Modern Marketing - Blog by Collaborate PR & Marketing

The Deep Waters Of Second Life

Deep End is a phrase Johnnie and I use when helping brands understand how modern web technology and cultures can quickly take them out of their comfort zones and into powerful currents.  Likewise, there's plenty of warm, shallow pools where they can splash around safely to their heart's content.  The problem is judging the depth of the water from the sidelines.  Some very inviting streams actually run quite deep and diving in without checking the tides can mean losing touch with shore.  Second Life is a case in point and Wired has a great article about brands that have dived into the metaverse, only to find it less than refreshing.  At first sight SL looks like a fun, albeit fantastic, manifestation of the modern web and a perfect place to splash around.  However, as I've mentioned before,  it's really an alpha-geek paradise run by a hardcore of freedom-loving hackers - not exactly mainstream retailing heaven.  Furthermore, they come tooled up in the shape of the Second Life Liberation Army, which undertakes disruptive action, including hiring mercenaries  to carry out L$1000 (virtual) hits on content developers bringing brands into SL.  "I felt like I was in The Shining," Wired reports a marketeer from Coke as saying after a recce of the metaverse.  The modern web is a wonderful, diverse environment.  But before diving into the next bright and shiny waters, make sure you know where the bottom is...

Lacking Inspiration?

Then look no further than this in-depth interview with the CEO of the Mozilla Foundation (aka Firefox browsers) Mitchell Baker over at APC.  Full of gems including the fact that Mozilla earns $55m buckeroos a year from Google and insight into plans for the launch of Firefox on mobiles - as I understand it in a potentially industry-bending partnership with Nokia.  All done with a core team of 12 people (and a big shove from Netscape).  "Sometimes I think it sounds funny to describe how much people actually love a piece of software and how excited they get and how much people are willing to do to help other people adopt that and to build it, and create it. But it actually happens," says Baker.  All leading to a 30 per cent market share in Europe.  Not bad considering the, "asset is owned by the public".  Lordy.  They've even got a new logo for Japan.

BitTorrent vs Joost

Many thanks to Brad for his excellent comment and insight on the morphing world of TV: "From the point of view of an end user, Joost and BitTorrent have little to nothing in common. BitTorrent is great for users, Joost is great for media corps (or one should at least hope so, as it's not very good for users).  BitTorrent fills in the gaps and reduces the inconveniences of non-global programming, ie. you can get TV shows from around the globe on demand, rather than the delayed marketing schedules of broadcasters.  Joost brings globalized corporate TV culture to the internet in a very 1970s (pre-VCR) way, ie. you can watch 'live' shows from global corporations that are already available globally; you get ads, you can't rec on Joost ord, you can't skip ads, and there's less content than on TV. If you want to save a show, you need to find it on BitTorrent, which really begs the question why one would use Joost in the first place." By the way, if you are in media thinking this is all irrelevant, alpha-geek guff, try a little straw poll in your office...LimeWire anyone? 

[UPDATE: But Joost's 1 million beta-testers is a decent platform to grow from...]

WOM, Tremor & Windy Miller

I have been helping Deborah Bonnelo with an article about word-of-mouth marketing which appears in the current Media Week.  It's become relevant since two large Media Shops launched WOM services: Zenith Optimedia with Newscast and Group M with BzzAgent.  WOM is a tricky area that only P&G seems to has cracked with its mega-platform Tremor.  However, in many ways it's just good old product trialling, albeit hyperlinked with a social loop.  Increasingly, the world of networked media is looking more familiar - less Blade Runner, more Trumpton.

The Internet Doesn't Exist

Writing over at P2P.net, Bill Thompson reminds us why the web and its open standards are indeed special:  "The standards matter because of the strange nature of the internet. Despite the fact that it covers the world, the Internet does not really exist. It is best thought of as a joint technical undertaking in which all the organisations and individuals who want to take advantage of the benefits which the network can offer agree to conform to a set of technical requirements for connecting their computer networks to other computer networks.  One of the most important aspects of the process is that the technical standards are not owned by anyone: they are intellectual property held in common, hence the description of them as ‘open standards.'  The history of the internet is therefore a triumph of mutualism and joint endeavour. All the many interests have worked together to create a system which is transforming the world, and anyone who doubts what can be achieved by cooperation should consider just how much we have achieved by working together online."

Google Unleashes Its Long Tail

A media grand fromage pointed out to me last week that Google's portfolio of long-tail advertisers has changed the game, because the company doesn't need mega-brand bucks to keep its $10bn annual turnover ticking over.  And now Google is starting to unleash that long-tail, along with the super-tech that makes it manageable, across other areas of traditional media. And it appears to be working.  Yesterday the company announced the expansion of its Print Ads programme from 50 to 225 newspapers in the US.  Meanwhile the EchoStar programme roles on...

[UPDATE: And now the GoogleKings want their own spectrum...]

Pirate Bay - The Good Ship?

Mininova, the BitTorrent site, has entered Alexa's Top Global 100 alongside Digg and other megasites, serving up 20m daily page views, reports TorrentFreak.  Disgraceful, eh?  Another example of the evil web spreading evilness and corruption into the minds of sponge-brained, keyboard junkies, right?  Well, remove those MPAA goggles for a second and go watch Pirate Bay founder Peter 'Brokep' Sunde on The BitLord Show talking about his motivations which include anti-censorship, speaking for the users of the internet, his negotiations with the Big 4, broken American law, his plans to launch an uncensored version of YouTube and best of all, buying Sealand!  All delivered in calm, relaxed Swedish tones in a local park.  Inspiring stuff, especially as Pirate Bay consists of three people.  These days lots of emerging technology appears first in legally problematic environments but then gets scrubbed up and enters the mainstream.  BitTorrent is getting just such a make over now, in the shape of Joost, run by market-makers Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, who themselves haven't always been so squeaky.  The lesson is that it's always worth watching the pioneers who are prepared to bend the rules along the way.  And as P2P gets shinier and Prince throws down his purple open source gauntlet, it's the 'respectable' commercial waters that beging to look a little murkier.  As Brokep says at the end of the video - keep sharing!

Hyperlocal Lessons

Mark Potts has written up the lessons he learnt from the boom-and-bust of the $3m hyperlocal community site Backfence.  It's familiar stuff but has the extra potency of first-hand pain!  "You don’t necessarily have to pay community members to contribute to and participate on the sites. That’s not their primary motivation. They want to be seen among their neighbors as sources of local knowledge and opinion, and that’s more valuable to them than being paid. Indeed, we never had a single member ask for compensation—and when we offered coffee cards in exchange for posts, Backfence users actually rebelled."  Potts also points at the rise of social networks as attractive alternatives to centralised offerings.  This is strikingly relevant through a quick search on FB for Hackney, my local district, which returns 197 groups and one for a local pub that has 112 members!

Media Metrics Shakedown Begins

The potential for massive disruption within tired media metrics makes it an intriguing area right now.  The reason is fairly obvious.  As the money flows into online the bean-counters are right behind making sure that this isn't actually all just dotbomb 2.0.  As the market leader Nielsen's shift from page views to 'total-time' is significant but I like Internet Outsider's take that it's just the warm-up act for a real-shake-up.  There's a huge number of factors involved but one is that technology is making real-time data about individuals more reliable and that will always trump demographics and aggregated ranking systems.  So the best route maybe to simply distribute the online tools to the publishers and advertisers and let them get on with it.  At the macro-level that is why Google's EchoStar deal is causing waves.  At a micro-level it's why, for this blog, I no longer have to try and second-guess muddy site stats, but simply keep an eye on the Feedburner numbers for RSS subscribers.

[UPDATE: Edelman enters the fray and Jeff Jarvis offers a critique].

Prince Goes Open Source

One of the notions behind open source software is that by giving away intellectual property, you can build reputation and credibility which makes it possible to sell other products and skills into the marketplace.  It's a way for small independents to compete with large, established players whose huge overheads and legacy systems make price point zero too costly.  Along with reputation, by turning your code into a free commodity a market can be quickly created which normally takes sales and marketing dollars.  But innovators in other areas are taking note.  First we had Craig Newmark's partly-free classifieds empire.  Now Prince has followed the open source path by giving away his new album with yesterday's Mail on Sunday, thereby creating a huge new market for his massive global tour.  For the Doc's deeper analysis go here.