Posts filed under 'digital'
Recession 2.0
Giles Powdrill writes:
“A powerful global conversation has begun. Through the Internet, people are discovering and inventing new ways to share relevant knowledge with blinding speed. As a direct result, markets are getting smarter-and getting smarter faster than most companies.” So said the Cluetrain Manifesto almost exactly a decade ago. The prescience of the work lay in the authors’ clear understanding of the connective potential of the web and the shift in power from companies to individuals which would accompany its growth.
However, despite witnessing this shift in power, the majority of organisations still haven’t adapted their business practices to embrace the internet. They are not making use of the networks, the empowerment or the easy conversation and collaboration made possible through the social media technologies broadly described as ‘Web 2.0′ to help create new types of relationships with their customers. For many, the internet is still just another channel.
But maybe this is beginning to change: perhaps the current recession, the first of the truly digital age, will be looked back upon as being the spur to growth of new types of online commerce. We are already witnessing the growing success of online shopping, price comparison websites and digital advertising in the downturn, but these are only first steps – doing old things in a new way. The real challenge is about greater engagement; working with and for consumers in an open way. It is about companies demonstrating that they know enough about customers and their behaviours to deliver a benefit. Combining transparency with networked data and new technological infrastructure can create situations where all gain, customers and companies alike, but if companies don’t work out how to use these new networks, they may find themselves bypassed as people decide to do it for themselves instead.
A good example of a company getting it right is Zopa, the social lending site set up by banking professionals on which people lend directly to borrowers online. Borrowers bid for funds, and lenders choose whether to respond. Lenders get good returns, and borrowers get lower cost loans. Zopa makes its margin by charging both parties a fee. Default rates are low and lenders can see their borrowers and follow the progress of the their loan. Zopa has disintermediated the banking business by adding social networking and a human touch. In terms of Recession 2.0 it’s a sign of the times. As the Cluetrain Manifesto said: markets are conversations.
The picture, ‘the garden of Zopa’, is from a digital campaign by the social lending site to demonstrate the benefits of personal involvement and mutual help.
1 comment 26 March 2009
The long and the short
Tom Ding writes:
I was fortunate enough to attend two thought-provoking, yet decidedly different events recenty: a four-day WPP training course and a conference on the Labour Party and Web2.0. Strikingly, the two were connected in quoting of Roy Amara:
“We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.”
When Rob Norman, the CEO of WPP-owned GroupM Interaction, used the quote, he was talking about the difficulty media and advertising companies have in integrating the internet into the core of their business. Since this sentiment could equally be applied to British political parties, and that a vast amount has been written about the use of new media in the recent US election, it was not surprising that ‘Obama’ was one of the most frequently used words at Labour2.0. But even Obama couldn’t out-perform ‘Twitter‘, perhaps a perfect example of overemphasising the short-term.
For much of the event, people were making the right noises: there was talk of ‘relationship management’; of technology as a means not an end; and of the importance of openness, transparency and authenticity. However, when Stella Creasy, an impressive parliamentary party candidate in Walthamstow, reached the podium, the contrast between talk and action was profound. She likened spending time online mudslinging to the old political tactic of ‘talking to your opponents just so they cannot talk to anybody else’ and pointed instead to her weekly email to 2,000 local constituents. Her most potent insight, and one many brands could learn from, was that in these emails she showed people what she was like, rather than telling them.
At the WPP event, Chris Hirst, the Managing Director of Grey London, talked about leadership. Two lessons stood out: that conveying urgency is key to actually getting things done; and that in business ‘culture is the behaviour of the management’. Of the dozens of people who spoke at Labour2.0, it seemed that only three really understood this: Stella Creasy, Derek Draper from Labourlist and Oliver Rickman from Google.
Rickman argued that we now live in a world of ‘fast vs slow’, where we are ‘always in beta’, where doing something is almost always better than doing nothing. But most organisations lag far behind in this fast-slow world, reduced to mimicry, Google and Obama just dots on the horizon. On this video evidence though, the Labour party should be hopeful: it seems that John Prescott has at least broken into a technological jog. Better still, and rarer, is the impression that he really does understand why he is running.
Add comment 9 March 2009
Trusting Twitter
Oliver Wright writes:
The noise of Twitter has reached a crescendo over the past couple of months, partly because of its role in sharing and even breaking news. The fact that it’s been used for this says something about the gaps in conventional forms of media.
One of the first news events that caught the attention of ‘tweeters’ was the earthquake in Sichuan in May last year, where people across China started using various blogging services – including Twitter – to tell friends and family that they were safe. A technology blogger, Robert Scoble, reported news about the earthquake ahead of the US Geological Survey (which tracks earthquakes in real time) simply from tweets he received from his followers in China.
Similarly (but with greater media coverage) with the Mumbai terrorist attacks, where tweeters effectively covered the event live, mashing up news from sources on the ground via tweeters and other agencies as new stories emerged. Doubts about the accuracy of these versions of events eventually led the Mumbai authorities to call for tweeters to stop spreading the news – a call that was, predictably, ignored. The viral nature of the information being spread by Twitter was captured, perhaps chillingly, by one user, “naomieve”, who wrote:
Mumbai is not a city under attack as much as it is a social media experiment in action.
The ‘social media experiment’ has continued with the Obama inauguration, the Hudson plane crash, and cyclist Lance Armstrong’s stolen bike (found) all receiving much publicity.
It was in the 1960s that the cultural analyst Marshall McLuhan argued that electronic media was a series of extensions to the human body which would create an ‘electronic interdependence’. As James Harkin observed recently in The Times,
The impact of this electronic information loop coursing through all our veins, McLuhan thought, could only enhance our ability to understand one another. It would, he felt sure, precipitate the rise of a “global village” and a new era of greater responsibility and understanding.
Instead, the cost of this electronic interdependence is a media landscape which is more fragmented than ever. Shared social experiences such as these are reduced to cultural nostalgia. But in an age where so much media, and politics, is carefully packaged, what Twitter – and media cousins such as the text message – can do is to reclaim a sense of immediacy, and to increase our sense of shared engagement in the events which are happening around us. Maybe McLuhan will have the last laugh after all.
The graphic is courtesy of Carrot Blog – on the addictive nature of Twitter.
Add comment 4 March 2009
Impossible polaroids
Tom Ding writes:
“One day I will tire of digital photography
and ‘get back to basics.’
While my pictures will not be
easy to share with friends and family
[via popular photo sharing websites]
If a photo is unsharable,
does that make it more personal,
therefore
more meaningful to me?”
(Carles, Hipster Runoff)
Now that everyone and their mum has a super-compact, many mega-pixel camera in their bag (and another on their phone), some have begun to miss the bits of photography that they have left behind. The lomography movement has been around for a while now, long enough to spawn satirical blog post poetry and iphone imitations anyway, but the impossible project feels more substantial. And more interesting.
In case you hadn’t heard, almost a year ago Polaroid announced that due to a lack of demand, they were to cease production of the film used in their cameras; the countdown to the final time when someone would truly “shake it like a polaroid picture” had started. Most enthusiasts were left with no option but to pay over the odds on ebay for the last scraps of the stuff, but a few have embarked on something altogether more ambitious: ‘the impossible project’.
Inspired by the original inventor Edwin Land (“Don’t undertake a project unless it is manifestly important and nearly impossible”), a team of twelve amateur experts have acquired the equipment from one of the old factories. They are determined that by 2010 they will have invented a new type of film, compatible with the original cameras, but that uses components that are still in production. On the website a new clock is ticking (29,333,530 seconds at the time of writing); if they manage it, and if Russell Davies is right when he says that this is going to be a year for ‘real, post-digital things’, then it may have been a manifestly good idea.
The photograph, from The Impossible Project website, is of the former Polaroid film factory.
Add comment 29 January 2009
The world in your pocket
Tom Ding writes:
When I discovered last week that my brand new phone gives me unlimited Google Maps on-the-go, I had one of those ‘The Future Has Arrived’ moments, able to locate the nearest pubs and bus stops at a glance. Which got me to thinking about the different functions of a map, and how cleverly Google has partitioned them. You see, Google Maps is useful indeed: It can be a Sat Nav in your pocket or a route-finder on your PC and it has an interface perfectly suited for such quick tasks.
Perhaps though, we should regard it as the latest evolution of the 1920s ‘wrist-mounted, wind-up Sat-Nav’ shown in the picture at the top of this post. Google Maps gives you no context. It is great, so long as you know exactly where you want to go to. It is a road map, not an atlas, and definitely not a globe.
And this is where Google Earth comes in. Here, exactly the same data has been used for something completely different, and this time it is all about looking, rather than finding. Instead of the watch, I think of Google Earth as being a modern equivalent of the Gallery of Maps in the Vatican- somewhere that you go when you cannot see a place first-hand, somewhere that you could easily lose a few hours and somewhere that not enough people know about.
And Google Earth is getting better. We are now all free, in a Wikipedia-esque spirit of collaboration, to hack the program, at least a little bit, and create our own ‘layers’ dedicated to whatever topic we choose. Just this week, someone has published a layer called “Crisis in Darfur“. There is a layer of “Lighthouses in New Zealand” and another of Frank Gehry buildings. With all of this within a couple of clicks reach, I can’t help but feel like Google is biding their time here- waiting for their user-generated library to reach a critical mass before they tell the world about it.
By then, it will not just be an old fashioned globe, but an encyclopedia inside a globe. We will be able to visually explore almost any subject by geography, by topic and by time. And then, well, then the future really will have arrived.
1 comment 5 November 2008
Brand impressions
From Brand Tags
Giles Powdrill writes:
The new media and marketing strategist Noah Brier has recently launched a simple, but fascinating website, brandtags. Its premise is “that a brand exists entirely in people’s heads. Therefore, whatever it is they say a brand is, is what it is.” Users of the site are presented with logos from different companies and invited to type in the first thing that comes into their head. The results are then displayed as a cloud, where the relative size of the words reflects the number of times it has been typed in.
Whilst ostensibly a bit of fun, the results are both revealing and potentially unnerving for brand owners who have spent time, money and effort to convey a certain set of attributes, only to then see their brands assessed in such a raw (and realistic?) fashion.
The site is a great example of the sort of visual and engaging research application which will surely become more commonplace as we enter the next phase of web development. It is also a long way from the traditional questionnaire typically used to measure brand awareness and perceptions and a useful reminder that methodologies will evolve just as fast a brands do.
The picture at the top of the post is a selection from the brand tags generated in response to the ‘International Olympic Committee’. There are also some more sympathetic responses in the full list.
1 comment 17 July 2008
Social networking for fun and profit
Pen Stuart writes:
The irresistible rise of social networking has long had media types trying to calculate the best ways to make some money from them. But marketers are increasingly finding that these routes work best when brands provide a service rather than just push their message, creating what’s become known as ‘branded utility’. There are recent examples. The Beef and Lamb Sector Company, EBLEX Ltd, has launched a Facebook application, “Beefy & Lamby’s Summer BBQ”, featuring – from the TV campaign – the sometime England cricketers Ian Botham and Allan Lamb to help people plan their summer barbeques. Leaving aside the question of whether 50-something cricketers are the best match for the somewhat younger Facebook crowd, it does give users a useful service that encourages consumption of their product and also raises brand awareness, even if it seems to be building its audience slowly (26 visitors on the day this post was written). The apparent selflessness of this service can help build brand loyalty in times when ravenous profiteering is increasingly frowned upon.
MakeTheTea.com, created by Cravendale, takes this one step further, devoting a whole site and social network to their utility. This allows office workers to input their tea (and coffee) preferences and link up with their colleagues. The site randomly selects one person to make the round, overcoming the reluctance of any individual to ask around and get stuck with the task. The site seems to be flourishing, with almost 70,000 brews made since its April launch
But there are still questions about the future of such ventures – they have the feel of short-term awareness campaigns which seem certain to be pulled in due course. Yet for low-maintenance promotion such as this, the best approach may be different, especially as these types of internet communities are endlessly discovered anew by different groups, each time creating waves of publicity through blogging and social network invites. In the world of social networking the fundamental assumptions of ‘offline’ publicity may need an overhaul. Or at least, as marketers like to say, more research may be required.
Add comment 4 July 2008
The commoditisation of sexual relationships
The image is a plot of the sexual relationships of students at Jefferson High School occurring within the preceding 6 months
Trevor Harvey writes:
Over the past few years, society has moved stealthily from viewing sex as a commodity, to the commoditisation of sexual relationships – the ‘free availability’ of the relationship surrounding and driven by sex.
The development of technology has facilitated easier sexual relationships, including changes in pornography and sexual material. Top Ten Reviews reported in 2006 that 43% of internet users viewed porn, and 35% of all downloads were porn, while porn sales themselves have been dropping rapidly over the past few years. Technology means that anyone with a mobile camera can now be a porn star or producer.
In fact, technology has touched all aspects of sexual relationships – from user-generated content sites such as XTube, PornoTube and Gaydar, to the public spat between Jimmy Wales (Wikipedia co-founder) and Rachel Marsden (the end of whose sexual relationship was played out in Wikipedia and eBay), to the re-interpretation of pre-arranged marriages through online sites where daughters are promoted by the parents. MMOEGs (Massively Multiplayer Online Erotic Games), which provide a safe haven for people to have sex virtually, are showing a rise in numbers – showing perhaps that while sexual relationships are increasingly treated as commodities, we’re still concerned about their safety.
And for good reason. The effects on health and well-being are alarming. A 2007 BMC Public Health study showed that a third of 16 to 35-year-old men and nearly a quarter of women questioned said they drank to increase their chance of sex. HIV infection rates rose sharply (by 48%) in the US between ’05 and ’06, according to the US Center for Disease Control, and also increased (less dramatically) in Western and Central Europe in 2007, despite years of public health and education campaigns. Other disease infection rates are as alarming: the Independent Advisory Group on Sexual Health and HIV reported that sexually transmitted infection rates have risen rapidly over the past 12 years, with incidences of Chlamydia and HIV both tripling, gonorrhoea doubling, and syphilis increasing by twenty times.
There have also been disturbing changes in the sexual relationships of children and young adults. UNICEF reported last year that more children in the UK have had sexual intercourse by the age of 15 than in any other country. UK Government figures show that the UK has the highest teenage pregnancy rates in Western Europe, while the sexual health of young adults in the UK has deteriorated over the last two years. In the US, the Federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported last year that one in four teenage girls has a sexually transmitted disease. Meanwhile, by way of further evidence that the commoditisation of sexual relationships is affecting teenagers and young people, media reports say that the number of teenage girls having breast implants have more than doubled in the past year in both Britain and the US.
Sex is a powerful motivator in human behaviour and society and when it comes to analysing trends we must understand it as a significant driver of change. But as a rule sexual relationships are something we prefer not to think about in this context. If we are to seek a rounded view of the behaviour of consumers, we need to consider the increasingly apparent commoditisation of sexual relationships, which is starting to raise moral issues for brands, and for products and services, as well as for society.
Add comment 1 July 2008
