Santiago Alfaro has been working on a project at MIT that I find fascinating, but also see tremendous commercial potential in. Called Surround Vision, the concept extends our view of television content to external handheld devices. If someone runs offscreen, holding a handheld device would allow the viewer to turn around and see where the person continues to run! Sort like adding a unique version of the story that you, as viewer, get to crop and control.

This project shows promise for making television truly interactive, as well as giving stories have unusual side plots, hiding Easter Eggs in the content and overall making television more enjoyable.

Google+ has an innate advantage over Facebook in its use of Circles.
Far too many writers are viewing this as a bad thing, it being anti-social, leading to cliques, etc. I do not hold to this view.

Circles allow for one thing Facebook is notoriously poor at: the hyper-targeting of content.

If I have a product with say, three vastly different audience segments, I may choose to do generic, bordering-on-bland messaging that appeals to all of them, or I may opt to write audience-specific messaging with their unique needs in mind.

Circles allow us to message in precisely this way.

Instead of creating Circles like “Fans”, “Influencers” or “Brand Ambassadors” which will be the unfortunate recommendation of many a social media agency, we should create Circles based on audience segmentation and personas.

Now that’s hyper-targeting your content.

Everyone loves Mini Coopers. Even among the most jaded consumers, you’ll be hard pressed to find someone who actively hates Minis. So it will come as little surprise to anyone that social sentiment surrounding the Mini Cooper will be overwhelmingly positive. That said, Mini is not the best-selling car. While everyone loves them and has glowing praise for the Mini, they account for just 0.5% of US auto sales.

What value then, do the comments of non-purchasers have when monitoring conversations? With several thousand followers on Twitter and a reasonable Klout score, I could be said to be somewhat influential—and I am highly positive toward Mini Cooper, yet I have no intention of purchasing one. Are my comments about Mini useful or merely interesting?

In my opinion, these comments are interesting in the aggregate, but useless when determining ROI or intent to purchase. The Mini Cooper Effect is a phrase I coined a while back to describe this phenomenon in conversational monitoring. Tools like Radian6 and Sysomos compile tens of thousands of these comments on a local, national and global scale, but it takes a skilled, patient analyst to sift through them for the gems. No matter how good your keyword set is, or how many parameters you filter by, you won’t get over the Mini Cooper Effect of interesting but useless comments. [DISCLAIMER: Campbell Ewald is a customer of both Radian6 and Sysomos]

Recently, I received a call from Barb Morgen at ValueVine to discuss their new Connect tool. It too monitors social conversations, but with a distinct and important twist: conversational monitoring is targeted to the building level. As I am to understand it, a client enters the addresses of all their retail locations. Connect then pulls conversations about and within those buildings and only there. If consumers check in to that location using Foursquare, Loopt, Gowalla, etc., their comments are only counted if they include a comment. Comments on other platforms about those locations are also counted, but not general comments. Only comments from consumers who have entered these locations will be tallied. The Mini Cooper Effect is effectively nullified.

I have not tried this tool (yet), but it gives me hope that (at least some of) the limitations of social media monitoring can be addressed in the coming year by new technologies like this. What are your thoughts? Have you tried Connect? How does it compare to other tools?

Photo CC 2007 The Pug Father