Comments on the social graph

FIVE COMPANIES CONTROL 64% OF ALL ONLINE ADVERTISING SPEND

2011-11-01T13:31:00.000-07:00

An interesting chart, sourced from Silicon Alley Insider, using data from VC Darren Herman, showing that the combined forces of Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Facebook, and AOL control about $40.1B of the world's digital ad spend, or about 64%. He took the ZenithOptimedia figure of worldwide digital advertising spend of $64.03B.

18TH CENTURY SOCIAL NETWORKS DATA VISUALIZATION

2011-10-28T13:06:00.000-07:00

I'm fascinated by mapping, and the role data visualization plays in bringing to life patterns that are essentially 'invisible' to the naked eye.

This smart project from Stanford takes 18th century correspondence between intellectuals in what they term the "Republic of Letters" and visualizes who is sending and receiving letters. Worth watching

FACEBOOK F8 KEYNOTE PRESENTATION

2011-10-22T20:05:00.000-07:00

Watch live streaming video from f8conference at livestream.com

Mark Zuckerberg knows that even Facebook's mighty ecosystem is not enough by itself, it needs partners. If developers combine their ecosystems with Facebook's ecosystem then Zuckerberg gets the complete map. Google wants that map, Microsoft wants that map. Who will get their first?

This video is long, but well worth watching if you want deep insights into Facebook's priorities within the developer community.

The first part of this video is just policy statements, and Facebook cheerleading, but at around time marker 06:55, Zuckerberg moves to the big stuff, as he says - which is the social graph.

It's interesting how Facebook is now starting to overlay semantics onto the social graph. This is powerful stuff. This semantic layer on top of the social graph comes in the form of the Open Graph Protocol

The Open Graph Protocol enables you to integrate your Web pages into the social graph. It is currently designed for Web pages representing profiles of real-world things — things like movies, sports teams, celebrities, and restaurants. Including Open Graph tags on your Web page, makes your page equivalent to a Facebook Page. This means when a user clicks a Like button on your page, a connection is made between your page and the user.

Your page will appear in the "Likes and Interests" section of the user's profile, and you have the ability to publish updates to the user. Your page will show up in the same places that Facebook pages show up around the site (e.g. search), and you can target ads to people who like your content. The structured data you provide via the Open Graph Protocol defines how your page will be represented on Facebook.

Just as interesting, was the launch of the Graph API:

At Facebook's core is the social graph; people and the connections they have to everything they care about. The Graph API presents a simple, consistent view of the Facebook social graph, uniformly representing objects in the graph (e.g. people,photos, events, and pages) and the connections between them (e.g., friend relationships, shared content, and photo tags).

Participating in the Graph API will help Facebook get one step closer to the map of connections of people and things. Remember this is not just a technical exercise, this map is a map of our culture. Being able to add and take from the map will be a very appealing prospect for brands and developers alike.

RETHINKING TV RATINGS AND SOCIAL MEDIA BUZZ ANALYSIS

2011-09-26T11:13:00.000-07:00

Strata Summit 2011: Jodee Rich, "Move Over Nielsen: Rethinking TV Ratings"

THE SECRET ELITIST WORLD OF SEARCH ENGINES

2011-09-26T10:28:00.000-07:00

"The limits of my language means the limits of my world." Ludwig Wittgenstein

Search is a language game, with an elite and an underclass. Some people simply know how to work these machines better than others. Not only do they have a deep understanding of computer based logic (Boolean logic), but they have wider vocabularies, and understandings of semantic relationships between search queries.

Today is Google's 13th anniversary, and that search box might appear to be one of the most democratic and egalitarian spaces possible, but don't let appearances deceive you. People using search engines are not harmlessly and positively divided by their interests, but are also divided by their aptitudes and knowledge.

In addition to Boolean operators like AND, and OR, there are other operators that power what users know such as:

Term Location: - inurl:, intitle:, intext:, or inanchor: to tell Google where it should look for the term your looking for.

Similar terms: ~ in front of a word tells Google to look for similar terms to that word, for example ~blog web 2.0

You'll find a full list here or here.

Knowing how to effectively use keywords and operators makes a huge difference in search effectiveness and thus content discovery. Keywords are still the dominant paradigm for navigating the digital space, and I hold to the phrase I created, which is that "keywords are doorways to content"

Many people out there would describe, Ludwig Wittgenstein, as the foremost philosopher of the twentieth century. Eccentric, even a little crazy, a genius, but no expert on search engines. But its strange how so much of his work around language is relevant for today's challenges around semantics, search engines, and tags. More to come on this topic in future posts.

KIVA PEER-TO-PEER LENDING INFOGRAPHIC

2011-09-10T06:00:00.000-07:00

This is a very cool infographic using data from Kiva, the peer-to-peer lending network. HAT TIP TO Jason Pearson

Kiva defines itself as "a non-profit organization with a mission to connect people through lending to alleviate poverty. Leveraging the internet and a worldwide network of microfinance institutions, Kiva lets individuals lend as little as $25 to help create opportunity around the world." Very cool.

Intercontinental Ballistic Microfinance from Kiva on Vimeo.

We often complain how charity money disappears into admin costs, but here we have no excuses - the intermediary is disintermediated, and we get to build a direct relationship with the beneficiary.

This is the type of cool stuff that reaffirms why we work with the Internet and how it's changing the world.

Here's a video that explains how it works.

How Kiva Works from Kiva on Vimeo.

ALGORITHMS AND THEIR POWER

2011-07-24T06:10:00.000-07:00

Two TED videos with very different views on algorithms. They both spotlight the tremendous power that algorithms now exert over our culture and business life. What do you think - force for good or bad?

GOOGLE+ SOME EARLY THOUGHTS FROM MY COLLEAGUES IN LONDON

2011-07-18T09:58:00.000-07:00

Google+ is here. What now?

View more presentations from Publicis Modem UK

Fascinating insights on Google+ and where its all heading

THE FUTURE OF MEDIA AND 8 NEW RULES FOR NAVIGATING THROUGH IT

2011-06-19T04:41:00.000-07:00

Future of media

View more presentations from aeffik

I've recently been spending some time thinking and tackling issues in the area where digital planning, communications planning, and media planning overlap. Some might argue they are all the same thing. They are going through transformational change. We are in essence lost in a new civilization, explorers in a strange land trying to find a map to help us find its treasures. This slideshow looks at 8 new rules for navigating this new landscape.

Probably best to view this on slideshare. Feel free to download the presentation there.

JUST WHEN BLACKBERRY THOUGHT IT WAS MAKING A COMEBACK - BB IS DEAD

2011-05-21T09:50:00.000-07:00

Whether you are a rap fan or not, you'll appreciate the significance of a song devoted entirely to criticizing a product, and 'bigging up' another one. A sign of things to come? UK rapper, GT Solo jumps into the debate around Blackberry vs iPhone.

We've all been there. You have an iPhone somebody else has a Blackberry. The debate is pretty emotive. Phones are now part of our identities, and the younger you are the stronger a role your phone plays.

It's an interesting time for Blackberry with its new tablet, and the growth of Blackberry Messenger. The FT recently talked of Messenger as BB's secret weapon, and a key part of its fight back, but GT Solo just doesn't agree.

TOP 10 BRANDS BY LIKES ON FACEBOOK

2011-04-02T14:14:00.002-07:00

ADAGE recently published this chart using data from Facebook.

What's becoming increasingly clear is that just chasing Likes for Likes sake is just a waste of time. Brands should be looking to turn Likes into Advocates. To do this you'll need to master Social CRM.

You'll need to know:

1. A bit about Facebook and Twitter; and
2. A bit more about CRM strategy
3. A lot about data analytics

This will not be easy for everyone.

HILLARY CLINTON: US LOSING INFORMATION WAR TO ALTERNATIVE MEDIA

2011-03-05T06:09:00.000-08:00

Hillary Clinton: US Losing Information War to Alternative Media

"The US is losing the global information war, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton declared while appearing before a congressional committee to ask for extra funds to spread US propaganda through new media.

For instance, RT's (Russian State TV) presence on YouTube is a real hit: almost 300 million views, when CNN International is struggling to reach 3 million."

PLANNING VERSUS STRATEGY: WHICH DO YOU DO?

2011-02-18T09:01:00.000-08:00

Since, I've been in America, I've discovered a huge confusion and debate about the difference between planning and strategy. I always thought my job title was planner, but what I was doing was called strategy.

The apparent distinction seems to be that planners do creative stuff and strategists do business stuff. In most instances I think the difference is as simple as some agencies chose one title, and others chose the other title. Where there is a real distinction - I agree - it is usually whether they get involved in the creative process or not.

In the UK, where account planning began, the difference only really exists in digital agencies with American roots. UK planners have had to consequently develop broader skillsets. With bigger budgets on this side of the Atlantic, many agencies can afford to have both types of people.

I'm not sure if there is room for both roles in the future, as margins continue to shrink in the digital world. It'll be interesting to watch. It's likely that digital agencies will experience the same thing that happened with account planning in advertising agencies- which had two original inventors and cultures. My view is that the distinction will disappear in digital agencies.

Account planning started in the UK in the 1960s by Stanley Pollitt and Stephen King at JWT. It gained a foothold in the U.S. in the mid 80’s - through Chiat/Day - and has been growing ever since. King would have aligned himself much more closely with what they call Strategists, here in the US, and Pollitt, would have aligned himself with what they call Planners here. The distinction has now disappeared.

I worry for the account planner who knows nothing about business, or the strategist who doesn't understand consumers. Do these people really exist, and how do they survive?

This post was a follow-up to an answer I contributed on Quora to a question entitled: What is the difference between an account planner and a strategist?

It's no surprise there is confusion. If you watch the videos below filmed here in New York you'll notice a few things:
- Most of the planners are British
- The videos aim to show consensus, but they don't really agree on very much
- The Planners all have different answers for what we do in concrete terms. Other professions find it easier to describe what they do. A film director would say 'I direct the actors and crew in the making of a film'. An architect would say 'I plan, design and oversee the construction of buildings'. Planners all have very different answers.

Here's a series of videos from PSFK on Skills of The Rockstar Planning that spotlight the differences in definition.

CLASSIC STEVE JOBS SPEECH ON THINK DIFFERENT CAMPAIGN

2011-02-13T19:50:00.000-08:00

At the beginning of my agency career, I did a little work on a peripheral part of the Think Different campaign, i.e. I was barely involved. But I do remember thinking that the campaign was remarkable. This video from around that time shows Steve Jobs at his best, explaining the thinking behind the campaign that remains at the heart of Apple's DNA today. It's also a very smart explanation of what a brand point view is and what it delivers.

UNDERSTANDING CONTAGIOUS DIFFUSION USING NETWORK DIAGRAMS

2011-02-06T06:56:00.000-08:00

As the social web moves beyond the hype stage, and the monetisation phase takes a grip, we all need to start understanding how contagious diffusion really works in different types of communities. We'll need to master how to construct network diagrams that show all the nodes in a network, and how the influence flows.

I'm starting to experiment with something called Gephi. It's an interactive visualization and exploration platform for all kinds of networks and complex systems, dynamic and hierarchical graphs. It's open source and therefore free. I'm trying to get data sources, and posted a question on Quora (if you can help).

Gephi demo at JavaOne from gephi on Vimeo.

I see this as a form of digital anthropology. Over the next few years, we will all use data and software like this to dive into the community and really understand what makes it tick. I currently use a series of qualitative techniques fortified with data coming from search analysis and online conversation analysis through Alterian SM2, but getting dynamic data-sets into something like Gephi is the next stage. I've posted on graph theory and network analysis before, and how we will need to master language like clustering coefficients, centrality, and betweeness, and other language that describes networks, but that future is now here.

Introducing Gephi 0.7 from gephi on Vimeo.

BLOGGER SCOTT SCHUMANN AKA THE SARTORIALIST

2011-01-22T19:22:00.000-08:00

Well produced short documentary of Blogger Scott Schumann, aka, The Sartorialist that shows how powerful digital technology make us all now - armed with only a camera and talent he has created a famous online brand. Today's technology is tearing down the walls that held back talent. With the right eye, an interesting point of view, some ambition, and social media, we can all become famous media brands. We live in interesting times.

Very cool for the Sartorialist - not sure how much Intel gets out of this

6 DEEP DIGITAL SKILL SETS FOR 2011

2011-01-04T02:55:00.000-08:00

Here are some of the skill sets that I will be focusing on in 2011. These skills aren't for those who want to dance around the edges of digital, but for those who want to dive deep into the grid, and want to do stuff that works, and get a real understanding of what makes this amazing system tick.

1. Knowledge of how to use social media platforms to manage communities
2. Knowledge of how to use social CRM to drive advocacy and lifetime value in communities
3. Knowledge of how to use mechanism design to construct experiences and sales promotions that incentivize short and long term community actions
4. Knowledge of how to do 360° degree community analysis including buzz analysis, social network analysis, & search zeitgeist tracking
5. Knowledge of how to use digital anthropology to discover insights for creating branded content & utilities
6. Knowledge of how to use social psychological models that exploit the social graph to spread ideas and products

Some polymaths and agencies will have skills across all 6. Most of us will aim to be good at a combination of these. I don't think being good at just one of these is enough any longer.

FACEBOOK MAP OF THE WORLD - VISUALISING THE SOCIAL GRAPH

2010-12-20T20:55:00.000-08:00

Here are some great data visualizations from a Facebook intern in its data infrastructure engineering team, showing a map of social connections through Facebook. For the first time, a full map of the social graph. Paul Butler, had access to Facebook's Apache Hive database and its 500m records, and through a series of carefully constructed steps was able to create this. More details on how he did it here.

The images remind me of some of Aaron Koblin's work on flight patterns.

This work reconfirms the fact that the social graph follows economic, political, and cultural ties. The English speaking world links together (e.g. UK, and North America), Portugal and Spain link through to South America, China doesn't have Facebook, so its dark, and most of Africa is unfortunately dark, except the big population centers.

Understanding the social graph and then learning how to use it is one of digital's biggest challenges.

DELL SOCIAL MEDIA LISTENING CENTRE

2010-12-11T03:20:00.001-08:00

Dell launch a social media listening centre.

GOOGLE ZEITGEIST VIDEO 2010: YEAR IN REVIEW

2010-12-11T02:42:00.000-08:00

Very cool video from Google looking at the past year through the way we've searched.

HANS ROSLING'S 200 COUNTRIES, 200 YEARS, 4 MINUTES

2010-12-09T17:26:00.000-08:00

Hans Rosling is always a pleasure to watch, and the way he tells stories through data is always fascinating.

BEST DIGITAL OF THE DECADE

2010-12-05T17:05:00.000-08:00

The One Club invited top digital creatives to determine which work from the last Digital Decade (2000-2010) were the best. See below, or click through to One Club to get some more of the backstory.

Number 10 - Dove Evolution (Ogilvy for Dove, 2007)

Number 9 - HBO Voyeur (BBDO for HBO, 2008)

Number 8 - Fiat Eco:Drive (AKQA for Fiat, 2009)

Number 7 - Dream Kitchens (Forsman and Bodenfors for IKEA, 2006)

Number 6 - Chalkbot (Wieden & Kennedy for Live Strong Foundation, 2010)

Number 5 - Whopper Sacrifice (Crispin Porter + Bogusky for Burger King, 2009)

Number 4 - Uniqlock (Projecttor for Uniqlo, 2008)

Number 3 - Nike+ (R/GA for Nike, 2007)

Number 2 - The Hire (Fallon for BMW, 2002/3)

Number 1 - Subservient Chicken (Crispin Porter + Bogusky for Burger King, 2005)

FACEBOOK PAGEVIEWS ARE 25% OF US PAGEVIEWS

2010-12-04T04:44:00.000-08:00

According to Hitwise, nearly 1 in 4 page views in the US took place on Facebook.com for the week ending November 13, 2010. The market share of page views for Facebook was 24.27% last week, 3.8x the volume of the 2nd ranked website YouTube with 6.39%. This is s big jump from just March when the figure was 1/10 page views or 10.28%.

That growth is pretty phenomenal, and looks set to continue.

In addition to the page views on Facebook.com, there are also the users of Facebook off of the main site, in functions like Facebook Open Graph. Many people have Facebook interactions on third-party sites.

The viral loop created by Facebook is so hugely infectious it's taking over the whole web, and the brutal efficiency Facebook have applied to ensuring that growth continues is testament to their management strength. Its gone wrong for many other networks much earlier than this.

When Facebook reaches 1bn users - which I reckon will happen towards mid-2012 - then strange things will start to happen to the rest of the web, and web giants like Google will need to adjust to a new reality.

FOURSQUARE I VOTED APPLICATION AND API

2010-11-28T08:59:00.000-08:00

Since I've been in New York, I've started to explore Foursquare. And although I'm finding the whole checking-in thing tedious, I'm excited at the prospect of using the type of data that Foursquare is creating and applications for its API.

You'll see below an interesting use of Foursquare's API for the recent US mid-term elections. Foursquare users checked-in, and then they unlocked a 'I voted' badge that was specially created for the election. Only 50,000 people did it, but there is something very, very interesting about the idea. Driving hyper local advocacy is Foursquare's strength. The phrase, "All politics is local" is a common phrase in U.S. politics. The former U.S. Speaker of the House Tip O'Neill coined this phrase which encapsulates the principle that a politician's success is directly tied to his ability to understand and influence the issues of his constituents (Wikipedia).

Its not brilliantly executed, and the search function doesn't seem to work, but you can see how politicians might be able to use this going forward. You drag around the map to navigate. More information on Foursquare and election app here.

NICHOLAS CHRISTAKIS: THE HIDDEN INFLUENCE OF SOCIAL NETWORKS

2010-11-25T15:39:00.000-08:00

TED Talk: We're all embedded in vast social networks of friends, family, co-workers and more. Nicholas Christakis tracks how a wide variety of traits -- from happiness to obesity -- can spread from person to person, showing how your location in the network might impact your life in ways you don't even know.

INFLUENCERS - A DOCUMENTARY EXPLORING CREATIVITY AND CONTAGION

2010-11-21T22:45:00.000-08:00

INFLUENCERS FULL VERSION from R+I creative on Vimeo.

INFLUENCERS is a short documentary that explores what it means to be an influencer and how trends and creativity become contagious today in music, fashion and entertainment.

The film attempts to understand the essence of influence, what makes a person influential without taking a statistical or metric approach.

Written and Directed by Paul Rojanathara and Davis Johnson, the film is a Polaroid snapshot of New York influential creatives (advertising, design, fashion and entertainment) who are shaping today's pop culture.

"Influencers" belongs to the new generation of short films, webdocs, which combine the documentary style and the online experience.

influencersfilm.com
facebook.com/influencersfilm

THE TWO FACES OF FACEBOOK AND GLOBAL MONOCULTURE

2010-11-07T07:44:00.000-08:00

Here's a presentation I put together for the Fantastic Tavern #tftnyc.

It's a look at social networks around the world, and how the Facebook juggernaut has two conflicting consequences on global culture.

The two faces of facebook

View more presentations from aeffik.

TWITTER AND ITS API:- A LITTLE LIKE A FRANCHISE

2010-10-25T19:02:00.000-07:00

Just found this stat: 75% of Twitter traffic comes from its API. Smart to get outside developers to build its audience http://bit.ly/b5T9gh.

Does this also mean that people outside of Twitter are smarter at making use of Twitter than Twitter?

APIs are used by many firms to build businesses and products on top of their core service. Both parties win. The outside developers gets the data and technology for free (usually) and the API provider gets an automatic installed base of millions to sell to.

I wasn't sure if this model had a name. I know its an API strategy, but in many respects it sounds like you create an API for the same reasons a business starts to sell a franchise: for reach. APIs are therefor a bit like franchises, just different.

INFORMATION DESIGN AND DATA VISUALISATION

2010-09-29T21:50:00.000-07:00

Hat Tip to Uba Kontrovasie

THE DEFAULT OBJECTIVE OF AWARENESS NEEDS FRESH THINKING

2010-09-19T18:58:00.000-07:00

Awareness fallacy

View more presentations from Mark Lester.

If you've received one brief too many, that says the objective is awareness, then this presentation is for you.

Great presentation by Mark Lester

SOCIAL NETWORKS IN ASIA PACIFIC

2010-09-17T21:11:00.000-07:00

After my visit to China, I visited Singapore and met people from around the region. This included digital marketers from Singapore, Thailand, Malaysia, Vietnam, India, Australia, and Indonesia.

As part of my presentation on social networks I looked at the history of networks in the region, and discovered that Friendster was until very recently the dominant platform in the region. It was pretty close to being unrivaled. Only in India, where Orkut was dominant was Friendster out of the picture. Now - just a few years later - Friendster is pretty much dead, and there is flight away from Orkut in India.

Facebook is now the dominant and leading platform right across Asia Pacific. According to Comscore Facebook is number one in pretty much all markets except for Japan (MIXI.JP rules there), South Korea (CyWorld rules there), India (where it is still slightly behind Orkut) and Taiwan (Wretch runs the show there).

There are still points of resistance against the Facebook juggernaut, namely: Hi5 seems to be holding out amongst the young in Thailand; and an interesting little microblog called Plurk seems to be growing rapidly. Its Alexa data shows its growing globally, but it seems to be have been particularly embraced by those in Asia Pacific.

I learnt a few things and reconfirmed a few things I knew already:

Dominance in social networks is ephemeral. If you do not reinvent yourself and keep connected to your audience your days are numbered - ask MySpace
Losing your audience is like a 'run on a bank' - once it starts it turns into a frenzy. A network with a large audience can disappear overnight
Social networks are social-cultural mirrors - they reflect local culture and local relationships. Hi5, sticking it out, in Thailand's youth culture is an example
Social networks exhibit network economics. Everybody moves towards the standard. Facebook has become the standard, and standing up against it requires great luck or great skill. Look at Microsoft in operating systems, and Google in search. This is 'winner takes all economics'.
Although Facebook is dominant, the content, people, and conversations are all very different from those in other continents - in the same way that their local magazines cover different subjects, with different celebrities, and different passion points.

What was perhaps more fascinating was how through my blog I was able to tap into the knowledge of two fine digital minds to get better insight on the region as I traveled. Which further demonstrated how social networks make the world a smaller, smarter place. Hat tip to Dhiren and Charles Frith.

By the way, the building pictured above is the new Marina Bay Hotel in Singapore, which is completely out of this world to see.

BRIDGING THE GAP BETWEEN MADISON AVENUE AND SILICON VALLEY

2010-09-12T09:02:00.000-07:00

Bridging the gap: Madison Ave vs. Silicon Valley

View more presentations from John Keehler.

A great deck on Bridging the gap: Madison Ave vs. Silicon Valley by John Keehler

SOCIAL NETWORKS IN CHINA

2010-09-11T20:02:00.000-07:00

I've just come from Beijing where I was talking about social networks, only to discover that the Chinese are in many respects ahead of the rest of the us.

1. Size of their social networks

QZone the largest social network in China has over 567M registered accounts.Larger than Facebook, which has almost 500m but is spread out across the world.

Other notable networks are Renren - targeting young people (last estimates put users at just around 50m), and Kaixien - a professional network (around 30M). Most of my colleagues in China were on these two networks.

51.com is another one - which they hadn't heard of - but is reported to be the second largest and used by people who live in "lower tier cities" and rural areas.

International giants like Facebook, Twitter, and Google are banned and are consequently missing out on the hundreds of millions of Chinese online users.

2. The world's most lucrative social network

Qzone is owned by Tencent, inc which has revenues that are larger than Facebooks. Tencent hails from Shenzhen, near Hong Kong. Founded in 1998, it had revenues of $1.8 billion in 2009. Although best known for QZone, its real innovation is its revenue model. Much of its profits come from online games and a virtual currency, called Q coins. Users purchase this with real money and use it to buy digital wares, such as virtual weapons to increase the powers of their avatars. Virtual goods and other “Internet valued-added services,” like avatars, dating services, online memberships, music and community sites are smart and lucrative revenue streams.

Social games, like Farmville, can trace their roots back to China. This is an interesting example of how the direction of innovation has started to change.

The one key thing that sets them back is the absence of open conversation. State control means that open community based conversation is out. The government appears petrified of open conversation, and the power of social media. Remember Iran, and how the protesters used Twitter and YouTube to fight state owned media control.

There is, however, a side of this argument that brands in the West can learn from. Brands see social media as open conversation, and are fearful of it - when actually social media has many components that are open to differing degrees. It shows that brands can use “Internet valued-added services,”, and tools as first steps and even alternatives to the cliche of open conversations - they are still social, and still very much on social platforms. Social media is broader than talking to a community manager on Facebook or Twitter.

ANTICIPATING WHAT AVERAGE OPINION EXPECTS AVERAGE OPINION TO BE

2010-07-27T23:34:00.000-07:00

At the IAB Rising Voices session last week I spoke on user-generated content and crowdsourcing and did a little experiment to demonstrate the wisdom of the crowds.

The beauty queens in the image above, were the winners of Miss Beach World. What I didn't share during the experiment is whether red, blue, or green won, came 2nd or came 3rd. I asked the Rising Voices (around 40 people last week) to guess the order the judges selected for position 1, 2, or 3.

This is a very different task to asking who they thought was prettiest, second prettiest, or third prettiest. The distinction is important. My aim was to see whether they could anticipate what average opinion expects the average opinion to be.The judges were defined as an 'average opinion' since they could not know who they were. They were asked to think who on average would win this type of contest?

In the table below you will see the options they could choose from.

Thankfully for me - the single largest block of guesses - around 40% of the crowd, chose the right answer (see comments for right answer). They correctly second guessed the way the judges chose.

•

This is an example of the application of collective intelligence, swarm logic, wisdom of the crowds - or whatever else you'd like to call it. More specifically, its what the celebrated economist J.M Keynes called the Beauty Contest. Instead of the usual sort of beauty contest, where women parade in front of a panel of judges, Keynes’ version is a post-modern contest involving the full participation of the public as real competitors.

Keynes' beauty contest happens through a fictional newspaper in which entrants are asked to choose a set of six faces from photographs of women that are the "most beautiful". Those who picked the most popular face are then eligible for a prize. Indeed, if all the other competitors are also aiming to win the prize, they are also looking at the problem from the same point of view.

Keynes likened the competitors in this beauty contest to professional speculators in financial markets. Keynes argued these speculators do not really attempt to predict what an investment will yield, but instead try to stay one or two steps ahead of average opinion:- they attempt to beat the market.

This type of intelligence - the hive mind - can be harnessed for crowdsouring, predictive markets, and creating social enterprises. Businesses will need to think of smart ways of truly capitalise on the latent intelligence that is buried deep underground in their firms. Mining this intelligence from your employees, stakeholders, and target market will be a key competitive advantage going forward. This is real social media.

FACEBOOK HITS 500M USERS

2010-07-21T15:04:00.000-07:00

Facebook hits 500m users, and is racing towards 1bn users. Strange things will start to happen. A virtuous cycle is revolving around it. More users means more time spent, and more time spent on Facebook means more advertising inventory it can sell. Which in turn means more revenue. More revenue means more investment in r&d, which means it can hire more of the best people. And more of the best people means it creates a better product which attracts more users.

But above all of these is the fact that Facebook is building a more and more accurate database of our social likes and dislikes. This data coupled with smart algorithms for linking people to products will be worth very, very serious money.

SOCIAL MEDIA GROWS UP BY GOING ALGORITHMIC

2010-07-11T15:03:00.000-07:00

A recent piece from NMA: Social media is a catch-all term for a range of disciplines unceremoniously clumped together. I divide this world into two distinct types of activity: manual and algorithmic, writes Tony Effik.

Most of today’s social media is of the manual variety. All that activity on Twitter, those blogs, all those Facebook pages and updates, and all those sites that are open to comments and even votes are generally all manual, and usually co-ordinated by a community manager.

Social media in its current form is now over six years old but still lacks a killer business model. The goldrush currently around community management is interesting, as all brands will need some form of community management, which means there’s still more growth to come. Community management will be a key part of the killer business model, but it’s not the full answer.

During Web 1.0 it took nine years – from Netscape’s IPO in August 1995 to Google’s in August 2004 – before the claims made in dotcom era investment prospectuses where made true. Google’s innovation was moving search from a human-based indexing model to an algorithmic one, and combining it with a killer business model in AdWords.

There are a few great candidates in social media chasing the algorithmic model Twitter is now a real-time search engine. Rumour has it that Twitter is working on algorithms that not only rate tweets with a ‘resonance’ score, but also rates the pages they link to to create a PageRank-like algorithm.

Facebook’s recent launch of Open Graph is another great candidate. Through the ‘like’ buttons now appearing around the web, Facebook is creating algorithms that help users and brands with all sorts of matchmaking.

Demand Media is the smartest firm that no one has heard of. It produces 4,000 videos and articles every day based on an algorithm that identifies gaps between what people are searching for and the content already out there. All its sites have social features, but the really smart thing is that all its content is crowdsourced from a community of freelancers that it manages with a smart algorithmic process.

The different threads that make up social media are now separating. So in the same way that every firm needs to manage communities using manual models, they should also be thinking about how they might work with these new algorithms.

MONITORING AND ANALYSING ONLINE CONVERSATION

2010-06-27T12:18:00.000-07:00

This is Gatorade Mission Control, where they analyse online buzz around the brand. It's pretty impressive. And a big investment, and commitment.

According to Mashable, "The room features six big monitors with five seats for Gatorade’s marketing team to track a number of data visualizations and dashboards –- also available on to employees on their desktops — that the company has custom built with partners including Radian6 and IBM" Read more about it on mashable.

This area is now gaining rapid traction as a discipline. Just last week McKinsey, and Nielsen joined forces to create a new company called NM Incite. The new firm will take on from where Nielsen BuzzMetrics left off, and use buzz monitoring to help transform business operations including product development, marketing, communications and customer service. With the creation of this new venture, BuzzMetrics becomes wholly part of NM Incite.

It's getting very interesting.

THE FIGHT IS OVER: NEW EGG CAMPAIGN

2010-06-25T09:43:00.000-07:00

Publicis Modem and Egg launch The Fight Is Over

See more Egg videos on YouTube

Egg on Twitter

MINING THE SOCIAL GRAPH

2010-06-05T01:53:00.000-07:00

Social CRM has become the next buzzword you'll have to master.

You'll need to know:

A bit about Facebook and Twitter; and
A little about CRM strategy
A lot about data analytics

The problem with the current hype around social CRM is that there are lots of people evangelising their skills who know about point 1 (Facebook and Twitter) but know little about CRM, and data, and the 40 year old science that sits around it.

We - in digital - are fond of re-learning the lessons of advertising over and over again. Our contempt for traditional advertising obfuscates our opportunity to learn. Social CRM is still in its infancy, and is better described as social direct marketing. Lester Wunderman - generally considered the father of direct marketing- introduced a "direct marketing" approach to service his clients, using the medium of clients’ mailboxes as a way to develop a more personal connection with potential customers than general advertising had previously found possible. Exchange the word mailbox for Facebook account, and add the fact that your friends can see and act on these messages in your mailbox, and we are talking social CRM.

Twitter is generous with data, but Facebook is a closed shop. Once the data that is trapped inside the Facebook API is released, social media strategists will need to take a crash course in data strategy. Segmentation and targeting will become more important. Remember recency, frequency, and monetary value (RFM Analysis)? Lifetime value modelling. Use of regression and Chi-square. Add to these techniques the maths that surround graph theory and you can see why I've been calling for a new class of professional to tackle this complexity. The Digital Economist will be key to deciphering the changing landscape of advertising. The list of data and CRM techniques is endless, but if social CRM is to pay for itself, social strategists will need to master these techniques and invent a few of their own.

TWITWEE THE TWITTER CUCKOO CLOCK

2010-05-21T04:32:00.000-07:00

This is both clever, and pointless at the same time. Clever like other experimental Internet of Things ideas, like Baker Tweet, and Botanicals, because it gives us a glimpse into what the Internet of Things might eventually look like. Conversely, its as pointless as Baker Tweet, and Botanicals because its interesting for 5min and 5min only. The guy who made this - Haroon Baig - is a rising talent. Check out his other work here Haroon Baig.

Twitwee Clock from Haroon Baig on Vimeo.

MOTIVATING IDEAS AT THE HEART OF GREAT FIRMS

2010-05-20T02:42:00.000-07:00

Now social media is on everyone's agenda, how do we answer some of the big organizational questions? A lot of the social media work I do now is about helping firms organize for social media, particularly on a global basis. Cross-departmental organization is also a major challenge. I recently did a talk on who owns social media at Reputations Online.

How do you structure firms for the social age? Who does what? How do you motivate people?

This video shows that money is a bad motivator. We have other higher purpose motivations. These motivations are at the heart of successful firms like Apple, and Skype, and also sit at the heart of the success of open source initiatives like Apache, Linux, and Wikipedia. Although the talk is not about social media there are lots of interesting ideas that can be applied to social media. The video is based on a talk by Daniel Pink, an author on the future of work.

BARATUNDE THURSTON ON TWITTER HASHTAGS

2010-05-17T01:54:00.000-07:00

If you don't understand or use hastags on Twitter, this is a very witty introduction from Baratunde Thurston from The Onion.

FACEBOOK'S OPEN GRAPH: A CONTROL CENTRE FOR THE DIFFUSION OF INNOVATION

2010-04-21T22:25:00.000-07:00

An important, but under-reported part of the the recent Facebook Open Graph launch, is the power it gives brands in the spreading of ideas. Graphs are ideally designed, both theoretically and practically, for the diffusion of innovation.

I produced the diagram above a few years ago using the Friend Wheel app on Facebook and it illustrates my social graph on Facebook or put more simply my friends on Facebook. It also shows how they interconnect. We chat, share information, use apps, but these activities are confined within Facebook. Facebook Connect opened the rest of web to these connections. This meant that every time I logged-in or did something on a site with Facebook Connect I could share that content with my social graph via their newsfeeds. Facebook's recent launch of the Open Graph to replace Facebook Connect moves this all on one step further.

According to Facebook:

The Open Graph protocol enables you to integrate your web pages into the social graph. It is currently designed for web pages representing profiles of real-world things — things like movies, sports teams, celebrities, and restaurants. Once your pages become objects in the graph, users can establish connections to your pages as they do with Facebook Pages. Based on the structured data you provide via the Open Graph protocol, your pages show up richly across Facebook: in user profiles, within search results and in News Feed.

A lot of the reporting on the Facebook Open Graph launch has focused on the spreading of Facebook 'Like Buttons' over the web, which means that a visitor to CNN.com, for instance, can click a button to "like" certain news articles, and see which of their Facebook friends have endorsed content on other websites.

But for me the really powerful development, is that once somebody has liked your page, you can then directly communicate with them, and consequently their social graph using Facebook Fanpage functionality.

Again from Facebook:

Once users have liked your page, you can publish stream updates to the users who have liked your page and get statistics about your pages just like you can with Facebook Pages. To administer your page, you need to associate it with your Facebook account.

This means the people that have liked your page on Facebook, can be treated like Facebook Fans and you will be able to update your fans with news and information, and they'll be able to talk and connect with each other. The like function therefore becomes a tool for the diffusion of innovation, and spreading of ideas.

What perhaps is an even more profound development, is that a network of sites using this functionality will be sharing and providing data to Facebook, and helping it not only map social graphs, but also will now help it map and connect separate parts of the whole web.

Mark Zuckerberg said at the Open Graph launch:

"Yelp is mapping out the part of the graph that relates to small businesses. Pandora is mapping out the part of the graph that relates to music. If we can take these separate maps of the graph and pull them all together, then we can create a Web that's smarter, more social, more personalized, and more semantically aware"

Organising and mapping the web was supposed to be Google's job. Facebook's Open Graph is a huge threat to Google. If you thought the battle between these two giants was already intense, you haven't seen anything yet. I can't wait to see what Google's next move will be.

THE INTERNET OF THINGS - STARTING TO TAKE OFF

2010-04-10T23:46:00.000-07:00

The Internet of Things is very quickly moving out of the hype stage. Wikipedia defines it as:

"The idea is as simple as its application is difficult. If all cans, books, shoes or parts of cars are equipped with minuscule identifying devices, daily life on our planet will undergo a transformation. Things like running out of stock or wasted products will no longer exist as we will know exactly what is being consumed on the other side of the globe. Theft will be a thing of the past as we will know where a product is at all times. The same applies to parcels lost in the post. If all objects of daily life, from yoghurt to an airplane, are equipped with radio tags, they can be identified and managed by computers in the same way humans can"

Over the last couple of years, we have had a few tasters of what it could mean, including Botanicals, the kits (pictured above) that:

"Lets plants reach out for human help! They offer a connection to your leafy pal via online Twitter status updates to your mobile phone. When your plant needs water, it will post to let you know, and send its thanks when you show it love." botanicalls.com

Many of you will also know Baker Tweet as well.

"BakerTweet is a way for busy bakers to tell the world that something hot and fresh has just come out of the oven. It's as simple as turning the dial and hitting the button. All of the baker's followers get a Twitter alert to tell them that it's bun-time. Or bread time. Or whatever." bakertweet.com

Although both of these are clever, they are also gimmicky, and driven more for the press releases than any long lasting higher aim or profit motive (although I do see both Baker Tweet and Botanicals are selling their hardware).

The Internet of Things will be grander than both of these ideas, but they are interesting because they both give us a tantalising glimpse into what it could be.

IBM are currently making a big play for this area, under their smarter planet campaign. The IBM video below also gives a fantastic overview of what we are hyping today, but will be a key part of our day-to-day work much sooner than we initially anticipated.

IAB SOCIAL MEDIA COUNCIL LAUNCHES PRACTITIONERS CERTIFICATE

2010-04-07T15:05:00.000-07:00

A key part of my agenda as chair of the IAB Social Media Council is to grow, and professionalise the industry. And as part of this effort to grow, and professionalise the industry, the IAB Social Media Council is launching a Practitioner Certificate to educate new starters. I'm personally very excited by this initiative.

The background:

The IAB Social Media Practitioner Certificate is a series of 5 sessions, all 2 hours in length - complete with coursework - designed to turn new starters within the industry into real experts. Social media is a vast, complex and thoroughly diverse space, so we believe that an introduction should be much more than a one-hour presentation. This is why we’re inviting 60 social media beginners to sign up and let us teach them how to become a social media practitioner.

We’ve employed the collective expertise of the IAB Social Media Council - representing media owners, creative, media and social agencies - to help nurture upcoming talent in the industry and provide young workers within the industry with the foundations needed to succeed.

Covering definitions of social media, industry research and all the case studies we can get our hands on, over 5 months our delegates will have all the latest, most practical knowledge at their fingertips. From word of mouth marketing to paid-for advertising, research and measurement to public affairs, this is an essential induction to the social media space.

More information, and to book:

To book a place click here IAB Social Media Council Practitioners Certificate

CANDIDATE OBAMA'S DIGITAL STRATEGY VS PRESIDENT OBAMA'S

2010-03-29T23:59:00.000-07:00

Obama ran a legendary general election campaign. Social media was a key part of that strategy. It's a shame he didn't carry through from his candidacy to his presidency, the same spirit of inventiveness, and focus on social media. He seems to have abandoned his social media tools, and now just seeks to spam people with email.

One of the smartest things he has done with digital recently is the Final March initiative, where his team invited people to call Congress:

After months of hard work, the final vote on health reform in the House of Representatives is expected to be this Sunday.

But it's shaping up to be incredibly close -- so whether you've called your representative before or haven't yet spoken out on health reform, it's now time to raise your voice.

Healthcare seems to be a turning point for him, but if he would have used social networks to mobilise grassroots networks earlier (as he did in his campaign) he might have been able to counter the "Tea Party" movement much earlier, which is itself a grassroots network that uses the web.

Obama's use of social media changed campaigning forever, but what he perhaps didn't realise is that he had also changed governing forever as well. Obama needs a new digital strategy.

FACEBOOK VERSUS GOOGLE: THE NEXT PHASE

2010-03-20T08:26:00.000-07:00

It's been widely reported in the news this week that Facebook has finally overtaken Google, according to Comscore, on pageview figures. This is a real milestone, but many of you could have guessed this by simply walking around your offices, and seeing the Facebook pages opened.

If you don't have Comscore, check out the Alexa data below, which tells a similar story. I've split the charts into pageviews, time spent, and reach. Facebook wins by a long margin on time spent, but the race is much closer on reach and pageviews according to Alexa. Facebook is the blue line, Google is red, and Twitter is green.

Twitter is still a long way behind, except on time spent, where it is close behind Google.

This first chart is reach. Google is ahead.

This second chart is time spent. Facebook is ahead.

The third chart is pageviews. Google and Facebook are fighting to the death, switching positions over and over again.

WILL TWITTER BE RUINED BY THE PRESENCE OF PAID-FOR ADS?

2010-03-13T23:16:00.000-08:00

Will Twitter be ruined by the presence of paid-for ads?

Marketing Magazine posed this question to me and three others last week. See my answer below and follow this link to get the other answers The Marketing Society Forum.

Ads will benefit Twitter. Last November, it changed its key question from 'What are you doing?' to 'What's happening?' The answers form a unique searchable database. Twitter is a real-time search engine - the fastest and most relevant way of finding out what's going on right now. This forces Google - worth £114bn - to reappraise its strategy. High stakes indeed.

Twitter knows that in the past, brands like Yahoo! got it wrong, by over-commercialising their online real estate and not balancing user and business needs. Google launched as its antithesis and honed its design, shunning banners for pay-per-click text ads. Discrete sponsored links are now an accepted part of the visual language of search.

Each web innovation creates a fresh generation of purists who gradually or grudgingly accept mainstream commercialisation. This is no exception.

Twitter has learned from its predecessors. It will emerge more useful, and the incremental income should fuel a new wave of innovation.

THE PHENOMENAL WORLD OF FACEBOOK GAMES AND OTHER SOCIAL GAMES

2010-03-04T23:14:00.000-08:00

Carnegie Mellon University Professor, Jesse Schell, dives into a world of game development, which will emerge, from the popular "Facebook Games" era. If you do not know much about the phenomenon that is social games then watch this. His insight that there are more Farmville players than there are Twitter accounts is powerful. He also explores how games are breaking out of the confines of fantasy and moving more into our day-to-day realities. What he sees as glorious future gets slightly dystopian at the end, but very much worth watching.

Xbox 360 Games - E3 2010 - Guitar Hero 5

FACEBOOK FAN PAGES: THE FUTURE OF CRM

2010-02-18T14:40:00.000-08:00

This video on Facebook fan pages shows that there is still a long way to go before these pages really reach their potential. Lots of brands are developing Facebook fan pages, and my agency is no exception. But like any new innovation there is a gimmick stage, and then the real business begins. These pages now need to work harder to truly capture the imaginations of cynical consumers, and budget-squeezed marketers.

Brands now have pages with thousands, and sometimes millions of fans, but what do they do with them?

Unfortunately, most brands and a very few agencies will know the answer, or have the resources to tackle the question. The combination of skills required to make these pages work is not in place in most agencies. Plus many brands create these pages with the wrong intentions, and are chasing the latest thing to tick on a box on the marketing plan, rather than understanding the radical repercussions it could have on their business.

For me Facebook fan pages are a key building block in the future of CRM.

This involves:

- Structuring your page intelligently to reflect different customer needs
- Design a customer life cycle or migration map that moves fans through each need stage
- Segment fans by influence, sentiment, activity, and other variables to differentiate what you say and offer to them
- Reward and incentivize high value fans
- Move towards one-to-one approaches
- Track and measure obsessively
- Integrate Facebook into the brand's broader digital ecosystem

Understand in CRM, that the Holy Grail of metrics, is customer lifetime vale (LTV). Build models, and optimise your campaigns to drive these LTV models.

This is all very serious stuff, and a world away from how most brands use fan pages, but watch this space. Facebook Fan Pages, the future of CRM.

IAB SOCIAL MEDIA COUNCIL RESEARCH SHOWS BUDGETS SET TO INCREASE

2010-02-13T07:50:00.001-08:00

One of the first things we have issued this year, at the Internet Advertising Bureau's Social Media Council, is some research into social media's progress. We are hoping to see it become an index, and a barometer of social media's progress in the UK.

The study, conducted in partnership with research company Opinion Matters, found that:

Social media will be getting greater budget allocations this year

Responsibility for social media within client organisations spans a number of departments, suggesting a need for ‘social media teams’ representing a range of skillsets such as marketing, PR and customer service

Driving brand awareness and consideration are the most popular uses of social media

Marketers identify the main challenges for social media as measurement and proving ROI

There was lost of great stuff in the research, but the most interesting stat for me was that a third of advertisers are planning to allocate between 6 and 20% of their digital marketing budgets on social media in 2010, compared with just 14% in 2009.

The study - conducted amongst 80 senior level marketers – found that only 7% of respondents yet haven’t embraced social media in any way, with 22% having made it a core part of their communications strategy, 20% feeding it into most campaigns, 23.5% using social media in ad hoc projects and 27% having tested it with a view to using again.

The chart below illustraes this progress
This means that:

1. Digital is eating into traditional media budgets
2. Social media is eating into traditional digital budgets
3. Social media consequently becomes ubiquitous and consumes traditional media

Social media is the revolution within the revolution.

There's a great summary of the research at the IAB.

DIFFUSION OF INNOVATION THROUGH THE SOCIAL WEB

2010-02-03T22:50:00.001-08:00

We are in an age of experimentation. Everyday in digital, people are doing things that no one else has ever done before. However, agencies tend not to do lots of forecasting, but clients are increasingly demanding more evidence that a campaign is going to work before signing up. Mastering models like these are going to be increasingly important, so I say forecasting and modelling digital programs is the new Holy Grail.

I've been experimenting with the Bass Diffusion Model, as I attempt to advance my knowledge in this area beyond Everett Rogers' Diffusion of Innovations. Bass focuses more on new products and how they get adopted as an interaction between users and potential users.

I see an easy application for the model and how it can be used to forecast spread of contagious ideas, and general marketing ideas across the social web.

We frequently talk in digital and online PR about targeting influencers and innovators, but use few formulae to demonstrate their impact. Both charts on this page, show how important they are to the spread of ideas and products. With better maths in this area, will also come better mechanisms for managing these programs.

CADBURYS GRAPHS AND THE CHALLENGES OF BRANDED CONTENT

2010-01-16T23:24:00.000-08:00

I'm still fascinated by Cadbury's Glass and a Half Full initiative. It's still one of the highest profile branded content projects out there. Creating branded content - that pays - is still one of advertising's biggest challenges. So I put a few Cadbury Graphs together to see how they are doing.

I've said it many times before, but search data is a lightning rod into the culture. If people are searching for it, they are definitely thinking about it, and probably talking about it. The chart below shows the search data for Simon Cowell's X factor. There is a baseline, but the peaks occur when the program is on air, in the last quarter of each year, as Simon Cowell cynically builds up towards a Christmas number 1.

So, are people searching for Glass and a Half Full content? And if yes, what does this say about the campaign? The chart below shows a number of search queries over the last few years for Cadbury Diary Milk associated keywords. Blue line (zingolo), red line (glass and a half full), yellow line (Cadburys eyebrows), green line (Cadburys eyebrow), dark blue (Dairy Milk eyebrows).

The absolute number of searches are low according to Google AdWords at 2,400 per month, but I'm impressed at the baseline glass and a half full (in red) has shown, as it is not given much prominence in the commercials.

The chart below looks at some additional search queries that shine a much more positive light.

The blue line (Dairy Milk) produces 135,000 monthly searches and Cadbury's Dairy Milk produces 18,100 searches per month. This is all good stuff and points to the successful creation of a branded media property.

This search success only points to half of the campaign's success, as the real centre of gravity of this campaign is YouTube. YouTube is the second biggest search engine. I'll explore the campaign's success on that platform on another occasion.

TURNING METADATA INTO INTELLIGENT SEMANTIC DATA

2009-12-20T23:49:00.000-08:00

One of the things I want to experiment more with next year is semantic data or as Tim Berners-Lee increasingly calls it linked data. Once data is tagged and coded for semantic meaning, or once applications emerge that 'extract' semantics we are on the verge of something very exciting.

Google has been experimenting with semantic search for a while, i.e search for the query "~what is the capital of France?" and you get a semantic search. Or try "~who is the president of nigeria?"

I recently came across, a new application from a subsidiary of Thomson Reuters called Open Calais. It is free, has an api, and is a semantic application that actually works. It describes itself as follows:

The OpenCalais Web Service automatically creates rich semantic metadata for the content you submit – in well under a second. Using natural language processing (NLP), machine learning and other methods, Calais analyzes your document and finds the entities within it. But, Calais goes well beyond classic entity identification and returns the facts and events hidden within your text as well.

The tags are delivered to you; you can then incorporate them into other applications - for search, news aggregation, blogs, catalogs, you name it.

It looks at unstructured data and pulls out content that is separated into the three classes of content it recognises: named entities, facts, and events, as shown in the diagram below.

Watch the video below (apologies for the cheesiness), and play with their simulator. More information at Open Calais

SOCIAL MEDIA COUNTER

2009-12-20T21:39:00.000-08:00

A fun app showing the growth of social media by Gary Hayes.

THE BATTLE FOR SOCIAL SEARCH

2009-12-14T20:17:00.000-08:00

Google has launched into social search by concluding deals with both Twitter and Facebook. I'm interested in where this might go.

The division between social media and search will disappear, and we should expect to see more spamming of social media to increase search traffic. Google miscalculated and missed a key evolution of search, after both Facebook and Twitter have won the real time search battle.

Google will remain number 1 in search but the search business is going to become increasingly fragmented. Mobile search is still an open field, and we are only at the dawn of semantic search. Even within social search, there is in my head, a further division, which includes real-time search (which Google is focused on), and geo search. There are many billions of dollars at stake, and the game just got a bit more unpredictable and interesting.

This is all still incredibly experimental but we all now need to master something new (again).

MANAGING YOUR DIGITAL ECOSYSTEM

2009-12-07T20:39:00.000-08:00

Here is a piece about digital ecosystems I recently had published in Marketing Week:

Every brand needs to manage its digital ecosystem. Like a jungle ecosystem, it is a wild, complex and sometimes dangerous place. The web is just one part of that digital ecosystem; it is as wide as it is deep and continues to grow. Nobody knows how big the web is and there is no real map.

Your brand is being talked about throughout its nooks and crannies, sometimes positively and sometimes negatively. Whether you are hosting the conversation, observing the conversation, or completely oblivious to its existence, it is affecting brand equity, sales, and loyalty

The greater digital ecosystem is multi-layered. However, unlike in archaeology where today’s living layer sits on yesterday’s fossilised layers, the digital ecosystem’s generations co-exist.

The first layer of the ecosystem is its foundation, and is the network of computers that links us all; we call this the internet. Selecting what hardware you buy and rollout, and deciding how that infrastructure is managed, structured, linked, and maintained are the key questions for this layer.

The second layer links documents together in a web navigated by hyperlinks; we call this the World Wide Web. In web 1.0, we focused on online banners, virals, websites, traditional search engine optimisation, and search engine marketing, as the main tools for driving success. Brands and media owners controlled the conversations here.

The third layer is a graph of people connected by social media platforms, in what Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook calls a social graph. This is web 2.0 territory and the key to success here is to understand how to create contagious ideas that change the conversation and manage communities of interest towards advocacy, whether they be in the blogosphere, on Facebook, Flickr, Youtube, Linkedin or MySpace.

A fourth layer is in its infancy. This is the internet of things, where things like cans, books, shoes or parts of cars are equipped with minuscule identifying devices. This is where we bridge the gulf between the virtual and real world.

The fifth layer is the semantic web. Largely still in the realm of science fiction, it’s a place where all things will have a Uniform Resource Identifier, meaning that they will be identifiable and open to manipulation by machine based intelligent agents.

This rapid evolution points to the idea that this is marketing’s Cambrian Period. In archaeology, the Cambrian Explosion was the period on Earth which saw a rapid increase in the number of complex animals. Marketing’s Cambrian Explosion is the period when we will see a rapid increase in the complexity of the media landscape.

To successfully manage your ecosystem, the smart marketer needs to build an engine with a strong brand idea at its heart. However, this idea is less about an image, and more about an experience centred on branded content and branded utilities that sell by helping or entertaining the audience.

This content and these utilities give the brand permission to engage right across the ecosystem - reaching from areas where people are unaware of the brand, all the way up the purchase funnel to places where your most loyal customers inhabit.

Perhaps most importantly, with the measurability of digital technology, each engagement must be optimised, so the brand works out which parts of the ecosystem are the most profitable places to hunt and which tools contribute most to these profits. Brands now have a choice: create an engine that allows you to glide through the ecosystem; or end up as a fossilised dinosaur. The choice is that stark.

ONLINE VOTING CONTESTS AND MECHANISM DESIGN IN SOCIAL MEDIA

2009-12-04T13:32:00.000-08:00

In the UK talent contest - X-Factor - the twins pictured above did spectacularly well despite their lack of talent. Jedward as they became known were voted through week after week by the public even though the panel of experts headed by Simon Cowell implored the public to vote them out. Punk legend Johny Rotten even got involved saying "They're just lazily untalented. It's not fair, it's not right and a perfectly good singer gets voted off while that dopiness gets promoted. How is that singing?”

The Jedward Problem is an example of mechanism design gone wrong. Lots of what we do in social media involves promotions, competitions, games, and other forms of mechanism design. Purists dislike using these techniques. They see them as downmarket, and a form of attention cheat. They say brands should invest in long-term brand building, and application development. They are of course right when you view this issue from within the social hive, but in the broader world of business there is no more complex set of challenges than those in mechanism design. The 2007 Nobel Prize for Economics was awarded to Leonid Hurwicz, Eric Maskin, and Roger Myerson "for having laid the foundations of mechanism design theory". It's complex stuff. Let me explain with the help of Wikipedia.

The distinguishing features of these games are:

that a game "designer" chooses the game structure rather than inheriting one
that the designer is interested in the game's outcome

The designer of a mechanism generally hopes either

to design a mechanism that "implements" a social choice function (e.g. high bid, low bid, no bid, or cheat)
to find the mechanism that maximizes some value criterion (e.g. profit)

Hurwicz, and many others have used complex maths to analyse everything from elections, to financial markets, and this thinking is at the heart of the Google AdWords auction system. Bloomberg quoted Hal Varian, chief economist at Google as saying "We are one of the most active users of mechanistic design,''. In the auctions, advertisers place bids to have their messages displayed on search result pages, but their final positions in the auction are not calculated purely on price, but also on what Google calls a quality score. Improving quality scores is a type of game. Deciding an advertisers position in search results is a mechanism design problem.

These games, incentives, and mechanisms are all over the web. In a previous post I wrote about Keynes' idea of the beauty contest and I have also previously written about what I call message, medium, and modus. For me, modus - the mechanism design you choose for your idea - is frequently more important than the creative proposition in the diffusion of your idea. If you can engineer the mechanism to be social and contagious then you can achieve your goals. But beware of online voting cheats, fake email addresses, and many other devices.

This approach basically means you can use other people's social ties to propagate your ideas. The strength of their social ties, their trust relationships, and their influence becomes the fuel that drives your campaign. Jedward have been voted off X-factor, but now they are free I'm sure they will be willing to share their knowledge of mechanism design.

GOOGLE STREET VIEW JAPAN VIDEO

2009-11-30T12:03:00.000-08:00

A cool video from Google Japan. It's a whimsical explanation of how Google street view is made. Worth a peek.

USING POWER OF CROWDSOURCING TO RE-MAKE STAR WARS

2009-11-21T10:31:00.000-08:00

Star Wars: Uncut Trailer from Casey Pugh on Vimeo.

A group of Stars Wars fans is trying to remake the original Star Wars film by crowdsourcing the production. The entire movie will be made out of fan-generated versions of Star Wars scenes. This is probably as geeky as it gets, but you can see there is a big idea in there somewhere. Most film credits already include huge lists of many different specialist firms, so why not take it even further and distribute production of different scenes to different directors?

For more information click here

IAB SOCIAL MEDIA COUNCIL - MY AGENDA

2009-11-19T23:49:00.000-08:00

I was recently elected Chair of the Internet Advertising Bureau's Social Media Council. See here for more detail.

The IAB social media council comprises of media owners, social networks, brands, creative, media and specialist social media agencies and was launched in 2008 to educate the industry about the opportunities within this space. With a range of experience and expert knowledge, the council’s collective remit includes word of mouth marketing and blogger outreach, content distribution, digital creative and social media research. I will take over the role from Lloyd Salmons, founder and CEO of agency Outside Line.

I will spend the year facilitating meetings, engaging with industry leaders and driving council initiatives, and acting on a proposed ‘6 Point Plan’ for the group:

1. Empowering ambassadors of specialist topics within the diverse membership of the social media council, thus giving every member a voice.

2. Sharing the council’s knowledge and practical guidance with the wider industry via editorial and video content each month.

3. Promoting the council as a ‘shop window’ for social talent and agencies.

4. To create standards, tools, templates, and systems to help grow the social media business in the UK.

5. To liaise directly with industry influencers on a regular basis with focused presentations and case studies.

6. To lobby and promote social media and the council to the major holding companies and industry bodies to ensure all relevant groups are talking in the same language.

Point 4 is of particular importance. Creating standards, tools, and systems will be key in growing the business, and upgrading it from a cottage industry. My aim is to bring some of the open source sensibilities already prevalent in social media into the social media council, so we can grow the overall business. We'll be developing tools, templates, and processes collectively, and will share these with the wider industry. We plan to break out of the confines of the ‘social media cluster’ and connect with the biggest advertisers and agencies in the UK, on their terms, offering training and support.

These goals will feed into the IAB’s ongoing role in supporting the social media industry via educational materials, dedicated forums for debate, marketing and consumer insights.

CONCEPTUAL CONSUMPTION AND THE BATTLE OF IDEAS

2009-11-07T04:09:00.000-08:00

I recently found this clever infographic at thisisindexed and it got me thinking about information, and how we use it. Too much information is bad. Equally, too little information is just as problematic.

A recent paper published through Harvard Business School argues that "As technology has simplified meeting basic needs, humans have cultivated increasingly psychological avenues for occupying their consumption energies, moving from consuming food to consuming concepts".

The things we consume conceptually are memes. They are everywhere as we seek more and more conceptual consumption. There are more ideas out there than brains that can host them, which is why some ideas prosper and flourish, and others fail, and die. There is an evolutionary battle of the fittest happening on the web, and elsewhere everyday. We can now see what ideas are on the up, and which are on the way down using data visualisation tools, and even search traffic. Product lifecycles are much shorter now, musical sub-cultures come alive and then fade quickly, and fads and fashions disappear at the blink of an eye.

Is there an upper limit to how much, and how quickly we can process all these memes? There are more memes, and more people to connect with than ever before. Kenneth Gergen in his book The Saturated Self argues that we have reached a state of social saturation.

This all sounds pretty depressing, except for one silver lining, which is that we can now - more than ever befeore - process these memes collectively, using collective intelligence, and distributed brain power. Social media allows us to share and process memes. Think social boomarking on Delicious, and Digg, or Yahoo Answers, think Google search algorithms based on link popularity, think ratings, user reviews, and voting. These memes have forced us to our next stage of social evolution.

AXE'S CLEVER USE OF SMS AND PRINT ADVERTISING

2009-11-03T10:35:00.000-08:00

This campaign is something cool I discovered on Adverblog recently. It's a cool use of SMS from Axe Uruguay. To see the complete picture of the scantily clad model, the ad simply asked the reader to text Axe to a short code after 9pm (to keep kids away). You then get to see the scantily clad model in her full glory. This is a smart understanding of the Axe brand (which is called Lynx here in the UK), and a great demonstration of how SMS and print can work together.

OUR ONLINE REPUTATIONS ARE BECOMING OUR REAL LIFE REPUTATIONS

2009-10-25T09:57:00.000-07:00

It's always worth keeping an eye out for what is happening at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Tracking research at Media Lab can be particularly rewarding. Those clever people over there are constantly pushing out new innovations. One that I've come late to is its Personas project, that tells you how the Internet sees you.

My Persona is below.
Although not the most accurate portrayal of me, it does however reinforce how online reputations have become our real life reputations. The trend of Googling other people you don't know or people you want to know more about is part of this phenomenon. This is truly interesting stuff, and an important innovation.

The site describes the project as follows:

Personas is a component of the Metropath(ologies) exhibit, recently on display at the MIT Museum by the Sociable Media Group from the MIT Media Lab (Please contact us if you want to show it next!). It uses sophisticated natural language processing and the Internet to create a data portrait of one's aggregated online identity. In short, Personas shows you how the Internet sees you.

Enter your name, and Personas scours the web for information and attempts to characterize the person - to fit them to a predetermined set of categories that an algorithmic process created from a massive corpus of data. The computational process is visualized with each stage of the analysis, finally resulting in the presentation of a seemingly authoritative personal profile.

Worth having a play with.

BREAKING THE SOUND BARRIER IN DIGITAL

2009-10-25T08:54:00.000-07:00

My old boss shared this recent TED talk with me that he did around sound. Its great. Sound is such an unexplored field, and in the world of digital communications it is largely virgin territory. There's a type of sound barrier in digital, as we surf silently across the web. Convention holds that sound is defaulted to off on websites, and in banners, and little time is invested around thinking how sound in digital experiences could increase effectiveness. The type of thinking Julian Treasure is demonstrating in this talk could help start to break the sound barrier. Enjoy the video.

A FEW PREDICTIONS ON THE FUTURE OF TV

2009-10-18T22:07:00.000-07:00

A couple of weeks ago the IAB announced that digital media spend overtook TV spend for the first time in the UK. But the lines are so blurred its a funny division to make these days, but satisfying none the less. In a recent issue of Media Week, I and a few others were asked to make some predictions about the media landscape in 2014 in a piece called, 2014: a media odyssey.

Here is the section on TV predictions:

The convergence of the TV and internet will change all the traditional broadcast rules. Suranga Chandratillake, founder of video search engine Blinkx, says: "Viewers won't depend on a schedule and there will be no such thing as prime time."

Chandratillake envisions a time when TV shows will be pre-programmed specifically for each viewer. He says: "It might be news tailored to the industry you work in or the weather forecast for your exact location. For light relief, your TV will find you some tennis, as it knows you like this sport from your previous viewing habits. On your commute to work, you might start watching the latest episode of your favourite soap on a mobile device, but pause it so you can watch the rest on your way home."

Nigel Walley, managing director of consultancy Decipher, forecasts that traditional broadcast will drop to about 60% of viewing time. He says: "Broadcasters will respond to this trend by making more programmes that demand to be viewed live by integrating their video-on-demand content into the broadcast stream and by building deeper relationships with their users through data, so they can do things like reward loyalty."

Tony Effik, chief strategy officer at Publicis Modem, predicts that Apple, Microsoft and Google will become significant TV players. He says: "Apple will launch an improved version of Apple TV linked to iTunes, YouTube and Hulu, and Google will work with Sky and Apple to offer pay-per-click models for the TV advertising. Pay-per-click will become hugely successful and will force change in TV business models."

Effik also forecasts better targeting based on Google technology, which will give advertisers viewing data on each household, as well as click data on advertising. He adds: "Targeting and pricing of advertising will be based on individual profiles, with some viewers worth more."

In addition, consumers will access sites such as Flickr and YouTube via the TV, and will watch with the constant accompaniment of a Twitter-type feed.

Damian Ryan, head of digital at consultancy Results International, suggests this could be called "Twelevision", enabling viewers to interact around content. He says: "There will also be the option for viewers to take control of broadcast under certain moderated conditions."

LIKE EVERY REVOLUTION, THE DIGITAL REVOLUTION WILL HAVE ITS MANY COUNTER REVOLUTIONS

2009-10-08T21:33:00.000-07:00

In a recent issue of NMA Richard Huntington, Director of strategy, Saatchi & Saatchi, argued “if you're a digital shop, it's turning out to be anything but your time. Good news for digital, bad news for the rather quaint idea of the standalone digital agency…” If I were not worried about the next few years for the business as a whole, I might have been offended by Mr Huntington’s understanding of the transition in the digital business.

In any real revolution, the new king rarely looks like the old king. A real revolution changes everything. In the music business, the record labels, who were the kings of music, look nothing like the new king: Apple’s iTunes. In the classified advertising business, the old kings – the newspapers – look nothing like the new king of classifieds: Google. Advertising will be no different. The new king will look nothing like what he calls an orthodox agency. The new king will not even look like what a current digital agency looks like.

Every revolution has its counter-revolutions, and it is no different for the digital revolution. In 1976, Zhou Enlai - Chinese Premier from 1949 until his death - was asked to give an assessment of the 1789 French Revolution. He said: it's too early to say! Mr Huntington could learn a thing or two from Zhou Enlai’s caution. We are just at the beginning of this revolution, and it is still unwinding, and filtering through the system.

Its also perhaps more appropriate to categorise advertising agencies that have hired digital people as hybrid agencies rather than orthodox, particularly when you recognise that there are digital agencies, becoming hybrids, by hiring former advertising people as well. Digital agencies want the keys to the brand and orthodox agencies want to find a door that takes them to the digital future, The new kings of advertising will look nothing like what he calls an ‘orthodox’ agency or even a standalone digital agency, for three key reasons:

1)Marginal players on the fringes of the digital business – The Internet is as wide as it is deep and continues to grow. Even the advertising agencies that have best transitioned to digital, Goodby SilverStein & Partners, and Crispin Porter Bogusky, are still only playing on the edges of this unfathomable space. They do superb banners, landing pages, micro-sites, and viral videos, but are not on the roster for real deep digital work like global ecommerce website redesigns, digital anthropology studies, implementation of content management systems, search engine optimization projects, blogger outreach programs, and website analytics.

2) Subsiding digital growth – To play in the deep digital space, orthodox agencies still need to hire people from disciplines beyond the programmers Mr. Partington mentioned in his article. They will also need to resolve a problem that every digital agency is struggling to resolve: how do you resource, and cover such an unfathomable space, whilst still keeping those timesheets full. This is not a question orthodox agencies have worried about so far, as they have subsidised their digital forays with TV-scale budgets. As they cross the rubicon between the orthodox and digital worlds they will need to balance finances for both of these worlds. In a recent interview, Rich Silverstein, co-founder of Goodby Silverstein & Partners said” The internet is so deep its like drilling for oil. So far, I don’t think we’ve charged for all the time we’ve put into it”.

3) The New Peter Principle – I recently read an argument put forward by John Kay of the FT to explain the financial crisis. The original Peter Principle holds that individuals find their own level of incompetence, and eventually rise to a job they are not good at. Organisations, similarly, frequently find themselves diversifying to their level of incompetence. They extend their businesses into areas that trip them up.

Orthodox agencies have a shiny new bike they want to learn to ride, but they are making the same mistakes that digital agencies made when learning to ride their bikes. Many orthodox agencies are peddling like hell towards the digital future to substitute analogue for digital revenue, and staff up with digital people. Many do this without considering the strategic and financial implications.

The digital business is a deflationary force to the industry as a whole: digital has lower revenues than traditional media; and is more expensive to service. For orthodox agencies that do not understand the dynamics of this transition, they could be falling victim to the Peter Principle and diversifying to the point of incompetence. If Mr Huntington is right, this is an example of the winner’s curse. Ad agencies will be substituting high margin atl revenue with lower digital revenues that they do not really understand.

Its perfectly understandable for orthodox agencies to pursue digital, but its too early to say what the consequences of this race are going to be for both orthodox agencies and those quaint old digital agencies he refers to.

WHAT TYPE OF AGENCY IS BEST AT DELIVERING THE BIG IDEA?

2009-09-26T03:56:00.000-07:00

I was recently involved in a project organised by PRWeek:

PRWeek launched a project to test how well agencies responded to a client's need for an overarching comms solution. The objective was to be discipline-neutral, picking one agency from the PR, media, digital and DM spheres.
The result is The Big Idea project, run in conjunction with the NSPCC. The children's charity body graciously agreed to put its 2010 Helpline marketing brief up for grabs. The four agencies - Porter Novelli (PR), MindShare (media), Publicis Modem (digital) and Lida (DM) - did the rest.

The process triggered a series of presentations, with each agency approaching the brief from a unique point of view. 'It reminded me how many different ways there are to come to a solution,' says NSPCC comms director John Grounds.

Click here to read up on what happened

GOOD MORNING VISUALISATION USING TWITTER API

2009-09-22T06:05:00.000-07:00

I recently discovered another amazing data visualisation from another superstar of the data visualisation world, Jer Thorpe. Add him to the list that includes Aaron Koblin and Manuel Lima. This area might seem overly specialist and artistically slightly indulgent for many of us, but it's not. There is a new science and craft developing here. We will be able to see and understand things about human culture, and the world around us that we would never of dreamed of before, and with greater clarity comes greater inventiveness.

This is how Jer Thorpe describes his Good Morning project:

GoodMorning! is a Twitter visualization tool that shows about 11,000 ‘good morning’ tweets over a 24 hour period, rendering a simple sample of Twitter activity around the globe. The tweets are colour-coded: green blocks are early tweets, orange ones are around 9am, and red tweets are later in the morning. Black blocks are ‘out of time’ tweets which said good morning (or a non-english equivalent) at a strange time in the day. Click on the image above to see North America in detail (click on the ‘all sizes’ button to see the high-res version, which is 6400×3600), or watch the video below to see the ‘good morning’ wave travel around the globe:

More details about his thinking on this project here, and here is the video.

GoodMorning! Full Render #2 from blprnt on Vimeo.

MOBILE BRINGS THE NEXT BILLION PEOPLE ONLINE

2009-09-15T03:39:00.000-07:00

NBN: Give and Profit from nextlab on Vimeo.

A smart initiative out of MIT to connect the world's poor to the digital economy. Mobile is the key. I've heard of some great innovations coming out of this space, such as sms-based mobile banking in Kenya, which was a world first. Worth watching, and seeing how adding another billion people to the digital economy changes not just their economy, but the whole economy.

IS IT TOO EARLY FOR MARKETERS TO BE SHOWING INTEREST IN 3D ADVERTISING?

2009-09-13T22:57:00.000-07:00

This is the year where 3D starts to take off. We have James Cameron's Avatar, and in the UK we have a season of 3D TV films due out soon, and even a whole channel on Sky to be launched dedicated to 3D film.

The glasses above are the i-3d video glasses. They employ 3D technology to make the whole virtual imagery concept utterly personal. Displaying images at 920,000 pixels per LCD at an aspect ratio of 4:3, the head-mounted display is capable of being hooked up to any standard video source, off which it displays stereoscopic virtual images on a screen sized 80 x 69 inches. Priced at $399.

Following on from Sainsbury's sponsorship of a week of 3D programming on Channel 4 in the UK this autumn Marketing Magazine recently asked a panel of people (including myself) to answer the question:

Is it too early for marketers to be showing interest in 3D advertising?

Here's my answer:

Attaching your brand to the magic of 3D is a good thing, but only if you go in with both eyes wide open. Arthur C Clarke once said: 'Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.' Advertisers should do it for the stardust it surrounds the brand with, and should see this as an opportunity to learn and experiment with a technology that feels like magic today, but will be mainstream tomorrow. 3D technology is fast appearing in our cinemas and in our homes.
Many viewers of Channel 4's 3D season will be thrilled by the magic of Sainsbury's' sponsorship, but they should be aware, even with retail distribution, that most people will not have the glasses they need to enjoy the season. Any lessons or content that Sainsbury's creates should be made to work for cinema as well, where films by James Cameron, Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson will soon be out in 3D.

The reach might not yet be fantastic for 3D ads, but the learning and magic it brings to your brand make it worth the investment.

THE SEMANTIC WEB AND ITS IMPACT ON THE MARKET FOR LEMONS

2009-09-05T00:05:00.000-07:00

“I was like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.” Isaac Newton

The transformation in the advertising business is only just starting. Like Newton said, we are just playing with pebbles on the sea-shore, whilst the full force of the transformation is like a tide waiting to come in. We are years away from it, but the biggest tide that will come in will be the semantic web, web 3.0, the Internet of things, or whatever you may choose to call it.

One of the most exciting things about the semantic web is its promise to link data. This will give us the ability to easily find and manipulate that data with web services. Berners-Lee talks about the semantic web being a unbelievable data resource based on linked data. In short with intelligent agents and the semantic web, things become easier to find and easier to manipulate.

I have a dream for the Web [in which computers] become capable of analyzing all the data on the Web – the content, links, and transactions between people and computers. A ‘Semantic Web’, which should make this possible, has yet to emerge, but when it does, the day-to-day mechanisms of trade, bureaucracy and our daily lives will be handled by machines talking to machines. The ‘intelligent agents’ people have touted for ages will finally materialize.

– Tim Berners-Lee, 1999

Intelligent agents are not here yet, but their early ancestors are here, in spirit, if not in shape and form. Think aggregator sites, like moneysupermarket and expedia. These sites don't have the machines-talking-to-machines intelligence that Berners-Lee seeks, but they do aggregate data and allow for smart analysis. This idea clashes with and challenges the advertising business.
I already work on some agency accounts where the client sees their information presence on aggregator platforms like these, as a replacement for advertising. They feel they must be in these aggregator data pools, and they pay handsomely for the privilege.

The advertising business was built on a market of information asymmetry, where one party has better information than the other. Usually the seller has better information about the market than the buyer. George Akerlof, won a Nobel Prize for economics writing about this in a paper called "The Market for Lemons: Quality Uncertainty and the Market Mechanism".

Akerlof complained that

The cost of dishonesty, therefore, lies not only in the amount by which the purchaser is cheated; the cost also must include the loss incurred from driving legitimate business out of existence.

Aggregator sites rebalance these markets by bringing symmetry, where asymmetry existed.

In advertising, we sometimes work with brands with great unique products, other times we mostly work with brands that have products with the same features and specifications as the market as a whole (they are me-too brands). Our goal is to persuade by framing the information we have about the brand to make our client's products seem better or just different.Thus most of the branding we do is based on perceived constructs rather than a pure form of product feature differentiation.

You can already see that intelligent agents, and aggregator sites are an antidote to branding. They level the playing field. In these environments, brand claims are easily neutralised by information transparency.They aren't a complete antidote, as we find on aggregator sites, people still tend to choose the brands they know and trust, but it does change the dynamic of the market.

In the age of the semantic web, and in this age of the aggregators - information transparency demands that the role of the advertising agency changes.

Yes, agencies still remain custodians and developers of the brand, but their role must expand to also include thinking of new ways to add utility and service to the brand. Creating branded utilities, and advertising as a service are the two key skills they need to add. This will come through close study of markets, consumer behaviour, competitor analysis, and general digital anthropology. Nike+ and Fiat Eco:Drive are two ideas that show agencies can be part of this new paradigm.

The dawn of intelligent agents requires the dawn of a new type of ideas shop: one dedicated to creating branded utilities and branded services.

GARTNER HYPE CYCLE AND THE HIVE CULTURE

2009-08-31T16:52:00.000-07:00

Gartner has been publishing its Hype Cycles since 1995. The latest one is out. See below. It describes a Hype Cycle as:

A graphic representation of the maturity, adoption and business application of specific technologies. They characterize the over-enthusiasm or "hype" and subsequent disappointment that typically happens with the introduction of new technologies.

You can see in the 2009 chart below that we are at the top of the cycle for cloud computing, and e-book readers, but microblogging is heading downwards to the trough of disillusionment. I'm not sure of the scientific objectivity of this as a study, but I kind of agree with its findings.

The two hype charts below are 2005, and 1995. 1995 is the really interesting one. Speech recognition seems to be eternally at the plateau of productivity. I'd love to know what's holding it up. Business Rule Engine was two posts behind Speech recognition in 2005 on the plateau of productivity, but seems to have come and gone.

The interesting part of these hype charts is not the latter stages, but what is being hyped at the peak of inflated expectations. The information superhighway was hyped in 1995, and is here. Intelligent Agents were also hyped, and they are not here.

The peak of inflated expectations is due to the hive culture we all work in. We read the same things, write about the same things, and produce the same things. Yesteryear - in a more fragmented age - we worked as part of smaller creative cultures. Now we are all linked by that once hyped, but now here, information superhighway. Everybody is having the same ideas. It's all about execution now. It's no longer the Devil we see in the detail, but as Mies van Der rohe said: God is in details. In a more interlinked world, ideas are spouting from everywhere. They are now the commodity, its how you execute them that counts.

IS SOCIAL MEDIA A FAD OR THE BIGGEST CHANGE SINCE THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION VIDEO?

2009-08-31T00:39:00.000-07:00

You might have aready seen this on other blogs - another example of the hive culture, where we are all feeding from the same sources. But just in case. There are some interesting stats in here, worth knowing.

AMAZING DATA VISUALISATIONS

2009-08-17T14:42:00.000-07:00

I'm loving this work by Aaron Koblin of Google Creative Lab, visualizing Amsterdam's SMS Messages. Data visualisation is my big thing right now, and was impressed at the cleverness and beauty of this.

Amsterdam SMS messages on New Years Eve from Aaron on Vimeo.

And this work looks at Yahoo search data through time around the world. The search query is in the top left hand side of the screen, and the time and date in the top right hand side of the screen. Watch how different parts of the world light up when certain search queries are tracked. Watch for India when cricket appears, and the east coast of America when Miss Teen USA is queried. Very cool

Yahoo! Search Burst Globe from Aaron on Vimeo.

FACEBOOK IS DEVELOPING ITS BUSINESS MODEL BUT STILL HASN'T MONETISED THE SOCIAL GRAPH

2009-08-15T13:32:00.001-07:00

Last year in an interview with FAZ Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook was asked: "The web 2.0 architecture is not necessarily a revenue opportunity. This is not where the money is", said Eric Schmidt from Google. Do you agree with him?

Zuckerberg said:

"What every great Internet company has done is to figure out a way to make money that has to match to what they are doing on the site. I don't think social networks can be monetized in the same way that search did. But on both sites people find information valuable. I'm pretty sure that we will find an analogous business model. But we are experimenting already. One group is very focused on targeting; another part is focused on social recommendation from your friends. In three years from now we have to figure out what the optimum model is. But that is not our primary focus today"

I suspect the relaxed "it's not our focus today" hides a growing fear from the increasing threat from Twitter, and the even bigger threat from Google. The interview was this time last year, and I have met with Facebook several times in recent months and think they are getting interesting again inspite of the confusing redesign. First Facebook Connect, and now its acquisition of Friendfeed. They are building systems for advertisers, new product features, and an infrastructure for servicing clients and agencies. All good stuff, they are generally tightening up their game.

Of the two areas that Zuckerberg highlighted: social recommendations and targeting, the more interesting is social recommendations. That was the original promise of the social graph. A term he popularised, and a term I used for my blog. It pointed at something mathematical, anthropological, and fresh.

The term social graph and its sister social networking, still often get used interchangeably and mistakenly. The best explanation of this came from Robert Scoble, several years ago when he said:

"The Social Graph is NOT my social network.

My Social Network is my friends list. But the Social Graph shows a LOT more than that. For instance, did you know you can see everyone who is into skiing on Facebook? Did you know you can see everyone who is into Daft Punk? Those people are NOT in my social network. But they are part of the social graph that you can study on Facebook. Interesting how we have disagreements about language.

So, what would you call what you can see in Facebook? It isn’t just my social network, though. Try again."

Facebook knows us. It knows what we like. It knows who we like. It should now be developing powerful algorithms that help us visualise and identify new services, products, experiences, and opportunities. At worse it should use Amazon like collaborative filtering technology to make recommendations, but at best should be inventing new ways for us to shop and discover. Its probably harder than it seems, as Facebook has hired some of the leading brains from graph theory and network science.

Perhaps Eric Schmidt, of Google, was right when he said "The web 2.0 architecture is not necessarily a revenue opportunity. This is not where the money is".

I hope not.

But only time will tell.

ONLINE CONVERSATION MANAGEMENT AND THE ROLE OF THE COMMUNITY MANAGER

2009-07-30T05:19:00.000-07:00

The Hydra was reputed to be a many-headed creature killed by Hercules as one of his Twelve Labours. The distributed conversations we are now trying to handle through social media have now also become a many-headed Hydra that we can't kill, but that we have to find ways of managing if we are to have more effective online conversations.

A while back I wrote a blog post called strangers in a community of the likeminded about turning my blog into a community, and I started using tools, like MyBlogLog, Digg, and recently Social Median and Businessweek's Business Exchange. I now have more readers off of my site through RSS, and other distributed content techniques than on my site.

One of my posts, as analyzed by Google Feedburner, has racked up more views through my feed than my blog has had visitors this year. This is partially good news, as it shows the post has gone viral, but it has gone viral through re-publishing, and bookmarking into some anonymous ether.

One of the great advantages of the social media revolution is the ease by which you can distribute content. You can simply Digg content, bookmark it to Delicious, share it to Facebook, Tweet it, and do many more things that takes your content to a wider audience. My feed service, Feedburner argues that published feeds permit publishers to instantly distribute content and give it the ability to make it "subscribable."Sounds good so far.

The flip side to this opportunity is that if you start 'conversations' in many more places, you have to respond in many more places. There are tools like Backtype that help you consolidate all of your comments, but it not the same as having a conversation on a single platform, and plugging yourself into the culture, and spirit of that community. This is important, as these places are not just platforms, they are also communities. And if you want to succeed, you have to become a citizen-participant, and view it as a place with a culture, with ingroups and outgroups, and elites, and ordinary citizens. Before its algorithm change it was been reported that the top 100 Digg users controlled 56% of Digg's frontpage content, and that a niche group of just twenty individuals had submitted 25% of the frontpage content. A few sites have raised the problem of groupthink and the possibility that the site was being "manipulated", so to speak (According to Wikipedia which has its own oligarchy).

The big catch with this need to join the community, and become a citizen-participant (or even aspire to climb the social ladder and become a member of its elite) is that a distributed conversation splits your attention, and split attention is a tough thing to master - particularly if you have a day job.

Managing these conversations requires the skills of a new type of specialist. These are 'community managers' or 'conversation managers' or 'Online PR specialists' or 'Online Customer Service Executives' . The titles are different and the jobs slightly different, but they are essentially employed to engage in online conversations, and with online content. They also handle relationships with bloggers, and other media owners, but also handle responses for brands, and initiate conversations. These people already exist and the demand is growing, and consequently challenges the existing practices of the public relation business.

Call this online PR, call it customer services, or blogger outreach, but the core rationale for these people is to handle, and manage the rising tide of conversations out there. You can distribute content, but because you can't distribute your attention, we now needs specialists to handle this task.

BEYOND THE BANNER AND INTO THE STREET

2009-07-25T14:09:00.000-07:00

Digital is changing and changing fast. One of the key changes is the rush to move beyond the banner, and into reality. And even to change reality. Augmented reality ideas are coming thick and fast, but I'm still struggling to even define it.

One of the big opportunities for me is to put digital onto the street. And I don't mean just kiosks. Check this work out below. To my knowledge it wasn't done using the Internet, but you can so easily see how it could.

555 KUBIK | facade projection | from urbanscreen on Vimeo.

Einblick from Daniel Rossa on Vimeo.

CLOUD COMPUTING AND THE DIFFICULTY WITH PAY PER CLICK MODELS

2009-07-22T07:01:00.000-07:00

I feel that advertising and marketing are on the sidelines of a huge battle that will impact on their futures. Last week Microsoft announced a full assault against the two current leaders in cloud computing: Google and Amazon. Azure, its cloud operating system is designed to challenge Amazon, and it also plans to launch a free, stripped-down online version of Office to rival the free Google Apps service. More about Azure another time.

Cloud computing is getting very hot, very quickly, and the battle between Microsoft and Google turned from being a cold war to an all-or-nothing nuclear war in the last week or so. And although the consequences of the cloud will have a huge impact on advertising, it feels a little like the tech industry adults are arguing, and when they finish they'll let the advertising and marketing kids know what the conclusion was.

The free version of Office will have an advertising business model - probably a pay-per-click model with some display advertising thrown in as well. PPC models are ideal for search but when people are in task orientated cloud applications, like when they are viewing photos, dong email, using word processing or spreadsheet applications, then they are not in a browsing and consequently PPC interrupt mindset. The lower clickthrough rates in the Google content network, or on social networks is testament to the single-minded mindset that sometimes militates against high clickthrough rates on PPC (even when the targeting is precise).

Our whole lives are going to be stored in the cloud soon, and consumers will visit their cloud applications on a daily basis. New formats might emerge to cater for these valuable eyeballs, but the sheer gravitational pull of PPC will mean that agencies will need to rethink how they plan, brief, and monitor campaigns. Google has reluctantly but successfully used pre-roll advertising, and and other display formats on YouTube, and might use more of these for cloud applications, but the PPC model has been so successful that Google and Microsoft are going to export it as far and wide as possible. Marketers must prepare for this future. It's a transparent future with an emphasis on performance, and return on investment.

CAN SOCIAL MEDIA DESTROY THE POLICEMAN INSIDE ALL OF OUR HEADS?

2009-07-19T15:06:00.000-07:00

The cliche about social media is that it gives the consumer power. The consumer transforms through self-expression, and disintermediation from a passive social agent into an activist: a citizen-consumer. The citizen consumer can cut out the traditional media and rely on other citizen-consumers for news and opinion. With this in mind I recently re-watched the excellent TV series, Century of the Self by Adam Curtis (see below for clip).

I asked myself: "How much economic and political power does social media really give to the citizen consumer? And is this a way of getting rid of the supposed policeman inside all of our heads?"

The clip shows how some thinkers saw/see advertising as a corrupting force, where instead of creating an identity for yourself, you simply bought one from the market as a means of self-expression. There is a long held belief in society that advertising manipulates and corrupts, and somehow the practitioners are involved in some kind of mind control, which forces ordinary people to buy things they do not want to buy. If only it was that easy. This is a fanciful belief when you look at how much rubbish advertising there is out there that is irrelevant to the public conversation.

Social media is supposed to be the ultimate force for self-expression, and Generation Y its ultimate purveyor. With social media, and its opportunities for self-expression, what do we search for and write about in this new age of un-mediated self-expression?

On Youtube this month's most popular are Samsung's Extreme Sheep LED viral, and a Pussycat Dolls video, and this month's top searches are American Idol, and Lindsay Lohan. And the top blogs listed on Technorati are generally gossip blogs.

It's also worth remembering this guy on YouTube who has over 1M subscribers

There we go. It seems it wasn't someone else who put the policeman in our heads after all. We put it there ourselves. The policeman is our own desires.

CLOUD COMPUTING AND THE IMPACT ON THE ADVERTISING BUSINESS

2009-07-11T16:27:00.000-07:00

If you remember the Sun Microsystems slogan "The Network is the Computer" then you'll know that there have been many attempts to move computing power away from the desktop and onto networks. This time it could work. People unhesitatingly now save photos on Flickr and Facebook, use email on gmail, and hotmail, and use word processing and spreadsheet tools from Google via a browser. All of this is free. The key difference between past efforts to make the network the computer and cloud computing, is that cloud computing is driven by an advertising-based business model. Google's announcement this week to launch Chrome OS, an operating system designed for the cloud to compete with Windows is well timed, and smart.

We already have more advertising inventory than can be sold, so the glut of new cloud computing ventures and their associated advertising inventory promises to destabilise the digital business. More inventory will drive down prices. More inventory will also drive down production costs, but increase demand for better optimisation and reporting across advertising campaigns.

Analytics will be key as new formats and new approaches emerge, die, and in some cases flourish. I also expect those who are overburdened by this inventory to start to look at new ways to raise margin by helping produce the advertising. So expect more cloud computing providers to start up creative units to help their clients produce ads.

Existing creative agencies can face this challenge by investing in teams focused on making cloud-based advertising work. That means more analysts focused on the maths and the optimization. That means more performance based pay that aligns with pay-per-click models. Notions of creativity have to change. Creativity shouldn't just mean arty and edgy, but should also broaden to mean useful and functional.

Equally creative agencies shouldn't just do communication strategy but should also do marketing strategy. Most importantly, it means recognising that the next wave of competitors are not the people you see at advertising awards shows, but are instead the geeks that live in neat streets in Silicon Valley. The music and newspaper industries were looking in the wrong direction when the revolution happened. Advertising needs to look West at California rather than towards Madison Avenue for the next challenge. This is only the beginning.

ADVERTISING AGENCIES VERSUS PR AGENCIES

2009-07-05T11:00:00.000-07:00

Last week I did an interview with PR Week about the fact 'PR agencies have been forced to question their role in the marketing mix, after advertising firms scooped a slew of awards with PR-led campaigns at the 2009 Cannes Lions Advertising Festival', such as Obama for America, The Great Schlep, and The Best Job in the World.

It's become very clear to me that all agencies are suffering from what I have previously called transition trauma, and this is going to have huge implications for what the agency landscape looks like in five years time. If ad agencies can win using PR techniques, then PR agencies are going to start moving towards ad agency terrain. Fragmentation of media, social media, consumer cynicism, and digital media in general argues for a move towards earned media rather than paid media. The battlefield has moved, and everyone is shooting into the centre ground.

I've been interested in PR ever since I started writing on the social graph as I see the social graph as been centred on PR type strategies. The social graph is about passing on an idea, concept, belief, thought, project etc. that is transmitted digitally. To use the jargon we would call these memes. They propagate themselves and can move through a ‘culture’ in a manner similar to a virus. Virals are memes, as indeed are product recommendations, and chain letters. Nobody has yet fully cracked it. Not even Facebook are 100% clear how this might all work, but the answer is currently more likely to come from an advertising agency than a PR agency.

My explanation for this phenomena caused quite a storm on this blog. Its worth reading the comments and you'll see that I join the debate, as indeed did the journalist who wrote the piece. It seems it's not just the advertising industry in the midst of metaphysical angst.

METADATA AS A SOURCE OF DIGITAL ANTHROPOLOGY

2009-06-27T00:05:00.000-07:00

One of the most interesting things I am focused on right now is how to use the metadata that is increasingly abundant on web 2.0 sites. My main focus is tags on places like Flickr, and Technorati.

This form of tagging has the rather clumsy name of a folksonomy.

A Folksonomy is a system of classification derived from the practice and method of collaboratively creating and managing tags to annotate and categorize content; this practice is also known as collaborative tagging, social classification, social indexing, and social tagging. Source: Wikipedia

These folksonomies give us a picture of the collective view, a summary of the zeitgeist, an understanding of the popular interpretation of meaning. There is personal meaning, and shared meaning. By looking at a tag such as happiness on flickr you can explore the collective meaning of the word and associated tags clustered around it.

Equally, by exploring the tag happiness on Technorati, you get an equally interesting array of associated tags, a list of the bloggers most frequently using that tag, and an understanding of the how the word is interpreted or used.

This bottom-up type of tagging is likely to be real way that the semantic web starts. Sir Tim Berners-Lee W3C is trying valiantly to get a top-down system of tagging to happen but that is currently unlikely to happen.

It's going to be a tricky affair making all of this work. Both of the images below came up from a image search on Google using the keyword "freedom"

Semantics and semiotics are complicated sciences and I am far from claiming any kind of breakthrough, but I am clear that understanding how to interpret the collective intelligence will be important. These tags are the same tags that are keywords in search engines results that pull from website metadata, blog post labels, and file names, and other sources. Coming up with clever ways of interpreting this data is going to be pretty important going forward.

THE APPS ECONOMY AND THE EVOLUTION OF MOBILE SOFTWARE

2009-06-15T23:09:00.000-07:00

I like this piece by Kyle Bean, a young British artist. More here about him. It conveys the rapid innovation the mobile phone has undergone, and underlines the fact that miniaturization is not the next challenge any more. Nor is it about packing the phone with more hardware features, such as bigger and better cameras, or music, or screens. It's all about the software and the application, as proved by Apple and its App Store, and Google and Android.

I am a very reluctant convert to iPhone Apps, as you might read in this piece in Marketing Magazine. With such a tiny share of the market, for me creating iPhone Apps for mass market brands was akin to creating websites that only worked for Apple's Safari web browser. This is all set to change with the announcement at the WDC of a $99 iPhone.

Creating Apps is already a big business, but with an even bigger mainstream market beckoning there is going to be a wave of new apps launched into an already saturated market. Getting noticed on the App Store is tough. But like on Facebook with its Apps, the novelty wears off very quickly, and once shiny new apps are placed in the ignore-me-cemetery very quickly. My interest is in apps with utility that serve a life purpose, rather than those that are gimmicks.

The apps economy is going to be a very interesting market to study going forward, and will start to migrate from mostly a gimmick based market, to one that looks like a traditional software market. Expect to see Apps with marketing budgets that launch new versions with huge advertising campaigns and razzmatazz each year, a la Windows. All of this, however, is a huge pain for agencies, who are expected to specialise in multiple platforms, multiple categories, and have multiple skillsets, all under one roof at all times.

THE FAME FORMULA AND PROFITING FROM FAME

2009-05-21T13:11:00.000-07:00

My friend Ray recently shared this story about PR man Mark Borkowski, who has developed a theory that says Andy Warhol was wrong to say fame lasts for fifteen minutes. Borkowski believes it lasts for 15 months and that celebrities should do something every 15 months to stay famous. He believes he has developed a fame formula and wrote a book on the topic. I'm interested in the idea as I'm increasingly interested in the PR business, and what it might teach us in digital communications.

The historical dividing walls between different types of agencies are down. With social media growing, I increasingly encounter traditional PR agencies, online PR, and blogger outreach agencies as part of my day-to-business. Social media is earned media, rather than bought media, and for an idea to go truly viral it has to borrow from the skills honed in PR. PR is built around spreading newsworthy stories. It's all earned media.

You'll remember in a recent blog post I wrote about 50 Cent and Paris Hilton and their skill in staying relevant and in the news. The importance of this for brands was confirmed for me when I recently discovered in The London Paper she earns a fortune from the personal brand she has created for herself.

The London Paper reported that "Court documents show Paris Hilton, who has a reputation as an airhead, earns a staggering $11m (£7.3m) a year. The US socialite, 28, raked in $22m in 2006 and 2007 from "promotional duties".

Brands could learn from Miss Hilton, and her amazing ability to stay in the news and to profit from it. Buying attention through paid media to stay front of mind is still important, but earning attention to stay front of mind is now a critical skill in growing revenues.

For all you big brained digital people, watch and weep as the 'talentless lady with a talent for staying in the news' interviews Lady Gaga (and gets paid to do so by Nokia). It's mostly tiresome until lady Gaga says some really interesting stuff about media culture and our obsession with fame and then talks about Hilton's fame.

WILL SELF-EXPRESSION THROUGH SOCIAL MEDIA MAKE US DUMBER?

2009-04-28T07:15:00.000-07:00

The kid who does this video, has just become the first person to get 1m subscribers to his YouTube channel and YouTube says he is also making "tens of thousands" of dollars each month via text overlays and display ads on his YouTube channel.

The content is truly atrocious, but it does signify two things:

One positive: It starts to establish there can be a model for commercialising user generated video (and Google will breath a big sigh of relief). This opens the door for the citizen consumer to establish platforms for self expression, and get paid doing it
One very negative: When the consumer citizen gets his platform, the base of that platform is not usually very high off the ground. Instead its usually only one step up from the swamp, and the dumbest things are usually the most popular things. Sounds a bit like commercial television doesn't it?

All those revolutionaries that thought unmediated self-expression would lead to a new republic... have now got Fred.

THE ENGAGEMENT MODEL MEANS BRANDS WILL BECOME SOME OF THE BEST AND BIGGEST MEDIA OWNERS

2009-04-21T20:29:00.000-07:00

If you are going to sell a TV set it makes sense to sell it by demonstrating the quality of the viewing experience -and it probably makes sense doing that using a spectacular film. But the film has to be great. Remember the Sony Ball s campaign

This Philips campaign to sell their 21:9 Philips Carousel shows how to do it.

I love the film, but have very mixed feelings about this as an overall campaign. The site is a bit of a disappointment. Great film, but it didn't make me feel any different to Philips. They create this film that draws you into this amazing world, but that's it. The film says nothing about the product in any truly meaningful way. Once you watch the film, the only thing there is an invitation to visit a very basic product site.

Its a bold move, but I wanted to get involved. I wanted to solve the mystery and work it out, but I couldn't. People will definitely talk about this idea - I have - so it also creates conversational capital about the brand, but when you create a world like this you have to plan the whole experience not just the film.

What's missing here is a understanding of how carry the audience with you right through the whole engagement experience. Overall its a great idea, with great production values, and people who wouldn't normally talk about Philips are talking about Philips. It's a further demonstration of how brands will need to invest in great content, and it supports my view that brands will eventually become some of the best and biggest media owners.

THE SECRET ART OF STAYING RELEVANT AND IN THE NEWS

2009-04-11T00:56:00.000-07:00

Not many of you would link 50 Cent, the rapper, with HP's Social Computing Lab. But they agree completely when it comes to understanding the relationship between relevancy and the scarcity of attention in today's media market.

In a recent interview the 50 Cent was asked who has the best model for staying relevant to fans [amongst his rivals]? He answered:

"Puffy has the best model for staying relevant, because [he does it] without a song. He’s been able to maintain an interest and stay in a space to executive produce television and film projects, and stay relevant to hip-hop culture. What was the last record that made you feel like, ‘Oh, my God, Puffy is on fire’? You don’t need it. That’s what makes his business model exciting to me.'

Smart words. 50 cent is no fool. To be up there and successful in today's media is no small task. Diddy and 50 cent know the art of public relations very well, and have the knack of being able to read the zeitgesit, contrive a story that is newsworthy, and consequently keep themselves in the spotlight. 50's approach is usually to contrive a 'beef' with another rap star, or cause some type of 'trouble' to re-affirm his positioning as rap's most dangerous bad boy. Diddy 's approach is to push his take on glamour and hedonism, he has even coined a term for it - Ghetto fabulous. This is all skillful, professional stuff - sophisticated public relations.

For a rap star and for a brand keeping relevant is today's key skill. However, attention is today's most valuable commodity, only a few can aim to be relevant at a given time. It's a zero-sum game. In a recent post on the BBC, Bernardo Huberman, a senior fellow at HP labs, and head of HP's Social Computing Lab, has called this a return to the "dawn of the age of intimacy".

Huberman and his fellow researchers have focused on what people do when information becomes more available, cheap and valueless. He and his team have studied why people gravitate to certain websites, stories or products and how long they stay there. "Attention is now the key commodity in this information explosion," said Mr Huberman.

For those striving to be novel and popular at the same time for a long time, Mr Huberman suggested looking at how Paris Hilton maintains near constant headline status.

"There is something to be said about people that, however trivial we might consider them, manage to create enough novelty to be on the front news page all the time.

"If I were to do something idiotic like stand on my head now on this table perhaps some of you might write about it. If I keep doing that every hour of every day of the week, most likely you won't do it. So I have to invent new things to be on the news the way Paris Hilton is.

"That's a huge talent in a sense," said Mr Huberman.

THE FUTURE OF TV BY LG - LGENIUS

2009-03-29T23:26:00.000-07:00

LG LGenius Innovations Keynote Highlights

LG introduces some truly genius innovations at a recent conference in Korea. Check out the site LGenius for more.

If only.

COMPARE THE MEERKAT CAMPAIGN AND ADVERTISING AS AN EXPERIENCE

2009-03-12T16:26:00.000-07:00

Well done to VCCP for their campaign for financial comparison site - compare the market - which has done very well. comparethemarket.com's challenge was to design a campaign that would increase the number of consumers searching the website out by name.

People who would never talk about a campaign from a finance aggregator are talking to me about this campaign. For me its an example of advertising as an experience, and joins the dots perfectly between broadcast media and digital media. They've created a 'media property' that allows them to talk cleverly and humorously about something audiences will find continuously interesting, and then found ways to relate it back to product. Very smart.

The site is very well done, and funny.
People are twittering about it
There are 116,000 search results for it

And above all, as you can see in the chart below it has helped it overtake the market leader (moneysupermarket) in search traffic (more data here). Searches for "compare the meerkat" are in blue, "compare the market" in red, and moneysupermarket in yellow. Who says good advertising doesn't work.

CHANGING THE LANGUAGE OF ADVERTISING TO REFLECT MOVE TOWARDS MANAGING COMMUNITIES

2009-03-05T23:22:00.000-08:00

Some of you who have followed my blog for a while will remember I had a debate with Mary Beth Kemp of Forrester on her paper about the Connected Agency (paper is here). In her paper she says "Today's agencies fail to help marketers engage with consumers, who, as a result, are becoming less brand-loyal and more trusting of each other. To turn the tide, marketers will move to the Connected Agency — one that shifts: from making messages to nurturing consumer connections; from delivering push to creating pull interactions; and from orchestrating campaigns to facilitating conversations. Over the next five years, traditional agencies will make this shift; they will start by connecting with consumer communities and will eventually become an integral part of them."

This prediction is becoming true with the increasing ubiquity of social media, and its growing presence in budgets. But with this change will come a change in the language we use for creative and media strategy in the act of community management.

As you can see in the diagram below the relationships between people in a community can be graphed and analysed. So in addition to talking about cost per thousand, impressions, and cost per click we will now have to add the lexicon of social network analysis to the language we use today in advertising.

Here are a few social network analysis metrics taken from Wikipedia:

Betweenness: The extent to which a nodes lies between other nodes in the network. This measure takes into account the connectivity of the node's neighbors, giving a higher value for nodes which bridge clusters. The measure reflects the number of people who a person is connecting indirectly through their direct links.

Bridge: An edge is said to be a bridge if deleting it would cause its endpoints to lie in different components of a graph.

Centrality: This measure gives a rough indication of the social power of a node based on how well they "connect" the network. "Betweenness", "Closeness", and "Degree" are all measures of centrality.

Centralization: The difference between the number of links for each node divided by maximum possible sum of differences. A centralized network will have many of its links dispersed around one or a few nodes, while a decentralized network is one in which there is little variation between the number of links each node possesses.

Closeness: The degree an individual is near all other individuals in a network (directly or indirectly). It reflects the ability to access information through the "grapevine" of network members. Thus, closeness is the inverse of the sum of the shortest distances between each individual and every other person in the network.

Clustering coefficient: A measure of the likelihood that two associates of a node are associates themselves. A higher clustering coefficient indicates a greater 'cliquishness'.

Cohesion: The degree to which actors are connected directly to each other by cohesive bonds. Groups are identified as ‘cliques’ if every individual is directly tied to every other individual, ‘social circles’ if there is less stringency of direct contact, which is imprecise, or as structurally cohesive blocks if precision is wanted.^[18]

Degree: The count of the number of ties to other actors in the network. This may also be known as the "geodesic distance". See also degree (graph theory).

(Individual-level) Density: The degree a respondent's ties know one another/ proportion of ties among an individual's nominees. Network or global-level density is the proportion of ties in a network relative to the total number possible (sparse versus dense networks).

Flow betweenness centrality: The degree that a node contributes to sum of maximum flow between all pairs of nodes (not that node).

Eigenvector centrality: A measure of the importance of a node in a network. It assigns relative scores to all nodes in the network based on the principle that connections to nodes having a high score contribute more to the score of the node in question.

Local Bridge: An edge is a local bridge if its endpoints share no common neighbors. Unlike a bridge, a local bridge is contained in a cycle.

Path Length: The distances between pairs of nodes in the network. Average path-length is the average of these distances between all pairs of nodes.

Prestige: In a directed graph prestige is the term used to describe a node's centrality. "Degree Prestige", "Proximity Prestige", and "Status Prestige" are all measures of Prestige. See also degree (graph theory).

Radiality: Degree an individual’s network reaches out into the network and provides novel information and influence.

Reach: The degree any member of a network can reach other members of the network.

Structural cohesion: The minimum number of members who, if removed from a group, would disconnect the group.^[19]

Structural equivalence: Refers to the extent to which nodes have a common set of linkages to other nodes in the system. The nodes don’t need to have any ties to each other to be structurally equivalent.

Structural hole: Static holes that can be strategically filled by connecting one or more links to link together other points. Linked to ideas of social capital: if you link to two people who are not linked you can control their communication.

KEYWORDS ARE DOORWAYS TO CONTENT AND ALL DIGITAL COMMUNICATIONS PLANNING SHOULD START BY TARGETING ORGANIC SEARCH TRAFFIC

2009-02-15T13:49:00.000-08:00

Here's a piece of news that's not going to surprise many of you: Google isn't disappearing any time soon. This means that pay-per-click media agencies will continue to grow, but this will also become an opportunity for creative agencies as well with a small re-adjustment in how we think about connecting with audiences. The Pew Internet & American Life Project research study last year reaffirmed the ever growing dominance of search:

"The percentage of internet users who use search engines on a typical day has been steadily rising from about one-third of all users in 2002, to a new high of just under one half (49%). With this increase, the number of those using a search engine on a typical day is pulling ever closer to the 60% of internet users who use email, arguably the internet’s all-time killer app, on a typical day."

You might be wondering - like I did - why the other 51% don't use search engines every day, but what is most interesting here is that 49% of your market is using keywords that indicate what they are interested in, what they might want to buy, and are reachable.

Keywords are doorways to content and desires. Creative agencies should be as focused on them as pay-per-click media agencies. I think we should start all digital planning as a project in search engine optimisation. Search is consumer desire digitally encoded - a lightning rod directly into the consumer zeitgeist. Work out what your audience is searching for and why, decide which keywords to target, and ruthlessly optimise the experience to map to these desires.

The only real anomaly in all of this is that creative agencies are all about demand creation, whilst search is about demand fulfillment, but if we catch the consumer at an exploratory stage - before product decisions have been made, then something all together different starts to happen. It takes a small re-adjustment in agency mindset to understand and exploit this, but the results could be huge.

CONNECTING ADVERTISING'S CREATIVES WITH GOOGLE ENGINEERS

2009-02-08T13:00:00.000-08:00

One of the most frustrating things in digital creativity is the fact that most of the big money goes straight to paid search. According to the IAB "paid-for listings maintained its position as the largest single format with a 58.3% share of the market. £981.0m was spent on search in H1 2008". This means creative agencies are generally disconnected from 60% of the business and disconnected from Google and it's engineering prowess.

So I was intrigued when I finally caught up with a story I had missed last year. I recently discovered that Seth MacFarlane, creator of “Family Guy” on television, teamed up with with Google to launch “Seth MacFarlane’s Cavalcade of Cartoon Comedy” - an animation series to appear exclusively on the Internet. What was interesting about it was how it was to be distributed by Google.

The New York Times, reported:

"The innovative part involves the distribution plan. Google will syndicate the program using its AdSense advertising system to thousands of Web sites that are predetermined to be gathering spots for Mr. MacFarlane’s target audience, typically young men. Instead of placing a static ad on a Web page, Google will place a “Cavalcade” video clip. The content will also be distributed via YouTube.
Advertising will be incorporated into the clips in varying ways. In some cases, there will be “preroll” ads, which ask viewers to sit through a TV-style commercial before getting to the video. Some advertisers may opt for a banner to be placed at the bottom of the video clip or a simple “brought to you by” note at the beginning.
Mr. MacFarlane, who will receive a percentage of the ad revenue, has created a stable of new characters to star in the series, which will be served up in 50 two-minute episodes.
In an interview, he described the installments as “animated versions of the one-frame cartoons you might see in The New Yorker, only edgier.”
For a more substantial fee, Mr. MacFarlane has been working with advertisers to animate original commercials that will run with “Cavalcade.” Google and Mr. MacFarlane would not reveal any of the advertisers, but the two said that several deals are among the largest ever landed by AdSense, which went into business in 2003.
Google, which calls the distribution service the Google Content Network, until now has only dabbled in distributing original content. In May, it announced a deal with The Washington Post to distribute real estate listings from the newspaper’s Web site in a similar manner."

That was last year, and the videos - like the one above - now sit on Burger King's Youtube channel. But the promise of 50 2min videos was not realised, as Burger King has dropped out, and been replaced by Priceline (the US Travel Co). Their first video is below (not sure its funny, I preferred the one above).

This whole initiative is interesting, not because of the fact its video - as Google has run video banners on its content network for a year or so already - but because of the investment in high quality creative content, and the way its been monetised. This idea starts to show how digital creatives and engineers can work together. All very interesting, and very exciting.

KEYNESIAN BEAUTY CONTESTS, REVERSE POP IDOL, AND ONLINE VOTING COMPETITIONS

2009-01-31T04:13:00.001-08:00

When thinking about incentivizing online participation its rare that the name of John Maynard Keynes, the Economist, is raised in conversation alongside that of Simon Cowell of American Idol and X-Factor fame. Simon Cowell wasn't the first to do it, but he has taken the idea of a popular vote in a talent contest to a new level, and with the assistance of his panel, who act as 'advisor' to the voters, he has devised a winning formula.

However, this approach does not always work for all those involved. In the UK recently, Strictly Come Dancing, a TV dance contest, created huge public controversy because the panel wanted a political reporter (pictured above) with two-left feet voted out, whilst a sympathetic voting public wanted him to stay in.

This advisory panel plus popular vote model doesn't always work on TV, and presents serious problems for online. People cheat online and it is not always the best entrants that win. As social participation becomes more important the mechanics by which these games are governed becomes more importanat. Site's such as Digg have had to change because of the wrong mechanics:

It has been reported that the top 100 Digg users controlled 56% of Digg's frontpage content, and that a niche group of just twenty individuals had submitted 25% of the frontpage content. A few sites have raised the problem of groupthink and the possibility that the site is being "manipulated", so to speak. In response to this question, the site's founder Kevin Rose has announced an upcoming change to the site's algorithm.

I am recommending two other models now, rather than just a 'Pop Idol' model for online voting contests.

These models are:

1. The Reverse Pop Idol - Where the public vote on their favourites - acting as a type of advisory panel - and then the judges choose from the candidates with the highest votes

2. Keynesian Beauty Contest - developed by John Maynard Keynes, Wikipedia describes this as a concept, where in a fictional newspaper contest, each entrant is asked to choose a set of six faces from photographs of women that were the "most beautiful". Those who picked the most popular face are then eligible for a prize. In my version of the beauty contest, if you vote for the same faces as the judges finally do then you win. I think this model reduces the chances of cheating on one level (through fake accounts and multiple voting), creates more community through anticipating and studying everyone else's voting patterns, and it makes it a more unpredictable game because the judge's choice needs to be guessed at as well.

Keynes (pictured above) said “It is not a case of choosing those [faces] which, to the best of one’s judgment, are really the prettiest, nor even those which average opinion genuinely thinks the prettiest. We have reached the third degree where we devote our intelligences to anticipating what average opinion expects the average opinion to be. And there are some, I believe, who practise the fourth, fifth and higher degrees.” (Keynes, General Theory of Employment Interest and Money, 1936).

"Keynes believed that similar behavior was at work within the stock market. This would have people pricing shares not based on what they thought their fundamental value was, but rather based on what they think everyone else thinks their value was, or what everybody else would predict the average assessment of value was."

For me Keynes is talking about a mechanism that establishes the wisdom of the crowds. In my last post, I said that 'process is more important than proposition', which is why in addition to thinking about message, and medium as classically done, we now also need to think about the process, or what I'd call the modus by which we organise participation. This type of thinking has typically been the preserve of game theorists, but now its another issue digital agencies will need to take on board.

MESSAGE, MEDIUM, MODUS AND HOW PROCESS IS MORE IMPORTANT THAN PROPOSITION IN THE DIFFUSION OF INNOVATION

2009-01-26T08:51:00.000-08:00

There are lots of smart people out there agonising about how to make their idea viral and get it spreading out across the web. Whether they are in music, advertising, software or anything else that can spread across the web, they are thinking about this problem, and most are focusing on the proposition or the idea. Ideas are what reach a critical mass, create a dominate standard, become a web phenomena, a hit record, or a underground movie sensation. To say good ideas always trump bad ideas is generally true, but in reality its not always the best proposition that wins.

Betamax was an superior proposition to VHS but VHS still won. Dairy Milk had a superior ad campaign to Galaxy but it still lost market share (see post). The Backstreet Boys are a crap band but they still top the charts. The truth is that process is more important than proposition in a market that is made opaque by the subjective interpretation of ideas. If you get your marketing machine performing more effectively you win. That was the lesson from Betamax vs VHS.

We know from decades of studies that the diffusion of innovation is key in all of this, as shown below.

Each step in the diffusion of innovation requires its own process if it is to be successfully crossed. This means creating an experience that not only has a contagious proposition at its heart, but also has contagious processes built into it, such as: send to a friend, social bookmarking, social networks, and incentives that reward recommendation or as Seth Godin says Sneezing that infects the rest of the hive. Betamax lost because people didn't sneeze enough when they bought the product. It never developed network effects, which is a form of power you get from increasing the number of people in your network (see Metcalfe's Law).

This is why in addition to thinking about message, and medium as classically done, we now also need to think about the process, or what I'd call the modus.

1M PEOPLE VIEWING YOUR TV AD FOR 30 SECS OR 50K ON YOUR WEBSITE FOR 2 MINUTES EACH?

2008-12-24T04:28:00.000-08:00

The media landscape is in transition, and old broadcast media is losing its hegemony over budgets. I've come up with a term to describe the difficulties of this period of transition from traditional analogue approaches to new digital approaches - Transition Perdition. It's hell for everyone from the music executive who can't sell enough digital downloads to make up for the decline in CD sales, the newspaper publisher whose digital revenues are not making up for the decline in print circulation, and the advertising industry still addicted to the old power of TV and reluctantly being dragged towards the still evolving new digital power.

I'm frequently asked to make the argument for digital, but many of the decision-makers and agencies are still wedded to the old model, and although us digital zealots might criticize, there is some logic to their position. So here are views from both sides of the argument.

So here is the argument for TV: the power of TV to provide instantaneous mass audience is still probably unrivalled. Few brand websites can claim to be able to muster 1M visitors in the same way a TV ad can. And although the bar for financing a TV campaign is high, the unit cost of converting someone through TV is low. Broadcast media is perceived as the low risk approach.

Digital on the other hand can rarely guarantee you TV sized audiences, is complex and ever changing, and is frequently more expensive on a per head basis (if you exclude search), response rates are usually very unpredictable, and it takes time that many marketers don't have.

So here is the argument for digital: Forgetting about the cost of a campaign for one moment, lets take an almost philosophical position on these as possible options. Given the choice of choosing between a TV ad that reached 1M for 30 seconds or a digital campaign (that includes an online advertising campaign driving to a website) that engages 50K people for 2minutes each -at equal costs - which would you choose?

For those of you familiar with this debate will know this is a nonsensical question, but indulge this argument for one moment and lets look at the simple maths:

TV:1M viewers x 0.5minutes=500,000 minutes of attention

Website: 50K visitors x 2minutes=100,000 minutes of attention

The simple maths tells us that TV should win, but when you unpack the argument four other elements suggest the digital approach is superior?

Active versus passive - The act of leaning forward (active) versus sitting back (passive) and spending your own time with a brand takes the audience many steps on in the decision-making process from the basic awareness a TV ad delivers

Organic search benefits - If optimized correctly the site becomes a magnet for organic search and also helps improve your Google quality score reducing the cost of your paid search

Total reach - Based on average clickthrough rates of 0.2% the online advertising component of the digital campaign would have reached at least 250,000 people who would have been exposed to your campaign message delivering awareness and messaging

Ongoing communication - One of the biggest advantage is that the website audience is not a mass of anonymous people sat in front of their anonymous TV sets, they are addressable and this means you can have ongoing communications with them (using CRM techniques). These communications can help close the loop and drive to purchase and beyond to loyalty.

Activating Advocates - The biggest advantage, however, is the ability to harness the power of the advocate. People who take time out to visit your website and enjoy the experience are the type of people who will take time out to talk about your brand and your products. They represent that 20% that the 80/20 rule suggests you should approach. They carry your message and make it contagious, and also spend more, and stay longer.

So for me in this transition period, we'd have to do that simple maths again, and weight the results to recognise the importance of actually having all of the above. But how much more valuable is one of those digital minutes than a TV minute? Twice as valuable, five times, ten times? Each brand will need to decide.

ANTHROPOLOGICAL VIEW OF YOUTUBE AND VIRAL CULTURE

2008-12-22T02:55:00.000-08:00

If you haven't seen this video presentation from Prof Michael Wesch, Anthropologist at the State University of Kansas, its worth investing the time. Also worth checking out his site.

DON'T WORRY ABOUT NEGATIVE USER REVIEWS AND RATINGS

2008-12-07T12:42:00.000-08:00

I've used this phrase - STRANGERS IN A COMMUNITY OF THE LIKEMINDED - before to describe the concept of likeminded people gathering together on websites but who are completely unaware of each other due to a lack of social and community features. Now this shouldn't be in an era of countless tools, and widgets, and open APIs. The ability for visitors to leave a review or rating is one such feature that every site should have.

One company that offers an off-the-shelf solution for this task is Bazaarvoice. They have Bazaarvoice Ratings & Reviews™ which brings customer reviews directly to your product pages, allowing customers to hear from people like them while they’re making buying decisions. Your customers can rate your products on a 5-star scale, write honest product reviews – and all the while, they’re helping you drive natural search to your site and helping you build an online community.

What I found interesting on their blog about this product was the distribution of ratings. Many marketers don't open up to reviews and ratings fearing negative feedback. But in addition to my theory that birds of a feather fly together, what Bazaarvoive have also found is that mostly positive singing birds flock together. An insight corroborated by the distribution of ratings that Bazaarvoice has aggregated together as shown in the “J” curve distribution below.

Across many clients in diverse industries the average rating is 4.3 out of 5 stars. The distribution looks like a J, where there are more 1s than 2s, but far more 4s and 5s than the lower ratings.

This is how they explain it:

Why is this? Aren’t people more likely to share their word of mouth about bad experiences? Perhaps they are more likely to share negative opinions when they have personal experiences with a company (service, sales) than the product they buy?

And perhaps customers are interested in sharing their opinion about great products they buy, because there are so many mediocre products. So there’s some satisfaction in sharing the news when we find a product we love.

We’ll learn more and share more here. But in the meantime, this “J” curve is part of the answer to the concern: “What about negative reviews?”

GROUP POLARISATION AND SOCIAL MEDIA

2008-11-29T03:24:00.000-08:00

I think one of the most under-explored ideas in social media is group polarisation. In Wikipedia it is roughly defined as a phenomena that has the effect of transforming people who have mild views, who then participate in a discussion group, into advocates with more extreme positions and call for riskier courses of action when compared to individuals who did not participate in any such discussion. For example attitudes such as racial and sexual prejudice tend to be reduced (for already low-prejudice individuals) and inflated (for already high-prejudice individuals) after group discussion.

The last time I wrote about this I posted that if as IDC forecasts, 70% of content will be user generated by 2010, then even the most controversial brands will have to hand over power to their audiences, and let them talk on their sites. I've worked with several brands that are understandably nervous about this. My stock answer attempts to reassure on three levels: 1) if they don't talk on your site, they're going to keep talking in a place where you don't have any control; and 2) if they are talking elsewhere then bring them to a place where you can effectively give your perspective to them, but in front of the Undecided (so you at least convince the Undecided ); and 3) if you don't open up, it looks like you are scared of talking and thus guilty.

I'd now like to add that the Obama social media success story adds a type of delphic validity to my views . My strategy was not about those on either extreme of the argument. My approach was about the Undecided. Obama's strategy was also about the Undecided, not the people who would never vote for an African-American, or who were die hard liberals. The now infamous Undecided voter was the focus.

If you check out the comments on the BarackObama.com blog you see that it became a meeting place for the die-hard activists and loyalists to share their experiences, rather than a place for debate between people of diverging views. Even on his Facebook Wall the comments are about support and sometimes adulation. It seems his critics just never visited. The site was for the Undecided and the loyalists. Thus if group polarisation was in operation then the net result would be to shift the waverers towards Obama even more.

The chart below (chart 1) confirms this with data from Google Trends for Websites. It compares people who searched for barackobama.com (in blue) and johnmccain.com (in red) and looks for what sites they visited in common.

Chart 1 - The sites also visited by those visiting barackobama.com (in blue) and johnmccain.com (in red)

In chart 2 below you can see that the sites that McCain supporters visited were very different, and had little overlap with Obama's.

Chart 2 - the sites also visited by those visiting johnmccain.com (in red) and barackobama.com (in blue)

Obama's main website barackobama.com was an interesting strategy, but it mainly attracted his fans. The most interesting strategy was fightthesmears.com which was developed to counter smears and 'to discover the truth about Barack Obama'. Obama is quoted on the site "What you won't hear from this campaign or this party is the kind of politics that uses religion as a wedge, and patriotism as a bludgeon -- that sees our opponents not as competitors to challenge, but enemies to demonize." Chart 3 below shows that the strategy worked as it attracted audiences that wouldn't visit barackobama.com

Chart 3. Sites those who visited fightthesmears.com (in blue) also visited and johnmccain.com (in red) comparison

You can also see in chart 4 what those who visited fight the smears searched on versus those who visited johnmccain.com

Chart 4. What those who visited fight the smears searched (in blue) on versus those who visited johnmccain.com (in red)

The issue of Obama's place of birth and birth certificate became a smear that was widely pushed by the right, and fight the smears became a counter for this on the web for the Undecided who genuinely wanted to know the truth. It also seems to have become a place for right wing extremist to check out for ammunition.

The Obama experience and fight the smears confirms my original view when I last wrote about group polarisation. I said brands fear a type of riot on their sites led by a few hardliners who will infect the Undecided and the positive visitors with their negative opinions resulting in everyone becoming more extreme, and suggested the response should be:

"...brands don't have to surrender control to anarchy if they open up to community discussion. Martin Luther King guided a group, and turned it into a movement. A movement that was angry, but at the same time pacifist, a movement looking for change, but driven by age-long ideals. A positive form of group polarisation is possible if it's driven by leadership that shapes the debate, sets the agenda, and moderates the discussion by providing a balanced counterpoint to the opposition's arguments. This also means being open and honest. Show both sides of the argument, compartmentalise the debate into different discussion streams - which you define.

Start the community on topics peripheral to the brand's core theme, then gradually move towards the core. Use advocates of the brand to be your evangelists, and get them to share their experiences with people in their social graphs. And perhaps most importantly, don't see it as a zero-sum game with a winner and a loser, but instead a mechanism for funneling the collective intelligence of your stakeholders into your brand. There's wisdom in those crowds. "

VIRAL IS AN ACHIEVEMENT NOT A FORMAT

2008-11-21T06:29:00.000-08:00

When clients approach my firm asking for a viral advertising campaign they usually ask with the belief that a viral is a video of some sort. The sort of video that ends up on YouTube or Boreme.com or Kontraband.com. But for me viral is a broader and frequently bigger concept than that. What I've been saying is 'viral isn't a format, its an achievement'

Two or three years ago I could understand this belief, but two things have changed this for me:

Social media means that pretty much anything and everything has the power to become contagious. The share this/save this widget on my blog page, an app on Facebook, or a band on MySpace, or a blogger outreach program all have viral features.
The most successful viral videos in history happened a while ago. The likes of Star Wars Boy, Numa, Numa, Trojan Games, or AfroNinja. Most were done before the advent of YouTube which encouraged an explosion in video creation.

I'm not saying video viral is dead, I'm saying its tougher to make it work now. Production budgets need to be higher and firms like Ridley Scott Associates are even now doing viral production. Seeding needs to be smarter (and consequently is now getting expensive). What was once a free distribution is now paid for distribution.

The fact its tougher than before, makes it an achievement when it works. Format is irrelevant if people pass it on. Viral is an achievement not a format