GeekMedia

Blogging about Blogging

2009-11-09T21:41:00.005Z

(Or 'how I organise my stuff on the internet)
Okay this might look a bit self-indulgent. Actually it is a bit self-indulgent, so you might want to stop reading now, but there is a reason for it. I like to sign up for pretty much any new sites or services I can find, and I try to have a go at using most of them. Which means that people, particularly at work, tend to ask me which ones to use for different stuff. So I thought I'd write down what I use, so I can just send them a link when they do.

News
I've sort of run out of space on both iGoogle and Google Reader - I've got 10 tabs on iGoogle split into work and non-work related stuff, so there's not many places to put new feeds other than well down a page. I only use Reader for the 30 or so that I'm really interested in, because I run the Reader feed into Viigo, which downloads them automatically to my phone so that I can read the latest stuff on the Tube when there isn't a mobile signal. Viigo also has the main news, tech and social media sites plugged into it, so I've got BBC, Guardian, Mashable, Techcrunch, ReadWriteWeb, Engadget, etc there as well. Anything worth saving can be sent to Delicious, or worth sharing can be sent to Twitter from the Viigo app.

Actually I do pretty much the same from a computer too - keep an eye on anything interesting on Twitter, and then save it to Delicious if it looks like it might be useful. As well as Tweetdeck groups to split out different types of interesting, I've also got Tweetdeck alerts, and FriendFeed desktop alerts so that if the (much smaller number of) people I'm following on FriendFeed add stuff to Delicious or Slideshare then that will trigger an alert as well. As well as the Digsby alerts for new Gmail, Hotmail or Facebook activity. I used to use Delicious for all bookmarks, but it's increasingly become work-related stuff. Like most internet stuff I do, I've sent the most recent links back to the sidebar on this blog. There are some browser bookmarks - synced between work and home through the lovely XMarks, which also means that I don't ever have to remember passwords either

Music
As explained here, I used to love Last.FM, deleted my account, and came back sheepishly a few months ago. At home I organise music through iTunes like most people, but to find new stuff AND listen to it (not easy through either iTunes or Amazon's recommendations) I use Last.FM's recommendations and Spotify's streaming. Anything played on iTunes, Spotify or Last.FM gets pumped back to my Last.FM profile to help improve the recommendations (and from there to the 'what I'm listening to' widget here).

Photos
Through not having done much photography in the last couple of years, my photos are scattered around a few sites - Picassa, Flickr, PhotoBox mainly. I've never got hooked on Flickr, I guess becuase you can't do that much without paying. Since discovering Compfight creative commons image search I'm using more Flickr images in presentations, and feel that I out to put some more stuff up there to give back to the community. But I haven't yet: mostly what I take photos of at the moment is family snaps to post straight to Facebook from my phone so my folks can see them. For online image editing Picassa works better for me than Flickr if you have it installed. Aviary is the best cloud based editor I've found. I could write PLENTY more on iPhone photo apps, but most of it would be paraphrasing Iain Tait.

Bionic Eye Augmented Reality

2009-11-04T17:28:00.007Z

Post up someone's great explanation of how social, mobile and AR are going to combine to make people's lives easier, and 5 minutes later someone shows you an example of it actually working. This is a screengrab from the Bionic Eye app, which locates the nearest Wifi, public transport, coffee shop and fast food (you can select how much of this you actually see...) and directions and distances. Currently looks a little bit like magic.

Two years from now this will probably look like Windows 95 looks to us now. For the moment I can't wait till Foursquare can overlay their recommendations onto this sort of AR, to show what people want to find rather than what retailers want to push.
(HT, as ever, to John for pointing it out)

The Mobile Social Computing Explosion

2009-11-04T13:22:00.004Z

Mike Arauz's ability to cut through the hype surrounding technology and highlight the strategic implications for brands means that his decks are always worth reading. I thought this explanation of the combined impact of social and mobile nails the challenges that marketers and agencies need to get to grips with before next year

Social Network In Your Pocket

View more documents from Mike Arauz.

Culturally digital

2009-11-04T09:30:00.000Z

I tend to get asked a lot of questions at work about how to find stuff quickly, where to get free stats, how to make presentations look different (content rather than design - my slides always look different and rarely in a good way) basically all the stuff that any self respecting media geek should know. So I put some slides together to show where i find stuff and how I use it, and showed them to a bunch of planners at our place, which I thought was worth posting here. Not least to thank Ramzi Yakob for the quote about being culturally digital).

being culturally digital

View more presentations from Graeme Wood.

Media Agency Twitter lists

2009-11-03T18:03:00.006Z

so I made a list....

same as lots of other people have been doing on Twitter for the last few days. There are already a lot of great things to explore on Twitter lists (starting with Listorious). Lists make Twitter much more approachable for people first starting out using the service (who have tended to start off with celebrities if they didn't know many people using it - i know I did). They also make it easier to discover interesting people and stuff no matter how much time you have spent playing around with Twitter. Interestingly they also at the moment mean that you have to go to the web version. While Seesmic are already beta testing list integration, and Tweetdeck will no doubt be close behind, this can't hurt the traffic figures which Mashable keeps reporting as stagnating (do they think people really use the web version?)

Anyway, i started playing around with liststried to do something a bit different to recommending. I made a list of some good friends, some people that I do follow, and some that I have neither met, heard of, or followed, but who happen to work in the same same business as me - ie in a media agency in the UK. The filter to that being that they have used Twitter a fair bit recently. Unsurprisingly (or not, depending on your views on meeja agencies) I've found some interesting new people to follow, and hopefully I've made a useful kind of aggregator thing. It's sitting down the sidebar now, so see what you think, and let me know if you want to be added on.....

Last.fm - a slight return

2009-10-30T21:12:00.004Z

I've written a lot about Spotify on here, because it's a great concept that (seems) to have a long term business model. But let's face it, there is a big hole in the model around socialised discovery of new stuff to listen to. While sites like Spotifylists.com make sharing possible, possible is a long way off where a brand like Spotify should be.

(Spotifylists also looks like it has attracted the same spam pollution that seems to mark anything that is becoming genuinely popular - check the 'small claims filing' playlist).

Of course there is a perfectly good way to find find what other people who share your taste in music like, on Last.fm. I deleted my Last.fm account back in 2007 when they were taken over by CBS, as I personally didn't want to give a record label access to my hard drive, and I didn't know just how much access Last.fm's scrobbling function would give them. So two and a half years on there don't seem to have been any prosecutions for whatever it is that constitutes 'things that record labels can prosecute you for' these days, and I'd largely forgotten about Last.fm. I was bemoaning Spotify's lack of sharing features a few weeks ago and someone pointed out that all the things I was after from it were so 2006, and I decided to give Last.fm another go - lets face it, it was a bit ahead of its time.....

Ok, so I was wrong. And my Last.fm profile is a bit lonely. If you're passing that way then look me up, and if you share similar tastes, I'm a little behind the curve on friends over there!

Twitter's deals with Google and Bing - changing everything and nothing

2009-10-25T16:35:00.005Z

There's not been a lot made of Microsoft's announcement earlier in the week that Bing would include real time results from Twitter (and to a lesser extent Facebook) in its search results at some unspecified time soon. It has mostly been interesting to the likes of Mashable and ReadWriteWeb because of Google's counter a few hours later that they would also being doing so, so removing any competitive advantage that this might have brought Bing.

Leaving aside the debate about how scalable this level of traffic increase will be considering Twitter's notoriously unreliable infrastructure (discussed in the comments of ReadWriteWeb's coverage of the announcement), it also raises some interesting questions for brands that haven't so far found a role for themselves on Twitter.

In most cases brands that are successfully using Twitter at scale are succeeding because they have understood that it offers an opportunity for dialogue with their customers - whether that is Comcast's customer service, Compare the Market's advertising character backstory (Disclosure - client), or Ford's combination of one-to-one dialogue, customer relations and comms campaign amplification. Those that successfully use the service as a sales channel (usually based on exclusive offers) such as Dell tend to have an established two-way communication presence on Twitter before pushing sales messages.

This all makes sense, as to maintain any sort of following of the scale that would be useful to a major brand their Twitter stream will need to offer enough regular interest and value to encourage people to opt in to it. Sales messages alone wouldn't fit with how most people use the service. The resource cost of monitoring and maintaining this presence has tended to scare some brands away from getting involved with Twitter at all - there is no value to them in involvement at low scale.

Google and Bing's ability to index the real time web fundamentally changes this. Suddenly the value for brands pushing direct sales messages on Twitter becomes their SEO juice. It's fair to assume that Google sees Twitter as a threat, and that as people are increasingly searching for real time or as near as results, the best way to see off the threat is to push recency in their own results so that Google, rather than any development of Twitter's own underpowered search engine, continues to be the first place that you go to search. And as long as paid links continue to show up next to them, Google still hoovers up brands' marketing budgets. So results from Twitter are likely to assume a greater importance in SEO strategies over the coming months.

It will be interesting to see how the search engines rank the Twitter data they now have access to. I'd like to think that Google has acquired deep enough integration with the data to apply its own version of 'tweetrank' algorithms, but given the level of competition between the two this might be unlikely. Microsoft has already announced that Bing will search either by recency or relevancy. Either way, there is now no reason for brands not to be on Twitter, as even running a sales channel feed to no followers has a potential SEO benefit.

However, a brand Twitter presence, however one-way and SEO orientated, will still attract lovers and haters of the brand to start conversations with it - it isn't ever going to be just a box to tick o improve ranking. While SEO will be the reason to get involved, brands will need a defined Twitter strategy covering customer relations, PR, marketing and SEO. And by the sound of it, they will need one fairly quickly given that both Google and Bing are going to be integrating their Twitter data access this year (indeed Bing already has a rebrand of Twitter's own search in beta at the moment)

Thinking through this, I worried at first that this was going to deluge Twitter with the sort of random direct response ads that you see everywhere else - after all, there is a strong rationale for DR advertisers to do this. Then I remembered that it won't make any difference to my use of Twitter because I won't see any of them, as I won't follow the brands. So while it does change how brands should view and use Twitter, the announcement makes next to no difference for anyone else.

Recruitment iPhone apps

2009-10-21T09:10:00.000+01:00

This question made me think when I first saw it - 10 years if you're interested. Strangely enough after you've got one job, you tend to find other ones through people rather than through advertising. I'm sure that this was always the case to some degree, but making wide ranging connections with relevant people has become quicker and easier the same way everything else has.

It doesn't stop recruitment companies with vacancies to fill requiring the attention of suitable candidates though - they can't find everyone on LinkedIn yet. and one called Harvey Nash are approaching it in a slightly different way. I was randomly browsing web apps the other day when I came across this one in the social networks category. 'Are you a digital evangelist' not 'Techulus'. Even a geek like me doesn't want to join a social network for 'iphonians'.

So I couldn't resist, and had a quick look to see what the app was for.

Having never heard of Harvey Nash, I actually scrolled all the way through to see what it was for (well, actually I was looking for a place to comment)

and felt a bit let down when I got to the final screen and realised that this was all an elaborate job ad. An then I was really impressed, as these guys clearly know exactly what is going to grab the attention of potential candidates, and exactly where to put it. Not just making an iPhone app for the sake of it, but making a quick cheap web app that does a better job than any ad

Twitter Times - Friend Powered RSS

2009-10-20T22:02:00.005+01:00

(photo courtesy)
I'd guess that most of the people reading this used to share lots of links on Delicious, and now tend to share them on Twitter. I follow lots of people on Twitter that I don't know, and many that I'll probably never meet, and I do that because they are interesting - they share stuff from other industries or other continents that is related to stuff i like. I've found that over the last year or so that has meant I read things like newspapers a lot less (actually that is partly to do with having all the bits of newspapers that i like downloaded to my phone using clever stuff like Viigo) and read more things that i get referred to on the internet. Decisions about which Sunday paper to buy used to be based on which one best aggregated interesting people writing for it, and in one sense relying on friends' recommendations is similar - you follow them because they are interesting - but it differs in having the power of recommendation behind it. And obviously in being on a screen, so without the tactile, lazy, spread out on the table benefits that come with a newspaper.

I was thinking about this while stuck on a train with no wifi over the weekend, because i'd just been sent a link to my personal Twitter Times, which aggregates all the links that my friends share into one feed reader. It also recommends stuff from friends of friends. There's a video of how it works below.

It isn't rocket science, but it is a really neat use of the API. I've moved away from my feed reader and spend more time on Tweetdeck recently, so this is something of a halfway house - friend-fuelled RSS if you like. Anyway, I was looking around at all the people who had remembered to buy a newspaper and wishing that I'd printed my Twitter Times. I don't think that this is what it was designed for, but I wish it could turn into that. A few months ago I made up some things that I thought the magazine industry could do, inspired by some famous magazine or other ceasing publication, including this

People like magazines (ok not enough to make them profitable). If you are using a site every day to check a few favourite feeds, then surely it should be able to learn enough from what you, other people like you, your friends, etc read to be able to put a pretty decent package of content together that you haven't read. And then your subscription could offer you a couple of printed copies per year (printed specifically for you, content specific to you that it knows you haven't read). (Perhaps when you book a train ticket you could be reminded to order it for delivery the day of travel) - the printed version becomes the personalised collectors edition.

There's not really been a way of making 'your friends' recommendations' a physical product like this, although most people have pretty good printing technology in their houses. OK you can print your Google Reader, but when you look at what something like Twitter Times could be when coupled with something like Ben Terrett and Russell Davies's Newspaper Club, which can provide the design templates and printing (I think that's what they're up to), or Marcus Brown turning his blog into a book then there are some exciting post digital niche publishing opportunities around, and one excited potential customer here

Online Display ads can be awesome (who knew?)

2009-10-14T14:01:00.000+01:00

Lovely work from Apple (less lovely handheld video work from me....)

Is 'social media' the problem?

2009-10-13T09:10:00.000+01:00

I wanted to write up the IPA Social event last week, but unfortunately I've had my arm in a sling for most of the time since, so here we go a week later! I've written a few things on here about how the IPA Social stuff kicked off, which was basically about a few people talking about what we thought other people might want to also talk about. The first event last week got a lot more folk joining in, and there seem to be a few themes that keep coming up - there's obviously a big piece around measurement, which I'll leave to people who know more about it, but I'm really interested in the role of brands, and their agencies, in "social media". Over on Advergirl, Leigh House makes the point that

When we talk about consumers paying for content, we skip over how brands get into the conversation. Can we really rely on WOM networks to do the work of mass advertising? Do we all want to turn into blathering mouthpieces for our favorite brands?

(as part of a much longer and very smart series of posts on the changing economics of mass media).

And a lot of the themes are around how things are changing for every type of communications business: brands don't believe for a minute that there is a whole population waiting to promote their products if they could only design that Facebook page right, but they are getting differing advice from their different specialists on what has changed.

Is the term 'social media' the problem for marketers?
It seems that the term social media itself is counter productive - a fundamental change in how people are able to communicate with each other will naturally have knock-on effects to all businesses that deal with communications. But it will affect each differently. So 'social media' means something different to an ad agency than to a PR agency because it impacts what they have traditionally done in different ways. So the advice that clients get from their roster is that 'social media' means a range of different things. Meanwhile the customer services and IT departments are finding that it means a set of other different things outside of the marketing department but intrinsic to the brand.

When you have a range of different disciplines, advertising, digital, PR, media, etc, in a room talking about something that crosses over (and changes) each of their specialisms, you naturally get different views of what is important and how to go about achieving it. Will's written a great piece on why a brand might not want to be social, asking why you would care more about what sharing opinions with your bank than how good it is at managing your money. Which makes sense from the perspective of what has changed for advertising. There's obviously some brands that aren't inherently social. In a lot of cases, it might be counter-productive for brand built around functionality and cost to try and make itself social. But only in its advertising, in what it says about itself. These type of brands also have over-stretched customer service departments in which NOT being 'social' ie not trying to initiate open conversations with customers, is far more counter-productive to the way the brand communicates. But these are outside of the role of most of the agencies employed by a brand marketing department because they don't sit within brand marketing. One of the key challenges to brands and their agencies that people have been talking about over the last few years is moving from campaigning to committing - as in John Willshire's great analogy about bonfires and fireworks. Someone (not sure who, sorry) at the IPA Social event challenged to this, saying that surely it is about committing and campaigning. Which makes sense; there's nothing wrong with 'social media campaigns', as long as they are part of a wider change in brand behaviour; but there's no point in talking about how you are 'listening to consumers' on TV and then ignoring them in call centres, as you'll get found out quickly and publicly. Campaigning has been the domain of ad agencies, while committing fits more into what we traditionally called PR. As media relations has evolved to include geniune 'public' relations (eg liaising with non professional journalists) among other things, PR agencies have been on the coalface of brands' moves towards 'committing'. This doesn't mean that 'campaigning' doesn't still have relevance, just that it will look different from what ad agencies have traditionally done (as Robin Grant rightly points out in his write-up of the IPA event). However, lumping all these changes to various comms disciplines together and calling them 'social media' makes it harder for marketers to understand the underlying changes, or the need to act on them.

To me the terminology is wrong because it confuses cause (structural change in communications that is far bigger than just our industry) with effect (that clients' objectives are best served by having a group of specialists relevant to their business needs). In that in a lot of cases clients find it difficult to put the correct roster in place because they are equally confused by the conflicting advice from specialists who concentrate on changes happening to their own specialist areas.... which is all labelled social media.

#IPASocial Principle 9: Change will never be this slow again

2009-09-29T18:34:00.004+01:00

(Photo courtesy)

So I've written a few things about the #IPASocial project over the last few months, about how it got started, and how I've had the chance to chat through loads of ideas about the future of advertising and communications with some awesome folks. And now comes the important bit - the time to chat about it with everyone else who is interested. We're going to have a go at doing that in person next week on October 6th when the IPA are running an event to have a chat around what social really means for our industry. We’ve worked up ten principles to start this off, and this introduction (written by Amelia) gives the proper context:

Social Media is a conversation. That seems to be one thing that we can all agree on.

But given that Social Media is a rather noisy and opinionated conversation, what value do we think we will have by adding our voices to it?

We are not Social Media gurus. In fact we are rather sceptical of people who claim they are. We are simply 10 people from across a wide range of communications disciplines in the UK and the US who would like to share some thoughts. Thoughts that have either been bugging us or inspiring us, thoughts that we believe could form some of the building blocks for succesful Social campaigns. We came together to respond to and add our voices to some work that the IPA had done earlier in the year.

We have each defined a Principle which we feel is important in this Social world. You will find each principle up here but they are also on our individual blogs where we will be curating the conversation which we hope they will generate. Please do get involved, maybe you think these principles don't apply, are there better ones? Are there changes that you would like to make? Are there examples that you could add to help illustrate them? The only thing that we ask is that as part of the advertising and communications community that you become part of the conversation. After all the more opinions that are being shared and built on, the more interesting and stronger the outcome. At least that's what we are hoping.

Thank you in advance.

The IPA have created a hub for all ten principles, along with an overall summary of twhy this is important, written by Mark Earls. This can be found here. Everyone who has joined in so far is also hosting a principle on their blogs, so please join in the discussion there too.

1. People not consumers – Mark Earls

2. Social agenda not business agenda – Le’Nise Brothers

3. Continuous conversation not campaigning – John V Willshire

4. Long term impacts not quick fixes – Faris Yakob

5. Marketing with people not to people – Katy Lindemann

6. Being authentic not persuasive – Neil Perkin

7. Perpetual beta – Jamie Coomber

8. Technology changes, people don’t – Amelia Torode

9. Change will never be this slow again – Graeme Wood

10. Measurement – Asi Sharabi

So my thoughts are all around the underlying changes in how people communicate, and particuarly what this means for agencies

IPA Social: Principle 9 - Change will never be this slow again

“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.”

Change has never happened this fast before, and it will never be this slow again. This shouldn't come as a surprise; Intel founder Gordon Moore observed in 1965 that since the invention of the integrated circuit in 1958 that processing power had doubled every 18 months, and predicted that this trend would continue unchecked. So far he has been proved right, and the future of advertising is too closely linked to that of technology to escape the effects of Moore’s Law.

That isn't to say that people are changing. Without paraphrasing too much from Clay Shirky and Mark Earls, all the things we are evolutionarily disposed to do and have a cultural requirement for are simply quicker, easier and further reaching than previously possible. Most of those things are to do with other people, not technology. To get hung up on technology risks missing the point: as Henry Jenkins says,

“Our focus should not be on emerging technologies but on emerging cultural practices"

As an industry we have faced change before; early radio ads were print ads read out. Early TV ads were radio ads in which you could see the face of the person reading. In each case the rise of a new medium provoked a step change in the advertising industry, but one that didn't happen immediately. But each of those media worked in the same way, and the one-to-many assumptions of the 20thcentury about how brands communicate are fast becoming a casualty of the power laws of 21st century networks. While it is fun to speculate on how technology will change behaviour, most examples follow Bill Gates' suggestion that

“We overestimate the change that will happen in the next two years, and underestimate the change that will happen in the next ten”

Interruptive advertising won’t disappear overnight, but each change towards a more networked world will make it less relevant. We can’t predict the impact of new technologies on cultural practice, only prepare our businesses to embrace and foster change rather than reacting to it. Things are happening quicker, including irrelevance. In the words of AG Lafley, former CEO of P&G,

"..our company's success rate runs between 50 and 60 percent. About half of our new products succeed. That's as high as we want the success rate to be. If we try to make it any higher, we'll be tempted to err on the side of caution”

So the real step change for agencies is about not keeping control or making things perfect, it is about embracing business models that constantly evolve and communications that are designed to exist in beta, making the move from what Gerd Leonhard calls “protecting brands to projecting brands’. Charles Darwin said

“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.”

We know that species of animal can remain unchanged for millennia, and then suddenly evolve in a few generations as their environment changes. The increasing speed of communications is eroding the 19th and 20th century assumptions that our businesses are built upon. Leading change rather than being lead by it demands that we don't err on the side of caution.

Dixons: the last place you want to go...

2009-09-24T08:24:00.000+01:00

I'm loving this new Dixons campaign, but I don't know i'm loving it in a healthy way. It's the sort of 'summarise the brand challenge' insight that turns into a whole strategy - sort of like Pot Noodle being the Slag of Snacks. I like buying tech toys as much as the next geek, on the few times I've had to go into Dixons I can safely say that it really is the last place you want to go for them. It doesn't feel properly dirty like Argos, so feels worse for pretending to have customer service but offering insultingly thick people who can't operate a camera trying hard sell features and benefits of cameras.

What it is doing though is getting people talking about Dixons, and evaluating their consideration list into 'research' (which Dixons would never have been on) and 'purchase' (which they may well stand a good chance of getting onto simply by gaining attention through humour and/or conversation). Selfridges and John Lewis make up the tension & the humour in this work, while the real target is Amazon, Pixmania, etc - everyone else on the 'purchase' side of the market.

So how is it working so far? It doesn't seem to be shifting huge volumes of searches, but Harrods are helping out with some free publicity by threatening to sue. And there's a love hate debate going on between people who see the ad - I tweeted about it when I first saw it, as did lots of other people. And the verdict is pretty positive so far - 66% positive on Twitter in London over the last few days
And the number of positive or negative (ie actually care) tweets currently outweighs the neutral ones - suggesting that if the strategy here is all about being talked about more than other cheap places amongst techie London Twitter type people, who might re-evaluate Dixons, then that positive sentiment is well deserved.

(you still wouldn't catch me in there though)

#IPASocial

2009-09-22T21:22:00.004+01:00

So I went to an event back in January about Social Media and the Future of Agencies. Sounded like interesting stuff, but it turned out to be an opportunity for the IPA to try to sell us some research which looked like a bit of a snapshot of stuff that was happening while missing a lot of the important stuff, the reasons why it is happening. Well it looked like that from the presentation, but it was hard to tell because none of it was shared and there were no opportunities for dialogue about it. Except of course there are always opportunities for dialogue in the interwebs, and lots of people including me were fairly critical about the whole idea. It could have just finished there, as another missed opportunity, but then Nigel Gwilliam from the IPA got in touch with everyone who had commented on the event to how the IPA could make the things they are doing more relevant, more like a conversation.

And over the course of a few months this developed into a few of us putting our heads together to work out what we think are the most important principles for brands and agencies to understand when navigating the new ways in which people relate to each other online. We've also added initial thoughts about what each of the principles means, kind of conversation starters so that hopefully lots of other people can add their thoughts. And then there's going to be an event, which might hopefully be some of the things that the last one wasn't. So there's some speakers to get the conversation going, and then there's some conversation.

And these are the subjects that we think people might want to talk about. Everyone who has written the thought starter piece will be blogging it over the next week, and we're suggesting tagging it all #IPASocial. Keep a look out and please join in.

There's apparently a plumber of Yahoo Pipes somewhere in the IPA who might even be able to aggregate this tag on their site soon too, so we can really live out the perpetual beta principle.....

1. People not consumers – Mark Earls

2. Social agenda not business agenda – Le’Nise Brothers

3. Continuous conversation not campaigning – John V Willshire

4. Long term impacts not quick fixes – Faris Yakob

5. Marketing with people not to people – Katy Lindemann

6. Being authentic not persuasive – Neil Perkin

7. Perpetual beta – Jamie Coomber

8. Technology changes, people don’t – Amelia Torode

9. Change will never be this slow again – Graeme Wood

10. Measurement – Asi Sharabi

Finding and using your net promoter score

2009-09-14T22:13:00.004+01:00

I was buying mobile phones again last week. Not to feed my tech habit this time, just cos my son threw one in the paddling pool. All very straightforward, courtesy of the Carphone Warehouse, but I wasn't expecting a text an hour later asking me One Question about my experience in buying the phone: on a scale of one to ten, how likely would I be to recommend Carphone Warehouse to a friend?
Now I've had a pretty good grip of net promoter scores for most of the brands I've worked with in the last couple of years, so I've commissioned people to ask this question a few times, but I've never been on the other end of it. It does make you think about your experiences of the brand (all pretty favourable in this case). And that led my cynical side to wonder whether brands that have an automated NPS tracking system in place for every transaction make more effort to deliver recommendable experience, or if it is more likely that it is only those that understand the importance of creating advocacy amongst their customers that bother to monitor NPS. Either way, it really impressed me. I meant to post about it last week, but to be honest forgot about it until I saw this ad on the tube today (you'd think with a new phone I could learn to take photos with it......)
Another Telecoms company, Plusnet, proudly letting me know that 8 out of 10 of their customers would recommend them to their friends.... which sounds like distilling the output of an NPS study down into an easily digestible headline as well. This category, traditionally one of the worst culprits for abominable customer service, seems to be paying more attention to brand experience....which can only be a good thing for people who keep having to replace their phones....

Geek Venn Diagram

2009-09-08T16:24:00.005+01:00

Love this.....
From here

Spotify for iPhone - owning or renting?

2009-09-07T21:26:00.007+01:00

Ok here it is: Spotify the iPhone/Android app:Which is in itself a bit of a surprise - Apple not really having a reputation for approving iPhone apps that duplicate the phone's core functionality. And let's face it, regardless of where the music is stored, Spotify wipes the floor with iTunes for user experience. But where the music is stored is the importnant bit. Spotify can cache up to 3,300 tunes in offline mode: ie it stores them on your phone... in much the same way that iTunes does. As long as there is enough memory on your phone, as from my sums 3,300 tunes would take up about 23 Gb. Which even on the biggest iPhone would not leave much space for iTunes!

The obvious flaw in the system for most people is the requirement to pay £9.99 per month to continue to rent your music from Spotify in this way. The beauty of Spotify's streaming music service wasn't just the user experience; it was the freemium mix of ad-supported 95% and subscription-paid 5%. People who have the disposable income to justify £120 per year on music rental, as well as an iPhone in the first place, are also likely to own a lot of music already. Like me, they might also be quite attached to the idea of owning music. To be honest, in the UK this is unlikely to change as Gen Y grows up: we are a nation of wannabe owners, as our housing market will testify. So, while this app is potentially exciting, the potential for most people is more because of what it might mean for future app approvals - the Grooveshark or We7 app for instance. If the pricing can be sorted out (not to mention actually being able to operate in the US at launch), then Spotify Mobile may just have broken down the barriers for someone else to rush through.

Things are happening quicker....

2009-09-06T19:01:00.008+01:00

(NB. This is part of some work that the IPA are doing on the impact of social media on the ad industry. When I say 'part', it's more like a big pile of ideas that would need sorting into some sort of order before they became part....)
The changes going on in the advertising industry are doing so faster than ever before. It is probably fair to say that they will also never be this slow again. This shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone; Intel founder Gordon Moore observed in 1965 that since the invention of the integrated circuit 8 years previously the number of transistors that could be placed on a circuit board had doubled every 18 months, and predicted that this trend would continue unchecked. So far he has been proved right, and the increases in computing power that Moore's Law describes are the reason that we are coming to talk about technology and advertising interchangeably.

That isn't to say that people are changing. Without paraphrasing Clay Shirky or Mark Earls too far here, all the things we are evolutionarily disposed to do, and that we have cultural requirements for, are simply quicker, easier and further reaching than previously. This is not a different challenge to those faced by our 20th century predecessors:
Early radio ads were print ads read out. Early TV ads were radio ads in which you could see the face of the person reading. In each case the rise of a new medium provoked a step change in the advertising industry, but one that didn't happen immediately. So if we have survived and adapted in the past, is the challenge really as great as it appears?

Well, not unless you believe that the set of assumptions that underpins how we help brands communicate might also be a casualty of the power of Moore's Law. It is fun to speculate on how technology will improve, but most examples follow Bill Gates' suggestion that

“We overestimate the change that will happen in the next two years, and underestimate the change that will happen in the next ten”

Our ability as individuals to control access to our attention is likely to be amongst these. Since the internet was invented, it has slowly grown to a point where it has roughly the same number of computers connected as there are cells in the human brain, and about the same number of links as there are connections. The number of synapses, or connections, in our brains is taken as a proxy for intelligence – it is basically processing power. So in the 18 years since the public birth of the worldwide web in 1991, the internet has developed the intelligence of one person. Moore’s Law means that all the processors, and all the storage, and all the other capacity will each be doubling in power every 18 months. According to Kevin Kelly’s calculations, by 2040 the internet will have the brainpower of 4 billion people. According to Kelly, in the medium term future we will move from computers connected BY the internet, to one single computer that IS the internet. Our devices will simply be views into it, our networks always on.

Advertising tends to be seen as a necessary evil, as a transaction in return for content, which means that the challenge that has historically faced those who work in advertising has been to disrupt, interrupt, gain attention. Increased demands on peoples’ attention has made this job more difficult in recent years, but it has still been fundamentally the same challenge. What will alter it dramatically is the shift from gaining our attention to gaining the attention of our digital gatekeepers, the devices that will increasingly filter our access to entertainment and information. If I trust my applications’ recommendations, why should I look myself? They know more about what I like than I could ever have time to. Technology simply amplifies and speeds up underlying human behaviour and interaction. Brands that are asking themselves why people would want to be friends with them should think about what the alternatives may become.

And going back to the earlier question, is the challenge really as small as it appears? If I knew the answer, I'd start the agency that solved the problem. What we do know is that it is time to test. We have been wedded to the big idea of the Big Idea for generations, but big ideas that are rigorously researched and pretested will struggle in a world of ever increasing change. Things are happening quicker, including irrelevance. The idea of lots of little ideas seems more suited to this quicker world. In the words of AG Lafley, the former CEO of P&G,

"..our company's success rate runs between 50 and 60 percent. About half of our new products succeed. That's as high as we want the success rate to be. If we try to make it any higher, we'll be tempted to err on the side of caution”

Lots of little ideas acknowledge that all we as an industry can do is to make things as mimetic as possible. It is down to the other 99.9% of the population as to whether they happen. In Sketching User Experience, Bill Buxton talks about an art college ceramics professor who comes in on the first day of class and divides the students into two sections. He tells one half of the class that their final grade will be based exclusively on the volume of their production; the more they make, the better their grade. The professor tells the other half of the class that they will be graded more traditionally, based solely on the quality of their best piece. At the end of the semester, the professor discovered that the students who were focused on making as many pots as possible also ended up creating the best pots, much better than the pots made by the students who spent all semester trying to create that one perfect pot.

So the real step change for agencies is about not trying to build that perfect pot – it’s about not worrying about the bad ones. Charles Darwin said “It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.” We know that species of animal can remain unchanged for millennia, and then suddenly evolve in a few generations as their environment changes. As the increasing speed of communications erodes the 19th and 20th century assumptions that our businesses are built upon, our role is to avoid erring on the side of caution.

Back to work, armed with new questions...

2009-09-02T22:41:00.004+01:00

Hello again. I've been away for a week doing things that don't involve teh internets. Perhaps it is only when you spend a week away from the technobabble that you remember how simple most of the questions and answers are. (BTW this is liberally nicked from DigiDay Daily, but the article frames it as answers that clients give agencies, rather than answers to questions agencies [should] ask themselves)

Challenge: I am not tech savvy!
- Response: It is not about technology—it is about people and culture.
Challenge: There is not enough time, I am too busy!
- Response: Continue to ignore the world around you and you will have plenty of time, but no job.
Challenge: My company blocks all social networks!
- Response: Get a new job, seriously! If you are a communications company that cannot participate in new ways of communicating, there is a good chance your company will soon be gone. Get out of there!
Challenge: I am lazy!
- Response: Perfect, that is the only real excuse :)

Peperami Crowdsourced Agencies

2009-08-26T09:30:00.000+01:00

Peperami....it's a bit..well, half-arsed really

On the one hand you've got a perfectly straightforward Idea Bounty brief to create a TV/print execution of Peperami's Animal character. But on the other this has been PR-ed as an end to Peperami's longstanding relationship with Lowe London, and a move to become the first brand to crowdsource lead agency status. So respect to the client Noam Buchalter for A. some great PR (whether it turns out to work in the long run or not) and B. for actively defending his move on Brand Republic forums to a selection of annoyed creatives (maybe annoyed because they have realised that their contracts forbid them from entering).

For me this falls some way short of being newsworthy (oh yeh, but I'm writing about it...). Crowdsourced ads are not big news: BMW & Red Bull being two of the brands who have used Idea Bounty in the past, and Current TV has worked in a similar way with a broader range of US brands. Even in traditional FMCG Doritos successfully bet $1m and a Superbowl spot on the concept in Crash the Superbowl. So the big idea here is firing your longstanding agency, which smacks of PR stunt. Why? Because the wisdom of the crowd is being directed to find a slightly different thing to do with a character created by Lowe, who has been featured in Peperami TV ads produced by Lowe for the last 15 years or so. So, nothing new, nothing different, just a bit of cheap publicity please. At least they could have had the confidence to ask for a new strategy to mark their departure from the traditional agency world.....

Contrast this with the work that the NSPCC (FD: Zed Client) do with virtual agencies, which is all about ideas and engagement, and intentionally generates very little media relations.

Fireworks and Bonfires

2009-08-19T21:43:00.006+01:00

I tend to link to a lot of John's posts, as he tends to come up with a lot of great stuff. But this in particular is a defining analogy between social media and advertising

Advertising Fireworks, Social Bonfires

View more presentations from John V Willshire.

Sony Ericsson's SMAA and the theft of ideas

2009-08-18T21:11:00.006+01:00

SMEBS Watch - Meet Andrew from Marcus Brown on Vimeo.

This was a really funny thing that Marcus did a few months ago - it's part of his campaign to warn about the dangers of Social Media Expert Burnout Syndrome (S.M.E.B.S.), which was also tied up in the Tweetreading phenomenon - now lots of us spend far too much time getting far too excited about the next big thing in our day jobs, and stuff like this pulls apart the pomposity of it all, which is why it makes me laugh. Out loud. A lot. And why I thought that there was something familiar about the Sony Ericsson campaign for the SMAA (Social Media Addicts Association.... see any similarities yet?)

There's more of this stuff at http://stopwritingonmywall.com/index.html, which is worth a look, as some of it actually uses whole chunks of Marcus's stuff. The agency behind this is Nascom in Belgium. Hopefully Copyc*nts will pick up on this soon, because it is one thing borrowing ideas from movies or TV shows, which are popular enough for viewers to understand how an idea references another idea. It is a totally different thing to steal ideas that have been shared around small groups of people and pass them off as your own when selling them on to major brands. Nascom call themselves a digital agency on their website, but they miss the most basic truth about the internet: everything is about reputation. Linking and referencing builds reputation. Steal and lose it.

UPDATE - @minorissues and @jannikolaas of Nascom reply to Marcus's version of events

IE6 No More

2009-08-12T09:10:00.000+01:00

Mashable reported today that the campaign to kill off IE6 reached a new level as Google's Orkut social platform (the largest in Brazil) announced plans to stop supporting the browser. On the face of it this might look like Google having another pop at its biggest rival, particularly in the face of Bing's takeover of Yahoo search last week. But the recommended alternatives are not just Chrome - Firefox, Safari and for that matter IE8 are also suggested as upgrades. This isn't really about Chrome at all (although the implications for advertising are related to it, which I'll speculate vaguely about later on) - it's about the future of websites themselves.

IE6 dates back to 2001: if you can't remember exactly what websites involved in those days, here's an example of the BBC's home page from January 2001:
and this was the sort of site it was designed to browse. Even if internet connections had been up to it, web designers would still have been limited by the fact that 95% of interent access was through IE6 at its peak. This was after Netscape had been seen off, and well before the days of Firefox. So although 20% of internet users are still using this technology, it was designed for a bygone age. The world wide web was 18 last week, and this is the equivalent of asking a ten year old to graft like an adult.

Now up till recently that has only been a problem for the coders who had to shoehorn state of the art websites into IE6's limited abilities. It is becoming a problem for everyone who wants a genuinely useable internet. HTML 5 is capable of providing audio and video files that interact (ie edit and change) in real time on a web page. It removes the distinction between desktop applications and websites, enables dragging and dropping from web to desktop and back, and is built on the basis of complete location awareness. It removes the need for Flash and Adobe Air (the heavy duty code that PCs can run but mobiles can't) so blurs the boundary between mobile and pc screen. In short it enables all the things that are going to make the web a whole lot more useful. And it won't work with IE6.

So for Google, for whom interactive audio-visual (YouTube) and drag & drop functionality (Google Wave) are key to future innovation, HTML 5 is a pre-requisite. This is great news for everyone, because the main problem with changing browsing behaviour is that most people don't care about all the stuff I'm talking about. Or at least they won't until it is developed and ready to use. But if they are threatened with losing access to YouTube (or potentially Facebook) if they don't upgrade, then they will soon work out how easy upgrading is.

To be fair, Microsoft agree that they would love people to upgrade, but that they won't phase out support for the browser, which was the standard in Windows XP. On their IEBlog the view is:

"Dropping support for IE6 is not an option because we committed to supporting the IE included with Windows for the lifespan of the product, and we keep our commitments."

So (partly based on the failure of Windows Vista to tempt people away from XP) they seem happy to let other people put a range of non-IE options in front of them. And to bring this back to advertising, that opens up some interesting questions about Firefox uptake. Chrome and IE8 are based on being ad-friendly: Google and Microsoft have the world's largest ad revenues to support. Firefox on the other hand offers the opportunity to block all online advertising (although it too makes most of its income through a revenue-share deal with Google for search ads). Only a fraction of FF users (9m, or 3%, of the 300m users of Firefox) block ads. But then, back in 2005 only 3% of internet users ran Firefox. Now it is 23%.

Of course on the other hand maybe sites running on HTML 5 will carry interactive applications and realtime audiovisual narrative that people won't want to block. Let's hope we get the chance to find out soon

www.old enough to vote.com

2009-08-11T21:15:00.005+01:00

I don't know if I missed this, but the World Wide Web came of age last week. On the 6th August 1991, Tim Berners-Lee wrote a summary of the W3 project that he'd been working on on the alt.hypertext newsgroup. Although the first server, Berners-Lee's NeXT computer, the first browser and the first web page had been live since earlier that year, this marked the first time that the project had been available to the public.

It's fair to say it has had a very public adolesence and been a troublesome teenager in the eyes of established businesses. But I reckon that we've not seen anything yet, and now the web is old enough to vote it can get on with the serious stuff

20th Century Media. The encore

2009-08-07T09:30:00.001+01:00

(photo credit)
So Rupert Murdoch has finally made the announcement that the rest of the newspaper industry has been waiting for: online news content will be hidden behind a big paywall from sometime in 2010. This was always going to be a game of who blinked first; who would take the plunge. Realistically I don't think that it could ever have been trialled, tested or rolled out, as success or failure rests on giving the rest of the industry plenty of notice and hoping that they will all jump on board. What will be fun to watch is who doesn't join in. Murdoch's comments today about

"the sale of digital delivery of newspaper content"

suggest that he doesn't get what digital distribution is. His UK competitors at The Guardian and The Telegraph seem to have a much better grip on the realities of news distribution in the 21st century. What they clearly don't have at the moment is any more idea about how to make money from reporting it. The 'if you report it {and make it freely distributable through APIs and full text RSS} then they will come' may still bear fruit in the long run, but can they afford to wait? The dual squeeze of paper cost inflation and massive ad revenue contraction means that they have to look to the short term in order to survive.

So it's safe to say that any business that has been based on charging for news in the past is going to be examining the ways in which it can do so in future in the next few weeks. I've been trying to get my head around any way in which this can possibly work, and so here's a few attempts:

1. In the UK at least there is a robust model for paid content. 9m households subscribe to Mr Murdoch's own Sky TV/Broadband. As is clear from the post below, I am a massive fan of not just the technology, but everything about the Sky brand. If News International can leverage this paid network, and potentially include Sun or Sunday Times online content as a Sky Broadband subscription package (for instance instead of one of the free TV packages) then this would demonstrably monetize online news content with minimal impact on TV revenues. It may not provide any major cash injection, but let's face it, Rupert's pockets are deeper than his rivals, and anyway the whole paid news content is in desperate need of credibility; Sky could overcome the initial hurdles for News Int in a way that no other news publisher could compete with.

2. eReaders. Have been referenced by the upper echelons of News Int as the future recently. (apologies for linking to my own posts, but I've love writing about this stuff, and then I know where to find it!). News Int are apparently negotiating with Sony over a new reader, but personally I can't work out the point. Ever decreasing size and increasing power of digital devices means that we really only ever need to carry one. If I have the internet, email, Twitter, an mp3 player, camera, video recorder, feed reader and phone in one device in my pocket, there is no way I'm carrying another one with a news subscription on it. So, applications. Interestingly the pin-up kid of paid news, the Wall St Journal, offers free access via iPhone app. Ignoring that, most of the difficult bits of viewing news on a small screen are about navigation and search, so justifying payment on personalised content may work - the value for the viewer is not having to hunt for stuff that's interesting because the app learns what is and seeks it out.

3. And the alternative to applications, and where I think Rupert may already be casting his eye, is the mobile market itself. So absolutely commoditised that a bespoke content owner should be able to make major inroads quickly (only problem would be a tech partner - Apple hide behind an even bigger wall than newspapers, while I can't see this crusade sitting comfortably on open source Android)

But there's also a few tricky obstacles to overcome in this last hurrah. The first is that in the UK we have a pretty healthy paid content operation, the BBC. We pay around £11.50 per household per month for all the news, comment and analysis we can eat. And all it takes is one source of quality content to remain free and all the rest will just lose traffic. Expect the Murdoch press to become even more vehemently anti-BBC over the coming months.

I think there is an important distinction though between the BBC and News Int, which is that News Int's business has been newspapers. There's no new costs involved to publish text and pictures online once they are sent to the printers. People don't view websites in place of newspapers, and their enjoyment of them is rarely enhanced by engaging with them across two media. It's just the same content in a different place.

Secondly, there are lots of people who are quite happy with newspaper content because they trust it and it has always been there. It just happens that they are spending more time online than they are reading newsprint these days. If for some reason it wasn't there, they might well find out that most of the best stuff online isn't written by newspaper journalists. It doesn't matter whether you are after cricket analysis or celebrity scoops, it is a really straightforward lesson to learn, and one that newspaper marketing departments should be terrifed about. News spreads fast in the21st century, and they really are in danger of getting left behind.

And the most important question is how people will find these sites to go and pay them. Google can't look behind walls. The whole basis for paying for news is that you will be receiving the most authoritative set of opinions (ok, or The Sun. Or Fox News. So you might just be getting the set of opinions that you want...). Anyway, 10 years from now there will be no reputation left worth mentioning. As Jeff Jarvis points out in The Guardian, this move cuts access to the link economy. And whatever might have brought success last century, that is where long term revenues will be found this time around.