Summary

The purpose of this article is to analyze the recent social media marketing trend and more specifically, how this trend applies to RIA and future development with the Adobe Flash Platform.

Introduction

There’s no denying the fact that one of the hottest topics and latest buzzwords in the online arena is “Social Media Marketing”. This is not an article intended to define social media marketing, and it assumes you already know what it is. Therefore, if you are not familiar with ths term, I suggest spending a brief moment reading the short Wikipedia entry for Social Media Marketing. Regardless of how familiar you are with it, I  suggest downloading and reading the 2009 Social Media Marketing Industry Report.

Streamlining Social Media Marketing with the Flash Platform

The ability to rapidly aggregate data from a variety of sources and organize it all into something meaningful in near “real time”, is one of the most prolific uses of the Adobe Flash Platform. I might also note that my favorite tool for this is Adobe AIR by a long shot. This is because AIR has direct access to system resources and is not forced to work within the limitations imposed on it by the web browser. As a result, social media mash-ups run faster. Tweetdeck is a good example of this.

Tweetdeck has been in beta for quite a while now, and has limited functionality. I have been hoping to see some more AIR apps developed with the intended purpose of merging all social network accounts and API’s into a single interface in the effort of streamlining Social Media Marketing.  Unfortunately, it seems as though innovation in this area has been somewhat lacking.

I recently discovered Flock, a web browser that is built on the MoZilla engine, which does a decent job of tying everything together.  It’s pretty clunky compared to a well-designed AIR interface though. Furthermore, with the powerful built-in browser capabilities of AIR, the functionality of Flock could easily be accomplished with AIR, and it could not only do it a lot more gracefully, an astonishing amount of additional functionality could be tied in to merge your favorite features of each separate social networking platform.

Part of the problem is that not everyone has an open API. It amazes me that LinkedIn has still not caught on considering the fact that Facebook was able to drive their valuation into the stratosphere by opening up their API.

Flex Data Tools for Measuring the Effectiveness of Social Media Marketing

According to the 2009 Social Media Marketing Industry Report, one of the greatest burning questions among marketers is “how do I track my social media marketing efforts?”. Right now this is not an easy task, and requires a multitude of tools and utilities that only perform a single function. Therefore, attempting to track the influence of a new branding strategy by a large enterprise is essentially the full time job of 5 or more people. This is ridiculous. Why haven’t we automated this entire process? It only takes one marketing director to monitor and take snap shots of the social media space from an all-in-one data visualization dashboard after a major news release.

The Data Visualization Toolkits that are available for the Flash Platform are absolutely staggering. There is a market opportunity out there right now for any software house that wants to take advantage of it: develop a quality dashboard using graphing components that displays near real-time information using something like the ILOG Elixir component library for Flex and AIR. Ideally, this application would include a set-up wizard where the initial information for the tracking would be entered. For example, using the Twitter API, one could enter a number of keywords to follow (such as the company name), as well as links (such as links to press releases and the company web site). Using this dashboard, a marketing department could essentially get a near real-time visual depiction of their “buzz” that they are creating in the social media atmosphere after a news or product release.

Of course, that is only one of the many potential functions that a “Social Media Penetration Dashboard” could include for the purpose of tracking market penetration. Consider how sophisticated such an application could be. Geo-targeting reports, for example, could display the level of interest for a product by location using the google maps API or Yahoo maps, identifying where the biggest “buzz” seems to be happening. That data could then be applied to other marketing campaign efforts, providing the data needed for a company, say Bed, Bath, and Beyond for example,  to do a mass mailer of coupons in a particular geographical area based on the amount of buzz that was generated in the social media space after the news of a major product release.

SEO vs. Social Media Marketing

Many compare Social Media Marketing to Search Engine Optimization. These are two different beasts and require completely different knowledge and skill sets to master. They are not one in the same and should not be treated that way. Measuring the effectiveness of SEO is different from measuring the effectiveness of social media marketing; completely different as a matter of fact.

Whether or not SMM will be exploited by black-hat trickery the way that SEO was a few years back remains to be seen, and my guess is that the answer will be that yes, someone will find a way to exploit it, and then so will others. Don’t look at that as a bad thing though. It was thanks to the black hat SEO thugs that Google is able to disseminate quality content and recognize when an attempt is being made to “trick” the robots in an effort to get higher rankings.

It will likely be a little while though before we start seeing “black hat trickery” in the world of social media marketing though. It took at least a year before it started in the world of SEO, and social media marketing has arguably been mainstream for only a few months now. This is emphasized in one of the statistics pointed out in the aforementioned industry report, which states the following:

“When asked to rate their experience using social media marketing for their businesses, a significant 72% of marketers have either just started or have been using social media for only a few months.”

Conclusion

In the software development arena, specifically Rich Internet Application development with the Adobe Flash Platform, a world of opportunity exists to leverage the rapidly growing popularity of Social Media Marketing.  What it really comes down to is – who will be the first to recognize and execute on this blatently obvious opportunity?

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Posted by Dan Orlando on May 23rd, 2009 :: Filed under Social Media
Tags :: Adobe Flash Platform, RIA, Social Media Marketing

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I’ve been waiting for quite a while to write up an informal article on this, and with the official announcement coming from Adobe on Friday, the time has finally come. What I am referring to is the recent announcement that Flex Builder has officially been re-branded to Flash Builder.

Naturally, this announcement has caused quite a stir already in the community. More specifically, the announcement has been met with mixed emotions. I had a feeling that would be the case, considering the fact that when I was first told this, the first words out of my mouth were “As if we didn’t have a hard enough time distinguishing the difference between Flash Designers and Flex Developers already!” I can’t help but laugh as I recall the stark contrast between those first words and what I was saying merely 20 minutes later.

Long Live Flex in the Enterprise!

As a strong advocate for Flex in the Enterprise, one of my longest standing arguments has been for the legitimacy of Flex for large-scale “RIA” applications. The reason I have argued so adamantly in this regard is a result of constant conversations with corporate executives who refer to Flex and AIR as “unproven technology”.  Flex gained this stigma amongst a large number of businesses as a result of having watched a substantial number of large-scale RIA Flex projects either never make it to full release or make it to release with only 30% of the intended functionality. On top of that, a significant portion of these projects went way over budget and rarely met deadlines.  I’ve spent a lot of time discussing this with people, particularly business decision makers, and I consistently suggest that they not point the finger at Flex, but rather consider the micro-architecture being used, and the people they have making the technical decisions.  Personally, I believe that it is largely a result of Adobe Consulting’s attachment to the Cairngorm Framework, which is unsatisfactory for enterprise development, and I’m not the first person to suggest that (I know, how dare I!).

Nonetheless, once you get over the shock of the change in naming convention, it is easy to see that this is actually a very smart move by Adobe. Furthermore, for people like me who are constantly advocating and trying to promote the use of Flex in the enterprise, this re-branding is more of a God-send than anything.

Consider This…

First of all, the movement to the Flash Builder brand marks the separation between the Flex Framework and the IDE built on Eclipse that can be used for the development of ActionScript as well as Flex projects. A general confusion existed in this regard previously, which was blatantly obvious every time I had a Flash Designer that used the Eclipse IDE to build ActionScript classes put down “Flex Developer” on their resume.

True Flex gurus know that there is a pretty hard core learning curve if you really want to get down and dirty with Flex. That is to be expected with anything though. You don’t just gain “guru” status overnight.  I don’t want to scare anyone that’s been thinking about giving Flex a try here, so understand that my point is only that the distinction between using Flex Builder and being a true Flex Developer had to be made somehow, so this is a good thing for those of us that have dedicated our lives to Flex for the last four years.

Of course, this brings us to the argument of whether or not the rebranding of Flex Builder to Flash Builder is a trade-off in favor of the aforementioned distinction, for a lack thereof between Flash and Flex development now. In this regard, my suggestion is to consider the fact that a SWF or AIR file can be compiled from Flash Builder (there, I finally called it Flash Builder, happy now? :) ) without a single reference to the Flex framework and without coding a single MXML file.

With that in mind, if you are still questioning the naming convention, then I ask you – is it really Flex Builder if I write all my applications without ever tapping into the Flex framework, and instead opt to code all of my ActionScript classes from scratch instead? How am I using Flex then? Even moreso, how could I call myself a Flex Developer…especially if my first choice was using the Flash CS4 IDE?  Yet, this is exactly what I saw on a day-to-day basis for two years, so I see this as a welcome change.

Separation Anxiety

Furthermore, the separation of Flash Builder and the Flex SDK provides a new opportunity to push Flex back into the enterprise and no longer accept the “unproven technology” argument. Business decision-makers need to pay more attention to who they have making the technical decisions and less attention to the technology itself. To expand further on this point, the technical decision makers need to accept responsibility for employing simple and scalable architectural conventions and use logical reasoning to evaluate architectural design patterns and frameworks that are proposed to them, as well as enforce a malleable network infrastructure upon which large-scale RIA applications can be deployed.

Lee Brimelow makes a good point in his response to the community chatter, where he states that we as a community must educate the general population on the fact that Flash is not what it used to be – intros without a “skip” option and animation that truly was completely pointless. Unfortunately, that is still the way a vast majority of the web population thinks when they hear the words “Adobe Flash”.

In contrast to this popular (and clearly outdated) belief, the technology has rapidly evolved into what we now know as (drumroll) The Flash Platform. This encompasses a multitude of Adobe products: ActionScript 3, Flash Professional, Flash Lite for mobile development, Adobe AIR, the Flex framework, Flash Builder, and Flash Catalyst (soon to come).

So What’s the Issue?

There is one particular argument that I’ve read, which seems to be a pretty valid one: whether or not “Flash Builder” unintentionally suggests that it is a scaled-down version of “Flash Professional”, when in fact they are two different products. Of course, going back to my last point, if we properly educate the general population on what exactly The Flash Platform is and what it means, then this should ultimately be a non-issue. The real issue is whether or not we as leaders in the Flash Platform community can properly educate clients, businesses, students, and individuals on what being a Flash Platform Developer means – its not about being tied to one development tool or a particular SDK. It’s about leading the way as an advocate for the evolution of technology and a rich, user-centric Internet through the Flash Platform as a whole.

With that said, Happy Flash Building!

Possibly Related Posts:

• Inside Scoop: Adobe Flex 4 and Flash Builder 4 official release
• Adobe Burned Twice After Apple Shuns Flash One More Time
• A few words on the state of current web tech: Apple’s iPhone, the iPad, Adobe Flash, and HTML 5
• Adobe takes Flash to the iPhone at MAX 2009
• Adobe Flash Builder 4: Data-centric Features for PHP (PHPBuilder.com)

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Posted by Dan Orlando on May 18th, 2009 :: Filed under Flash Platform News
Tags :: Adobe Flash Platform, Enterprise RIA, flex news, RIA News

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