's tourism marketing corporation, Visit Florida, is going social with a digital "Sunshine Moments" summer marketing campaign that focuses on geotargeted digital advertising buys on sites like Facebook, AOL, and Yahoo. The organization is counting on the $1.1 million, five-week campaign focused on boosting family vacations to the Sunshine State to generate 315 million online impressions. The bipartite effort comprises an exclusive Facebook buy to appeal to families in 16 of Florida's key drive markets. The effort centers on a sweepstakes promotion encouraging visitors to upload their favorite Florida vacation images. The consumer-contributed photo gallery will appear on Visit Florida's Facebook page, where followers can vote for their favorite photo, which determines a grand prize winner. The winner gets a Florida vacation, a Mazda CX-7 crossover and a Kodak PlayTouch video camera. The second part of the campaign is an ad buy across eight targeted Web sites, including Yahoo, AOL, iVillage and Parents.com, intended to reach family "decision makers" on parenting forums, and sites about family activities and travel. The effort is intended to drive traffic to visitFlorida.com, which the organization says is the top trafficked state destination marketing organization Web site in the country. The organization last year launched an "Insiders" rich content portion of the site where local experts offer tips, videos, blog posts, Twitter feeds, fishing reports, interactive maps and other travel planning content. Earlier this year, Visit Florida launched a public service announcement touting its Share a Little Sunshine program. The ad featured the state's governor Rick Scott, who talks up tourism as a job creator and encourages Floridians to go to ShareaLittleSunshine. org. The Share a Little Sunshine program is a social Web platform intended to allow Floridians to share recommendations, photographs and invitations to visit the state with friends and family. The site features things like digital postcards and videos that include special offers. Those who send the postcards are entered into a sweepstakes, giving them the chance to win their own Florida vacation and other prizes. The state says that in 2010, it got 82.6 million visitors, who spent over $60 billion. According to Visit Florida, in the first quarter of this year, 23.3 million people visited the state -- a 3.3% increase from the same period in 2010. The bureau says the statistics represent a 2% increase in domestic visitors, a 14.4% increase in visitors from overseas, and an 8.1% increase in Canadian visits. Domestic visits were 84.8% of the total. The state says tourism-related employment for the first quarter is up 5.5%. "Florida's tourism industry is rebounding well after several challenging years," said Ed Fouche, Chairman of the Visit Florida Board of Directors and SVP of travel industry sales for Disney Destinations, in a statement. This is the second year the state is running its "Your Florida Side Is Calling" campaign, which has included media placements in snowbird cities like New York. Visit Florida says year one of the push garnered 180,000 Florida trips. The organization's partners include AirTran Airways, American Express, Disney Destinations, Dollar Rent A Car, The Hertz Corporation, SeaWorld Parks & Entertainment and Universal Orlando.