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User Generated Campaigns & Buzz Areas

Following on from my Obama related post ‘The User Generated Candidate’ I have been thinking about how this approach can be best adapted for a B2C online campaign in effect creating ‘User Generated Campaigns’. I know what your thinking isn’t that just a viral campaign. Well yes and no, certainly not in the traditional sense. Nor is it standard ‘buzz marketing’; simply identifying potential ‘Super Advocates’ (influential bloggers or media owners) and making friends through bribery. The aim is slightly different. Rather than just trying to win over influential bloggers to help amplify your campaign you are looking to empower the individuals who are inspired by your campaign what ever their motivation.

To explore these individuals possible motivations:

The creative mind..
Someone who is inspired by the creative execution

The product fanatic..
They just love your product. Full-stop.

The marketing professional
You and I, impressed (beyond jealousy) by the execution.

Very often whether they like the product on offer or not most people will respond positively to a clever ad. You only have to look at the recent success of the most popular UK online video ad Cadbury’s ‘Gorilla’ drummer. And as for the fanatics that love your brand or a particular product in a slightly obsessive manner; well this is a perfect untapped unpaid marketing force. They could all help amplify a specific campaign’s reach if you only you empowered them. The ‘Bring Back Wispa Group’ setup on Facebook & Myspace by such people saw the product brought back to market purely due to chocolate nostalgia. This was without there even being a Cadburys campaign around it. Apparently!

Given more individuals are making profiles on social networks, writing blogs or using social book-marking and more importantly customizing these spaces we should look at feeding this need for new / fresh ‘social currency’ with unique creative assets to decorate their spaces or content to give their audience.



A good example of how this has been done on a Macro level with success was by GM. Following a bit of factually incorrect and ultimately negative PR in the New York Times they asked for it to be retracted. To no avail. What happened next considering this is GM inspires me and should leave any client, no matter how conservative, with no excuse to not embrace new digital thinking. Rather than call in their multi-million dollar lawyers they responded like an aggrieved Web 2.0 bedroom blogger…. telling their factually correct story through the blogo-sphere. The blogo-sphere, normally a group of cynics and corporate hatters, were charmed and took up GM’s cause. In fact taking it right to the top and eventually attracting major main stream media attention which forced the NYT to retract their comments, formally apologise and back the hell down. GM knew they had pulled off a coup. Riding high they then went one step further and set up a ‘Social Media News Room’ for online reporters (I use the term loosely) to get relevant GM assets and official news with OFFICIAL facts for anyone big or small to upload into ANY of their social media environments.

‘If businesses want to exploit social media then keep in mind these networks are said to be giving power to the people, democratising the web, the implication is power is moving away from the traditional suppliers of content’ GM Statement

THE MESSAGE IS SIMPLE EMPOWER THE PEOPLE!

Bringing it back down to the micro. Converse asked the users to become their advertising agency 'Thank You Campaign', and to carry out a series of actions to promote the brand. The better / the more they promoted Converse, the more points they earn. And we know what points mean… PRIZES! Well actually in this case points could be exchanged for products.

Now whilst I think points and prizes are great I think you would be surprised how many people would do it just for the love or for the new ‘social currency’.

So stick with me. Campaigns need micro-sites to keep the relevant / specific conversation you started away from generic thus improving conversion. However I believe these micro-sites should do more than convert or simply communicate a message they should also empower the brand / product fanatic, marketing enthusiast / professional, or impressed viewer.

With a little bit more effort every campaign micro-site could have a specific ‘Buzz Area’ with cool stuff / ‘social currency’ all inline with the creative execution as well as paired with Web 2.0 technology to empower its distribution. That can be…

• Behind the scenes making of videos (Sony Bravia ‘Play Doh’)
• Wallpapers for your Myspace
• Theme tune ring-tones for your phone
• Badges, buttons, widgets for Bebo / Myspace
• Forums to discuss anything related
• Loads of feeds of text based content, busy bloggers need content
• Animated smileys for messenger
• Games for the mobile phone (that can see sent onto their mates)
• As well as related groups whether sponsored or free on social media platforms with exclusive prizes

Web 2.0 Tech:
• RSS feeds
• Social book-marking buttons
• Tools to customize all the assets (perhaps make their own cut of the video, customize it with their mates face or some toys to play with like the South Park avatar maker)

The reason why we take it all down to not only product level but campaign specific level and away from just a main-site buzz section is that a campaign fan certainly doesn’t care it was Diageo, probably not even that the product was Smirnoff but they just loved that ad with the things flying out of the ocean. It's all about empowering anyone who wants to get involved. Believe me if you have a creative execution worth shouting about this is the megaphone that will amplify its resonance and extend its life ten-fold.

Intelligent Websites (Using browser history to personalise a user journey)

The big theme of Web 2.0 for me is personalization. The personalization of all that content on the Web and the personalization of how I want to digest it (iGoogle, Netvibes etc). When we are talking about websites this is how those fields are pre-populated with my details, the links I have already seen are highlighted, how Amazon makes recommendations based upon my previous purchases. Basically the site acts like the chap at my local corner store who says, "hello", remembers my name and tells me that he has just got some more of that new product I really like (yes its alcohol related!). That’s why I pick his store over the other 10 on the same street selling the same product at the same price.

The ever enlightening Niall Kennedy touched upon this when he recently wrote an article on using browser data to personalize a journey as if the user is a regular even if they are a totally new visitor. All web developers should listen up….



To help you on your travels your browser stores a list of sites you have recently visited for a default: 1 week. A website interacts with this list in many ways. The example above of having links highlighted a different colour if you have visited that page before is a one simple way. But imagine the ramifications of what a web designer or evil marketer could do with that data.

Below I have summarised the intelligent features Niall discusses in his posting and has been using on his own blog for sometime:

ONLINE AGGREGATORS

What is your preferred online aggregator; My Yahoo, Netvibes or iGoogle. Well rather than show you all those options I’m just going to show you the relevant one. By subscribing that’s one more in-bound that all helps with SEO and Page Ranking.

SOCIAL BOOKMARKS

Same as above; if you use Digg then I will just show you that button and a feed of dig postings to wet your appetite.

OPEN ID PROVIDERS

Similarly if they have a Blogger account I will give them the button so hopefully they sign-in and write about my posting. Clever Niall I did!

MAPPING SERVICES

Want to see where my offices / stores are and have a preferred mapping service well I already know don’t I. You want to view a route (I can assume that from your IP)and show it through Google Maps.

MY CONCLUSIONS

All these features are genuinely ‘nice’, helpful and utterly harmless just helping him de-cluttering his blog and I get what I want whilst being prompted to 'amplify' his blog. However as you can expect his blog received varied responses. I am personally and firmly in the ‘using data to make things relevant is OK’ camp. I agree perhaps you may want a disclaimer to ensure your brand, whether personal or corporate isn’t associated with privacy violations and to make clear that you aren’t passing their info to 3rd parties. There are a lot of people who don’t get it and find it all very invasive. E.g. the same camp as all those Facebookers who were crying in their sleep that in return for their FREE favourite toy their profile data was being used to make ads RELEVANT on what is an AD-SUPPORTED network. Hmmmmmm.

As there is a growing use of social book marking with tools like Del.ici.ous or Stumble Upon you could possiblly grab their ID depending upon how they login and see what their interests are and hey presto their website responds with only relevant links and articles or promotions by identifying key visits.

One point that comes into my ‘evil’ marketer head is if you can identify a customer is in the research phase for a lets say a laptop by identifying where they have been and what product pages they have been looking at, including if they have gone into any of the shopping-cart pages (no point trying to sell them something they have already bought), then you could show them related offers. If you are a vendor or affiliate you could show particular merchant banners. This could even be offers / creative with prices that under-cut the sites they have seen but not those they haven’t. Ensuring you are competitive but you are also securing the best price from the sale.

With this ‘intelligent website’; personalized info, relevant and highly targeted advertising the opportunities are endless and I strongly believe this kind of intelligent marketing will become common practice and of increasing relevance as there is more popular uptake in the personalization of the Web.

Barack Obama The User-Generated Candidate

I recently posted on the increasing use of digital and the social media platform in American politics. I touched upon how Obama was being used as a case-study for a great digital campaign by WPP Group to which my agency belongs. It was only having a recent conversation with a colleague who, oblivious of all of this, mentioned that he thought the Obama digital campaign was really inspirational that I started looking around for some more views. Were we really witnessing a cultural revolution!



I found a great article in The Guardian by Terry Mancour called The User Generated Candidate which I thought I would summarize and draw some conclusions from:


•Firstly his campaign has decentralized political campaigning.

•Moving away from the consultants (I probably shouldn’t be writing that) and focus groups

•Tapping into all the pop social networking platforms with a Myspace group, Bebo group, Facebook group , Linkedin group .

•The message has been personalized in two ways; firstly ‘how do you want it’ on your ipod, via RSS feed, or on mobile? Secondly he has allowed the advocates to communicate it to their peers in their own tone (I will touch on this in a later point).

•Donation by profile (the big red button) or email no matter how big or small. COULD THIS HAVE TRULLY DEMOCRATIZED POLITICS by moving dependence away from large donors and to the average Joe. Obama has raised an estimated $30million at the moment.

•‘Virtual volunteer’ (real audience participation online). As mentioned before the Obama campaign has attracted some of the brightest digital minds. Not just professional digital marketers but bedroom enthusiasts including the bloggers, diggers etc.

•An example of this if where the main campaign site fails to deliver hundreds of grassroots sites have covered. His campaign message appeals to everyone because they are translating it for him to their peer groups.

•Television commercials? Its been the creative user-generated contributions that have popped up on blogs, websites and Youtube that have created the buzz and the message. All starting with the innovative and brilliant amateur commercial (Hillary Clinton as Big Mother, a skit on Orwell's 1984).


•Followed by Obama Girl, ringtones, wallpaper, screen savers, text messages all done by the volunteer.

•Artist endorsement has even been deliberately de-centralized. The ‘Yes We Can’ video was produced by Will.i.am of the Black Eyed Peas and Jesse Dylan (Bob Dylan’s son) and involved a star-studded multiracial cast singing the text of Obama's New Hampshire concession speech. The campaign team deliberately had no involvement so there was no risk, no censorship, not criticism of using celebs, or the wrong celebs therefore no censorship just a whole load of benefits.


•It's become much more than a candidate. Its about the mass of people who have committed their energy and passion to change with Obama as the focal point. Companies watch and learn!

•This level of involvement as a collective is not just about political allegiance. It’s about the supporters helping shape their candidate live during the election process to be truly representative.


MY CONCLUSIONS:

Is this campaign success down to Obama possibly being the first black president, frustration at what many Americans have regarded as a long and repressive regime, Obama’s campaign team? All these have undoubtedly had their influences on the American public but I think what is so exciting for me as a digital enthusiast is that I believe we are watching a cultural revolution.

These platforms, technologies and new ways of communicating we have been playing with for the last few years have matured. It’s no longer about having 5000 friends on Myspace or a Facebook Vampire widget. It’s about being empowered and using that power and influence to quite literally change the world and the governments that run it.

To end on a quote from The Guardian article, ‘The 21st-century is when everything changes, and Obama is the first example of the 21st-century politician’.

Facebook Advertising & The Super Advocate

So everyone’s clients, who haven’t already been burnt by ill advised social media strategy, want to be in Facebook. With Hitwise reporting UK Internet traffic to social networks now surpassing ‘email services’ (see chart below). So given Facebook IS the UK social network of choice with 37.70% of market share its obvious where advertisers need to go.



However a Sponsored Page costs a minimum of $60k ($20k per month for a minimum 3 months). Even for big clients this a little too much money to spend on the unknown. So what about the other options; straight-up media buying, banners and skys. Well with a CTR (Click-Through-Rate) of 0.04% compared to the industry standard of 0.39% it isn’t really an option. Yes Facebooks new ad system, Beacon, has arrived to make more relevant by using profile data but I think it’s just a case of banner blindness. So what DOES work?



Well firstly let us look at the most successful Facebook campaign to date at least in the UK. 02 (UK mobile phone operator) took the punt and put down the $60k tenancy fee for the sponsored and £50k prize money and began ‘The Battle for the UK's Favorite University'.

• The o2 Facebook group encouraged students to generate 'noise' on behalf of their university by uploading photos and comments.

• The university with the most Facebook activity at the end of a 30-day period won a £50,000 o2-branded on-campus party.

• O2's Facebook initiative attracts 63,000 students in 11 days and finished with 89.861 members.

So a great engaging campaign showing how to best approach the medium but it cost £85k+ at the time. Are there any cheaper ways using the same viral approach?

The answer is using ‘Super Advocates’. Avenue Q a US theatre show arrived in London back in 2006 and were suffering empty theatres. Their demographic was London based students so they decided to Facebook a go. But they didn’t have cash so…

Phase 1

• They picked 6 Advocates, four of the capital’s top universities each with 500+ friends
• Gave free tickets for them and their friends
• All they had to do was go and join the Avenue Q London Group which had been pre-populated with video, images and content.
• Activities such as joining a group or posting a comment on a wall appear in user newsfeed / made public to friends
• This exposed them joining and every comment/ posting there after to over 3000 friends most of which were students on the London Network
• Their guests also joined opening it up to their Networks starting the viral chain.
• There were now 300+ members.

Phase 2

• Wanted to build upon this foundation of activity
• So used the group to launch a simple competition:
‘VIP night out at the show, with dinner, champagne and a meet-the-cast opportunity’
• To win members simply had to post a ‘nominate me’ request in the group’s discussion forum and then get their friends to vote for them
• To nominate their friends, Facebook users had to post a message on their friends’ thread. The act of doing this creates a newsfeed message which is sent through that friend’s network: ‘John Smith has discussed Avenue Q London’.
• The friend who sees this thinks: ‘John is discussing what? I better go and take a look’.
• To post nominations, friends also had to join the group. John Smith has joined the group Avenue Q London. Another newsfeed message!
• Wall posts were made, new discussions were started, and pictures went up in the photo file of various cast members with the groupies who had caught them outside for autographs and chats.

The Results

• In a couple of days the group had 480 members the friend who won had 120 nominations from friends.
• By the end of December, over 97,500 pages were served up with the message: e.g. John Smith has joined the Avenue Q London group
• Over 71,000 pages were served up with the message: e.g. John Smith discussed the Avenue Q London competition
• Over 5,000 pages were served up with the message e.g. John Smith has written on the Avenue Q London group wall
• Over a four week period around 250,000 Avenue Q related statements had appeared in individuals’ newsfeed.
• Their bums-on-seats increased significantly!

What will Web 3.0 look like? (Part 2)

Previously we looked at whether The Semantic Web would be the next major evolution of from Web 2.0. Whilst undoubtedly The Web and Search will at some point resemble this kind of vision I think there is a more imminent evolution that will be Web 3.0. This will be born from the mobile.

Firstly mobile technology has always moved at an astonishing rate. This is partly because of how people consume the product. Prior to the current 16 month contracts being flogged by the UK carrier 02 most people had 12mth contracts or a pay-as-you-go. This meant unlike most technology you would be looking for an upgrade, a NEW PRODUCT, at least once a year. This wasn’t too much of an issue when the main difference between phones was predominantly aesthetic. And anyway it was the problem of the phone manufacturers who had to begin to bend over backwards to get access to the huge Networks user bases. A deal with Vodafone meant a lot of cha-ching. So they began to develop features to differentiate their product from the noise and win that lucrative big deal. This was the beginning….

If your operator couldn’t give you a brand new phone with all the new features well you would swap networks. So new ‘features’ were being brought into the market at an astonishing rate. 3G phones got people excited but did everything but allow you to make reliable calls. The Blackberry brought mobile email mainstream. GPS and The Web had been around but it wasn’t until recently with the drop in surf costs and tech developments that made it a viable feature for the general public (still some room to go there). It was the more recent generation of phone that made me put 2 and 2 together all be it at 3 steps behind Steve Jobs.

The iPhone has heralded not only a shift in the industry, the operators now were bending over backwards for the product this time, but also in how we the consumer use our phones. In reality we are no longer talking about a ‘mobile phone’ but rather a mobile device. Stevie J saw that people were carrying around a lot of portable devices including his rather successful iPod. Other mobile manufacturers started to put iPod like features onto their mobile and he wanted to protect the market he invented and as only he does take it that one step further. Apart from looking rather cool the iPhone also allows powerful and easy-to-use web browsing meaning the Internet is no longer limited to WAP sites. The new Nokia N81 8GB has also taken mobile web browsing a long way and has got me doing a lot more than just checking my Facebook.

In fact mobile internet is now big business with major search giants Yahoo and Google now preparing to battle it out over the deals to power portal search on publisher sites including people like the The Sun and Eurosport. EMarketer predicts that mobile search will be worth £365m by 2011.

Now bring in GPS meaning I and my phone have a geographical relevance. I want a pizza restaurant with directions on a map. Or even better, I recently had a meeting with the guys at Buddyping.com, a cool purely mobile non-ad supported social networking platform, where you can setup groups or events and interact by your mobile. We even discussed the possibility of being alerted when a pal is in a certain radius of me / my phone. Or alerted when a stranger, if they exist now a days, passes by and has the same interests, that are single, the same age or not, and are up-for-a-drink! Much much more than a phone!

The implications of this kind of Web 3.0 to a digital marketer is that ads can be targeted to real-time geo relevance. Now let’s stop there for a second. The next evolution of the mobile market place enhances GPS targeted advertising as you will soon see. Blik recently launched the world’s first totally free ad-supported mobile network for 16 – 24s. Its aim is to link young people with brands they like and return gives them free texts and minutes every month. Open to UK only users, at present, users opt into channels or brands they are willing to have conversations with, currently only by SMS, and get a free mobile operator. If you look at the standard home Broadband pricing model its almost free, Skype internet calls are free (now with its own mobile), Wireless Free Zones in the city. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see where it’s going. Yippee mobile calls for free and possibly even internet browsing. The price you have to pay is via a select portal (wireless) or with advertising from your provider…..

……Back to GPS and an ad-supported mobile business. By tracking your GPS movements during times of the day. Between 8-10 you travelled on the same route as the No 85 Bus. So that’s your route to work. On that route to work you pass Gap. Ping if you are using the web a text Gap ad as you pass. Or similarly where you seem to spend most of your weekends, or an assumed lunch-break. Your ad-supported operator can make assumptions about your habits and take them into consideration. If you think about what Google knows about your browsing habits, your emails, and The Others know about your purchasing habits and now the mobile operator knows about where you are…. all the time being combined into an UBer profile.

This might sound like an Orwellian nightmare to most. Particularly those people that got freaked when they found out, heaven forbid the totally free ad-supported network that changed your life, FACEBOOK, was using your profile data to show you RELEVANT ads. To me if somebody gives me something for free that helps me communicate and would normally cost me a fortune hey … I don’t mind being shown an advert generally but particularly if it is a RELEVANT product I might want to buy.

So is this Advertising 3.0 or Web 3.0 I hear you say. Well what drives the evolution of any technology, since the dawn of time, is inevitably War or Commerce. If you consider Barcodes can now be sent to phones and scanned in store for discounted offers, Bluetooth has added even more depth to the mobile as a marketing platform. Commerce likes these small devices that we use to take videos, pictures, organize diaries, communicate with friends by social network, SMS, email or call and now browse the Web with. And guess what they are with us 24 hours a day unlike a TV or laptop. The writing is on the wall!

What will Web 3.0 look like? (Part1)

Over the next few postings I intend to look at some of the theories being thrown around about exactly what Web 3.0 could look like. This posting will deal with a popular theory that it will be the evolution of ‘Search’ creating a ‘Semantic Web’.

So exactly what is ‘The Semantic Web’? Imagine the Web as an ocean of undifferentiated information. A mass of billions of text documents designed to be read by a human. Sure you can search for them by using keywords but you then still have to spend time searching through the results to find the specific page that has the exact information you want (if your that lucky).
Enter the ‘Semantic Web’. The information in those pages has to be turned into data a computer can read and in turn evaluate on its own without human help. Only then can a computer completely take over tasks on your behalf and find the nearest cinema with a particular movie at a particular time. Effectively the Web becomes smarter and uses reasoning in its results.



To me this seems some way off but the pioneers Radar Networks, a company filled with the geekiest geeks on the planet, value the market for products and services related to Semantic Web technologies is at $7 billion today and could be $50 billion by 2010. I am sure this is true but you could value demand for eternal life at $100 billion it doesn’t make it any more foreseeable.

The theory of a ‘Semantic Web’ was born back in 2001 in an article by Berners-Lee in Scientific American. They had a dream of software agents that roam the Web with mission objectives to say book travel arrangements and doctor's appointments even muting the stereo when the telephone rings. A dream born out of a very very lazy mind. The question is can a man so lazy be bothered to deliver a dream so big?

So back down to immediate reality. Well we have Google. It does a fantastic job of sorting those web pages for us but ultimately its up to you to find what’s truly relevant from those 10,000’s of results if you bother looking past page1. It’s also up to you to combine information from independent searches into say a travel plan. When you look at it like this Google Page Ranking doesn’t help too much.

The dream is that the ‘Semantic Web’ acts more like a series of inter-connected databases, where all information resides in a structured form. Have I lost you yet? Hopefully not! Within this structure there are layers of description that in turn add meaning that the computer can understand. Hence ‘Semantics’ a subject I studied at university, the true definition being a 'branch of linguistics concerned with meaning'.

If you were looking up a person on the semantic Web, it wouldn't just be a name that pops up on a few WebPages when you’ve googled them. They would be a fully defined object deepened by well defined properties including: DOB, a job title, home address, hobbies, lineage, as well as all the connections to their social / professional sphere, dates, times, geographies. The growth of social networks and blogs can only fuel the wealth of these dimensions.

Let’s say you wanted to organize an event to bore people on the topic of the ‘Semantic Web’ you would have to send emails, arrange dates, find a location, book the venue, do some PR, deal with the confirmations and given the subject rejections, let alone speak to the caterers. Yes it’s a real pain. Well not with the ‘Semantic Web’ it KNOWS exactly what is involved with arranging such an event, presumably because it remembered how you did it before. So it sends the emails, makes the bookings and even orders the goodie bags. Hell in a GPS-enabled world, it could even let you know how far away the guest speaker is who is running late.

Well we are obviously no where near that yet. However tagging is a start, with platforms like Flickr and Google Base offering a kind of crude Web 2.0 version of the semantic Web. Amazon.com has already being exploring how semantic technologies can help customers navigate its databases. Of cause with anything like this the US CIA aren’t far behind apparently loading its databases of overseas phone taps into semantic "mills" to help make it easier to make connections between people, places, and incidents"

Undoubtedly this is the future of the Web to some degree but I would hope their will be some other significant ‘stuff’ that happens in the mean time because it’s a long way off. I personally believe this, often controversially, to be the evolution of The Web on the mobile phone. Which I cover in part 2.

EA focuses on ad-supported video games

Electronic Arts are have decided to launch an ad-supported free online game. It will see the popular and successful game Battlefield, which has already sold 10 million copies worldwide, made available almost entirely free other than a limited micro-payments system. The previously PC only game, Battlefield Heroes, will only be available online or via mobile and for the first time won't be sold in shops.



The move is EA's first serious approach at tapping into the new ad-driven revenue model beginning to be adopted in Western markets. It follows the previous success of a free Fifa game version released in South Korea, which netted over $1m a month from in-game sales.

The new approach is catering specifically to how users are consuming gaming with online gaming now reaching a massive audience. People now want to play and access games in new ways and that is as quickly and as easily as possible. Therefore is leading to an entirely new distribution model and pricing structure. It is believed that this is just the beginning in a sea of change.

It is interesting, as a direct comparison, to see how quickly the gaming giants and industry at large have been to adapt to how 'online' has changed their customers consumption habits compared to say the music industry which has been dragging it heals for sometime now and is currently paying the price.

As a measure of this market back in 2005, in-game advertising spending was $56 million, with current estimates predicting it could grow to $1.8 billion by 2010 (Massive Incorporated figures). Ad-agencies attentions are based in the need to target the male 18-34 demographic who are increasingly neglecting the TV for the video console. If you consider the average time people will invest in gaming environments any branding, whilst sometimes deemed as invasive by fanatical enthusiasts, will almost certainly gain access to the unconscious psyche of the gamer.

As the figures clearly suggest this is no longer a new arena. In game advertising is incredibly sophisticated. As an example even back in 2005 Irrational Games 'Swat 4' featured dynamic adverts (by way of Massive Incorporated technology) where ads were delivered to promote up and coming TV shows that were time and location sensitive.
Second Life, has seen many brands and products build a presence in their virtual world including the likes of Lego and Toyota and Everquest 2 offering the option to order food directly from Pizza Hut in-game.

I believe that this is one of the most exciting platforms to an advertiser. With the opportunity to really engage and demonstrate top class creative thinking. So watch this space!

Al Qaeda Goes Mobile

I am slightly paranoid I may start being 'monitored' for even typing such words into my blog. Or possibly marked as an 'enemy of the state'. Nevertheless I have a duty to inform you of any significant digital developments no matter how perilous to my own safety...

Al-Qaeda have recently decided to offer mobile video downloads! I am not entirely sure exactly what the content will be but it is rumoured to include clips of the terror network leaders Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahri speeches. I guess so you can get terror on the go!

The announcement came from al-Qaeda’s media wing, al-Sahab, with numerous postings on websites commonly frequented by the Islamic militants. The first series of downloads included eight previously recorded videos. One of which was a tribute to the former al-Qaeda commander in chief, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who was killed back in June 2006.

Why am I covering this. Jokes aside. Well I personally see it as rather significant that such an organization has chosen to use such communication platforms and even more significant that many advertising agency clients haven't... no names mentioned (the list would be too long!).

Lets remove ourselves away from exactly what they represent or wish to communicate and regard them, if possible, as an organization that has a consumer / audience. To me its no surprise that any organization has adopted this 'personalization' of information. By personalization I mean making your output / communication available in whatever format the individual wishes to consume it. Thus making it as easy as possible for them, mobile or i-pod allows you to do it on the fly, and therefore increasing the likelihood life doesn't get in the way of that consumption.

So what would have inspired this intiative from a political organization. Well its not all togther new. In fact WPP the Group that owns the agency I work at tout the recent campaigning of American Presidential candidate Obama Barack as 'best practice' of digital marketing, personalization, and use of social media. He has successfully profiled himself on platforms such as Linkedin, Myspace, Facebook, Youtube, Flickr and joined the digital debate. Not only does he have a comparative overwhelming presence in these popular environments you can really get to know the individual see his track record, profile and download / watch videos or podcasts getting that little bit closer. Have a look at his site www.barackobama.com he even has Obama Mobile and an impressive new media center. The point; consume his message in your own time, in your own way, even in the environment / platform you spend most of your time.

It will be interesting to see how mainstream or niche these audiences really are and if this digital canvassing gets the first black president into The Whitehouse. What is for sure is he and his team, which includes big-hitter David Plouffe, have changed the political landscape and campaigning forever. I hope that corporations take heed and follow suit capitalizing on the power of the communication platforms available in the world of digital. If they are maybe its time you were too.

The Fear of Facebook

I have almost bored myself talking about Facebook at the pub, in client and internal meetings even with my girlfriend about those ex's who I'm 'friends with'. It's a permanent fixture in my life. Way back when I too began with 'Facebook Fever' frantically running home to check my wall or to see which blast from the past has added me today. Avidly exploring friends networks and image galleries. However I now admit I rarely check it. I now officially suffer from 'Facebook Fatigue'. Was it the mass of useless applications. No. Was it the 'sudden' realization that it's, heaven forbid, an AD-SUPPORTED NETWORK (Like 99.9% of everything else on The Web). No. I have just lost interest. I like to socialize once again in the traditional sense.

Now if the media is anything to go on I am a growing WAVE of people dropping off the platform. Like all the other platforms before e.g. Friendster. However this just isn't the case. The general public still love Facebook. They recieve 30.6 million unique users (September 2007) a month with membership growing not declining by the day. It's not just the amount of users that's killer it's the length of time they spend there, an reported 28 minutes a day, with an average of 2.3 visits a day. Making it gold-dust media property and justifying Murdochs move.

It may be true that a small number of early-adopters, those of us who have been using Facebook for a good while now, have moved on. However our type are by our very existence transitory, defined by the fact we are always looking for the next Facebook moving away from 'the popular'. And a group Facebook no longer has a need for its already been discovered and has moved firmly into the pop. Introducing some people into serious usu age of the internet (previously just email checkers and Googlers). Some professionals prefer Linkedin but there is little yet to seriously replace Facebook as far as Joe Public is concerned. My fanatically digital eye is on mobile social networking giving geo-relevance and context to my digital communications and socializing. Currently being pioneered by people like Buddyping here in the UK. But do Facebook care!

My point is whilst I don't use it much a lot of people do. Their new ad system 'Beacon' finally makes use of all that profile stuff and turns it into ads that will finally convert (Previously there was reported ad-blindness with poor conversation rates). Everyone is running around screaming foul-play we gave your our entire identity and expected you to not doing with it!?! Well how about the fact that you have always seen ads they were just never relevant now they are. So shut up and carry on enjoying your free social networking platform.

So I hope by now if you are my client you get that just because I or you might not personally enjoy Facebook you need to be there. So that Beacon thing means now we can just buy media space, like we use to, rather than those sanzy but expensive, $60k minimum spend Sponsored Page's. Well no still people don't really go to look at stuff or buy it. If they want they go to Money Supermarket. They go to Facebook to communicate with other people. So you need to do the scary thing and start a conversation about your offering. Yes I know its scary. What if they something bad. Well yes they might. But if that's the case they are already doing it and you don't know its happening so you can't answer it or better have your advocates answer it for you. If you need the metrics to argue for that sponsored page setup a free Facebook Group or Network and get creative, start the conversation. Get the Comment and Member figures then commit the money and Facebook is here to stay!

Facebook As Your Professional Brand

I know your all thinking another bloody Facebook article! Well yes. However this is less about a personal profile that lets face it most people want to hide from the professional world and more about the creation of a industry / public facing profile (almost alter-ego). Firstly this article gives a great insight into how professionals can showcase themselves to a wider audience than say with their www.Linkedin.com profile particularly now your Facebook profiles are going to be listed in Google.How does this relate to our clients I hear you say. Well how about key individuals create a professional facebook account, one they are willing to open up completely to the public. These can be linked to from recruitment sites showing they are Web savvy hipsters! Secondly it means when people type in lets say 'Bill Gates' into Google they will be met by HIS Facebook profile (as Facebook profiles will be treated very favourably by search engines due to SEO algorithms which I won't bore you with now). Thus out ranking all the negative PR in search engines around his name. Bearing in mind 70% of people only click on the first 5 results.

TO SUMMARISE;
Look at us our key people are Facebook savvy
Shows transparency
Talks to people in an environment they feel comfortable in
Our voice outranks the negative voices chattering in search engines (GREAT PR)
Facebook The Hub For Your Professional Brand WEBPRONEWS.com

Build Your Own Virtual World For Free

A free tool that allows anyone to create a virtual world has been launched.
I think this could offer us the opportunity of making bespoke and 100% relevant environments for our clients and their target audinences rather than trying to make a costly jump into say Secondlife where the audience is generally anything other than relevant. Think virtual recruitment fairs!

Users of Metaplace, as it is known, can build 3D online worlds for PCs or even a mobile phone without any knowledge of complex computer languages. The web-based program is the brainchild of Raph Koster, one of the developers of massively multiplayer online games such as Ultima Online. Users make the virtual spaces from simple building blocks. The results, which could be used for gaming, socialising or e-commerce, can be embedded in a webpage, facebook profile or blog.

"We are out to democratise virtual worlds and bring them to absolutely anybody," said Mr Koster, founder of Areae, the company behind Metaplace. "You can come to the site, press a button and have a functioning virtual world that supports multiple users in about 30 seconds."
Web puzzle.

There are already a number of popular virtual worlds such as Second Life, There and Entropia Universe. In addition there are games worlds such as World of Warcraft (WOW). Most of these require a person to download specialist software or buy a game and there are no links between the different universes. "They're all walled gardens," said Mr Koster.

In contrast, Metaplace is entirely web based and connections can be made between all of the different worlds. "We modelled this on the web," said Mr Koster. "You can think about each world being a webpage and every object within in it is a link." Users can create the worlds using different methods. People with no programming background can use the graphical interface and choose worlds from a number of templates, such as a shop or a puzzle game. They can also clone worlds developed by other Metaplace users.

More competent visitors to the site can build a world from scratch using the tool's own programming language known as metamarkup. The language is "platform agnostic", according to Mr Koster, which means that it can be used to create worlds which can run on anything from a powerful PC to a mobile handset.

User control

Mr Koster believes the tool will be used to create a wide variety of different virtual worlds including chatrooms, games similar to WOW, or teaching environments. "Others may want to make a book club that is integrated with Amazon where people can get together and chat every Thursday night about a book but they can actually see the pictures of the books on the wall, click on them and buy them," said Mr Koster. "The applications are pretty open."

When complete, each world is given its own page on the Metaplace website. "You can mail that to somebody, they click on it and they are logged in to your world." Visitors will also find a forum, user ratings, wiki and other "community tools" associated with each page. For example, users will be able to suggest an age rating for each page. As each world is based on standard web technology they can also be embedded in blogs, a facebook profile, myspace page or website. "It becomes just another piece of the web - another way to display content and information," he said.

'Crazy worlds'

Mr Koster says he developed Metaplace partly as a reaction to some of the already established virtual worlds. He believes the medium has "enormous potential" but because of the cost of building them developers have never pushed the boundaries. "There's a huge amount of conservatism about what virtual worlds can be because it takes such a huge investment," said Mr Koster. Developers, he said, cannot afford to get it wrong when they are juggling multi million pound budgets.

He hopes that his free tool will start to solve this. "We want to see 10,000 virtual worlds so that lots of wild and crazy stuff gets made because that is the only way it will advance as a medium." The program is currently going through testing and the final version will be made available to the public in spring 2008.

Google Trails New Interactive Ads

Google Inc. is testing a new advertising format that it hopes will make people spend more time looking at ads online, and even embed them in their own Web sites. These are called Gadget ads, the service has already been in testing with a small handful of clients. On Wednesday Google announced that it was widening the tests considerably, which means more of the ads will start appearing on Web sites.

The format allows companies to build ads that include audio, video, gamesand live data feeds, and to spruce them up with the Flash and JavaScript programming languages. The ads wind up looking like small Web pages within a Web page, and people can save them to a blog or their iGoogle home page.

Google posted several examples of the Gadget ads on its Web site. An ad for a Nissan car lets people type a U.S. postal code in the advertisement to get a map showing traffic conditions where they live. Another for the Six Flags Inc. theme park includes a simple game and a link to "add to your Google home page."

The ads give advertisers detailed metrics about who uses them, according to Google. The Six Flags ad delivered 94.5 million impressions to 17.1 million unique users, and was interacted with about 200,000 times, Google said.

0.3 percent of those exposed to the gadget ads interacted with them, Google said. In comparison, direct mail generates a response rate of 2.18 percent, according to figures for 2006 from the Direct Marketing Association.

The gadget ads run on Google's Adsense advertising network and are priced by number of clicks or number of impressions. Google didn't say when the testing period would end, but the it said Gadget ads will eventually be available in 20 languages and 100 countries.

Microsoft Corp. and other companies also let advertisers put video and interactive features in Web sites, but Google claims that its ads offer more ways to keep people engaged. The ads can also appear on YouTube and sellers can include part of a checkout process in the advertisement.

What this means for us as employment comms folk is that we can be more clever creatively. For example we could have a series of qualifier questions built into the ad that if answered successfully allows the user to click on a link to then go through and apply for the position. It could also qualify their specialism and send them through to a highly relevant landing page improving conversion but also allowing to a wider skill-set catchment through one ad placement.
The possibilities are endless!

Digg PR

Digg.com is an online news portal where the editor is you. Well to be precise you and, according to Richard MacManus's striking statistics , 445,000 other registered users. By 'digging' a news article on any range of subject matter, a feature which is readily available on most web savvy sites (haven't added it to mine yet!), you can create the headlines for the day.



The reckoned demographic of active 'diggers' is, According to Digg's advertising partner Federated Media; "Audience: Business and IT influencers working in technology.* 94% male * 88% 18-39 * 64% HHI above $75k * 52% IT professionals, developers or engineers * 26% managers or above * 39% publish their own blog"

However, again according to Richard, only 2,287 users contributed any stories to the site during the last six weeks. With the top 100 users contributing fully to 55% of the stories that appeared on the site's front page, and the top 10 users - yep, you can count 'them on your own two hands - contributed a whopping 30% of the front page stories. Peer production? I think a better term for it would be 'peerage production' (Mashable).

So how could this benefit us online marketers. Well if you haven't got it yet this is a great online PR tool that is lets just say open to influence. Working with a large global company like JWT, that sits within the ever growing WPP Group, I have a lot of colleagues direct and in-direct. But we all want great PR for our clients and with a little helping hand from your friends you can make the headlines with ease. Got a PR peice, post it on Digg, send a blanket email with the URL asking for some digging (it will only take them a second) and hey presto you have started the ball rolling for the diggosphere to pick it up.

To give you an idea into the relative ease this can be done Apple posted an article on a scholarship program that recieved 1311 Diggs and recieved as a result 30,000+ views. So get digging. It may even be worth setting up an email group specifically for this purpose. But being a digital environmentalist (not wanting to be the parasite that kills the host that kills the parasite) we should always look to be interesting and informative otherwise there will be no Digg and we lose a tool!



If you really get into Digg there are tools that allow you to really get to grips with the 'diggosystem' namely Mashable's Dugg Analyzer which gives you some pretty cool stats about Digg put into a graph where you can look at data over time. The tool also shows the frequency data of dugg items based on several variables, taking a top-down approach. Study larger trends based on a particular Digg category, and break it down further into topic, username, story title and even where the original story is hosted. You can see the frequency by day, week or month. The chart options include getting data on the number of stories, average diggs and total diggs. You can also get graphs on submission time and duplicate links, in addition to the other variables listed. For all of you that would like to see, graphically, how Digg items and activity play out, this application is for you. There are not yet options for the comparison of all the multiple variables, but that addition would introduce a new level of digg analytics.

 

The Latest News On Widgets

Newsweek declared 2007 to be “The Year of the Widget” but Lijit backed it up by giving us some metrics to understand the detail. They break down:

• What widgets are popular?


• What is the distribution within widget verticals?

Their spiders manage to look at a lot of blogs but here a shapshot of ten thousand blogs were included. Whilst the tip of a 55million + blogoshphere it is still a very useful insight in to how people are using widgets. The first graph shows the top 50 widgets, ordered by percentage of blogs which contain at least one widget from the provider. We see the classic power-curve (aka long tail) shape, with Google the clear leader.

Next, check out the widget popularity by the type of widget, the “vertical”. We see that bloggers clearly want to know about their readers, even more than they want to monetize those readers. They are also very interested in knowing what other people are linking to them. “Ecosystem” refers to widgets that identify a blog as being part of a group, for cross promotional purposes and such.Within each vertical we can examine the breakdown between the competing widget providers.

Note that each pie graph represents the percentage widget distribution among all widgets from the vertical. Contrast this with the numbers below each chart which show the percentage widget distribution among all blogs which contain a widget from the vertical. This distinction is important because many blogs will use use multiple widgets of the same type. This is especially clear for advertising widgets where 90% of all blogs with ads use AdWords, yet the AdWords widget accounts for only 75% of all advertising widgets. The degree of overlap can be estimated by how far the percentage totals go over 100%. For example, we can see that 47% of Analytics widgets do not appear alone.

Search

snap.com

528

48.26%

Trackbacks

technorati.com

1690

92.00%

Advertising

googlesyndication.com

2431

90.14%

Analytics

google-analytics.com

3264

56.18%

*The numbers for Lijit skew high as our search used Lijit users’ blogs as seeds to begin the crawl (Before we had to throw out most of the blog data as invalid.).

For Widgets Sake!

Widgets or Gadgets as they are known are the more recent addition to Web 2.0's growing evolution. They allow companies both great and small to tap into almost any platform going. Whether that be your dashboard widget for Apple's MAC OS X or Windows Vista, desktop widgets like Yahoo! Widgets Konfabulator, web based iGoogle or Netvibes, mobile widgets, social media widgets for Facebook, Myspace your blog or website. Get the idea! They are every where. Widgetbox’s directory has about 7,000 widgets. And, yes, there is volume. RockYou is pushing 100M/day.

I personally use a number of widgets on my desktop; The London Underground Widget telling me about any delays or lines down; a currency converter and weekly weather forecast. These all serve a tidy and precise purpose making my life easier by providing me with fresh information in an environment I spend most of my day using whilst offering some ‘service related’ branding to the supplier. A true win win situation.

However I am getting frustrated by the growing number of pointless and empty widgets coming into existence. Due to the sheer volume they are firstly cluttering widget directories making it hard to find any that may be of use but more importantly, and from a digital marketer’s perspective are warping the public and industry professionals understanding of their actual purpose. As far as I’m concerned; from a suppliers perspective they should be an extension of your business offering not your business offering and from a users perspective they should give you some form of live information, to a lesser degree allow you to share information, without you having to leave an environment you inhabit.

Facebook is a perfect example of widgetmania gone wrong. Whilst it is arguably responsible for their more recent volume burst and high level of public interest I believe it now to be damaging the very fabric of widgets. Initially I loved Facebook’s strategy of opening up their 'API' for developer’s great and small to innovate and essentially ‘improve’ their product offering. Acting like a global and totally free R & D department.

Whilst there has been widgets with some phenomenal ‘success’ an example being the popular ‘Where I’ve Been’ interactive map, now available to Myspace users, that appears as a world map on a users Facebook profile page displaying the countries they have lived in or visited which they can share with their friends. Very basic really and of little interest let alone interactivity. However at last count it had 2.5 million facebookers using it and was sold to TripAdvisor for a staggering $3million. So ok it’s branding at $1.2 a head, they already have a travel business, I can see the logic. Although I think they forgot, or were misinformed, on one vital detail that these things have, generally, a very short life cycle.

Any regular facebookers will have at least one annoying 'friend' like I do who seems to find every widget so interesting he invites all his friends to use it. 34 in all. No matter how inane he keeps on adding, like one that makes you a facebook vampire infecting others with the vampire widget. Does that make it VIRAL marketing? Needless to say he is no longer a friend and he has left me craving a widget to deal with pointless widgets.

To surmise these kinds of widgets to me are a waste of time and space but it’s also taking important eyes off the core essence of what a widget is or does and has possibly limited what the marketing mechanic could do if worked with best practice. A saving grace is that widgets without an existing business behind them generally don’t make their creators any money and in fact cost them a lot in hosting with their fashionable rise in popularity and related traffic. As an example the iLike widget required the operators to install 100 additional servers within 3 weeks of operation. They had a business proposition but most don’t.

Will this 'widget-wobble' correct itself? Well I believe it will but some ‘businesses’ are going to learn the hard way and at the expense of social media as a whole.

Geek Marketeer

Steve Rubel is a senior marketing strategist with over 15 years experience. He currently serves as senior vice president in Edelman's me2revolution. He aptly described exactly what what it is I do in his Advertising Age column.

Over the last few years an entirely new career path has been emerging existing on all sides of the advertising spectrum at PR/advertising agencies as well as on the client side of the fence. Steve kindly gave birth to the phrase The Geek Marketer to best describe it.

The understanding of how its come about is it's difficult for marketing peeps to keep on top of the daily twists within the digital space because technology has such a monstrous pace. Most marketers whether they be client or agency are stuck with their head in the hectic day to day of their business. So companies are combating this by hiring people who act as, well, a translator between the ultra geeks and the marketers to push the company forward and be at the head of evolving platforms and technology.

These cross-trained specialists have to be fluent at least in the language and theory of both these worlds. For those already deeply engaged in both technology and marketing, and their convergence this undoubtedly your time.

Many Fortune 500 companies are actively seeking to recruit Geek Marketers from within or outside their organizations however these people are hard to come by. This is compelled by CEOs demanding accountability for time and spend ever more chief marketing officers have to press with embedding technology into every facet of their strategy. But marketers and technologists aren't exactly the same people. In most cases you could say they are adverse to one another. Literally speaking different languages. Marketers like GRPs (gross ratings points). Geeks like APIs (application protocol interfaces).

Generally Geek Marketeers are by trade marketers but driven by a hard-core interest in technology and social anthropology curiosity has kept them constantly surveying the digital landscape and its advances and how they are impacting culture and media. With these powerful insights they apply them to marketing and by liaising with brand teams can have a great impact on big business.

These people who I regard as kindred spirits are piloting development, testing and measurement for groundbreaking marketing programs. This can be simple RSS feeds, to the complex community orientated platforms.

Employee Twitter

Some of you may or may not be aware of Twitter. Basically a blog is an online diary where you can put your thoughts for the day for all to see. These have been used by corporations / employers to give a personal face to their company.Twitter however has gone one step further and is essentially a micro-blog where you give updates on your day in 140 characters per posting format. You can do this from your Facebook account, your mobile, AIM Messenger, or from the Twitter site itself. This makes it all very fresh and live compared to a traditional blog. You can also subscribe to someone's 'twitter' and receive updates on their posting's live as they happen again to your own Twitter page, Facebook Acct, mobile or Messenger. It's a really simple tool but because of its ease of use and because you only give short snippets people update them a lot more frequently than a normal blog and it has had massive uptake.



The below article goes into detail about how it's being used at the moment by the wider public. I think there is great potential for this to be used by our clients to break down the barriers between them as the corporation and the public / recruit but secondly to give a live insight into the day to day of various employees roles.Idea: Create an area on the clients site where either a single person or multiple people give Twitter insights into their day from their mobile phone or Messenger, this should be purely professional. The Result: Insight into the day to day of a role/s. How Difficult & Expensive: Twitter is free to use so all we would have to do is create a page on the recruitment site or micro-site where their live twitter is fed into, perhaps with a profile. Thats it. The only necessary component is a person willing to do so.So who has the ground breaking client!

Please follow the link below to learn more....

Inspired by: Social Networks For Short Attention Spans

Online PR Technology Could Help Cyber-Bullying

This is slightly off topic for me but the BBC today reported that schools have been told to take serious measures in combating cyber-bullying. I've provided the link but its not telling us anything new other than the Governments intent which is a start.

The most immediate measure I can think of drawing upon my corporate digital expertise are online PR tools. These tools can measure and monitor as well as combat negative PR within search engines and social media. Social media being where this bullying is happening, Myspace, Bebo and as a result search engines.

We would use this technology it to monitor the negative and positive PR voices relevant to board members, key employees, renegade employees, or general brand terms across the web. The technology would allow us to follow a cycle (See Below):



Not only can you combat the 'negative pupil PR' but you can identify the offenders / key influencers and in the schools as well as media owners case hand out punishment. (See Below)



The only problem is that such technology due to its extensive nature is quite costly and probably out of the reach of most schools or local authorities. If the government is serious the solution is there but are the willing to put their money where their mouth is. I'm sure given the importance of such a measure that a private sponsor/s would be willing to through in a pound or to for all the great PR they themselves would get.





Yahoo also picked up on the story supplying some interesting statistics