Modern Marketing - Blog by Collaborate PR & Marketing

The Danger Of Likeminds (And Facebook)

Many thanks to the splendid Ian Collingwood for this thoughtful counterblast to my last post: "This  "circling of wagons" that you describe may be attractive, (especially for marketers) but is it, in fact, socially damaging? Surrounding yourself with "like-minded" people might feel good from the inside, but really you're building an echo-chamber for your own opinions - and I think that may be harmful to society as a whole. I'm not a fan of building walls, and I believe that it's not a huge leap from "like-minded" to "narrow-minded". Already this is happening in the real world - last week's Economist noted research showing that people in the States are increasingly choosing to live amongst those who share identical political views to themselves. I believe such communities are likely to be socially impoverished (not to mention, tedious and bland) and will tend towards the development of increasingly polarised and intolerant viewpoints. This cannot be a good thing in our current world. If this trend towards actively removing oneself from hearing or seeing anything that challenges one's viewpoint is replicated online through services like Facebook then I feel we will lose something enormously valuable. The Internet has always been a place for vigorous, challenging debate. Long may that continue".  Open ID for you then Ian...? ;-)

Facebook Knows You're A Dog

Peter Steiner's famous cartoon in New Yorker magazine first appeared in 1993 and has adorned a million powerpoint slides since.  The cartoon's single line, 'On the internet no one knows you're a dog', captured some of the crazy, frontier spirit of the web, where it seemed the normal rules did not apply.  However, that could be about to change as Facebook rattles its way up to 300 million users worldwide, making it more populus than all but four of the globe's countries, powered by its new Connect facility and Open Stream API.  In this instantly-seminal Wired essay, Fred Vogelstein makes the point: "Connect and Open Stream don't just allow users to access their Facebook networks from anywhere online. They also help realize Facebook's longtime vision of giving users a unique, Web-wide online profile. By linking Web activity to Facebook accounts, they begin to replace the largely anonymous "no one knows you're a dog" version of online identity with one in which every action is tied to who users really are."  Regardless of the way you may feel about Facebook, it's becoming increasingly easy to see how much better the web can be if you can search people - not just pages.  The result will be a very different looking web, where information-overloaded people circle the wagons to create troll-free social networks of their most trusted contacts, picking up whispers, buying tips and news only from within those groups.  For brands, the value of links from within those circles will be much higher than from any other source.  "Why settle for articles about the Chrysler bankruptcy that the Google News algorithm recommends when you can read what your friends suggest?", says Vogelstein, in a shift which FriendFeed users might recognise.  In other words, who wants to know what a dog thinks?  And the realisation of the value of this information is not lost on Google, as shown by the company's launch of Friend Connect and more recently individual profiles.  No doubt all driven by the ever-growing blackhole in its search results created by Zuckerberg's empire which is vast but invisible to the Google index.  But show me the money, right?  Well Facebook has quietly been building annual revenues to the tune of $275m.  Nowhere near the scale of the shekel machine that is Google.  However, as the Wired article notes, Messrs Page & Brin bowled along for five years before stumbling over the Adsense pot of gold.  And Facebook's recent credit system shows it is serious about innovation.  All of which could mean a troll-free web experience, a shake-up of Search and some genuine competition for Google.  And fewer dogs.

The Rise Of Funny Money

A much loved and admired uncle of mine who became very successful trading industrial optics, started his entrepreneurial career in pyjamas.  Yep, that’s right – pyjamas.  After the war, the government sold off vast amounts of the kit no longer required by soldiers and military personnel.  My uncle would go to the government's auctions and buy these items to sell on in civvy street.  After a few weeks he noticed thousands of pyjamas appearing separately as tops and bottoms.  So he started buying up all the auction lots of either pyjama shirts or trousers for next to nothing and then waiting for the matching halves to appear.  Obviously the reacquainted items were worth a lot more together than apart, so he could then sell them on to retailers and their thrifty post-war customers for a healthy profit.  This was a widely told story in my family and one that seemed to illustrate the reasons for my uncle’s success.  He had a knack of creating cash from nowhere.  Sort of funny money I always thought to myself, while admiring my uncle's counter intuitive nouse.  One aspect of the web that has sparked my interest in recent weeks has been the ever growing examples of such 'funny money'.  Where significant flows of cash or profitable trading environments appear from unlikely origins.  Part of my interest is because the web is now such a noisy place, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to sort...

How Small Change Became Big Money

About six years ago when my late mother was in her seventies she told me how amazing she found the choice that people had in the modern workplace.  'We just used to get any job we could and hold on to it for as long as possible', mum remarked, 'but you’ll see some interesting changes'.  'In new technology?' I suggested.  'Oh no, in people’s lives', she said.  I was reminded of this conversation recently when a super-talented designer friend of mine described how he had taken an idea for a new iPhone application to someone he knew at a major London advertising agency – who snapped it up for a MegaBrand client.  This turned out to be a bad move.  Many months of pain followed as my buddy defended his idea from the agency strategists, brand police and finance folk.  Including a demand for a multi-thousand pound insurance policy in case the app damaged the iPhone of a hypothetical customer in an unknown corner of the world.  At the end of the process (the app in question never made it online) my friend reflected that he should have cut out the agency and just put his idea straight up onto Apple's AppStore.  That he explained would have meant, ‘less pain and more money’.  And he’s not alone in this view.  There are currently 41056 apps available in the iTunes AppStore - many the work of individuals.  Between them they've been downloaded one billion times in just nine months.  Some estimate that the average revenue from a top 100 application could run to $12k per month.  While others are thought to make a lot more.  There’s no doubt it’s an extremely competitive, quite chaotic marketplace but considering it’s not even a year old that's pretty amazing.  Other direct routes for individuals to go to market include the Facebook Platform that allows people to create products and services and distribute them to the social net’s 200 million users.  SAI recently noted that Facebook developers, many of which are solo agents, will collectively make about $500m this year – possibly more than Facebook itself!  And then there’s...