Frontiering Talk

It’s amazing how some drawings can be made to look real, even when drawn on a flat surface. Take a look at these 3D drawings. Certainly a great talking point !

As Blogs, Forums, Newsgroups, and Opinion / review sites gain in both numbers and popularity, the purpose for “going online” is also changing. Rather than going online to “check the email and local football results”, consumers are spending a larger percentage of time online discussing, sharing and learning. Ironically, sharing of knowledge and opinions is where the internet began.

Is is possible that we are returning to days of old where people would gather at the market place to discuss new spices and fabrics found in distant lands?

Trust in mass media is in decline, as people realise they have a tool that allows them to seek, hear and also give honest feedback to others.

As part of an increasing trend to utilise the growing consumer voice in the online world, several companies have made it their business to create and encourage community ratings.

Audioscrobbler takes searching for Music to a new level. Extending the Amazon version of “People who bought this, also bought that”, Audioscrobbler allows users to create their own unique music profile and then connect with others who have similar profiles. In this way they help induce people to grow their music interests by downloading more songs.

Storycode is applying the same principle to books. They have a unique scoring system which you use to describe books that you have read, and then they are able to recommend other books based on matching your responses to others readers.

Movielens is research project being conducted by the University of Minnesota pitched along similar lines.

Whether these sites will still be around next year is hard to say, but they are picking up on an important trend. People do listen to other people, and the internet is making it easier for people to give and hear those opinions. Community voices are definately finding their pitch, but many companies are still not listening.

So what should companies do to stop this trend and ensure that people only listen to what the PR agency wants them to hear?

Well, I think rather than ignoring this trend, companies need to open up their intranets and let consumers get involved with their products!

Changes are that next time you change your phone, one of the features you will get whether you like it or not will be a camera. Although you may still have a digital camera, you’ll be surprised how many times you forget to take it when you want to take a photo.

Quality of the camera pictures are improving, and several websites are allowing people to post and view pictures directly from their phones.

As I stated in my Phone shoot tv ad post, news reports are increasingly using the publics phone pictures to help with first on scene reporting.

So it’s hardly surprising that a company called Scoopt is wanting people to send in pictures or videos that they can on-sell to various magazines and they split the income 50/50 !

You Tube has created a place for people to share their videos, whether they be budding special efex short clips, or just videos taken from your mobile phone.

You can then share the URL with your friends and relieve the experience.
Videos are sorted by categories including Commercials, Top Rated, or by other tags. I particularly liked this one .. aptly named Legoman’s Great Return.

To help encourage submissions, they have monthly topics .. this month is Can you Dance?

There are now more than a few text books on Word of Mouth or Buzz Marketing. Whilst most Marketeers understand that these mediums exist, many fail to realise that these communication channels can be used to reach out to existing and new consumers.

What is interesting is that research has found technologies and techniques that are now available to help to identify how Word of Mouth or Buzz Marketing works. In the book, “The Tipping Point“, Malcolm Gladwell demonstrates how often a seemingly irrelevant or inconsequential influence can have major unforeseen impacts. The ‘tipping point’ is that magic moment when ideas, trends and social behaviours cross a critical threshold and ‘take’, causing a tidal wave of far reaching effect.

How can Brands reach the “connectors” that Malcolm Gladwell refers to?

Finding Connectors
People with unusually high social networks, charisma and the pretense to pass on opinions either positive or negative about products are indeed worthy of special treatment. But finding them is often not that easy. However, new techniques are emerging that can segment a large group, filtering out the most likely connectors. Some are limited to using simple social network questions, but there are tools and techniques that include other factors such as the number of affiliations people belong to in order to gauge the “reach” of the person, and the degree to which people engage with the product / service segment.

Create a contagious experience
Once you have this segment, the second challenge is to create the right sort of “experience” and resulting “story”, that these connectors will pass on to their extensive networks. Ideally the experience of using your product or service can generate the story for you. Skype’s free telephony service is a good example because once you use it, you want your friends to use it to, so that the value of the product increases. Metcalf’s law states that as the number of users doubled, the value of the network quadrupled.

Enable the word to spread
Successful word of mouth requires a reason to pass it on, whether that be an incentive for the connector or just the fact that by passing it helps to add value to the receiver. Remember the Hotmail tag line of “get your free email” went with every email making this a particularly fast spreading tool. The tiny Japanese stickers that you get from a photo booth gave you 16 copies, thereby encouraging you to give them to your friends.

So, what can you do to improve the speed at which your product unique selling points get noticed and spread?

Tags: Social Network, WOM

As a sign of things to come, and building on their recent purchase in May of Android, Google has produced a local search engine for mobile phones with built in maps.

Check out Google’s imode local search, Especially if you have an I-mode capable phone and live in the UK! Each one of the identified bubbles is displayed as the name of a matching search such as Indian Restaurant.

Now ……. if I could only check and compare menus and availability, and after reading up what other people say about the restaurants, make a decision and book a table for tonight!

Beaming video advertising from a transmitter, people who walk by with a bluetooth enabled mobile phone are presented with a “would you like to view an ad?”. In this case, the ad directly relates to the Billboard advertising.

In a 2 week test for the band Cold Play, 13,000 out of 87,000 Bluetooth enabled phone owers opted to view the ad for their new album. Even allowing for the novelty peak, that’s a pretty successful result.

I think this is a great opportunity for companies to tap into a generation who are watching far less television.

Why stop at viewing an advertisement? I can envisage “Click here to download the song!”

As news breaking stories are increasing using video and pictures taken from mobile phones of people on the scene (remember the recent London bombings), the UK Department for Transport has taken the the idea one step further and created a television ad bringing to attention that 55 teenagers in the UK die of traffic accidents every week.

You can see the ad here.

Not sure if they have thought about it, but I would try and find a way to seed this ad to some of the influential teenagers phones and let the message spread teenager to teenager !

Google has today released an upgrade to it’s Desktop search tool which includes a new feature aptly named the sidebar.

It’s a development that will no doubt bring Google more into direct competition with Microsoft as it attempts to extend it’s footprint of useability beyond the browser. The extended plugins like To Do list, Itunes controller are a nice way to create a kind of all purpose remote control for your computer.

The news and RSS feed function is also a useful way to keep track on your favourite Blogs and it does this automatically.

As usual the interface is very easy to use!

Tap into what the blogosphere is saying about your brand / product by going to the Blog Pulse.

You can even graph the results to see what % of the total blogosphere is saying about a particular topic. Relating to my earlier blog on the BigAd — Look at this graph for what blogs are saying about Carlton Draught over the last 6 months.

Why don’t you go to Blogpulse and check out what consumers are really saying about your product / service?

The world of Henry Fords “You can have any colour you like, as long as it’s black” is rapidly ending. Customisation and personalised products are becoming increasingly popular and the price premium seems to be reducing as the demand grows

Some examples?

Japanese stickers
The Japanese fad of getting 16 or so stickers printed out from a photo booth, is a popular way of personalising books, computers and other possessions.

Mobile phone and MP3 player accessories
Companies like Skin it have a dedicated business here where you can select a skin or even upload your own photos which they will produce as a sticker customised for your type of phone or MP3 player.

M&M’s
But larger companies are also realising the potential of personalisation such as M&M’s in the US now allow you to personalise messages and chose colours of M&M’s for special occasions.

The thing I love about personalisation is that it very easily translates into a talking point.
Talking points are then avenues for consumers to market products to other consumers ! You know the conversations .. “I want one of those,where did you get that?”.

What products do you produce, is there a clever way to offer some kind of personalisation that would generate a flow of buzz as excited consumers tell their friends?

A new company in the US called Lease your Body is building a business on leasing out it’s members to Advertisors willing to pay them to wear temporary tattoos.
Advertisors can browse the growing list of more than 2500 members and pay from $100 to $5,000 for 30 continuous days of advertising on one of six body parts (neck, forehead, forearm, upper arm, hand, stomach or lower back).

This comes after an online casino paid a woman $15,000 to have her face permanently tattooed with their URL.

Novel this is, and with the right person, in the right place, and with the right product this may make some sense. For most products and services, I think Advertisors would be better focusing on creating a story (consumer generated media) that consumers would voluntarily spread to their friends, who in turn may be inspired to try the product, and in turn tell their friends.

In a world of increasing customisations, Tanaka have released an automatic door that goes beyond the standard door that opens when you set off a particular sensor. This door calculates the shape of the person or object approaching and using clever horizontal sliders, opens to the optimal shape to allow entry.

Cool this door is, but it also helps in keeping the ‘cool weather’ out, minimising dust, pollen and bugs while keeping the temporature constant on the inside.

Here is a link to a video of the door in operation, whilst it is in Japanese the video does make for interesting viewing.

The applications? Besides high tech manufacturing or Tokyo high class outlets, I imagine the door could make for an interesting entry to a Jazz bar (assuming you could have some of the panels black to look like a piano).