Entertainment, news and education. Yes, it has some of the capabilities of a laptop and a giant iPhone… and there may be some that want to use it like that but what it is absolutely going to dominate at, is watching movies, sports games, music events and providing a new, rich reading experience.
Erik Qualman writes an excellent post here about the possibilities for enhanced knowledge transfer for educational books through the iPad. Imagine no more scribbling in text books or getting a second hand Economics book with the notes of a D- student masquerading as useful insights (I am still bitter about that one!). Instead, you will get the best notes from the smartest brains, even the authors themselves and be able to search for complimentary information all in the same place – very cool.
The latest industries to be disrupted by emerging technology, music and print, can start to tip toe their way back in by utilizing these platforms. Will people (micro) pay to have their chosen sections of the Times, Sun, NYT, FT downloaded to their tablet each day so they can read it on the train without attacking the person sitting next to them with a load of paper – yeah I reckon they might. How about the latest blockbuster while they are on a 4 hour train or plane journey? Definitely. The highlights from their team’s win in the Cup the day before as they lie in bed on Sunday morning…yes please!
Don’t expect it to do something that already exists. If Apple are good at one thing then its leading innovation and I think the entertainment industry as a whole is the most obvious application for the ipad and it should present a wealth of opportunities for the producers and gatekeepers of the content.
The iPhone or HTC (in my case) are too small to watch anything longer than 15-20mins worth of footage and people don’t want to hump their heavy laptops around everywhere they go. The iPad (I should point out that I am yet to touch one!) looks the perfect size to consume entertainment and that means new business models can start to appear – micro payments, freemium, sponsorship, content marketing etc.
Written on a Friday but posted on a Saturday, here are six posts from around the blogosphere that caught our eye this week. As always, if you have any thoughts on these posts or would like to point us at some of your favourites then let us know in the comments.
Thought we would start off with a video (made by Jesse Thomas) – mainly because we are too lazy to write the stats out plus we all prefer to watch a video than read on a Friday.
An excellent post from the Brand Builder on how there is a huge amount of focus on strategy and not enough on implementation which means that the customers never get the experience that was laid out in a strategy. Brands need to plan their social media programs from start to finish and look for additional value propositions outside of talking to customers on Facebook and Twitter in an authentic way.
This slideshow of some of the most niche social networks you can think of is, A – fun to look at and B – a good example of how like minds are finding eachother online and defining their own communities. Expect this to continue and for brands to seek them out more and more as a more efficient alternative to the major networks.
Read the quote in the post by Douglas Adams, it’s a good philosophical thought on the perception of new technologies depending how old you are. A sweeping generalization, yes…but nice none the less!
Of course they do. A good post highlighting the need to make use of your ‘homebase’. It is probably possible, for the first time to be engaged with your customers online and not have a website. But the website is still the best place for registrations, transactions and ‘official contact’.
There has been a number of high profile brand social media implosions in the last couple of years and this post looks at the new rules for crisis management and response. Walls of silence, advertising your way out of a crisis or being slow to respond are not viable tactics brand protection tactics anymore. Social media loves spreading bad news and people have got each other to get the ‘truth’ from.
This popped up in my Twitter stream yesterday via @Christinekorda , ‘A list of the 10 most bizarre social networks’ and I think it highlights, if we didn’t already know, how niche and contextual the social web is. This is extremely important to remember for brands looking to engage with potential customers.
It is so easy to focus on the latest ‘shiny tool’ or the biggest network, as we are constantly being bombarded with eye watering usage stats that lead to a ‘everyone else is doing it, so we must’ mindset, when the sensible strategy should be ‘a lot of my customers are doing it, so we must’. Yes, half the universe is on Facebook and however many billion tweets per month are about brands (exaggerating for effect!), and these shouldn’t be ignored but the challenge as a marketer is to figure out what is the best community for your customers, where can we have the most impact, what will provide the best context for your product.
If you are launching a new vampire show (and that is every network and channel in the known World right now) then maybe http://vampirefreaks.com/ would be better than MySpace?
If you have a product aimed at Christians then you should have a presence on http://lineforheaven.com/
Of course, it shouldn’t be mutually exclusive and presences with the major social networks won’t do you any harm, but some cost benefit analysis on where you will get the most value for your time is a major factor for SME’s. The value in your marketing efforts are going to be diluted big time if you are just part of the noise and unless you have a solid value proposition and offering, it would be naive to assume that customers will come and seek you out on Facebook or start enaging with you on Twitter.
There are tools (free and paid) to help you find where the fish are, and who the fish are. This should be the corner stone of any social media strategy and implementation plan, otherwise you run the risk of ‘fondling the hammer’ as Jeremiah Owyang put it. Some proper research and social profiling of your customers online behavior will be worth its weight in gold when it comes to ROI time…
Oh yeah, and once you have found where to fish, please don’t dynamite fish…Spearfishing is so much better!
Sports teams and athletes are at an enormous advantage to corporate or consumer brands. They have a huge amount of content, they have an exisiting, passionate offline community who want their rpoduct. On top of that, sports fans are one of the most brand loyal groups of people I can think of and sport itself is inherently social. It brings people together around the game itself, in bars and pubs, in people’s homes…and online can help augment the game experience by bringing the fans into the inner workings of the clubs on a daily basis.
A sports team’s product isn’t just the game each week that the fans will pay to come and watch and broadcasters will pay to distribute. Fans want interaction with the team and players and not through the traditional methods of the press and staged TV interviews. In the UK, Football is going through a rough time financially and we may see more clubs going the same way Portsmouth and Crystal Palace have recently - into administration. I am not saying for a minute that a social media program will solve these structural problems, far from it, but it can keep the fans, from feeling like the clubs don’t care about them and keep them coming through the turnstyles or buying their favourite players shirt – wanting to stay loyal, wanting to be brand advocates. Long term, that’s surely the game.
A team’s ‘customers’ want to be as close as they possibly can to the club and the players…this is in stark contrast to consumer brands. If you sell mobile phones, insurance or detergent, do your customers really want to be your friend? They will take any freebies or decent offers but its no small ask to keep them engaged on a regular basis and enjoying every bit of content, they just aren’t that interested. Not so in sport.
So, what can a club or team do to harness this opportunity?
Make sure you have a ‘fan engagement’ strategy – This is different to an online marketing and PR strategy. It needs to provide an experience the fans can’t get through traditional channels.
Have at least one community where conversations can take place – An interactive area of the clubs website, An official Facebook fan page, a private social network. Be active and conversational here, don’t treat it as another PR vehicle.
Think what ‘exclusive’ content you can reward your fans or members with. There is boat loads of this! Exclusive footage from training, locker room interviews (within reason!), injury news from the physios, community projects….
Bring the fans into the fold. Consider empowering the fans, if you check your Facebook groups and forums I bet there are plenty of unofficial communities already thriving – harness that. Why not create Fan reporters, team tweeters, a fan zone that has some clout with the club. In Spain, Barcelona are ‘owned’ by the fans…other teams would do well to adopt a similar mindset.
Consider what Mobile can offer. Mobile is going to be big for entertainment – The devices are getting better and the teams already have a glut of content which can be distributed to people’s pockets. Think, what can we get to the fans via mobile? Arsenal and Chelsea both have iphone applications at around the £2.99 mark which is a good start. Sure they are the big fish, but the same will be true for clubs of all sizes, just on a different scale…the same principles apply.
Another key difference is that sports fans will pay for this type of content and level of interaction. Not huge amounts, as some fans will testify that it is expensive enough supporting their team but this is a question of value rather than pounds or dollars. Anything that provides a level of joy and touches the tribal part of our brains, a few quid here and there to make me feel it’s MY club is fine by me.
New Revenue
I think clubs have genuine untapped revenue streams here, not only through online advertising, sponsorship and merchandise sales but in streaming and distributing their games and content to much, much bigger audience than they currently do through TV broadcasting contracts. For the clubs with international audiences (especially Asia and Africa who have a lot of growth in terms of intenet access ahead of them), if and when the devices and connectivity improve, they can have millions more people watch their games and additional content and pay micro payments for the privilege. We aren’t there yet but it is coming.
For the athletes and players there is also the opportunity to build a huge amount of brand equity. This can be used a positive platform for a media career, raise awareness for good causes they are involved with, create a more authentic and trusted voice for the individual than old school press releases. Some are doing it well, (more in the US but we are seeing signs of it this side of the pond). Chad Ochocinco has his OCNN channel, Shaq has been a Twitter exponent for a few years now. Having the players active on these channels does come with its own set of potential pitfalls, but ignoring the new communication channels and opportunities isn’t going to make them go away. The clubs, agents and athlete’s representatives need to find a balance where the players can be treated like adults and decide the type of relationship they want with their fans…they may need them after they retire!
Organisations, brands and sports clubs are all in the same boat with needing to be more trusted and that takes time and comes with authenticity and engagement. Its all people to people communications, after all!
Update: A good example of exactly what I was talking about is Manchester City. Read this excellent post by Ash Read covering similar lines of thought.
Right, we are coming to the end of February (2010 is going quickly) and there was plenty in the social media blogosphere this week for us to draw from. There were enough posts bookmarked this week to increase the top six to the top ten…but we are trying to keep the same format for a few more weeks. Please feel free to add any of your favourite stories from this week, or any other week for that matter, in the comments.
Apple are going on an anti sexual content crusade in the app store. According to Apple, anything with overtly sexual content will be removed…unless its Playboy, which apparently isn’t sexual at all. Admittedly, its been a while since I read a Playboy, but unless they have done a serious re brand, this seems like a slight case of double standards. Jason Kincaid goes into the details.
“Of all the amazing new technologies that are opening up possibilities to communicate and connect in the digital space, video is the one that holds the most promise”. I couldn’t agree more. Humans are visual beings and while we have been used to text based communications online, the next few years should see us using video more and more. The technology is there, connectivity is getting better and I believe the content is already there for brands…they just need to dig inside their company to find it. Valeria Maltoni takes us through some video strategy, from Technology, content and getting seen.
Not too much to say about this other than if you are a fan of his Holiest The Dalai Lama, then you can now follow his musings on twitter. I doubt it is actually him on the keyboard but its pretty cool none the less! Follow him at @DalaiLama
At Spearfish Labs, we are all about helping companies be more human. In this post, Katy Lindemann talks about how some of the biggest and best brands (Virgin, Apple, Ben & Jerry’s etc) reflect the personalities of their founders. Social media lets brands reflect a persona to their customers and this can be an extremely powerful branding strategy…if your founders are good!
We thought we would throw in some stats for all the bean counters out there. Burson Marstellar have released a study of the 100 largest companies in the Fortune 500, and found that nearly 80% are using social media to communicate with customers and stakeholders. What is better, is that they show some proof that customers actually like these methods of interaction. There is a good presentation embedded in the post so go and check it out.
An interesting one from the IAB. They are calling for specific social media teams to be set up in organisations to avoid the confusion that is currently being experienced when defining who ‘owns’ social media. The different disciplines and measurement metrics mean it shouldn’t rest solely with marketing or PR or Research. I get the point but believe that creating a social media department would merely be another silo when it needs to be integrated into every department and used internally as well as a customer communication channel. Guy Phillipson (IAB CEO) spells it out “If leveraged correctly, social media has the potential to sit at the very heart of an organisation,” We agree with that, so maybe the title is misleading. Worth a look.
OK, thats all for this week, folks. Have a good weekend.
I had to buy some new hardware over the weekend, in fact I should have bought it about a year ago but have been delaying but that’s a different story. This was not a happy shopping experience, and got me thinking about how some organisations have lost sight of how to provide their customers with the service they need…and instead focus on the service they think is important.
Every company or organization (large or small) has one big question to ask itself before any program and that includes marketing, customer service and research – How can we make the organization more useful?
For every business this will be different depending on what they do. If you are a restaurant, then it could be how can we make it easy for customers to book or how can we let them know how good our food is? For lawyers, it might be how can we get free, understandable advice to potential clients? For a sports team it should be how can we build closer relationships to our fans? The store in question was a major high street retailer so, n this instance, it should have been how can we make it as easy as possible for him to buy from us. To give you an idea of my pain, it went something like this.
Saturday – A reconnaissance mission online and then to the physical stores identified the hardware needed. (I should add at this point, I couldn’t buy the goods at that point due to a curveball from the bank), when asking if I could reserve the products, the answer was No as they only had one in stock and couldn’t reserve their last one.
Sunday morning – I call the companies central customer service line who said not to return to the store nearest me as they still only had one in stock and instead, I should drive twenty five minutes to a different store where “they had over six in stock”.
Sunday early afternoon – I arrive at store with my reservation code. (note – a frightening number of store employees were on the floor, but all rigorously sticking to their patches, which were empty but it seemed they couldn’t take any initiative and help a customer in a different zone). I was told to go and queue up for the reservations and spend those fifteen minutes wondering why one of the available staff couldn’t jump in and help? Finally I reach the front of the queue to be told to go back to the floor staff as they have to get it from the stock room. A store assistant returns looking worried and calls for reinforcements. Four of them huddle round their in store stock system then one breaks off to inform me they have none in stock.
I ask the usual questions, which get me no where so decide (with my limited but comparable IT knowledge) to have a look at the stock system. After a couple of minutes I start to sympathize with the staff as whoever implemented this isn’t giving them a chance to do their job. The system was clunky, and more importantly was lying to them, apparently there were four of the items I wanted in stock! The good news was they ‘definitely’ had some in stock at their store another twenty five minutes away.
Sunday, late afternoon. Finally manage to buy what I wanted a day and a half late.
When the red mist dispersed, I was left contemplating the following points from the experience:-
- It wasn’t the staff on the floor’s fault. They aren’t being trained properly on the importance of customer service.
- They aren’t being given the technical tools to do their job properly even if they wanted to.
- There were too many bodies on the floor. Stores think that having more bodies on the ground will equal better customer service, it doesn’t – better trained and motivated staff equals better customer service. Having lots of people there while not providing excellent service adds insult to injury!
- They aren’t being paid enough to care (unconfirmed but a good guess)
To re-iterate , If you are in the retail game, the answer to “how do we make the organization more useful to the customers” is - Make it easy for them to buy your products. This means looking at the holistic experience a customer will have online and offline. As soon as it is established that this customer wants to buy from you, there should be multiple touchpoints to facilitate the sale – over the phone, in the store, through the website, via social media channels...wherever the customer wants!
Sean Colgon shares this article and presentation from the iStrategy 2010 event in Berlin. Coca-Cola have recently been ousted by Google as the top brand in the world, but they do social media as well as anyone, which is saying something given they are as corporate as they come. Their Fans First approach to community engagement is a good benchamark for any organization grappling with how to move away from the campaign mindset to one of constant engagement and brand building. Good to see.
From the good to the bad. Apparently only two in five retailers in the UK have a presence in social media. It doesn’t cover whether they monitor what is being said about them (which may raise the number a bit), but if you are in the service or retail game then the corner stone of your business should be customer service…social media is pretty good at helping with that so we found that surprising.
Social media Examiner does as good a job as any blog in explain social media and its possibilities in laymans terms. We like that! Here Ruth Shipley covers an area we have been looking at lately with how important Youtube is as a marketing channel for businesses. “400 million people worldwide actively seeking information on an estimated 6 million to 9 million YouTube channels every month” is hard to ignore.
Fondling the Hammer you ask? That’s focusing on the shiny new technology tools and not business needs. Some very sound advice here on how not tying social media programs to business objectives and simply jumping from one platform strategy to another will confuse the hell out of your customers. Your agency partner should be helping you develop a long term customer engagement strategy not a short term marketing one.
A good (long) analysis of the art of influencer marketing. Influencers for your specific market or industry won’t be your customers, they will hang out on the sidelines…but will have the ear of your market and their opinion matters. The post covers finding them and keeping their attention – check it out.
There a lots of live chat options available now…which we like! For fan or customer engagement and authenticity there really is nothing better so we thought Ustream’s new Social Stream feature which lets you login to all of the above and ping content out to them as well as the Ustream chat box is very cool.
There has been a fair amount of Buzz around the social web this week (pun intended). The Superbowl on Sunday and of course the ads, which Google appeared in and Pepsi didn’t, a few social media clangers and Google’s new social offering which is going to rule them all…or maybe not? Anyway, here are our six of the best from this week.
The latest Edelman Trust Barometer is out and the world trusts all types of media less than it did last year. TV is down twenty points, print down twelve and even peer recommendations are down twenty points. The reports did find trust in business and government was UP?! I…so I am going to say trust in the Edelman report is down ten points as well. Valeria raises some sound points that agencies and consultants need to get serious about helping organizations who are serious about integrity and communicating that.
So VodafoneUK are the latest to be punk’d by social media as one of their staff posted this little gem , cue corporate panic on an epic scale and frantic @apologising to anyone who commented. Not great by any means but they did jump on the issue quickly and, as Chris, points out in his useful takeaways – Human Error will occur and you only really need to say sorry once.
Good rules and pointers on how to implement a successful B2B marketing campaign. Achim outlines the ‘four pillars’ as Insight, Strategy, Creative, Metrics. Each of these aspects needs to be used to support a campaign either on or offline. Worth a look.
Tripadvisor.com have published the crowdsourced Dirty Hotels list . Not somewhere you would want to be if you are in the hotel game. Easy to game and bad mouth your competition? Apparently not according to the CEO who says the sheer weight of genuine reviews makes it hard for any fake ones to make the cut.
The new BBC Director of Global News, Peter Horrocks, has mandated that all journos need to get on the social media bandwagon or get on LinkedIn and start looking for jobs. This on the back of Sky News incorporating Twitter more and more and I would expect to see more ‘mainstream broadcasters’ follow suit this year.
We had to get Google Buzz in somewhere this week. While its too early to accurately make calls on Buzz, it looks like Google means business this time. In this post, Jeremiah gives us an interesting analysis matrix of the four social network guerillas comprised of SWOT analysis, and a look into the future. Always good stuff.
Christmas 2009 was not a happy time for Eurostar and was even worse for any travelers who used the service. The short version is, the week before Christmas hundreds of passengers were stranded under the Channel for over ten hours as three trains broke down in the tunnel. To add insult to injury, Eurostar’s only active Twitter account was being used to push out promotional deals when many Twitter users were on the trains trying to find out how to get home. The usual social media malestrom ensued, I wrote about the incident here.
This morning, I recieved an email from Eurostar reaching out to people who had written about the incident and explaining the measures they have taken to improve communications in the future. While it takes more than an email to a few bloggers to rectify a brand implosion, the first step is to acknowledge there was a problem, take it on the chin and then outline the steps that will be taken to improve. The full email is below for your viewing pleasure (Eurostar were happy for me to post it)…
Hello
Youposted about the Eurostar trains that broke down in December, and made the point about the need for better communication with our passengers.
While you don’t normally post on transport issues, I thought you might be interested to see a copy of the Independent Review into the events, and our response.
You can find our response here http://bit.ly/9idW1l together with a visual representation of what happened on the day.
We are extremely sorry for what happened, and take the situation very seriously. We’ve already taken action to address many of the Review’s recommendations, and we are committed to implementing all of its recommendations as quickly as possible. Above all we are focused on:
Improving passenger care in disruption
Improving communications, and
Strengthening the resilience of our trains
The Eurostar communications team will be providing information and updates at @eurostarcomms where we’ll be working closely with @little_break and @creamoflondon. You’ll find us making corporate announcements there as well as reporting back should there be any key service updates.
I hope you have time to look at the review findings, particularly on the communications side of things. If you have any thoughts please don’t hesitate to let me know.
All the best
Of course this only the beginning of a rebuilding strategy but you have to start somewhere. The next steps are to implement and sustain the improvements but it is a good example of listening to your detractors and instead of adopting a ‘we know best’ strategy and hoping it goes away, taking it on board and using the negative to create a positive. With all the social media channels and tools now at the disposal of disgruntled customers and bloggers, as painful as it may be for big brands to swallow, it is the only way to start rebuilding.
I am fan of Social Signal’s blog, so when this little gem showed up in google reader, I thought it was worth sharing. With Valentines Day this Sunday (no one needed reminding did they?!), the Social Signal team have come up with a short video showing how you can use social media to find love and keep it. Have a watch and let us know of any other ways you can use social media to improve your love life…but keep it clean!
Entertainment, news and education. Yes, it has some of the capabilities of a laptop and a giant iPhone… and there may be some that want to use it like that but what it is absolutely going to dominate at, is watching movies, sports games, music events and providing a new, rich reading experience.
This popped up in my Twitter stream yesterday via 
Sports teams and athletes are at an enormous advantage to corporate or consumer brands. They have a huge amount of content, they have an exisiting, passionate offline community who want their rpoduct. On top of that, sports fans are one of the most brand loyal groups of people I can think of and sport itself is inherently social. It brings people together around the game itself, in bars and pubs, in people’s homes…and online can help augment the game experience by bringing the fans into the inner workings of the clubs on a daily basis.
I had to buy some new hardware over the weekend, in fact I should have bought it about a year ago but have been delaying but that’s a different story. This was not a happy shopping experience, and got me thinking about how some organisations have lost sight of how to provide their customers with the service they need…and instead focus on the service they think is important.![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=111b97ba-a431-4856-91ce-757a036850ef)
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