Comments on the social graph

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.