Wake Up - Its 2012

The team at Blackberry Australia have learned a very valuable lesson this week. Their Wake Up Australia  teaser campaign generated such a high level of interest and intrigue that they had to out themselves over a week before their big reveal – which is still set for 7 May (countdown clock still ticking down).

It seems they planned three week teaser campaign. Three weeks! That’s, like, a lifetime in the digital world. According to my five minutes on Google - in three weeks:

-          14.7 million people join Facebook

-          1.8 million hours of video are uploaded to YouTube

-          2 billion hours of video are watched on YouTube

-          3.7 billion tweets are tweeted

-          151 million photos are uploaded to Flickr

-          1.7 billion photos are uploaded to Facebook

In the age of social networking news travels fast. Very fast. And we would all do well to remember this when planning campaigns and activations even if they aren’t strictly digital.

Pinteresting

I had my haircut on recently at my local surburban salon. The lovely stylist and I had the usual conversation: what cut would I like? How might it look? Did I have any examples?

This is where it got interesting, she pulled out her ipad, navigated to the salon's pinboard and scrolled through a selection of styles similar to those we had talked about. The extensions too are endless: personalised boards for each client, tracking styles over time? A board of the essential tools and products for each style? How-to boards showing how to execute a particular style?

Simple, effective and so easy.

Like other social media darlings Pinterest has shown phenomenal growth - 656% growth in NZ visitors from May 11 - Feb 12 according to Comscore. So of course brands need time to establish what role it may play some are further along - check out this great example by Kotex. In the meantime we should at least be providing our consumers with good quality images to pin.

If my local salon can do it - our brands can too.

Does social connectivity equal influence?

Last night I had the privilege of seeing @danielberkal present Project Butterfly – a study into the “effect learning about how sociable people interact in the real world has on the online space”. The purpose of this study is to help brands - and the agencies that work for them - understand “how highly sociable people work” and how “this knowledge can be used to build online social communities that act more naturally”.

All interesting stuff. I’m no market researcher, but the way this study has been conducted is groundbreaking and worthy of every award won to date.

My reason for being there was to understand the connection between sociability and influence, in particular:

-          Does real world influence translate to the digital world; and

-          Are those who are socially connected online, influential?

While the study wasn’t designed to answer these questions, it did offer some interesting and applicable insights.

In the real world Social Butterflies are those who can bend social conventions, but in a good way. They are experts at initiating friendships, but also at maintaining them. They’re interesting, interested and genuinely curious about everyone and everything.

We all know one: they’re the organizer, the one who keeps in touch even just to say Hi. They’re resourceful and will hook you up with anything you need. And they’re happiest when everyone around them is having a good time.

But are they influential? My guess is yes based on three findings from the study: Social Butterflies are early adopters, decisive and the kind of people you turn to for advice.

What they are not is digitally prolific. Their online presence is likely to be built around maintaining one-on-one connections rather than broadcasting clever one-liners to the world, making it near on impossible for brands to identify them using standard ‘connectedness’ metrics. And even if we could identify them, it seems unlikely they would use digital tools to exert their influence.

Instead brands have tended to consider those who are socially connected and highly vocal in the digital world as ‘influential’. Not anymore. According to this study these ‘hyperconnected’ people are delusional self-promoters who need external validation to make themselves whole. They crave attention and use the internet to overcome their social awkwardness.

While they initiate lots of connections, they have no interest in maintaining them. It’s a one way conversation – usually about themselves – which their audience soon loses interest in.

But are they influential? For me the jury is still out.

If the number of people losing interest is less than the number of new connections being made then surely they could maintain their influence – if indeed they had any in the first place.

And if I buy into their online persona by liking or following them because what they offer is interesting, entertaining or useful to me, then do I care who they really are IRL?

Heck, there are many celebrities out there with a million plus followers who don’t even write their own tweets so maybe it’s not just the highly connected that are living a fantasy life online….

So many unanswered questions, but as someone who works with brands seeking to influence in the digital space there were some definite learnings:

-          True influence is about quality and frequency, not quantity

-          Getting someone to tweet or post a status update on your behalf is not the same as influencing.

-          Brands who implement ‘influencer programs’ need to look beyond the digital world.

The Butterfly project is an utterly fascinating body of work, and I would encourage anyone who has the opportunity see this presented in person to grab it with both hands. Thank you @danielberkal for a truly thought-provoking evening.

Those In Glass Houses…

Google have recently revealed they are working on augmented reality glasses, which will beam smartphone-like features straight to your retinas as you go about your day. Check out the cheesy teaser video

There is predictable excitement from the techosphere as well as a healthy skepticism from the rest of the world. This opinion piece from the Guardian sums it up nicely.

I tend to agree with the skeptics. Google already know a lot about you, but this takes it to a whole new level; where, in an inversion of the
Orwellian nightmare, Big Brother is not just watching you – he is controlling what you watch.

Tin-foil hats at the ready!

Five things I learned at Ad Tech Sydney

This year I thought AdTech Sydney was good. Not brilliant. Just good. Good because the things I heard there confirmed my thinking – something which is important when you are working in a small and isolated market like New Zealand. And good because organisations seem to have gotten over themselves and are happy to share what they are up to in the social space – the good, the bad and the downright ugly.

So here goes - the five key learnings I took from Ad Tech were:

1.       Brand stories need to be cohesive even when fragmented:  according to Jeff Julian from www.monkeysac.com your consumers won’t see your campaign in its entirety, or – for that matter – as a story at all. They’ll dip in and out piecing the story together based on their own media touchpoints and social connections and most likely in a different order from that intended by the creative or media agency.

Making sure you have the right creative assets for each channel is critical. It never was acceptable to treat your TVC as a piece of video content, or cut up your magazine ads to create an online banner, but in today’s social environment it’s unforgiveable.  

Ensuring each channel stays true to the creative vision will enable your message to be received when consumed in a fragmented way. And if you do need channel selection take priority over creative vision ensure you understand why this decision is being made.

2.       When it comes to Social Media, timing is everything: Andreas Panayi of FTI Consulting (www.fticonsulting.com) presented a study of how 144 businesses operate in the social space. While 83% of businesses had social policy in place only 56% had a plan in place to manage issues breaking or escalating in the social space.

Scary – especially given 38% of social media crisis arise due to poor brand experiences, influencer relations, community censorship or just a plain and simple failure to respond – things that are completely within the brands control.

If you are managing a social presence, then ensure you have license to respond quickly. With 38% of crisis breaking on either Twitter or Facebook – even the slightest delay can be the difference between resolution and escalation. Which brings me to the next thing I learned…   

3.       The jury is still out on who manages social media: the answer to this is “it depends”. Speaker Ben Kimber (@benkimber) felt strongly that all social media activity should be managed in house – particularly if there was customer service involved. Yeah – like that’s never been outsourced before.

To me the more decisive factor is resource. If you need to be in the social space but can’t resource this internally, then outsource you must.

And what about brands that are more about experience than customer service? Coke, Lynx, Skittles to name just a few. I don’t know for sure, but I’d be willing to bet that their agencies are pretty heavily involved in their social presence.

4.       Socially enable everything: put as much focus on creating discoverable content as you do on finding ways to deliver content. How the content is found and consumed is what gives it power. Information sent – and so endorsed – by a friend, or discovered yourself through search, will always have more credibility than something you see in an ad – even if it is the same content.

Rob Norman (@robnorman) of http://www.groupm.com/ also made the point that the conversion rates from reach to engagement are so low that it’s absolutely critical for brands to work harder at turning engagement into advocacy.

5.       Life’s a game, play it: Create a game with a sense of purpose and before you know it you’ll have your customers doing exactly what you want them to do – and enjoying the experience to boot. They don’t have to be ‘gamers’ to take part - a good game can appeal to even the most conservative audience. An example of this is www.mint.com – gamifying your finances – or “Epic Win” (http://www.rexbox.co.uk/epicwin/) which turns your everyday to do list into a game.

According to @chriserb from www.easports.com, get it right and the rewards for your business are significant – increased engagement and loyalty and a lower propensity to shop around.

Looking through my notes, this list could have been so much longer – so stay tuned for more from AdTech over the coming weeks.

O For Awesome

Time for some personal hand wringing about NZ on line news, specifically nzherald.co.nz. I feel compelled to add at this point the following is only because I care. As a former employee who had a very positive experience working there, a firm believer of the importance of a quality fourth estate in a healthy democracy blah blah, that this brand is the best chance we have of a quality news site in the NZ market and, a little more selfishly, to provide a quality and engaging space for me to clutter with advertising.

While it’s by no means every day, I see blunders on the home page that make me wish the journo’s and / or sub editors would just slow down. Take a breath. Pause and maybe even spellcheck to avoid headlines with the word (um, word?) ‘Inconscious’ in them (had to chuckle after emailing the screen shot of the home page to a contact at the nzherald to ask ‘what is wrong with this picture?’ to have them point to another error I hadn’t noticed in another story).

Or in some cases taking their time to add their own headline to fit the brand and audience, instead of just using whatever pre packaged headline news agencies supply them with. I suspect this was the case with the headline ‘Jailed! Spot-Fixing Pakistan Cricketers Sent To Slammer’. An exclamation mark and the word ‘slammer’ instead of prison? Good lord. Makes me think I’ve stumbled onto Stuff or The Daily Mail. Eww. I’ll leave my views on the (over?) use of their Breaking News bar for results of horse races or test cricketers reaching centuries and other quality control concerns for another post.

All this leaves me with unanswered questions. Is the immediacy of on line degrading nzherald as a product in their haste to publish? Are these errors and tabloid tactics symptomatic of the difficult transition between the old cash cow of newsprint to moving news on line? Has David Tua taken up a role in the nzherald news room?

The Bus Stop Zumba

For the past three years Microsofts Kinect gaming devices have been gaining a strong foothold in New Zealand lounges, bringing a new level of interaction to gaming, further empowering teenage boys to blow the heads off poor saps from war torn middle eastern countries and helping the gym shy perfect their Zumba routines. But now these devices are on the move out of the lounge and coming to a bus stop or a mall near you.

While there are plenty of excellent examples of ambient and out of home executions, the integration of Kinect technology is providing a digital element to add a further layer to the all important engagement with messaging, like this example for awareness of Autism in children for Autism Speaks.

‘Cool, whatever – a natural evolution’ I hear you say. Sure, fair enough.

But there are some executions appearing that allow social media to feed into these installations, including this example from Stockholm that attempts to soften the aesthetic impact of a construction site. The result is an extension of the initial out of home experience into your social media world or vice versa, continuing the trend of the lines between digital and traditonal media being blurred.