Frontiering Talk

A new social network has launched in Australia which hopes to address some of the key insights from online social media research.

Vibe Village is a social network which is hoping to connect brands to social influencers, by targeting 3 needs.

Being First.

I still remember running home to tell my brothers that I had found a way to get through the lane way at the back of my house, only to be disappointed when it became apparent that the news wasn’t news to them.

One of the key motivators for research and discovery is to be one of the first to know about a certain product, service.  Being First can be a relative concept, for example there is only one Neil Armstrong.  Yet, it’s much more common to be the first person in our social group to communicate a new fact.

Free stuff.

We all like stuff for free, so much so that we are almost suspicious when we are offered free things.  Vibe Village lets its members chose products that match their interests, offering programs that members can register for, and obtain free stuff such as advance copies of soon to be released DVD’s and new innovative products.

Share and Shape.

Members are encouraged to shape the innovation of products by being given a direct voice to products, and are also given opportunities to share news by hosting parties.

In today’s world of advertising clutter, it’s more and more difficult to get your message in the hands of the people who can provide a genuine word of mouth communication.  Vibe Village is attempting to provide a targeted solution for brands wanting to recruit product evangelists, by providing access to individuals who are passionate about your category. 

Disclosure: Vibe Village has been a client of Frontiering

Imagine you are in the delivery business, and want to show that you deliver anywhere in the world.

DHL, with the help of a swedish artist Erik Nordenankar, and a GPS device have managed to create what they describe as the biggest drawing in the world.

The website documents the creation, along with detailed instructions and delivery documents, and even contains video footage of the drawings journey.

In a world of increasing clutter, it takes something unique to stand out and get noticed, and judging by the number of blogosphere conversations, the initiative appears to be something that will help raise awareness for DHL’s global delivery service.

When I was young, radio shows such as American Top 40, or Billboard were the established authorities on determining the most popular artist or album.
The internet has revolutionised the distribution of music and it’s no surprise that there is no shortage of innovation in the delivery of informational services.

Recognising that popularity includes discussions, consumption as well as purchase, the BBC has created an index of bands and tracks.

The index is updated every 6 hours, using IBM’s Semantic Super Computing which scans sites such MySpace, Bebo, Last.fm, iTunes, Google, YouTube, monitoring conversations, music listened to, artists watched, and songs downloaded, to establish the most popular 1000 artists and tracks on the web.

The more conversations an artist or song receives and the more it is is downloaded or played, the higher up the Sound Index they are listed.

The Sound Index can also be filtered based on genre, location of people and age group.

Whilst you are unable to “click through” to the actual conversations for a given artist, this index represents a good indicator of their marketing performance.

I can see these type of measures being applied to almost any industry or category. The Food Index, The Restaurant Index, even the Agency Index.
Are you monitoring what is being said about your brand or service?

New interactive technologies can help to bring brands or big ideas to life.
Bullseye in partnership with 808South are pleased to announce Australia’s first client demonstration of the iBar™.

Speaking about the technology, Ian Farmer Senior Brand Strategist for Bullseye said

“The iBar™ has received many innovation awards in Europe and we are excited about the digital possibilities this technology can provide to Australia. Designing a creative set of interactive experiences is an integral part of producing a rewarding and engaging brand interaction”.

Intelligent surface system

iBar™ takes consumer interaction to a new level. Integrated video projectors beam content onto the bar surface and the intuitive tracking system creates a new connection between real life products and dynamic digital content. This turns the bar into a giant touch sensitive screen allowing multiple people to interact with the content at the same time.
Coloured lights, animations or any rich media content can illuminate, link and follow every movement of a hand, bottle or glass.

The iBar™ software consists of two parts – tracking and displaying. All objects are tracked and their position is transmitted to the displaying-software. The displaying software can be adapted to your needs. The use of pictures, text, movies, animations or any visual content is possible. iBar™ is a modular, stand alone system that can be configured to suit your needs. The modules are 2m long and can be linked together to form a seamless interactive surface of virtually any length.

The iBar™’s can also be networked wirelessly to allow interaction between two or more separate units. Content can also be streamed via the net and bars can be fitted with Bluetooth technology to allow consumers to download content. Each portable module consists of its own cameras, projectors and computers. Any number of iBar™ modules are available for hire on short and long-term arrangements.

Super Bowl advertising isn’t cheap, and at nearly $2 million for a 30 second spot it is the most expensive placement you can make.

So if you are going to advertise during the Super Bowl, there are some basic things that you should get right.

1. Create a microsite for the ad and show the URL in your commercial. If you are spending that much on placement, having a microsite is almost mandatory.
This year 84% of ads did this and unlike last year these URL’s led to the right landing pages.

2. Purchase search ads so that consumers can find your site before / during and after the event. 70% of this year’s advertisers did this. 28% purchase Super Bowl related keywords.

3. Call to action. Only 6% of ads had some kind of call to action in their ads. Ads that cost this much to run should link a promotion or competition to the ad to extend the investment. One of the best forms of promotions is one that invites people to interact with your brand.

Proctor & Gamble is doing just that by inviting consumers to submit spoof ads of the Talking Stain ad. The ad features a guy interviewing for a job and a stain on his shirt cleverly translates his comments drawing the interviewers attention. Since the airing of the ad, 5,500 consumer generated spoofs have been uploaded to the spot’s microsite mytalkingstain.com.

These can be viewed on Youtube here. Free ringtones, and related buddy icons are also available. You can also interact with the commercial by “being the stain” which is powered by Oddcast’s lipsyncing tool.

Reprise Media has a full scorecard on this years Super Bowl ads available as a PDF download.

Stories are the best forms of communication, and ones that you can wear can be great forms of conversation starters.

For charities, getting potential donors to feel involved with a cause can be difficult.  Rosa Loves facilitates this by selling t-shirts which have both a graphic and a story describing the cause they are supporting. The story is placed on the inside of the t-shirt next to the wearer’s heart to invoke a personal attachment to the cause.

Causes can be as simple as a person in need, or a disadvantaged community, but each one has a specific goal and a defined funding requirement.
60% of the sales from each t-shirt goes directly to the cause.  T-shirts are hand-numbered and created in small batches until the required amount has been raised.

This is a great example of a product serving a growing need for authenticity and personalisation.

ChallengeOptimus is a mobile phone company based in Portugal wanting to target young people within a big music festival.  So they came up with a plan to create a unique viewing platform service provided by ten big men.  The service called "broad shoulders" was greatly accepted by the young people in the festival and word quickly spread across the festival.  More people used the "Broad Shoulders" service to get a better view of the concert, search for a lost friend in the crowd.

Why did this work ?
The "Broad Shoulders" service was unique, free, fun, and provided a benefit to people.  It’s no wonder word quickly spread about the service across the festival and ChallengeOptimus’s brand health would have received a boost in the process.

So when you are thinking of reaching a particular audience, think of providing something that is unique and of such benefit that your audience can’t help but spread the word.

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.

His New York City apartment had to be fumigated. All of his friends have tiny studio apartments. Hotels in New York are insanely expensive. Left with few living options, Mark thought it would be fun and make an interesting video to move into an IKEA store where he’d live and sleep for a week. Never in a million years did he think IKEA would go for it, but miraculously they have a agreed.

Mark moved in early morning Monday January 7th to the IKEA in Paramus, New Jersey and will stay for the week through Saturday January 12th. Every day people can watch a video recap of his day. He will be living in IKEA 24/7 and eating all his meals in the restaurant (he may order Domino’s take out once or twice). Thankfully they have a shower for him in the back offices.

He has a website to record his week in Ikea

http://marklivesinikea.com/

Perspective: This is a great initiative by Mark, but also by Ikea who will gain lots of free publicity from Mark’s live recording of his experience.

Many consumers are frustrated when wanting to interact with corporations. Phone calls met with “please hold” notices, or emails that get a “thanks for your input” reply, but nothing further.

Getsatisfaction is trying to solve these challenges by providing a place where consumers and marketeers can communicate. They call it “people-powered customer service” and allows consumers a platform where they can converse about customer service issues specific to a particular company or product.

Examples are this request on the Product “I want Sandy”, which is a pretty cool reminder service that I have been testing out.  The replies to the initial request include suggestions and claficiations from a representative of “I want Sandy“, and demonstrate how effective this is.

Participants in the conversations can include other consumers or employee representatives (declared as such), and the ability to rank useful posts enable the community rated posts to bubble to the top.

Discussions are controlled by the community, providing a freedom that is harder to provide inside normal corporate consumer response services. From a corporate view, representatives are encouraged to respond to feedback in a collaborative way.

Currently the service is free, although I suspect it gains traction they could monetise the service by either charging corporate participation on a monthly fee, or offering extended offerings that are paid for.

Perspective: More and more consumers are willing to express their opinions about your products and services, and brands that ignore these conversations do so at their own risk.

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.

Commuispace has released a study titled Meeting Business Needs by Meeting Social Needs, which examines the 6 social needs that people seek in social networks.

1. Expressing personal identity: online social networks provide people with the ultimate tool for defining and redefining themselves, as evidenced in profile pages on Facebook and MySpace.

2. Status and self-esteem: the need for autonomy, recognition and achievement are essential to our sense of self-worth and are fulfilled in online communities, blogs, and social networks that provide a way to develop and manage a virtual reputation.

3. Giving and getting help: people have a need to both seek and provide help to others. Mutual assistance between strangers is a phenomenon that has been uniquely enabled by the Internet.

4. Affiliation and belonging: online communities are becoming the way people find, create and connect with others “just like me” – people who share similar tastes, sensibilities, orientations or interests.

5. Sense of community: a sense of belonging or affiliation alone is not equivalent to a true sense of community. Achieving a real sense of community requires long-lasting reciprocal relationships and a mutual commitment to the needs of the community as a whole.
6. Reassurance of value and self worth. People want to be reassured of their worth and value, and seek confirmation that what they say and do matters to others and has an impact on the world around them.

These needs are very relevant for any company or brand that seeks to establish a community, and make an excellent benchmark to test the value of a social network. Meeting these needs helps to deliver trust and deeper insight into the community members, says the report.

Perspective: It’s very difficult for a brand to achieve these needs, as most offer limited expression for the community and fail to enlist the power of the social network to give and receive help. This reduces the feeling of affiliation and belonging, and the value of the community. That’s why most of the successful communities such as Shespeaks, Yelp, Minti are run by independant and passionate consumers rather than brands. Brands then try to engage interrupt the consumers with advertising clutter, treating the social network like any other content channel. Consumers want to be heard, and are ready to give help to be reassured of their worth and value. I wonder when brands will recognise this?

Gary Vaynerchuk of Wine Library TV fame, talks with The Trend Junkie about building the Wine Community, transparency and the acqusition of Cork’d.

It’s an insightful video full of excellent advice for people wanting to start a community.

Tags: community, interview, Social Network, wine