THINKblog

Digital megatrends - Think BIG

Great article in iMedia Connection today by Adam Kleinberg points out five marketing megatrends that you can't ignore. http://bit.ly/QCFVc

"Our society is undergoing massive fundamental transitions. Learn how these forward-thinking brands seized the underlying marketing opportunities."

1. Mass collaboration is powering the new economy
2. Constant connectivity in an on-demand world
3. Globalization: Making the world a smaller place
4. Pervasive distrust in big corporations (example: Ally Bank commercial on YouTube)
   
5. A global sense of urgency to fix the problems of a modern world

Presenting from the cloud, part two

I'm waiting for a plane to take off, and get into a conversation with the guy next to me.  He asks what I do, and when I explain that I run the strategy group at a digital agency, he wants to know what we've done and how we do it.

Robert v1.0 answer: I tell him what we do, ask for a card, tell him I'll send him samples or point him at a links list

Robert v2.0 answer: I whip out my iPhone, launch Soonr, and flip through a quick capabilities presentation, including creative samples, all served from the cloud.

How does it work?

• I signed up for Soonr, and got several other client-facing execs in the agency to do the same thing
• I created a folder for iPhone creds decks, and pointed it at Soonr for cloud backups
• I logged into my Soonr account and shared the file with my coworkers on the service
• I downloaded the Soonr app to my iPhone
• I optimized a version of our deck for the small screen, punching up font sizes and removing things like our tiny footer

That's it. Now, when I change the deck on my hard drive, it synchs with Soonr via the cloud and is available on my phone anywhere I have a connection. (Hard to do on a plane after takeoff right now, but wireless is increasingly available on planes, so that will be changing, and fast.

And with one of these, I could present to a crowd from the iPhone... is this a great world or what?

Are you presenting from the cloud? Let me know.

Presenting from the cloud, part one

 Recently we participated in a review where it was important to demonstrate to the prospect that we understood their highly digitally engaged target audience, and that we as an agency were very "digital" as well. We tailored our presentation to demonstrate both these points, chucking PowerPoint overboard along the way.

Here's a run-down of how we ran the presentation:

• Core slides (not many) ran off a presentation in Google Docs
• Ran a video with our account planner talking about research highlights from Vimeo
• The planner presented some theme boards about audience insights, which were built in Scrapblog
• Clicked over to Coroflot for our some case study creative
• Created comic-book illustrations of our clients and presented client references from Comiqs

Seem like a stunt? Maybe so. But when we said to the client

"We're not showing you anything from our local computer.

Everything you are seeing was created using tools your audience could seek out and try on the web."

The reaction was... great. Un-tethering the presentation physically helped our clients un-tether themselves from their expectations of what a presentation was supposed to be.

Of course, we had a backup plan - we downloaded the Google Docs presentation and all the graphical assets, and could have presented them from the laptop if we needed to. And don't forget to make sure the client has live internet access in the room!

Let me know about your adventures presenting from the cloud.

The Relevance of Email in a Social Networking Age

Email is losing it's relevance in an ever more connected world of social networking for maintaining personal realtionships. This is not to say that email is now or may ever be irrelevant in a buisiness setting. For business, the organizational and long term storage of communications, documents, and various forms of work-product is no where close to declining. But the things we used to use email for in our personal lives such as keeping in touch with friends and family both near and far is much easier and more immediate with the use of tools such as Instant Messaging, MySpace, Twitter, Facebook, and oh so many others.

People are freeing themselves from the constraints of the one-way-at-a-time nature of email communications with these social contacts. Embracing the immediacy and power of social networking allows them to be more connected to more contacts simultaneously. They no longer need to send out emails to a dozen or so friends when they want to announce a party or even an informal gathering after a long week of work. Now they simply set their Facebook status, or tweet out a brief thought and see who jumps on board.

Additionally the social networking sites, especially sites like Facebook, allow you to share not only updates about your life or what you're currently up to, but they let you post and share photographs, link to your collection of YouTube videos, point out stories in the news, find old friends and acquaintances with whom we've lost touch over the years, and so much more. Again, this saves us the tedium of adding 50 addresses to an email just to share pictures of the baby's first birthday party with distant family. And you don't run the risk of alienating Aunt Edna because you forgot to include her when you emailed out those pictures in the first place. All you have to do is make sure Aunt Edna is your friend on your social network of choice and she can see anything and everything you want to share.

Individuals are basically discovering what broadcast media has known for years. It's far simpler and cheaper to send out a mass message and let those who are interested consume it and those who are not ignore it, than it is to try to maintain dozens, hundreds or even thousands of one-to-one relationships. Networks such as Twitter and Facebook have built in measurement capabilities and the numbers have meaning and names and faces to go along with them. How many followers do we have on Twitter? How many friends do we have on MySpace or Facebook or Friendster? These numbers are a direct correlation to how many people we reach. And those people aren't faceless numbers in most cases (followers of celebrities or brands on Twitter, or in many cases, friends lists for celebrities and brands on the big social networks are a clear exception). They are real people in the real world.  In effect, we are each becoming our own little broadcast network. People choose whether or not to "tune in" to our lives. When they do tune in, we can provide a variety of content types from simple text to audio and video.

For marketers, the ever growing relevance of the social networks has become more important than building large lists of verified email addresses. The CANN Spam Act may have been designed to help prevent the inordinate amount of unsolicited email we all receive on a daily basis, but it hasn't really been effective in slowing the flow of bad email. Consumers in droves are instead abandoning email as their primary form of online communication in favor of much more spam-free mediums. After all, on Twitter, we only follow those we're interested in. If someone we're following turns into a fountain of spam, we simply stop following them. On Facebook, with the right settings, only those we choose to allow can communicate with us or see our posted messages/photos/videos/articles/etc. The choice based or closed nature of these networks is an excellent firewall against spam and unwanted messaging. The trick for marketers trying to penetrate and engage these audiences is to either become or gain the eyes and ears of those who have the largest followings or the most friends and then leverage them as a channel for their marketing messages.

Infosnack: latest data on Twitterverse

The folks at Pew Internet have profiled Twitter users vs. Internet users who don't. (They do exist, trust me. Easy for the digerati to forget when you are immersed in the medium.)

We've packaged them visually for convenient consumption and snuggled the presentation into our slidespace at Slideshare ... bottom line is, Twitter users have a higher degree of affinity for mobile, wireless and social connection than your average online adult. Check out the slide on news consumption...

#socialbowl: Twitter tactics

While the great mass of digital commentators seem to have gravitated to simply reviewing Super Bowl ads this year (more on this later this week), we took a different tack, posting and asking for comments on advertisers web, social and mobile tie-ins. (We used hashtags #digitalbowl, #socialbowl and #mobilebowl.) We got a few contributors but ended up doing most of the posting ourselves... hope to build on it next year!

One thing we noted was Twitter participation among advertisers. We found four brands actively participating: HR Block, Sobe, Pepsi and E-Trade.

@hrblock helped us find the HR Block mobile site when we struggled with it, and offered to find out more information about device re-directs when one of our phones didn't pick up their site correctly. (Would have been better if hrblock actually followed through.

@sobeworld jumped in when we wondered where to get the 3D glasses, since the link referenced on their promo page didn't exist on the homepage it pointed to. Sobeworld pointed out that the promo had just ended, which we pointed out was probably accurate but possibly out of touch with the expectations of consumers sitting around gettting ready to watch the game. Bowled over by our impressive display of logic, sobeworld responded "noted"

What got a little weird was when sobeworld then switched into hungry lizard mode for the game - somewhat of a disconnect in voice and tone. When brands have a character tweeting, should they have a separate identity to just do basic customer service stuff? OR do the service stuff in the personality of the character... either way, but mix and match probably not the best approach.

@etradebaby kept up the tone of the campaign with a running commentary on the game and tweeted out  a link to some baby outtakes, too. Points for consistency. The baby caught onto the #superbowlads hashtag about halfway through the game. Nice catchup, but shouldn't you have known - even at your age?

@pepsuber also kept up the tone with inane tweets that featured a lot of "pepsi pepsi pepsi" messaging.

The verdict: No clear winners.  Good to see brands augmenting the ad conversation with Twitter, but lots of inconsistency and lack of ability for the tweeters to add value (beyond the E-Trade video extras) make this seem like exploratory efforts, not full-blown campaign elements.

Did we miss anyone? Let us know at #socialbowl.com

iPhone development

A Social Vice Versa

Video has been crashing into and becoming essential on the social web for sometime; vice versa, the social  web is making its way deeper into web video.

Check out Viddler which allows embedding of comments into the time bar of videos, the comments then pop-up as the video plays. It's an open and free platform, even better.

Everyone needs no babysitter

I am halfway through Clay Shirky’s book “Here Comes Everyone.”  The treatise has many great insights into the social front of the ongoing digital revolution. 

Here are the top three points from the first half of the book, as well as my questions that we as marketers must be asking in regards to each:

1. Massive amounts of energy previously spent on passive media consumption are now being redirected into social networks and digital spaces such as Wikipedia. *
Question: Does your organization understand the relevant ways and places this is happening?
This is not about discussion boards or CEO blogs, rather it’s about where your customers are now in charge and where they will take control next and how you must change and prepare.

2. True democratization of expression and communication, nearly unparalleled in history even by tectonic shifts such as movable type, are taking place.
Question: Are you playing it too close to the vest?
Newspapers did, and look where they are today. How can you let go and be a part of the wave? If you don’t, it is very likely your brand/cause will drown.

3. Everyone needs no babysitter.
Question: Are we looking at our organizations and markets as managers or as facilitators?
Yes we must advertise and we must drive revenue, etc.; however, to excel I believe it’s an imperative of our roles to provide platforms, environments, and tools for our organizations and markets to collaborate together. If we don’t, they will go elsewhere.

* I cheated on this one a bit, this is actually from a speech Clay gave recently and not from the first half of the book (although they are related and I am expecting to see this at least implicitly before the volume’s end). You can find this video here, its well worth the few minutes.

‘Tis the season to shop with mobile apps

This holiday season brings a host of new options for mobile commerce, making holiday shopping a little less stressful — even if you wait until the last minute.

Retail powerhouse Amazon is offering a free iPhone application that, in addition to accessing and purchasing products from a store, allows you to photograph the item. If it is sold on Amazon, you’ll receive an email with a link to buy the product. The service, called Amazon Remember, takes the posted pictures to a cloud where real people review them and match the pictures with products. The inclusion of real people into the process may greatly reduce the amount of errors that occur in other barcode scanning applications. While Amazon already offers an iPhone-optimized web site, this mobile application is slicker, faster and it provides more product information on one screen.

For Blackberry users, mobile shopping is provided by Digby — a company that allows retailers to quickly set up stores accessible to the more than 250 million Blackberry users. To make it even more enticing, Digby claims most purchases can be made in under 30 seconds. Now, the platform is being adopted by retailers to go beyond simple access to products. For example, it offers an SMS alert feature that sends special offers and gift ideas for those hard-to-shop for people.

Though still small in terms of market penetration, the new G1, running on the Android platform, is already creating a stir. ShopSavvy, developed by the company Big in Japan, allows users to scan barcodes and compare prices while shopping in a store. The application also provides links to online retailers as well as pricing from stores nearby based on GPS readings. The application won first prize at the Android Developer Challenge and was a featured application when T-Mobile launched the phone in the US and UK — it was downloaded over 10,000 times the day the Android Marketplace opened.

Unfortunately, not everyone is happy with a consumer’s ability to price check in stores. One user reported two experiences using ShopSavvy. The first happened when he looked up a product price and then drove to the nearest Sam's Club to buy the product. When he arrived, the price in the store was higher than reported. The consumer used the application to show a manager the difference. While the manager decided to match the price, he was confused by a consumer’s ability to access such information. Later that day, things got worse at Target. While scanning a product, the consuer was approached by an employee and told that barcode scanning was against Target's shopping policy. The consumer contacted Big in Japan, who followed up with Target only to find that the company has no stated policy against in-store barcode scanning.

As always, new technologies lead to new behaviors that can impact how business is done. And since it’s the season to shop, why not try out a new way of checking off your gift list? You may just find yourself saving time and money.