Posts Tagged ‘Interviews’

Last week I had the opportunity to speak with the NutshellMail co-founders, Mark Schmulen and David Lyman, about building their company and the quick exit to ConstantContact. While we had a long conversation, I’ve cut down the interview to 7 key points that we covered during our conversation. There are some great takeaways for entrepreneurs looking to build their own businesses.
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ClipWire Games is announcing their newest social gaming title, Haven, and I had the chance to sit down with their CEO, Ritesh Khanna, to discuss the title and the social games market in general. We discuss the status of Mafia Wars-style games, the importance of using metrics to guide your games and virality. Read below for the interview and brief discussion of Haven.
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Want to learn more about some of the Facebook Page promotion opportunities that are out there? In this interview between MediaBistro’s Matt Van Hoven and Vitrue’s CEO Reggie Bradford, we learn more about Vitrue’s offering including Wall Apps, a feature we wrote about earlier this week. Unfortunately this is not part of our normal podcast series so for those of you viewing this in the feeds, you may need to visit the page to view it.
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I recently had the chance to have a few words with Sean Rad from ad.ly, an advertising service for Twitter. Ad.ly describes itself as “an in-stream advertising platform that matches top-tier Twitter publishers with top-tier brands”. In short, ad.ly connects big brands with the biggest Twitter accounts on the web, and allows brands to propose advertising to the top publishers. Some of their publishers are TechCrunch, Kim Kardashian, Newsweek and Gossip girl, and some of the brands are NBC, Sony, Microsoft and Universal. Reports have indicated that Kim Kardashian earns up to $10,000 USD per tweet.
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Ayogo Games are an independent social games shop from Vancouver, Canada. They’ve worked on some high profile titles like Mob Wars, and have some interesting insights into the social games community. I sat down with CEO Michael Fergusson to discuss the social games environment, monetization and the Vancouver social gaming scene.
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The browser gaming world has slowly been adopting Unity3D as its tool standard for 3D gaming, and dimeRocker is taking that one step further by connecting these 3D games with Social Networks like Facebook and OpenSocial. Used in games by companies like EA and The Cartoon Network, the technology has begun to gain prominence as a true alternative to standard full-install disc based 3D gaming.
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As a journalist, former programmer and senior editor at Fast Company, Lynne D. Johnson is a social media maven. She was also a general manager for Vibe and Spin magazines with an award-winning blog. She’s been fusing technology, community and journalism since back in the days of online bulletin boards. It’s no surprise that the Advertising Research Foundation (ARF) recently snagged her as their first senior vice president of social media to help guide the industry into the new age of community tools. I recently sat down with Johnson to get her take on how brands should be listening while navigating the social web.
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Last week I had the opportunity to speak with Murti Hussain, the President and Co-Founder of Peanut Labs about the company’s advertising strategy and the social advertising landscape in general. Peanut Labs helps publishers monetize their sites (largely game publishers) through survey offers from large brands. The company actually got started through their own gaming site which used peanuts as a form of virtual currency.
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Word-of-mouth marketing company BzzAgent is launching a new product today, seeking to create a better way for brands to engage consumers. Called BzzScapes, the new tool acts as a social media tool as well as an extension o the company’s client services.

So what is a BzzScape? It’s a web-based, social destination where people can create a page for any given brand, and add information about that brand as they see fit. A mix between a product review site and Facebook public profiles, BzzScapes aim to provide an open forum for consumers and brands. While anyone can create a brand page on BzzScapes, brands also have the ability to have one created, or to claim one that has been created for their brand. BzzAgent will offer a series of BzzScapes-specific tools for brands to use for things like market ressearch and managing their brand online.

Below is an interview with BzzAgent Founder and CEO Dave Balter, who speaks on the objectives for BzzScapes, as well as how it fits into the social media conversation.
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Social media marketing. It’s a growing industry and one that we’re we’re still struggling to figure out, in terms of implementation, usability and overall effectiveness. Selling brands online can be a tricky task, but done right it can be quite successful.

So in terms of being smart about social media marketing, a brand needs to be smart and ready to be held accountable for not only its product but its interaction within the social media realm. Mr. Youth is a marketing agency that takes these things into consideration, and creates a marketing process around brands with some of these goals in mind. Below is an interview with Brandon Evans, a managing partner over at Mr. Youth.
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