Texting Is So Last Year

A weird side effect of our fast accelerating culture of technology is the development of “micro-generations”, where people two or three years apart are having completely different experiences with technology. This observation can have a profound effect for youth marketers and their campaign targeting. Do you believe this observation is news or have micro-generations always been a part of being a kid?

My 11-year-old son, like all 11-year-old sons, thinks his Dad is incredibly, risibly out-of-touch. He mocks me for using words like "video" when I mean "DVD", for preferring CDs to free downloads, for watching TV on the television instead of on the laptop, and for wearing my shirt with one top button undone when obviously it should be two.

But what the poor boy doesn't yet realise is that the last laugh will be on me. Whereas it took me three decades to become the embarrassing fuddy-duddy I am now, he and his nine-year-old sister are going to be past their best in less than 10 years. Such is the weird side-effect of our fast-accelerating technology: you're past it by the time you hit 20.

This phenomenon of the micro-generation gap – where 16 year-olds sneer at 19 year-olds for being oh-so-square, Daddy-O – came to light six months ago, in a widely publicised report written by a teenager on work experience at Morgan Stanley. Teenagers, revealed Matthew Robson (then 15), in a report named How Teenagers Consume Media, use their laptops as radios (streaming music from, say, Last FM so as to avoid adverts and DJ prattle), get round high cinema prices by watching pirated DVDs, prefer Facebook to Bebo, and never use Twitter, which they consider a hobby for old people like Stephen Fry.

The last two points came as an especial surprise to us oldsters, who imagined that teenagers Tweeted at least as regularly as we did, and that Facebook was more of a student-age thing while people of Robson's age preferred MySpace. But we can hardly be blamed for failing to keep up with each tiny micro-trend: not when a new one seems to turn up every couple of years.

"People two, three or four years apart are having completely different experiences of technology," Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Research Center's Internet and American Life Project told The New York Times last week. "College students scratch their heads at what their high school siblings are doing, and they scratch their heads at their younger siblings. It has sped up generational differences."

I've noticed this even in the tiny gap – exactly two years – between my younger children. Girl (9) is totally smitten with her Nintendo DS, as are most of her schoolfriends. Boy (11) considers that particular games console so impossibly uncool he won't even borrow it. For him the only device worth having is an Apple iTouch, just like all his friends have got. This, I get the impression, has less to do with the joy of playing the games themselves than the matchless pleasure of running up huge and pointless bills downloading new apps from iTunes.

Before Boy and Girl came along I used to get all my techno advice from my stepson, Jim. But at 23, Jim is starting to seem dangerously passé. The other day we were playing on our new joint Christmas present to ourselves – Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 – on his Xbox, and wondering why the gameplay seemed to end after so few levels. After further inquiry Jim found the answer. "Hey, things have changed," he said. "Nobody plays games on their own any more. They fight other people. On the internet."

This is confirmed by research from Pew. Teenagers are much more likely to play online games than are twentysomethings (78 per cent versus 50 per cent), and also more likely to send instant messages (68 per cent versus 59 per cent). Which makes Jim as much a prisoner of his generation as I am of mine. Like so many kids of his era, he takes enormous pride in his ability to write text messages at high speed, because that's what people born in the mid-Eighties trained themselves to do. When they hit their early teens and got their first mobiles, texts were the affordable alternative to phone calls, as well as the best way of communicating without being overheard by your parents.

For teenagers now, though, texting has been largely superseded by instant messaging – as Stephanie Lipman, a 17-year-old Londoner, explains. "I did text for a while, but instant messaging is so much better – like a constant stream-of-consciousness. You don't have to bother with 'Hello. How are you?' or any of that. You just have this series of conversations with your friends which you can add on to when you're in the mood."

As Stephanie says, she just happened to be the right age for the right trend. Like most of her friends she subscribes to BlackBerry Messenger. When she was younger, BlackBerries were things that only businessmen had, but she came of age just in time to catch the tipping point for their transformation into the must-have teen accessory.

And what of the even-younger generations? According to Mizuku Ito, of the University of California Humanities Research Institute, they'll make less distinction between online friends and real friends, and will be more discerning about what they choose to take from popular culture. And according to Larry Rosen, a California professor, they'll be better at multi-tasking: his research has shown that 16 to 18 year-olds can perform seven tasks on average in their free time (texting, checking Facebook, watching TV, etc), whereas people in their early 20s can only handle six, while those in their 30s perform about five and a half.

My own prediction, from watching my 9 and my 11 year-old in action, is that kids will give up on conventional television. Boy and Girl now watch all their programmes via the internet on laptops, so that they can see exactly what they want when they want: Girl goes for Horrible Histories or cookery programmes on BBC iPlayer; Boy downloads the latest episodes of The Simpsons from the US. No one showed them how to do this, and they're not especially techno-minded: they just intuited it in that scary way children do.

Will they all abandon printed books and start reading everything on Kindle? Or will it be the next micro-generation that does that? And will there be some kind of retro backlash where, in a statement of difference, kids start gravitating back to books and old-fashioned texting, or even vinyl LPs for their superior, warm, analogue sound?

The truth is we just don't know, and anyone who claims otherwise is talking nonsense. As The Spectator's techno guru Rory Sutherland, aka Wiki Man, points out, there's not even consistency among age groups around the world. "For example, US kids were much earlier adopters of instant messaging than British kids, except in odd pockets like Cleveland, Ohio – where texting was huge. And in Japan eBay isn't big, but Yahoo is colossal. And in Poland, they don't Tweet, they Gadu Gadu, while in India and Brazil they prefer Orkut to Facebook."

All we can say with confidence about future technologies is that they're not going to be the disaster we Luddite oldies instinctively fear. (Remember the fuss about how texting was going to wipe out a generation's literacy, thanks to abbreviations like gr8? These were largely an urban myth: hardly anyone used them, and those who did were shown by research to be children with the higher reading ages.) And that, in another couple of years, we're going to find ourselves more passé than we could ever have imagined.

Source - TelegraphUK

Exploring The Relationship Between Narrative & Value

There’s an interesting trend in consumer behaviour that should make brand champions a little nervous. Increasingly, people are opting out of branded products/services in favour of goods/experiences with custom meaning. In other words, it’s unique stories behind products and services that are the true drivers of value. The following is a fascinating looks at the relationship between the narrative and value.

In the old days, most of the meanings of our objects came prefab. This is what brands did for us. Brands, and the advertisers, planners, researchers and marketers who made them. Inevitably we would add meanings to our possessions. We might finesse the ones we found there. But mostly, anyone with the same objects had the same meanings. Thus did our material culture make our culture material.

We have since seen the rise of custom-made meanings. This is one of the reasons we like antique fairs, and farmer’s markets is that these objects have been stripped of their original meanings and taken on new, historical, ones. What used to be someone’s tea cup is now our Victorian teacup.

It’s the reason we like the tourist trinkets we bring back from vacation. These were likely hand made somewhere. That textile just says Mexico. More than that, it says, "our vacation in Mexico."

It’s also the reason we like artisanal goods, the chocolates, beer and bread that is so popular now. There are no brands here. These products take their meaning mostly from the process of hand crafting and the person who made them. These objects come with stories more than meanings and we like to tell these stories. "Well, Frank, that’s the guy who made these chocolates, he’s got that little shop down on Cambie, Frank used to be a professional football player. No, I am not kidding."

Of course this sort of thing has always been true of high end restaurants. This has always been hand crafted, unbranded (at least in so far as national brands are concerned), and meanings that come with this food are all about this very particular restaurant, chef, owner, designer, etc. Here the brand is a man or a women.

The rich like to live in a relatively unbranded world. Kitchens, furniture, bespoke tailoring, all of this is completely custom made. It’s fun to go due north on Madison, I think it is. In mid town, we are looking at branded stores, but as we hit the the upper east side, the brands fall away. Now all the shops are little and very particular. This is no brand land.

Experiments like Etsy give us a glimpse of a democratized version of this world. Now, the rest of us can own customized stuff. No brands. No manufacture in the industrial sense. What we buy from Etsy.com is unique and if its to mean something, it will be because we have invested it with meanings particular to our own lives and sensibilities.

So I was interested to note the website called Significant Objects. (Thanks to Leora Kornfeld for the head’s up.) This was invented by Joshua Glenn, Matthew Battles, Rob Walker and others in the summer of 2009. Here’s how they describe what they do. (Sorry to be vague about the founders of Significant Objects but they appear to take pains to efface their identities on the SO website. I can’t but wonder whether they are waiting for authors to supply identities for them…or at least names. Excellent strategy.)

Significant Objects has three steps:

1. The experiment’s curators purchase objects — for no more than a few dollars — from thrift stores and garage sales.

2. A participating writer is paired with an object. He or she then writes a fictional story, in any style or voice, about the object. Voila! An unremarkable, castoff thingamajig has suddenly become a “significant” object!

3. Each significant object is listed for sale on eBay. The s.o. is pictured, but instead of a factual description the s.o.’s newly written fictional story is used. However, care is taken to avoid the impression that the story is a true one; the intent of the project is not to hoax eBay customers. (Doing so would void our test.) The author’s byline will appear with his or her story.

The first version of Significant objects can be defined still more particularly:

Significant Objects was originally intended as an experiment exploring the relationship between narrative and value. (In fact, we didn’t think many writers would want to participate — before we launched the experiment, we listed 100 writers we knew or just admired and asked ourselves, “How do we convince/cajole/trick/browbeat these talented people into helping us with no guarantee that they’ll get anything out of it whatsoever?”) Our goal, then as now, was not simply to generate content, or to provide writers with a fun creative exercise, but instead to pair our carefully curated objects with stories that we’d curated every bit as carefully. We want the site to offer a consistently great reading experience — and we put a lot of effort into that.

The relationship between narrative and value. How very interesting. Economics is not very good on this relationship. Indeed the idea that stories can create value is a little mystifying. And this would be a good time to come to terms with this, because as I say, it is the coming thing.

I fell to thinking about a variation of the SO theme. As it stands, in what remains of the old world of marketing, a watch comes charged with some standard meanings, crafted by the CMO, the brand, agency and its creatives. Take for instance the Rolex that uses the Bond movie franchise to give the watch a certain quality of romance, danger, adventure, etc.

A SO approach would craft the meaning of the objects more particularly. The brand could engage a team of writers and have them standing by to deliver stories to the owner, perhaps on a just in time basis. What I am a buying the watch then is also a stream of stories that might come to me every day or week or month. Tomorrow, I might get an email that reads

Today your watch is owned by a functionary, a man who lives in Ottawa and works for the Canadian government. You have a secret. You have embezzled $3 million from the Canadian government. Today is actually is your last day. You wouldn’t be here, but the embezzlement will finalize today. You are nervous. Actually you’re sweating bullets. Make it through today, and you can spend the rest of your life in some sunny country that laughs in the face of the Canadian extradition. But you can’t help feeling that suspicions are flourishing. You know people are looking at you. Aren’t they? Every glance, every comment today will be charged with menace. Have a nice day.

This is narrative and I believe our Rolex is more valuable for it. As these stories change, as we enter the narratives that come with the watch, the watch becomes more and more valuable. It serves as a portal on alternative realities and multiple selves.

Source - Grant McCraken

Perceived Value vs. Real Value

Advertising adds value to a product by changing our perception, rather than the product itself. Rory Sutherland makes the daring assertion that a change in perceived value can be just as satisfying as what we consider real value -- and his conclusion has interesting consequences for how we look at life.

Video: Here

How To Let Consumers Sell Themselves

Marketers need to work harder. It's not enough to be persuasive; you've got to make it easier for people to persuade themselves. That means offering consumers the opportunity to play and engage with your offering. Granted, the following argument isn’t for every brand/product but the article does make some interesting points about the power of engagement.

While working at MIT's Media Lab, "Demo or Die" not "Publish or Perish," was our academic motto. I quickly observed that we basically produced two kinds of demos.

The first was show-and-tell: We'd show off a clever object or a device or software snippet. The goal was to make jaws drop and/or blow people away. There was something of a "magic trick" quality to the best of them. How did you do that? Cool! Did I mention that Penn & Teller were huge fans and welcome guests at the Lab?

The other kind of demo — though culturally less cool — intrigued me more. These were demos where you'd give your prototype to people to play with. Try this...see if you can get it to... Designers of the former type loved the theater of their demos. They loved an audience. They loved performing. Designers of the latter kind of demo preferred participants to spectators. They wanted to watch people having fun with their inventions instead of putting on a show. Their demos weren't props — they were playgrounds.

You might say that the first group enjoyed "selling" people. Whereas the second group liked people to "sell themselves."

That design distinction stuck. Although I consider myself open-minded, I dislike people — no matter how charming or expert — trying to "sell" me something. To heck with charisma. I don't like being "sold." On the other hand, I do like selling myself. I'm less likely to be persuaded by someone doing a fantastic show-and-tell than by someone giving me the opportunity to sell myself. If you hand/send me something and say, "Play with this for as long or as little as you'd like and get back to me," I'm yours. Some people need to be — some people want to be — convinced. But I want the chance to convince myself. Which type are you? How do you know? Better yet, which type is your best customer?

When working with technical innovators and marketing entrepreneurs, I'm struck by how little creativity and effort go into exploiting these fundamental behavioral differences between people. Designing a model, prototype, or simulation that makes it easier for an innovator to "sell" it is fundamentally a different task than coming up with something that makes it easy for a prospect to sell themselves. Everyone reading this post can think of mobile phones (or enterprise software) that invite playful exploration that leads to new value — or those that end up inadvertently deleting your most important data. Clearly, Apple's appstore has become a virtual — in both meanings of that word — paradigm for innovative sampling and sampling innovation. Less celebrated but remarkably clever is Google Labs, the search engine's public playground for its more offbeat innovative betas. These are "sell yourself" marketplaces. I'm surprised that IBM, with its strong cloud computing infrastructure and "Smarter Planet" campaign, hasn't done more of this. Then again, IBM is a classic "sales" culture rather than one empowering customers to convince themselves.

But the "sell" vs. "sell yourself" sensibility transcends digital devices. Professional service firms are fools if they're not constantly looking for ways not just to better communicate the value of their work, but to give people things that let them sell themselves on the firm's value proposition. What should a law firm or financial services practice "give away" that prospects could play their way into a serious conversation about becoming a client? Or what about retail? If I were running Ikea, I'd tell the Swedish superstore they'd sell even more DIY furniture if they'd let me see YouTube-like videos of people actually building the darn things. Whether you're Whole Foods, Wal-Mart or Best Buy, you have to acknowledge that — as important as friendly and knowledgeable staff may be — you need to create places, spaces and opportunities for your customers sell themselves through self-sampling instead of selling-sampling.

For completely understandable reasons, managers and executives feel compelled to be better salespeople both inside their organizations and out. Whether its consultative selling or Zig Ziglar motivational selling, people are always looking for tips, techniques and technologies to sell better. That's fine. But between the Media Lab, my research into innovation adoption and the global pervasiveness of digital media, I'd argue that the future of salesmanship and innovation alike will increasingly depend on giving people easier ways of selling themselves on whatever it is you're selling. It's not enough to be persuasive; you've got to make it easier for people to persuade themselves.

Are you making the right kinds of persuasiveness investment?

Source - Harvard Business Review

Social Media ROI Metrics

In 2010, we’re entering a new era of social media marketing – one based on information, rationalization and resolve. In the end, investors simply want to calculate the return on investment and associate social media programs with real-world business performance metrics. This is an awesome look at one of the most debated topics of modern day marketing.

The debate over measuring social media investment inspired many brands to cannonball into popular social networks and join the proverbial conversation without a plan or strategic objectives defined. At the same time, the lack of ROI standards unnerved many executives, preventing any form of experimentation until their questions and concerns were addressed.

In 2010, we’re entering a new era of social media marketing — one based on information, rationalization, and resolve.

Business leaders simply need clarity in a time of abundant options and scarcity of experience. As many of us can attest, we report to executives who have no desire to measure intangible credos rooted in transparency and authenticity. In the end, they simply want to calculate the return on investment and associate social media programs with real-world business performance metrics.

Over the years, our exploration and experience has redefined the traditional metrics and created hybrid models that will prove critical to modern business practices and help companies effectively compete for the future.

EARLY ROI ADAPTATION

Where the “I” in ROI represents investment, marketers have also explored ancillary elements to address the socialization of media, marketing, and the resulting dynamics of engagement.

Adaptations included:

Return on Engagement: The duration of time spent either in conversation or interacting with social objects, and in turn, what transpired that’s worthy of measurement.

Return on Participation: The metric tied to measuring and valuing the time spent participating in social media through conversations or the creation of social objects.

Return on Involvement: Similar to participation, marketers explored touchpoints for documenting states of interaction and tied metrics and potential return of each.

Return on Attention: In the attention economy, we assess the means to seize attention, hold it, and measure the response.

Return on Trust: A variant on measuring customer loyalty and the likelihood for referrals, a trust barometer establishes the state of trust earned in social media engagement and the prospect of generating advocacy and how it impacts future business.

But as we progress through the ten stages of social media integration, our views and techniques mature into more sophisticated strategies.

For many businesses, the case for new metrics can’t be made until we have an intrinsic understanding of how social media engagement affects us at every level. It’s not as simple as counting subscribers, followers, fans, conversation volume, reach, or traffic. While the size of the corporate social graph is a reflection of our participation behavior, it is not symbolic of brand stature, resonance, loyalty, advocacy, nor is it an indicator of business performance.

THE NEED FOR NEW SCRUTINY

In 2010, social media endeavors are often still thought of as “pilot programs,” launched to steer a brand toward perceived relevance. Budgets, for the most part, are borrowed from other divisions to fund the largely experimental programs. Where that money goes and comes from depends largely on the social media champions who push for this experimentation from the inside.

In many cases however, new programs are introduced without an integrated strategy. Money is allocated from existing programs. If we’re going to take away from something, we should determine whether or not we’re justified to do so.

According to a 2009 study performed by Mzinga and Babson Executive Education, 84% of professionals in a variety of industries reported that they do not measure ROI.

In 2010, executives are demanding scrutiny, evaluation, and interpretation. Even though new media is transforming organizations from the inside out, what is constant is the need to apply performance indicators to our work.

THE BUSINESS OF SOCIAL MEDIA

The CFO, CEO, and CMO of any organization would be remiss if they did not account for spending and resource allocation for social media.

MarketingProfs recently published a study by Bazaarvoice and the CMO Club that revealed the true expectation of chief marketing officers. The bottom line: They want measurable results from social media.

Most importantly, about 15% believe there is no ROI associated with Twitter, and just over 10% cannot glean ROI from LinkedIn or Facebook.

I believe this is the direct result of a disconnect between social media activity and a clearly defined end game. We must establish what we want to measure before we engage. By doing so, we can answer the questions, “what is it that we want to change, improve, accomplish, incite, etc?”

Defining a clear strategy can help us reach our social media goals, including:

- Sales
- Registrations
- Referrals
- Links (the currency of the social web)
- Votes
- Reduction in costs and processes
- Decrease in customer issues
- Lead generation
- Conversion
- Reduced sale cycles

CUSTOMER INSIGHT

Customer ratings and reviews rose to the top of useful marketing feedback, as they delivered tangible ROI insight. In 2009, 80% of respondents reported that customer stories and suggestions shape products and services. As a result, brands earn the trust and loyalty of their customers by listening and responding.

According to the MarketingProfs study, CMOs will have more opportunities to engage with user-generated content in 2010, with many reporting:

- A 400% increase in use of Twitter comments to inform decisions about products and services

- A 59% increase in the use of customer ratings and reviews

- A 24% increase in use of social media for pre-sales Q&A

MONETIZING SOCIAL MEDIA

Social media metrics will be increasingly tied to revenue in 2010. To what extent seems to vary according to CMOs. The study indicates:

- 80% predict upwards of 5%

- 15% optimistically hope for 5-10%

In 2009, those companies that aligned social media investments with revenue estimates:

- 5% or less revenue tied to social in 2009 foresee an increase of an additional 5% in 2010

- 6-10% of revenue stemming from social media is expected to increase more than 10%

- Those with greater revenues resulting from social engagement expect an escalation of revenue derived from social at 20%

Companies like Dell are not only tracking the impact of social media on revenue, but expanding lessons learned across the entire organization. According to Dell’s Lionel Menchaca:

“Our @DellOutlet is now close to 1.5 million followers on Twitter, and back in June we indicated that @DellOutlet earned $3 million in revenue from Twitter. Today it’s not just Dell Outlet having success connecting with customers on Twitter. In total, Dell’s global reach on Twitter has resulted in more than $6.5 million in revenue. In fact our Brazilian and Canadian accounts are growing rapidly too –- and it was Canadian tweeters who asked to make sure Dell Canada came online to Twitter. Dell Canada responded because the team heard our customers. In less than a year, @DellnoBrasil has already generated nearly $800,000 in product revenues. Similarly, @DellHomeSalesCA has surpassed $150,000 and is increasing at notable pace.”

THE FORECAST FOR METRICS IN 2010

Earlier we mentioned generic forms of social media metrics. The survey revealed that indeed, 89% of CMOs tracked the impact of social media by traffic, page views, and the size of their social graph or communities. However, 2010 is the year that social media graduates from experimentation to strategic implementation, with direct ties to specific measurable performance indicators.

In 2010, CMOs will seek to establish a connection between social media and business goals. The study documents the adoption of three metrics:

- 333% surge in tracking revenue

- 174% escalation in monitoring conversion

- 150% increase in measuring average order value

A CALL TO ACTION

Defining the “R” in ROI is where we need to focus, as it relates to our business goals and performance indicators specifically. Even though much of social media is free, we do know the cost of engagement as it relates to employees, time, equipment, and opportunity cost (what they’re not focusing on or accomplishing while engaging in social media). Tying those costs to the results will reveal a formula for assessing the “I” as investment.

When we truly grasp the ability to define action and measure it, we can expand the impact of new media beyond the profit and loss. We can adapt business processes, inspire ingenuity, and more effectively compete for the future.

Source - Mashable

Habits Of A Media Junkie

Media consumption is not a zero sum game. Marketers have always been concerned that “new” media is adopted at the expense of “old” media however recent Nielsen data proves that just isn’t true. For example, since the Internet went mainstream, TV viewing is up by 20%. The following explores why the growth of new media options has only fueled consumer appetite for more consumption.

It is truly a golden age of media for consumers. Content is available on multiple screens almost anywhere a consumer wants it—at home, at work, on trains, and on planes. And who among us hasn’t been nearly run down by a cab as we check an email, a news item, a tweet, or a web video on our smartphone as we cross the street? The big media story of 2009 is how we’ve fully embraced these expanding options… and come to demand even more.

Nielsen data shows that time spent on each of the three screens—TV, PC and Mobile—is increasing. In particular, the consumption of video content is on the rise across all platforms. Since the mainstreaming of the Internet about 10 years ago, TV viewing is up by about 20%. Online video consumption stands at more than three hours a month and mobile video is growing too, as devices and connectivity become more widespread.

So what gives? Where is all the extra time coming from? And why isn’t media consumption a zero sum game? Let’s look at a few factors.

Television:

1. High Definition: The quality of TV content has improved significantly with the advent of HD programming. Coupled with falling prices of TV hardware, HD technology has significantly enhanced the viewing experience.
2. DVRs: Have allowed viewers much greater control over when they watch what they want to watch. Time-shifted viewing is also on the rise.
3. Expanded Options: The increasing number of channels and video-on-demand content is contributing to the overall growth in TV viewing.
4. More TVs than People: The sheer growth in TV sets in the home means that viewing opportunity is available in almost every room, and every member has their own set…and then some.

Internet:

1. Bandwidth: The vast majority of users have broadband, which allows the delivery of richer content without degrading the experience.
2. Availability of Content: Rich media, streaming media and more offline content is finding its way online. And a constant stream of new consumer-generated media via Facebook and Twitter are deeply engaging users to spend more time online.
3. Accessibility: More than 40% of online video is viewed at the workplace. Workers sitting in their offices for 40 hours a week do spend a bit of that time surfing the Internet.

Mobile:

1. Infrastructure Upgrades: Service provides are upgrading networks fast. 3G networks are now the norm, and 4G is being rolled out allowing for faster download speeds.
2. More Powerful Devices: iPhones, Blackberries, smartphones, app stores and the recently launched Droid have blurred the lines between phone and PC. These devices are leading the growth of media consumption on mobile.
3. New Content: TV programming is now available on cell phones for a nominal fee. For someone who can’t get enough TV at home, they can take it with them almost anywhere.
4. Anytime Anywhere Media: One of the biggest advantages of smartphones is that the user can share content or have it delivered wherever they want.

What’s Next?

What does the next 3-5 years have in store? Given the massive change going on in technology, regulation, pricing, content distribution deals, etc., doing a simple projection based upon historical trends may be misleading. But five key trends will have a significant impact.

1. TV Everywhere: A cable MSO initiative to make TV content available to paying customers online took notable steps in 2009. The approach enhances viewers’ value proposition by taking content currently available only on TV to any screen, anywhere.
2. Net Neutrality: The big question before the FCC: Should Internet Service Providers offer all content, no matter the source or bandwidth requirements, to users with the same priority? Content companies want it. Access providers want to have some control over what flows through the network they have built to optimize performance. The legislative outcome will have a significant impact on content available online and mobile networks.
3. Tiered Pricing for Internet: “All you can eat” access plans—now the norm for broadband—changed the “pay as you go” model. With increasingly rich content available online, heavy video online consumes use much more bandwidth than a light or occasional user. Should both pay the same amount since the cost to deliver Internet content is variable? The counter argument is that TV is a fixed price model and with cost of bandwidth dropping fast, the incremental expense associated with a heavy user should not warrant higher prices.
4. Interactive TV: Various companies are rolling out interactive services to enrich the TV viewing experience and to enable viewers to interact with programming and advertising messages. While this is in the very early stages of rollout, if successful, TV can be expected to take an even larger share of people’s screen time.
5. Over-the-Top TV: With wireless Internet access now common, device manufacturers are introducing DVD players, TVs and Video Game consoles with built-in wireless connectivity. These devices piggy back on an existing wireless network and pull content from the Internet straight to the TV set with no additional hardware, wires or advanced degree in electronics required. And there is content that is well suited for TV that can be delivered via the Internet—NetFlix is just one example. Some providers are making applications like Facebook available on the TV sets. Not all of the experiments will succeed as consumers will not want some applications on the TV. Expect TV in 3-5 years to be quite different from what it is today.

By this time next year, we’ll likely be dissecting the impact of a few other game-changing additions to the media mix (EpixHD? An Apple tablet?). No matter what the addition, any new evolutions to the media universe will have to follow the new laws of increasing portability and increasing content to satisfy the consumer’s increasing demand for anytime/anywhere access. We’ll be watching.

Source - NielsenWire

Your Friends Don't Trust You

Marketers have always hailed “word of mouth” as the most persuasive form of communication out there. Interestingly, our friends’ recommendations are having less and less impact on our decision making process. Since 2008, the number of people who view their friends as credible sources of information has dropped by about half. What!?! Serious trust issues.

It's a finding that strikes at the foundation of many a social-media marketing philosophy: Tapping into peer-to-peer networks is a way for marketers to tell authentic, credible stories to consumers whose confidence in corporate CEOs, news outlets, government officials and industry analysts has taken a beating. But according to Edelman's latest Trust Barometer, the number of people who view their friends and peers as credible sources of information about a company dropped by almost half, from 45% to 25%, since 2008.

WHOM DO YOU TRUST? Edelman's barometer
Richard Edelman, president and CEO of Edelman, believes it's a sign of the times -- and the lesson for marketers is consumers have to see and hear things in five different places before they believe it.

"The events of the last 18 months have scarred people," Mr. Edelman said. "People have to see messages in different places and from different people. That means experts as well as peers or company employees. It's a more-skeptical time. So if companies are looking at peer-to-peer marketing as another arrow in the quiver, that's good, but they need to understand it's not a single-source solution. It's a piece of the solution."

Consumers are a distrustful bunch in general -- the credibility of TV dropped 23 points and radio news and newspapers were down 20 points between 2008 and 2010.

CEOs up
And when asked how credible they deemed the information they get about a company when a "person like yourself" serves as a spokesperson the numbers again dropped. This year 39% of those surveyed felt the messages conveyed by consumer spokespeople was credible compared to 45% in 2009, the biggest drop-off among all categories.

Conversely, CEOs -- who have of late been trotted out as public faces of their companies in times of stress, such as General Motors CEO Ed Whitacre -- saw the biggest year-over-year increase from 17% in 2009 to 26% this year. Other groups seeing increases in the level of consumer trust were government officials (22% vs. 27%), a financial/industry analyst (46% vs. 52%), NGO representative (42% vs. 44%) and academic experts (61% vs. 64%). The only other group to see the credibility of their word diminish was company employees, which saw a drop of three points (31% vs. 28%).

If consumers stop believing what their friends and the "average Joes" appearing in testimonials say about a product or company, the implications could be significant not just for marketers but for the social networks and word-of-mouth platforms selling themselves as solutions to communicating in a jaded world. The influence of peers has been considered the leading rationale for brands' shifting marketing dollars to social media.

In some cases, social networks themselves may be contributing to the decline in trust. Platforms such as Facebook and Twitter have allowed people to maintain larger circles of casual associates, which may be diluting the credibility of peer-to-peer networks. In short, the more acquaintances a person has, the harder it can be to trust him or her. Mr. Edelman believes the Facebook component has "absolutely" played a role in diluting trust levels.

A changed game
"When you're seeing so much noise, it's very easy to dismiss a lot of it, and that's a problem marketing messages have had for a while now," said David Berkowitz, director-emerging media for 360i. "Facebook really exemplifies this with the live-feed and news-feed options," he said. "If you use the live feed and have a few hundred friends, some kind of peer recommendation, whether it's explicit or not, appears every couple of minutes and sometimes they come in a matter of seconds. If you're seeing all of that come in, it can be overwhelming."

Not surprisingly, Paul Rand, president-CEO of Omnicom Group's Zocalo Group and president of the Word-of-Mouth Marketing Association, said word-of-mouth is more effective than ever. But he does concede the game has changed.

"The mind-set is no longer 'I can just trust it because it's somebody's opinion,'" he said. "It's, 'I can trust that specific opinion because it's someone I know.'"

Another potential reason? People have caught on to the fact marketers are increasingly behind that influential blog post or tweet. Despite regulations regarding disclosure of marketer-driven efforts, consumers may feel that whatever it is these people are receiving from companies positively influences their endorsements.

Christina Smedley, global head of Edelman's consumer practice, said there is still a core group of influencers that can change how people trust and influence the actions of others. And consumers, whether they are close to them or not, will follow their lead.

"There are ... consumers who still only trust the people they see every day or their 120 friends on Facebook," Ms. Smedley said. "But there are those that trust all 380 of their friends on Facebook. And there's opportunity for brands with both groups. If marketers can find those action consumers, they can build campaigns that work through their parameters and get some very good results."

Source - AdAge

Socialnomics

Quantifiable ROI has always been a roadblock for social media evangelists. It’s hard to convince decision-makers to sign up for social media if they don’t know what return they’ll get on their investment. Thankfully, those who swear by social media as an effective marketing strategy can now rely on more than just faith for convincing non-believers. The following video correlates brand success to participation in social environments.

Brand Relationships For The Social Media Era

If “earned media” is your ultimate motivation for engaging in social media then your strategy is flawed. In order to be sustainable, brands need to focus their efforts on creating meaningful consumers experiences. Here's a set of guiding principles to help you get beyond “earned media” tactics and enable you to create richer, and ultimately more successful, brand sponsored social movements.

While brands still try hard to "crack the Social Media code," most seem to understand consumers no longer find the prospect of being friends with a brand more engaging than the single click it took to fan the brand page on Facebook. After all, what's so novel about the thought of a friendship with my butter? Precisely, nothing.

The impact of social media at the heart of new media is shaking up how brands think of experience design and what consumers expect from brand experiences.

Let's talk digital sociology. I'll quote three impactful points of view from Michael Wesch, Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Kansas State University. In his series called "The machine is (Changing) Us: YouTube and the politics of Authenticity," he describes the following (which I've roughly transcribed):

• "Media defines us while we define media."
• "We've shifted from media to mediated relationships."
• "Connections were the constraint, we now have connections without constraint."

How can these statements help us understand how to be better at building brand through social media and digital experiences in general? Here's a set of guiding principles to help you get beyond tactical earned media generation and enable you to create richer and more successful "social movements" around brands.

• You can shape the outcome, but can't prescribe it. Leave predictable outcomes behind. Successful social experiences all have one thing in common: They relinquish control. Bring your consumers closer to action and let them take over. When insights are scarce, leverage the good old reward method to get them to play, then watch them play. If your brand has risk and readiness constraints, consumer control is not a pipe dream. Make it a priority.
• From Communication to Connectivity. Your brand should no longer think of itself as an authority (even if it is one), but rather a facilitator or enabler. Its role is no longer to broadcast, but to connect. Understanding brand connectivity requires more than just digital listening and influence identification. Moving beyond single degree measures is crucial. Examining passions and motives within dynamic behavioral contexts is essential. Digital discovery (or anthropology) can help uncover motive “in action”. Social media is an unbound source of insights, allowing limitless exploration of digital personas and their behavior. Your brand can engage and build connectivity through behavioral contexts it can associate with.
• Create mediated experiences. Focus on understanding the potential impact of various media interactions against consumer motives and apply that understanding to your experience strategy. Leverage YouTube as more than an outlet for brand video and search traffic. Instead, study how video sharing can promote the quality of the engagement and motives you seek to trigger. As you plan your experience, don't limit yourself… Define the media while giving it the opportunity to define you. Create experiences that are engaging but unconfined. Experiences that impose less constraint (or more connection) lead to a greater ability to mine insights from engagement. Branded widgets and social network applications can surely help amplify brand messaging but are really little more than evolved direct media. UGC campaigns with very prescriptive requests cannot allow you to measure much more than response rates.
• Listen to your experiences. Leverage digital listening to clearly understand how the media has shaped you. Extend your discovery efforts against your conversation to understand patterns of behavior, motives of engagement, audiences and other measures of how your brand is or can be more connective. Measure impact beyond response and conversion by putting your data to work across all sources to truly understand consumer behavior against key business metrics, both offline and online.
• Keep Shaping & Being Shaped. Whether looking to sustain successful initiatives or creating new ones, brands need to understand how to play in a fully dynamic context. Focus too much on the media itself and your efforts won't scale. Instead, focus on measuring and extending your “connectivity” step by step, creating a well balanced insights & experience machine.

While butter brands of the world now have their work cut out for them, I'm hoping they'll leverage Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, or their own media as mere interaction vehicles while devoting their attention to understanding the essence of consumer engagement within the media. Only then can they design experiences that shape conversation, to then understand how those conversations have shaped their brand.

Source - Fast Company

Crystal Ball For A Mobile Future

Mobile is the most elusive marketing channel out there. For the last few years, marketers have falsely predicted “this is the year for mobile”. It would be foolish to make the same claims for 2010 however we do anticipate mobile marketing to become critical in the near future. The following provides a glimpse of a potential future for mobile behaviour in Canada by looking at the Japanese market.

Three quarters of Japanese social network users access the sites only from their mobile phones.

This observation comes from a survey conducted last year with almost 4,000 social network users in Japan by Mobile Marketing Data Labo. They found that 75.4% of respondents only accessed social networking sites from their mobile phone (and not from their PC). The number only accessing it from their PC (and not their mobile phone) was very low at just 2%.

This is a reflection on the mobile nature of the internet in Japan where 3G penetration stands at 95% of the market and 85% of customers have a data plan added to their contract. This is a much more developed mobile market than we see in Europe or North America and their use of mobile online services is world-leading.

These an other insights into the Japanese mobile social networking market is found in the great presentation below from Alexei Poliakov.

There is much that we can all learn from looking at the use of mobile internet, and the way it has influenced social networks in Japan. Whilst in other markets the growth in social networks sees a growth the likes of Twitter and Facebook, in Japan, homegrown social networks dominate. This is, in part, a result of the English-centric focus of these sites, at least initially. But also mobile social networking leads to a different type of site and different uses by consumers. In Japan, mixi and Mobage-town and Gree are incredibly successful social networks. Mixi has a reported 17 million users in Japan, compared with 1.4 million Facebook users and about half a million Japanese people on Twitter.

These social networks are very different in two main ways:

1. They put gaming either central to or highly within the user experience. Facebook and Twitter tend to be about content exchange or organisation whereas the Japanese social networks have a strong gaming element that attracts and connects users.
2. Premium content is often paid-for. Mixi, in particular, provides premium content and features at a fee to users and this is easily done by adding it to their mobile bill. (This trend explained the rumours that Twitter would charge for access in Japan)

Whilst it is unlikely that other markets will necessarily develop in the same way, it is interesting to see how these sites work and operate in Japan. An increasing penetration of 3G access and data-plan adoption in Europe, and the US, will see more and more people using their mobile as a major access point to the internet in 2010. And with social networking sites from Facebook to Twitter becoming more mobile friendly (such as the launch of push notifications on the iPhone from the Facebook app this week in the UK) it is likely that use of social networks from mobile devices will increase this year.

So we should learn more about what is happening in the more developed mobile markets like Japan. Whether it is simple things – such as brands allowing customers to complete a whole journey (from social networking site to purchased item) on convenient mobile platforms. Or more complex things – such as the adoption of paid-for add-ons to the mobile social networking experience. There is a lot for us to observe and a lot we should experiment with.

Case Study - Slide Show

Source - Future Lab