Frontiering Talk

Brightcove have just published an excellent whitepaper on 5 keys to successful online video.

The 5 keys are :-

1. Create Context This refers to label and tag the videos to help with searching)
2. Encourage snacking (displaying related videos around the main video)
3. Produce for the Medium (i.e. short form content, bearing in mind not all genres are equal)
   - Av length is 2.6 mins
   - Less videos provide fictional narrative and drama, more at news, paparazzi video, individual personalities
4. Use Internet Distribution
   -  Allow consumers to embed your videos
   -  Organise syndication with internet video distributors
5. Monetize (for non branded sites)
   -  Need to thinking through how to integrate 15 sec pre-rolls
   -  For Brands .. the creation of 15 sec pre-rolls is an important strategy

Mike Murphy VP Media Sales Facebook (x-Yahoo) gave today’s keynote address and spoke on the Power of Social Media for Brands.  Some key take outs.

Facebook Australia Statistics
- now have 2.2 million
- that is 1 in 5 Australia people online.

Mike talked around the frequency of how Brands are mentioned in conversations without incentives.
For example, there are
- 118000 mentions of McDonalds
- 7000 mentions of Ikea in their profile

Polls
You can now run polls on Facebook, and in this example people were asked on their preference for Vegimite, Marmite or neither), and in 14 mins over 500 responses were received.

Trust and influence
People are discovering their friends various passion points, and this is being used to influence purchasing behaviour, as well as close friends being trusted for all topics.

Value of online media
Mike showed some examples of branded online media
Ali versus Ali (addidas)
Aussie Week (which was is a clever travel log showing real people experiencing Australia)

Distribution through Conversation
Mike talked through the social graph to explain social networking

Media spend
4 to 5 % of budgets are being spent online in Australia versus 25% in the US
He appealed to the industry to find better ways to measure engagement

Examples of companies doing social media right
1. Be a part of the experience
Gillette Venus Breeze razors, which asked women to interact with experiences

2. Maintain a daily dialogue
JP Morgan / Chase bank.
- Asked collegue students what was important to them in a credit card
- Results suggested that points were important, but that they didn’t feel they would accumulate enough points
- Chase responded with an application that enabled student to accumulate points together and then you could see how many points your network has
- This was the most successful credit card campaign that Chase has done

3. Give a reason to share
Cloverfield movie .. created a facebook application which could run as a widget on users pages.

What makes social media different and exciting? (some quotes from leading US ad execs)
- The power of conversation
- Like the difference between leaving a voice mail and the other person picking up and talking
- Putting your brand out their and letting people contribute to it
- How do you listen and engage consumer needs … over and above your brand needs
- Creating a fair value exchange - experience for their attention

A recent Nielsen study of more than 22,000 active mobile data users, shows gaining acceptance of mobile advertising in the US reports Marketing Charts.

23 percent of US mobile subscribers (58 million people) say they have seen mobile advertising in the previous 30 days.

Half of mobile data users (51 percent, or 28 million people) who recall seeing a mobile ad say they responded to the ad in some way.

However, just 10 percent of US mobile data (e.g., text-messaging) users say they think advertising on their mobile devices is acceptable - but an increasing number appear to understand the value proposition of ad-supported mobile content, Nielsen said.

Nearly 1/3 of mobile data users say they are open to mobile advertising if it lowers their overall bill, according to the survey.

Among other findings of the study:

• The number of data users who recalled seeing mobile advertising between the second and fourth quarters of 2007 increased 38 percent (from 42 million to 58 million).
• Teen data users (age 13-17) were the most likely age segment to recall seeing mobile advertising (46 percent recalled seeing some type of mobile advertisement, compared with 29 percent of all data users).
• 26 percent of those who saw an ad responded at least once by sending an SMS text message, the most popular ad response.
• 9 percent say they have used click-to-call to respond to a mobile ad (i.e., users follow a link on their phone to call a specific number).
• 13 percent (18 percent of males) said they are open to mobile advertising if it improves the media and content currently available.
• 14 percent said they are already open to mobile advertising so long as it is relevant to their interests.
• 23 percent expect to see more mobile advertising in the future (up from just 15 percent in Q1 2007).

Perspective:  The Australian market is probably 12-18 months away from these numbers, due to barriers such as access speeds and cost. 

Mattel and Hasbro who the worldwide rights to the Scrabble game are suing the creators of Scrabulous, one of Facebook’s most popular applications for copyright infringement.

Scrabulous attracts over 600,000 daily users and nets the 20-something Indian brothers who created the application, $25,000 worth of advertising each month.  So Hasbro has asked Facebook to take down Scrabulous.

This is where Legal deparments don’t understand social networks.

• The Scrabulous fans are passionate about the game and are not happy about Hasbro’s heavy handedness.
• Already, there are over 55,000 members in a Save Scrabulous Facebook Group that are talking of a boycott of all Mattel and Hasbro products.

So what should Hasbro and Matel do instead ?

• Consider buying Scrabulous and use the passionate fans to evangelise scrabble as a learning game.
• Hire the Scrabulous creators to develop online versions for other social networks.
• Sponsor competitions of the online game.
• Allow fans to create personalised scrabble games which they can design online.

Truveo (a video search engine) has just launched several country specific video sites Australia, Brazil, Italy, Mexico, The Netherlands, Russia, Turkey.

This is the top rated section in Australia sports category, which you can “snag” as a widget.

It’s incredible just how much video content is now available, and the ability to create and serve niche channels is quite powerful.

Don’t you hate it when you hire a DVD and it’s just not your kind of movie.

Social networks such Criticker and Filmtrust are helping and it’s no surprise that a company who’s very business is about renting movies is trying to improve the “success rate” of hire versus like ratio.

Netflix have announced a contest where the prize is $1 million, to the person or team that can create a better system for improving their movie predictions system.

I love their contest and they describe it here.

Netflix is all about connecting people to the movies they love. To help customers find those movies, we’ve developed our world-class movie recommendation system: Cinematch. Now there are a lot of interesting alternative approaches to how Cinematch works that we haven’t tried. We’re curious whether any of these can beat Cinematch by making better predictions.

So, we thought we’d make a contest out of finding the answer. It’s ‘easy’, really. We provide you with a lot of anonymous rating data, and a prediction accuracy bar that is 10% better than what Cinematch can do on the same training data set. If you develop a system that we judge most beats that bar on the qualifying test set we provide, you get serious money and the bragging rights. But (and you knew there would be a catch, right?) only if you share your method with us and describe to the world how you did it and why it works. To keep things interesting, in addition to the Grand Prize, we’re also offering a USD 50,000 Progress Prize each year the contest runs. It goes to the team whose system we judge shows the most improvement over the previous year’s best accuracy bar on the same qualifying test set. No improvement, no prize.

They even have a leader board to ensure transparency of the competition, and the 2007 winner was recently announced providing a 8.43% improvement on Cinematch.

Perspective: It’s great to see companies outsource innovation in this way, and rewarding the successful innovators. There are many ways to tap into the wisdom of consumers to help with solving challenges like this, it’s just that most brands / companies aren’t prepared to let consumers in.