advertising – RickyRobinson.id.au

There are many ways to measure brand awareness. As in most analyses, you shouldn’t rely on any single metric to determine which brands have most mindshare. Having said that, the Social Radar Top 50 Social Brands ranking is interesting. It measures conversations and web chatter. According to the ranking, Twitter comes out on top. Google comes in second, and Facebook makes it into fifth place. One of Twitter’s major competitors, FriendFeed, doesn’t even make it into the top 50 by this particular measure (did Scoble back the wrong horse and Kawasaki the right one?). But this ranking didn’t just include “social networking” brands. Rather, it was a survey of how frequently any brand was mentioned in a collection of blog posts, news feeds, forums, social networks and Twitter posts. Interestingly, such well known brands as Coke and McDonald’s fell outside the top 50. I imagine this is because these brands no longer have novelty value. They are ingrained in our culture. Really the only time we could be bothered blogging about these sorts of brands is when controversy strikes, or when someone makes a provocative movie like Super Size Me.

So what does this mean? It means that right now Twitter is hot. People are talking about it, and that’s the best that Biz Stone and company could hope for. The big question for Twitter is how to convert all the talk into more users, and ultimately revenue. If they do manage to do this, it would be nice to know how they did it!

After a week of using the MacBook Pro that NICTA bought me (strictly for work purposes, of course), I gotta say, I love it! The MacBook Pro will be replacing my Windows desktop at work, and it’s also for taking back and forth between home and work and for taking to conferences etc. I’ve been working on a publishing and reviewing system, and up until now, although it’s NICTA’s IP, it was all being done on my own Linux box at home – not the optimal state of affairs. The sub-optimal nature of this arrangement was made crystal clear when my Linux box started to fail (it’s quite old). So, I asked for a laptop such that I could work on the SAFE project stuff at work as well the publishing and reviewing stuff at home. Somewhat to my surprise, NICTA duly obliged. At least now if something goes wrong with the laptop, all the code is on a NICTA machine and hopefully I won’t be culpable. Of course, it’s much easier to lose a laptop or to have it stolen than a desktop…

The loser out of all this is Linux. I bought a Dell to replace my home machine, and it’s got Windows Media Centre (with free upgrade to Vista) and Office on it. Karen and I need at least one up to date copy of Office between us. The Dell machine is very nice, but I’m a bit disappointed that I seem to have settled into using Windows at home, a day I thought would never come. I’m not a fan of dual booting – I’m generally too lazy for that kind of thing. To my chagrin, in my current job I really do need to use Office products quite frequently, and I’ve never been happy with any of the Open Source Office replacements. I’m still thinking this is only a temporary backward step, and that sooner or later I’ll be back on Linux, or I could even run Mac OS X on the Dell; now there’s an idea!

But one must give Microsoft credit where credit is due. My MacBook Pro has MS Office for the Mac installed on it and I’m using Entourage for mail. So far Entourage has left me with mostly positive impressions. I like it a lot. The Project Centre inside Entourage makes it easier to implement GTD, and it’s generally nicer to use than Outlook, and in my view it’s even nicer than Thunderbird. I haven’t tried Apple Mail, but my feeling is that those Mac users who don’t have a militant aversion to Microsoft products use Entourage in preference to Mail, iCal etc. I only wish that you could customise some of the properties of the mail folders in Entourage, like telling it to display a count of all the messages in the folder rather than just the unread ones. This is one useful feature that Outlook has which other mail clients don’t seem to support. I’ve been using this feature on my PC at work to help me implement my GTD system, and it works very well.

Oh, and here are my favourite Mac ads:

Actually all the ads are great.