The Consumer Matters is the blog of Leslie Grandy, aka Gearhead Gal. My passion is creating and delivering compelling products that delight customers through simple and elegant user experience design.
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Wednesday, March 23, 2011 at 12:40PM
Facebook, content marketing, social media, twitter in Social Media Monday, March 21, 2011 at 9:15PM @dannysullivan can we agree? it's not an NYT paywall, it's an idiotwall. designed by idiots to get money from idiots, the idioci. Prob will work a bit, too
@gary_hustwit "You have to systematically create confusion, it sets creativity free." Jasper Johns
The importance of storytelling RT@PeterGuber How to Make Your Career A Hollywood Blockbuster http://bit.ly/hdEgrw
Monday, January 24, 2011 at 4:49PM 
Reputation and relationship management skills are foundational to architecting an effective customer development strategy for both B2B and B2C enterprises; this will be acutely true in 2011. No longer just the responsibility of a community manager, social communication will be integrated into service and support experiences, product, point of sale, and commerce solutions. Because official spokespeople are no longer the sole purveyors of your company's message, social channels can be counted on to accelerate and amplify the conversation between customers and brands. Look for the following trends to drive changes to integrated marketing plans in the year ahead... read more here
Sunday, January 2, 2011 at 10:13PM @kenradio Why Bing "Likes" Facebook, Facebook should give Microsoft an edge against search rival Google -http://bit.ly/g6CJQ4
@bgershon Ad Execs Gaze Into 2011 Crystal Ball - Great overview.... http://tumblr.com/xsb16mkrnd
Social Media in 2011: Expect a Big Dose of STFUhttp://networkedblogs.com/cvGB1 from my pal @BigGuyD
Great article from @Jabaldaia to start the new year, Design Thinking and the courage to do things http://bit.ly/gTboJu
RT@quirkyinc The NY Times Pogies celebrates product features which are "clever twists that make life just a little bit better" http://qrky.co/hwMqe3
Facebook, design, digital marketing, digital media, social media, twitter in tweets Friday, July 2, 2010 at 6:34PM RT@saschasegan: More sad, bad tales of KIN: http://bit.ly/dvjrX9 and http://bit.ly/bOcII3” MSFT took the Sidekick down with it. Strange trip.
Hilarious @CraigyFerg "a magazine is like a paper-y blog." They came before there was AOL.
Wednesday, June 23, 2010 at 8:09PM First published on Technorati June 22, 2010
Most days, the average Internet user curates a flood of content from multiple destinations into a patchwork of information, updates and insights that help them stay connected. It’s a lot of work to hunt, gather, personalize and sample all the content available, and even more if you are part of the growing percentage of consumers interested in watching video. Tubemogul reports Web media brands posted 326 million video streams in the first quarter of this year, which is an increase of more than 300 percent compared to Q1 of 2009, and does not include all the user generated content uploaded to photo and video sharing sites.
“Some times you just want to push play, and see what’s on,” said Blair Harrison, CEO of Frequency, a real time video site that lets you lean back and watch samples of video playing continuously from all over the Internet. “But with so much video coming online each hour, there really is no way for a consumer to get a sample of what’s playing on the web” Harrison contends that consuming video on the web has become a laborious and disjointed experience, forcing people who want to enjoy rich media online to jump from link to link, collecting clips or navigating between embedded players and web pages just to sample video content.
Launched earlier this month by Harrison, the former CEO of IFILM, which sold to Viacom for $49 Million in 2005, Frequency aims to make it easy for anyone to quickly scan and tune into what’s playing online at any time. He brought together a crew of experienced digital media engineers from that company, and built a platform that offers content publishers a promotional engine for long form video clips. Frequency’s tools create a continuous stream of previews, auto-generated in different bitrates, from feeds aggregated by the company’s platform. Users navigate the clips which play like previews of coming attractions, touting the longer version on the publisher’s website.
When consumers enter the Frequency site, there is always something playing. Like a stream of 140 character headlines on Twitter, the Frequency player cycles through fifteen-second clips from across the web, categorized by topic and source. If you want to learn more on a topic, simply pick a tag, and the player pivots to play previews that share that term in common. If you like to follow a particular publisher or collector of videos, you can create a personalized channel that just tunes into their “frequency”, or channel of auto-play clips.
“There are over 200,000 video clips being posted to the web every hour,” said Harrison. “We want to make it simple for anyone to quickly discover and watch what is appealing to them at any particular moment they’re looking to tune in. “
Frequency is a privately funded, early stage video network, and is also client of Waldo Finn, LLC, a business and strategy consulting firm, which employs the author of this post.
Digital video, digital media, social media, twitter in Tech Monday, May 10, 2010 at 6:22PM Was it an accidental search for fellow fans of an eighties rock band or the nefarious hacking of a hidden Twitter application command that bankrupted celebrities like Ashton Kutcher (@aplusk) and Perez Hilton (@perezhilton) of millions of followers today?
According to Gizmodo, a regular Twitter customer in Turkey claims to have accidentally stumbled upon a way to force any Twitter user to follow you. By simply entering the word "accept" with a username - for instance, type [accept oprah] into the Twitter status field - anybody could get themselves followed by people like Oprah, Jack Welch or even Kim Kardashian. The action is similar to adding "RT" before a username to repost a user's status.
The value of a follower is a hotly contested topic in marketing circles these days, and having celebrities follow you is a sign that a fan may have gotten the attention of a star. While the bug was being investigated by Twitter, followers were set to zero, and the notorious celebrity leaders of the Twitter pack had to laugh off their sudden unpopularity. Wrote @bodhielfman "I have more followers than @aplusk." In addition, marketers who measure the success of their campaigns by fans and followers had to do a day of client-side vamping to manage the fall in metrics that normally would be considered catastrophic by most brands measuring the reputation and reach of their social media spend.
Later in the afternoon, as following counts were returned to users profiles, there was still damage control to be done, since it appeared forced followers were still showing up in users' lists that they hadn't really joined. @ConanOBrien posted the disclaimer, "if it ever says I have been following more than one person, I have been hacked. I'm a completely monogamous Twitterrer - I only follow Sarah Killen."
If only Tiger had tweeted instead of sending SMS, he could have said someone just co-opted his account.
Friday, April 30, 2010 at 4:11PM A weekend reading list o' links, brought to you by the folks I follow on Twitter...
@rcrwirelessnews RCR Special Report: Mobile Marketing's Promise: A Universe of One. Sponsored by Mobile Marketing Association. http://budurl.com/MMASR
@SignificObs Concept? Rocks. Writer? Rocks. Cause? Rocks. Bid on one of the last @SignificObs http://bit.ly/9kOxI5 @girlswritenow (via @R_Nash)
@communiquepr Social Media Contests Have the Power to Drive Massive Awareness & Engagement | http://bit.ly/awaxPh
@mcuban The Bifurcation of Twitter: In case you haven’t noticed, there are now 2 Twitters. The first Twitter operates just... http://bit.ly/aoualk
Brand, social media, twitter, wireless in tweets Tuesday, January 12, 2010 at 2:09PM
RT@TechFlash Zappos' Tony Hsieh on company culture and locking in employees http://bit.ly/8X5umc
RT @frogdesign 19% of Internet Users now update their status on services like Twitter (up from 11% in April) PEW: http://j.mp/3QlZ7E (@nickbilton)
Monday, December 28, 2009 at 11:57AM 
CXP2WR2VBQHG - A recent report by eMarketer on the trends in user-generated content indicates that less than half of the world's Internet users maintain a social networking profile or upload photos and videos to a website. In addition, with more than 130 million blogs indexed by Technorati, less than 13% of US users surveyed engaged in writing a blog.
See the complete story on Technorati by clicking here.
And if you are wondering about the funky alphanumeric at the start of this post, Technorati elves are using it and you can ignore it.
CXP2WR2VBQHG, Internet, blogs, digital media, social networking, twitter in Tech Thursday, December 10, 2009 at 5:04PM one of the best Silicon Valley service companies http://bit.ly/4YzkEy (via @Scobleizer and feedly)
No wonder brands struggle RT @technorati: Only 23% of marketers think their traditional agency can handle digital http://bit.ly/7kvTmC
Used to it but don't love. my husband worries a lot if he hung up RT@triciad: Are iPhone users used to the lack of end call button? #mnbuzz
Gearhead Gal
And then there appeared late tonight:
RT @ shelleehale: Microsoft Is Losing Fight for Consumers, Analyst Says (Steve Lohr/Bits)http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/12/10/microsoft-is-losing-fight-for-consumers-analyst-says/
Tuesday, December 1, 2009 at 1:01AM Does Everyone Agree? RT @techstartups: Top 10 Mobile Web Products of 2009 http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/top_10_mobile_web_products_of_2009.php
Sunday, November 22, 2009 at 10:00AM I don't know about you, but I feel like practicing good password-hygiene is getting harder and harder these days. The more places I have accounts, and the more ways I might want to connect to my stuff, and my stuff with my friends, the more unique passwords I need to have to keep my personal things secure.I have been told as a consumer I should have a unique user name and password combination for each service just in case a hacker gets one of them, he or she doesn't have access to my all my data.
I have also been cautious about allowing the linking of my identities across the various social networks, photo sharing sites, financial accounts and memberships I access. Every time Twitter or Facebook ask me if I wish to allow a new application to access my information, I feel my security lax.
But is my stuff where I really think it is? What's moving around between sites that "shake hands" isn't always clear to me, and I'm supposed to be a tech savvy buyer. Sure, there are privacy policies posted and I check the box on the page that says I've read them. But I'm going to admit right here and now that I haven't had the time or inclination to read them all. Lawyers often don't make entertaining writers. And some times, I'm in too much of a hurry buying that belated birthday gift that I don't even read the fine print about the return policy or back-order. So do I know who really has control of my content? Click here to read the rest of the post on Technorati.com.
Cloud Computing, Facebook, twitter in Tech Friday, October 30, 2009 at 8:34PM
The most frequent social media tip I heard when I started this site was that posts with lists drive lots of click throughs because they create quick digestible pieces of insight with little investment for writer or reader. (This comes as no real surprise in the ADHD world of 140 character headlines, does it?) And with the introduction of the Twitter List feature, I can now let others find people and their the relevant small kernels of content for me.
But first, I need a list for my lists, so I tried a new directory service for Twitter lists today, called Listorius. Listorius is one of a growing category of tools that help consumers digest the massive amount of content produced on the web. Remember when we all thought web search would solve all of our discovery problems, because relevance could be data driven and all we needed was the Google algorithm?
As more personal media is produced, hashtags have facilitated content relevance for search engines, but consumers use the '#' subjectively and eradically, often placing underscores, hyphens, or abbreviations into their tags. Some common words are also brand names - Sidekick, the phone and sidekick, the companion, for instance. Proper names become symbolic of behavior, as in "she pulled a Palin" or "that was so Kanye", so when I search on Twitter for #Palin or #Kanye, do I want to see more posts about her new book, girls talking about their boyfriends named Kanye or celebrity headlines? Since social media produces a ton of additional content to parse through on top of the long tail of blogging sites indexed for search of the web, these directory destinations have emerged with a consumer value prop to simplify the discovery of content through the filter of like-minded people. (After all, isn't that why it's called social?) As a result, social media directories create new information frameworks for discovering conversations around a topic.
To show you what I mean, here are some of the topics of digital conversation that I like to eavesdrop on when I have a few minutes to discover new ideas on technology, design, and branding. Please create and add your own in the comments sections below. Listorious is only a few days old and even the most popular topics only have a dozen or so lists, so contribute your view on the trends and topics you create or track. Make your own lists we can explore together.
@Scobleizer/most-influential-in-tech
@anndouglas/tech-design
@innovte/innovation
@martinjbishop/brand-gurus
@daveinthecloud/apple
@sarik/mobile
@RAC_Services/internet-tech
Gearhead Gal
Apparently a few other folks seem to feel this way about lists, too!
RT@timleberecht:Followers?retweet?Follow Friday?"The new high fidelity for my vanity is the Twitter list"(via O'Reilly) http://bit.ly/1fB3If
lists, search, social media, twitter in Brand, Experience Design, Tech