Interactive Marketing Sans-Fluffery

Google recently introduced the WebFinger protocol and enabled it for all Gmail account.

What is WebFinger?

WebFinger is a protocol that can be used to attach public profile information to an email address. Engineers have been fumbling around with ways to standardize the way profile information is shared for years. Remember OpenID? Or Facebook Connect? Many of these products have major shortcomings. With OpenID, users have to remember a provider URL and yet another account login. With Facebook Connect, we're at the mercy of Facebook with regards to how data is handled.

The interesting thing about WebFinger, is that information can be attached to an email address. Email is required for just about anything you do on the web so it makes sense that data about a profile should be attached to it.

WebFinger is about making already public information more easily discoverable, not uncovering private data.While a WebFinger profile may have information about the location of a user's Facebook profile, it won't contain data secured by Facebook.

What kind of profile data can you get from WebFinger?

WebFinger can support all kinds of data. Really, just about anything digital can in some way or another be added to a WebFinger profile. WebFinger data is delivered as XML and can include references to the source of the data, not just a copy of it. For example, if you have a public profile somewhere, and WebFinger knows about it, WebFinger would just display the URL to that public profile, not a copy of the data in it.

Google's implementation of WebFinger publishes user hCards, OpenID provider, Google public profile info, and other neat stuff.

What can marketers do with this?

What might be of obvious use is the amount of data that could be pulled down about a user. The data is public already, so there should be no problems with discovering and analyzing the data.

I think the more interesting application will be with the convenience the data can provide for users. For example, imagine a form where you want to gather a user's contact information. The form could be built so that as soon as the user enters an email address, WebFinger is used to prepopulate the form with the user's contact information.

What can be done today?

Obviously, this is still an emerging technology. However, the protocol is open and ready for experimentation. One idea is to create forms that enable WebFinger capabilities for Gmail users. Or, your organization could host your own WebFinger server to link public data about your employees. We'd love to hear from anybody building practical applications for WebFinger.

By now, you've probably heard of invite only, Google Wave.To appreciate all the new stuff packed into Google Wave, you should watch this very long video or this very short video below:

The best part about Wave is that it isn't just a Google only toy. Wave is a protocol designed such that eventually, anyone will be able to create their own Wave server. The protocol is specifically referred to as a "federation protocol" which means that Wave servers will be able to talk to each other. Eventually, Wave, or something like it, will replace email. We won't send emails, we'll start or respond to waves. However, this post isn't about future IT predictions.

Before I continue, I want to remind you about what email can do: send and receive text and attachments. Got it? 

Wave Robots

Today, I want to introduce you to the concept of Wave Gadgets and Wave Robots. First, a definition of Robots (aka: bots) from Wave Robot API documentation:

A robot is an automated participant on a wave. A robot can read the contents of a wave in which it participates, modify the wave's contents, add or remove participants, and create new blips and new waves. In short, a robot can perform many of the actions that any other participant can perform.

You can use a robot to perform actions such as the following:

• modify information in a wave
• interact with participants in a wave
• communicate and synchronize information in a wave to the outside world or to other waves
• access or modify state in a third-party (such as a database)

Here's an example. Let's say you want to tweet and view tweets from within a wave. Just create a wave, then add the Tweety Bot to the conversation (tweety-wave@appspot.com). This bot is an application that could be hosted anywhere. In this case it is hosted by Google. After the bot is added to the conversation, it first displays a Twitter login screen directly within the wave. Let's pause for reflection...

Remember before, when we discussed what email can do? Send and receive text and attachments. Got it?

After you log in with Twitter, directly from within your wave, you can send a receive Tweets inside the wave. See this post for screenshots.

Another sample bot comes from Amazon. The bot scans your wave text and converts it to Amazon links and buttons where applicable. Check out the demo.

Wave Gadgets

Now, about gadgets. From the Wave Gadget API documentation:

Wave gadgets typically aren't full blown applications, but small add-ons that improve certain types of conversations. For example, a wave might include a gadget that lets wave participants vote on where to go to lunch.

Wave can handle existing gadgets. But, creating Wave specific gadgets allows you to access things like user information and better handle wave playback.

Remember back in early 2009, when people used this archaic concept called "email"? Back then, if you wanted to conduct a poll, you had to send around the "email" which would contain links to a 3rd party site that users could interact with to cast their vote. Incredible right? Neanderthals...

With wave, you could use a polling gadget and embed it straight into the wave. Users participating in the wave vote right then, without leaving.

Marketers

Your head is probably now swimming with ideas for bots and gadgets. If not, here's one idea to get you kickstarted. Bob's Pizza has a bot that listens to wave participant's conversation about favorite pizza ingredients and disliked pizza ingredients. The bot produces the ideal order for the pizza party and provides buttons to automatically call in the order and have the pizza delivered. The bot might even display special offers or topping ideas based on the conversation.

Or Tom's Electronics wants to send out coupons to the launch of a new store. Instead of just firing off coupons in email, he sends out waves with an embedded, puzzle gadget. The puzzle gadget requires multiple participants to solve. Wavers add participants to their wave to help solve the puzzle. After the puzzle is solved, all the wave participants get the coupon. The net effect is that more people get the coupon and users engage with the brand in a fun, social way.

When?

Although the Wave protocol is federated, it hasn't yet surpassed email in adoption. Wave may never replace email completely, and even if it does, it will likely be a decade before it does.

However, Wave is already very popular and used by millions. If you are trying to market something to an early adoption type crowd, this platform seems ready to go.

Twitter recently baked in retweet functionality into their core service. Here are the notable changes:

• Retweets now display with the original twit's profile, not the retweeter's profile.
• Twits can just click a button to retweet instead of typing "RT @username"
• Retweets show retweet stats including who else has retweeted the tweet
• The API has a new method to accomodate retweeting programmatically
• The API has a new method that displays all the retweets for a given tweet.
• Twitter now has pages for "Retweets by others", "Retweets by you", and "Your tweets, retweeted"

Razorfish surveyed 1,000 U.S. consumers to cull information about the way people interact with digital branding efforts. Read the full survey here and Razorfish’s analysis here.

I found a few of these findings of particular interest to marketers. The bottom line is that digital branding, specifically through social media, is very effective. But you need to entice users with freebies to get them to participate. Here are the lessons to be learned, sans-fluffery.

Digital sweepstakes are no joke… you should use them (#21). Digital sweepstakes lead to brand awareness and the coveted WOM (word of mouth) (#21).

Most people don’t spend time producing content (like a video or essay) for a contest (#23). But when they do, the results are a WOM goldmine (#24).

Most people don’t follow brands on Twitter (#25). But when they do, they recommend the brand to all their buddies (#26). Why do people follow brands on Twitter? Because of the deals and offers (#27).

A healthy group of people will friend a brand on Facebook or MySpace (#28). And when they do, good things happen (#29). Why do people friend a brand? Because of the deals (#30)! Do you sense a theme?

Digital branding is effective (#32, #17, and #18), so use it. And don’t forget to use sweepstakes, giveaways, deals, offers, or freebies in general.