5 must-have marketing tools for the lean startup

**MailChimp **Nothing beats the measurement and attribution capabilities for multiple lists for the price. Your startup more than likely doesn’t overkill nurturing capabilities that expensive solutions have. Use third-party integrations with SalesForce to associate email campaigns with lifecycle and behavior groups of your users/customers. **Rapportive **Know everything about a potential partner from a pane in Gmail. Instant connectivity to Facebook, LinkedIn, and Crunchbase with contacts is awesome for quick update on partners, customers and prospects.

The dumbest way to fight showrooming: Charge customers $5 just for browsing

Facebook Stock Price to Twitter Sentiment Correlation

If you had traded FB Stock the IPO Opening day based on Twitter sentiment signals, how would you have done? Think Twitter could be a valid indicator of Facebook Stock Price?

Probably pretty well! Claims data collection and analysis company Datasift.

They monitored Twitter’s social data and its relation to the Facebook stock price. What they found was pretty interesting: the positive and negative posts on Twitter mirrored the fluctuations in Facebook stock price.

Adobe for iPad - Need to Step up on Experience

Last month I wrote why Apple doesn’t allow Adobe near the iPhone . Today, Adobe is trying to get into the iPad … Adobe will roll out new publishing software for tablets. This new software, which will soon take its place in the Creative Suite pantheon, will be downloadable from Adobe Labs and will include tools that bridge the gap between print-oriented InDesign and software for interactive formats.

Adobe released a video showcasing the new capabilities, available to watch at Adobe TV and embedded below. You will noticed they added tons of capabilities around content … such switching images, embedding video and rich content … but it’s all about content? What about gesture navigation? what about the experience? For how long will Adobe keep missing the experience aspect that makes Apple, Apple.

The new magazine experience in a tablet is not based on technical capabilities of the tablet, it’s all about providing a richer experience to the user… making it more natural, seamless, human per-se.

What does it take to make a successful iPhone application?

**What does it take to make a successful iPhone application? **

Before answering what does it take to make a successful iPhone application we have to define what makes an application successful. Sapient always asks why are we building something, what are we trying to achieve, and how are we going to measure it; so starting from top down, what are the business objectives, the key performance indicators, and all metrics. iPhone applications usually serve one of two purposes: drive brand or drive revenue.

**Objective: Drive brand **Applications that drive brand most likely are free since they have to target a broad reach. Objective is usually increase awareness, brand recall, or word of mouth, and is traditionally measured based on simple downloads, usage, and extended with how many share with friends, stickiness, and engagement levels. A good way to take it one step further is tie in social media monitoring and analyze share and velocity of voice, general sentiment, and overall impact of the application within social conversations.

Now that we understand how to measure it, what will the application do? Nowadays brands cannot push messages to the consumers, they have to provide value and we generally call it brand as an enabler. Applications that drive brand usually fall under one of two categories: be entertaining or be useful. Entertaining applications usually have a wider adoption, more downloads, but less engagement as users open it just a few times before they get bored. Useful applications have a smaller reach but higher engagement; less users will download the application, but they will use it much more than simple entertainment applications. However the key for both types is simplicity.

Autonomy launches social media analysis tool

Infrastructure software giant Autonomy launched a new web content management tool under its Interwoven brand, designed to monitor social media content and allow businesses to act on the insights gleaned. The Autonomy Interwoven Social Media Analysis solution is a combination of the Autonomy Interwoven web content management system and Autonomy IDOL (Intelligent Data Operating Layer). It is designed to provide organizations with the ability to understand and leverage the conversations happening in social networks to make some money.