Modern Marketing - Blog by Collaborate PR & Marketing

Lonely Girl Ain't Lonely Anymore

The increasing quality of content on the web is one of the most striking trends of 2007.  Or in other words Lonely Girl ain't lonely anymore - she's got plenty of competition.  In the US MySpace has its own TV channel and is busy commissioning original programming like Room Mates.  In fact, another MySpace show QuarterLife has become the first webisode to be picked up by a major network in the shape of NBC.  (Ironically, this last move appears to be one result of the writers' strike in Hollywood).  Meanwhile, Mania TV and No Good TV are busy building million-strong audiences around programmes such as The Daily Indie and Will Ferrell has launched his own web comedy channel called Funny Or Die.  While the very cheap and very good Break-A-Leg on Blip.tv has been viewed one million times.  But it's not just the US.  In the UK, Bebo launched the latest part of the LG15 universe in the shape of Kate Modern which has served up 25 million videos in three months and Tory-talking shop 18 Doughty Street continues to build an audience.  Why the boom?  Aside from everyone having broadband access, and gazillions piling into the social networking space, the cost of web programming is dramatically lower than traditional TV shows.  I met Miles 'LG15' Beckett in the summer and was struck by the low-fi nature of the Kate Modern...

"We Need To Protect The Music"

I don't have the mental capacity to unravel the levels of irony currently unfolding in the music business.  Explaining the strategy behind Universal using DRM-free music to create a new market that will challenge the omnipotent iPod is like Sudoku for marketeers.  However, the trigger is clear.  This year, 22 percent of all music sold in the US will move through iTunes.  Having spent gazillions on lawyers fees trying - and failing - to prevent such a DRM-free market being created, it's a remarkable twist in this story.  But in this fascinating Wired article we can understand that myopia created by quarterly reporting and reliance on the huge profit margins of previous distribution systems (ie CDs) were equally culpable in the industry's current desperate situation.  "We need to protect the music. I know that," says Universal Music Group CEO, Doug Morris.  Don't worry Doug, 'the music' is going to be fine.  When you gave it all to Steve Jobs he put it in his safe.  Now he only lets people use it if they pay him.

Turbulence Is Entertaining - Who Knew?

This year I helped out the splendid folk at Favela Fabric with an event they were running for KLM at the mega-social-tech bash PICNIC '07 in Amsterdam.  It was the first step in the airline putting a toe in co-creative waters as part of an innovation programme called Flight of the Future.  There's a write-up (in German) about it in Handelsblatt here.  The format was to invite together all sorts of people who have an active stake in the airline including KLM employees from every area of the business, journalists, analysts and customers to talk about the future.  My job was to bring alive the power of open web platforms which I did by talking about why I hate RyanAir so much and to moderate the open conversation.  In our planning sessions we had discussed the topics that might be raised but it was fascinating to see how greatly our forecasts differed from the reality of the mini-Bazaar created by Favela.  Although the environment was a natural concern, my impression was that customers presumed this was something KLM were already working on (which they are).  On the day, the most passionate area of discussion was how to make flights less boring - which hadn't really come up in our planning at all!  And the ideas to brighten up flights were incredibly diverse.  One person suggested the very practical notion of letting people flag their interests at booking...

Brand Whuffie?

Last week, I introduced the term Whuffie in a presentation and went onto explain it as a concept that captures lots of the ideas about reputation-as-currency that apply to today's social web (also see Egoboo).  I also mentioned this rather splendid Whuffie ring that popped up recently.  It made me smile that I then had to emphasise that Whuffie is a fictional idea and not the latest beta roll out from the Googleplex - surely a sign of our fast moving times.  The aspect that appeals to me most about Cory Doctorow's post-scarcity currency is that the valuation system used is public opinion.  Which all sounds a bit futuristic until you think of eBay ratings.  But it was this thoughtful comment by Scott Pearson on the post below which brought Whuffie to mind with regard to brands: "I believe that Brand is a consequence of success not a prerequisite for it. Google is successful, so its brand becomes trusted. Brand is a measure of trust and expectation, not awareness!".  Which you have to say makes a lot of sense.  In a complex world people are looking out for things to trust and, more than ever, it's each other they're turning to, to try and gauge where to place that belief.

Goodbye Branding (It Doesn't Matter What You Say)

The greatest problem marketeers have these days is that no one really cares what they say.  The only opinions people are interested in are those from other people.  Let me give you a personal example.  I have been in the market for a new kitchen for sometime and as a result, quite randomly, found myself in a Moben salesroom and booked up for a consultation.  The Moben rep duly arrived and was very good, explaining everything we needed.  In short we were sold and even cancelled other consultations.  However, I then mentioned our intended purchase to friends and family and got some concerned looks.  Unusually for me I hadn't checked the company online but then did so.  I found a series of horror stories - including this particularly graphic one.  Order cancelled.  Moben's tight marketing programme including a shop in a nice part of town, lovely website, super salesman and beautiful literature had been made entirely redundant by my 10 second search. Call it death by Google Index.  All of which is a problem.  For forever and a day the marketing industry has worked on the basis that if you tell a good story...

SUMOTorrent

SUMOTorrent is a new BitTorrent network that has has gone from nowhere to the edge of the Alexa Top 100 rankings in 6 months, attracting 350k visitors a day.  TorrentFreak has an interview with the team who launched the system.  This part caught my eye and offers an insight into the mindset of the web's vast P2P community: "P2P and BitTorrent websites are here to stay, and they are the major means of online content distribution nowadays. This is a fact. Instead of trying to block the highway that leads to your customers, you should put your strategy into question. When the time will come that P2P sites will get better organized (and this time is soon, you know it) and ran by smart structures instead of simple individuals, you will understand you have missed the last opportunity you had to jump on the bandwagon of the digital revolution!"

I Love Marmite - But Do You Care?

The new Facebook SocialAds model works by one person admitting to a range of brand allegiances and advertising them to their social network.  Having established that circle of interest Facebook will allow advertisers to introduce commercial messages into those conversations.  The idea is that advertisers will effectively be  invited into social networks which currently act as filters to many traditional marketing techniques.  It's a pretty clever notion that makes you think FB's greatest asset is that its founder and boss was born in 1984.  Will it work?  Well I love marmite and eat it everyday but does anyone else care?  Maybe.  However, as Weinberger notes, "it could finally make it possible for me to ask my local friends what plumber they like."  What is interesting is that this approach and the HyperTargeting service announced this week by MySpace are both claiming that the more information punters give up the more useful advertising becomes.  It's becoming a stronger argument.  After all, who can say that Google's contextual approach hasn't been an improvement on mass TV spam?  So, in fact, it was our fault all along.  The only reason that advertising has become an irritant for so many people is that customers weren't playing along.  Naughty customers.

Blodget's analysis here is good, especially the last part: "What's in it for the "friend" who is bombarding "friends" with an advertising feed? Discounts on future products?  Great table next time you visit?  Is all this disclosed?  Will other friends enjoy it?"

All The World's A Platform

Just when you think the web world is going to settle down, get out its pipe and slippers and kick back, someone rips up the blueprint and we have to start all over again.  When Facebook decided to create a platform that other people (ie software developers) could come and use as a shop window for their stuff it catapulted the social network from a preppy hang-out straight into the big-dog-o-sphere.  The reason simply being that new stuff attracts people which makes it a better place to launch new stuff.  (Think restaurants).  It wasn't obvious that this move would work but 6,000 widgets later and following one of the most astute deals ever done on this or any other planet, we can safely say...good job.  However, even more tellingly, is the speed at which the other grand fromages have jumped on the bandwagon.  First, Murdoch's Myspace followed suit, then the open platform became a major strand of Jerry Yang's uber-strategy for Yahoo, then Microsoft stumped up everything-for-nothing just to get a foothold, and now Google lines up an alliance to try and out-Facebook Facebook - in the shape of OpenSocial.  In a very Google-like way, this new standard is huge, ambitious and spread out all over the web.  In a very un-Google like way, they are playing catch-up.  For marketing folk it means that the world of widgets, which can be used to create little (or big) branding tools, just got a whole lot bigger.