After a pretty hectic week in the MediaCom Sydney offices, we’re proud to announce the launch of the KFC Good Times campaign. Celebrating everything that’s ‘so good’ in Australia with the Madden Brothers.

Through the KFC & Madden Brothers campaign, Aussies will have the opportunity to provide Joel and Benji Madden with inspiration to record a song that expresses what it means to have a good time in Australia. This inspiration will be submitted through a MediaCom designed and built Facebook App.
The Maddens will regularly visit the Good Times Gallery to inspire them when writing the lyrics of their new song which will be performed live and exclusively at the KFC International Twenty20 cricket match on Australia Day. It will also be made available by the Madden Brothers to KFC’s Facebook Community on the 25th January 2013.

The campaign has already received positive coverage and comments with one Mumbrella user saying that the KFC Madden Brothers campaign was “ something refreshing from KFC.
A bold partnership – but an interesting one. Glad to see agencies working together to find engaging ways to reach consumers. Look forward to seeing this one unfold” while Mark, a commenter at Campaign Brief said it was one of the “Best KFC ads all year.”

Facebook is also becoming a playground for many brands. They have their own pages, their own fans and try to engage them on Facebook. Yet despite this, Social Bakers reports that across all the brands it monitors in Australia (currently 561) brands do a poor job when fans are trying to engage with them. In the past month (3^rd May to 3^rd June), Social Bakers indicates that 62% of all user generated posts are not being replied to. Further to this, the average time average response time is over 11 hours!

So what?

It means that there is room, not only within a specific industry, but in Australia, to get greater visibility among brands on Facebook.

How?

Well many brands are great as posting updates (but if you would like a quick refresher go here & also here) but are not good at responding to their fans, especially when there is negativity involved. Facebook is a conversation between brands and its fans which increasingly starts with the fans, not the brand. Every day users ask questions, post up funny pictures and socialise on a fan page. Brands should reply to these as soon as possible and further stimulate conversation at every opportunity possible.

Why?

This not only builds rapport with fans on Facebook and the brand, but also does increase your visibility your fans newsfeeds. This is because Facebook will increase the visibility of a brand on news feeds is it sees it is popular. Not only this, every interaction that a fan makes with the brandmakes an impression on their friends news feeds. This means that the brand is exposed to Facebook profiles that may not be fans of the brands fan page yet!

But how does this all impact a brand?

Responding to users and creating conversation beyond updates will increase a brands fan page edge rank. This will increase the visibility & therefore its share of voice on Facebook. Ultimately, with a good social content strategy a brand can go viral, creating many ‘light-weight’ touch points with a larger percentage Facebook community. These interactions with the brand will ultimately lead to it being placed higher and higher in the consideration set of an individual increasing the likelihood of your brand being brought!

Say hello to our first finished prototype of Dashtop – a modular system that displays real-time, real-world analytics.

It’s a desktop dashboard, in a very real sense.

Dashtop has a base module that hooks up to your ethernet, power, and has five 3.5mm jack outputs. It connects to a web interface which allows you to report back any data you want – Facebook likes, real-time Google analytics, daily eCommerce orders, or number of times your cat has used the cat-door.

This data is then displayed using whatever modules you want – just plug them into the base module. So far we’ve built a 8-digit display, and a flashing LED box. In the works is an analog VU-meter and an audio alert.

Why?

With an ever increasing focus on data, we’ve become really interested in new ways to represent the meaningful data.

After seeing the LikeLight last year, we quickly built a bare-bones Arduino version and hooked it up to some of our Facebook pages.

That was cool. But we wanted more information than just a flashing light – so we added the counter.

At this point we realised the value of presenting data in unique and novel ways – especially when that data isn’t on a screen.

So rather than doing the data-grab via the Arduino code, we just got the Arduino to send a request to our own server. That way we could control what data was being displayed a lot easier, without reprogramming the Arduino.

What Next?

This first finished prototype took a while to build. So the next versions will be 3D-printed plastic, making them a bit more durable and easy to assemble. But importantly, we still want them to look awesome sitting on your desk.

We’re also working on what modules can come next. We’re already making a VU-meter to display levels-based data, but obviously we’re super interested in what we could do with light, sound, and even movement. Imagine a desktop analytics dashboard that moved closer to you if your website traffic was dropping. Awesome.

I have a confession to make….I don’t really get Pinterest, I mean I get WHAT it is, and HOW it works, but being quick to dismiss it as a tool for wedding scrap book creation and dream journals I was never really sure how it applied to me.

But with 11million+ registered users and rising, it’s made me wonder, why? What does it offer users that makes it stand out from the raft of other social platforms on the market? I think the answer lies in fulfilling a behaviour that no other platforms tap into.

So what exactly is Pinterest? It’s a virtual pinboard, enabling users to collect, share and categorise images from across the net. It’s visual ‘post bookmarks’ and equally well-suited for building home décor inspiration boards (the number 1 category on Pinterest) or maintaining a ‘to buy’ list while trawling the net.

Despite all the other social platforms out there, from the mighty Facebook with its 900 million+ users to the rapidly growing mobile picture site Instagram (recently bought by Facebook) with 40million users, Pinterest offers something none of them do: visual curation.

Facebook is about ‘sharing’ and Instagram or Flickr are about ‘creating’, but there is this gap in the middle for people who don’t want to create ‘stuff’, they just want inspiration! They want to collect, reorganise and maybe share with friends.

From a behavioural point of view there is no other platform on the market that really enables this level of digital involvement for users who don’t want to ‘make stuff’, but do want a place to keep all the junk they compile while trawling the internet (guilty!) as well as those who want to build inspiration boards, and let others be part of the experience.

Taking this idea of collection and curation and the behaviour surrounding it there is fascinating implications for how Pinterest is planning to evolve. They recently announced ‘video pinning‘ offering a place to organise your videos alongside the images you have already collected. Here again, is another untapped space: a content hub for themes (cat pictures and videos anyone?). This can also really expand how brands can play in the social space, holding static content (images) with dynamic (video) in the one location.

Whole Foods the US organic grocer has been using Pinterest with some success to share images of it’s fresh food (enhance fresh credentials) as well as providing a location for static recipes to live, but video will enable them to take this experience a step further.

 So why couldn’t a beer brand use Pinterest to curate it’s historic content, to develop a place where consumers can come to see award wining commercials, and access funny print ads from the 1800s. A place where fans can easily share them with friends, start their own boards and amplify the content out far and wide.

The second announcement is the introduction of a public API (application programming interface), which will enable individuals and brands to build programs and applications to connect or interface with Pinterest  A release of  public API is often a fast track to innovation as now programmers can get in and tinker… but what does it mean?

Well some interesting data has been circulating about the money Pinterest has been making linking to affiliate sites (link through and click on a picture of that green sweater and Pinterest gets paid), so the natural progression from this is a proper e-commerce/wish list function so I can tag items I like only to buy them through Pinterest later, or for that special someone to pick up the tab.

So, I’m still not sure where I stand with Pinterest, but it’s a platform with a plan and as it continues to evolve and develop beyond being simply a scrap book I think we’ll see some really interesting new behaviours evolve out of it.

Dennis K Berman, marketplace editor for The Wall Street Journal, summed it up with a single tweet: “Remember this day. 551-day-old Instagram is worth $1 billion. 116-year-old New York Times Co.: $967 million.” While the rest of us were scoffing down our Easter eggs, Mark Zuckerberg splashed out $1 billion to buy a mobile app that makes your photos look like they were taken in the ’70s.

The numbers are mind boggling. Instagram had less than 100,000 users in October 2010. By December, 1 million. Three months later, 2 million. By the start of November 2011 photos around the world were being vignetted and overshared by 12 million iPhone users. On April 3 this year Instagram launched its Android app, and picked up a lazy 1 million new users in a day. By the time founder Kevin Systrom was calling Zuckerberg “boss”, the app was being used by over 35 million people. To give that number some perspective, Instagram was installed on 1 in 10 iPhones in the world.

Unsurprisingly, in the last week there’s been a wave of speculation around why Facebook acquired Instagram. For advertisers, there are three key motives worth paying some attention to. And it’s not necessarily because they paint a rosy future for mobile and brands.

Firstly, and most obviously, Instagram was beginning to pose a real threat to Facebook. While even 50 million users is a fraction of Facebook’s audience, Instagram had grown its user base fast. Even more importantly was how it had grown it: photos. Facebook knows first hand how powerful photos can be in building a social platform. It was the addition of photo tagging that saw one of the biggest spikes in user growth in Facebook’s history. Partner this with the fact that Instagram has perfected the “content graph” – the ability to identify and recommend photos based on the photos you take and the tags you use – and it’s understandable that Zuckerberg was getting twitchy. On the Thursday before Easter, Instagram secured a $50 million round of funding, at a $500 million valuation. Cue complete twitch out.

Secondly, Zuckerberg wants to diversify. While Facebook will go public in the back half of this year, the founder still controls 57% of the company’s voting rights. In a letter to would-be investors in March he stated he wouldn’t be listening to “whiny short-term public shareholders”. Zuckerberg clearly doesn’t think that just adding new features for users or advertisers is the future for Facebook. He needs to diversify, and he’s willing to make some long-term bets in doing so. Looked at from this angle, the Instagram acquisition looks and feels a lot like Google’s $1.65 billion acquisition of YouTube in 2009.

Finally, and most importantly for advertisers, Facebook just hasn’t been able to nail mobile. Last year its revenue climbed 69% to US$3.1 billion. In Australia, 2011 SMI data reports over $26 million was invested in advertising on the platform. But not one dollar of this came from mobile. Facebook doesn’t often talk publicly about mobile for this very reason – it even listed the lack of mobile advertising as a risk in its IPO filing. But the platform’s growth in mobile, like mobile itself, has been stratospheric – in December 2010 it saw 432 million people accessing the site via mobile, up 76% from 12 months earlier.

In its acquisition of Instagram, Facebook has picked up arguably the hottest mobile-focused development team in the world. While Instagram will continue to operate as a separate product, you can bet that those developers have now been tasked with creating a scalable, user friendly, content-aware solution to get brands investing in ads on Facebook’s mobile platform. Once it’s cracked that, it will move on to creating an offering for any app developer to integrate advertising that utilises Facebook’s Open Graph. Facebook doesn’t just want to get mobile advertising right, it wants to become the biggest mobile advertising network in the world.

What will now keep Zuckerberg awake at night is the fear that he’s actually hunting a unicorn. Outside of paid search, no media company has been able to mobilise its existing advertising revenue successfully and meaningfully. While Instagram had outlined plans to create advertising revenue, it was still a long way off implementation. If Facebook can’t get mobile right, the bad news for brands is that they will continue to be excluded from what is now the fastest growing media channel in Australia. And it’s highly unlikely that any consumers will miss them.

Imagine you’re with a friend talking about your weekend. What is said & how it is said will be largely determined by the circumstances surrounding the conversation such as:

• Whether your alone or in a group
• The environment e.g. over coffee compared to a loud club
• Whether you are in person, over the phone or online.

We make these decisions almost subconsciously, modifying how the conversation will develop in light of situational factors.

The same type of thinking needs to be applied when a brand is talking to its fans over social media. The fans responsiveness is largely dependent on the situation in which the message is received (and this is not even taking the message in to account!). Brands on social media websites such as Facebook should take time in analysing and understanding their fans. By combining this with key insights in to Facebook traffic, a brand can generate high reach, high volume of interactions and greater visibility on their fans newsfeeds.

So just how do you do this?

1. Analyse your Fan base: every fan page has back end analytics. Here brands can find out about their brands age’s, where they are located, what language they speak & where they have liked your page from.

2. Combine the findings of your unique fan page audience with Facebook traffic insights gained through Virtue. The research company conducted a 2 month survey on over 1,500 Facebook fan pages to analyse Facebook traffic and its correlation with interactions with brands.

Key outtakes from the study are:

• Facebook activity is greatest midweek
• Peak activity during the day occurs at lunchtime, 3pm and then around 8pm
• Users are more likely to interact within the first 15 minutes within the hour.

Conversations will change depending on where they are situated. You now know your audience and the key days/times of the week that they interact on Facebook. By understanding the situational circumstances of the individuals in your fan base (eg: most people would be either at work or school during day in the working week), you can tailor your status updates accordingly to gain the most interactions from your community.

So why should a brand care? Through positive ‘lightweight over time’ shift the brands position in an individual’s consideration set higher and higher. Over time the brand becomes a part of everyday conversation, creating brand advocates & Word of Mouth marketing.

Digital-first brands are intentionally designing to be distinctive, relevant and active. Distinctive in their approach to storytelling, relevant by becoming personal and meaningful, and active by understanding social media has changed the frequency of interaction to real-time. As such, consumers now expect responsiveness from brands and digital is one of the only mediums to allow for this. Facebook recognised the importance that storytelling will play in a brand’s online identity. The new timeline feature will force brands to look not only at their past but also tell a ‘tell a story’ through the conversations on their page. Even through other brands that they ‘like’.

Digital-first brands recognise that technology can help them tell a better story, allowing their brand to exists within that experience. These brands play with interaction and engagement. They don’t do this by sprinkling some ‘social salt’ on top of a TV campaign or adding some ‘digital spend’ to tick a box. They understanding their customers behavior online and using multiple channels, technologies and interfaces to tell a better story, providing value of some sort.

2. Maybe, “ad-agency” is a dirty word.

There is no question where the innovation in technology is coming from. Brands when striving for innovation seem to always be on the back foot and agencies are simply not re-creating and re-inventing themselves enough to lead innovation. By lifting my head up from my clients business and immersing myself in the hungry start-ups world, I learnt that in comparison, these young, resourceful fearless entrepreneurs are quick to adapt and learn. They are about building for the long-term and for their own idea’s investment. They take serious risks in a sea of uncertainty and maybe as a result, with learnings applied over and over again, their ideas can shift the World to a new way of thinking, doing or ‘playing’. As an agency, we need to not be afraid to fail, measure our mistakes, build and learn from them.

3. We need a new agency structure.

What happens when you put a technologist, a developer and a creative in a room?

I believe at the very least you will drive debate and foster an approach that does not live and die by a TV, outdoor or online idea. We will develop more rounded multi-platform ideas based on user experience and behavior; ideas that integrate open source, real-time data, new technologies, platforms and story telling. These are the ideas that change the game. Ideas that can be useful, entertaining and insightful.

Technology and our love for it are simply moving too fast for the old-World agency structure to yield new-World ideas. Designers are strategic, engineers innovative and as such, traditional creatives need to understand platforms, limitations of code and APIs. As Rei Inamoto said at SXSW, agencies need to encourage a structure where there is a hacker, hustler and hipster all working on a brief. Where the process is no longer linear and strategy, storytelling and software can integrate and collaborate.

4. Test, test and test again. Then quantify feedback and test again.

Design for interaction is about being iterative. A brand has the opportunity to live in the interface between brand and consumer not just on it. To do this, a brand must understand behavior, become responsive and test for every eventuality. Only then can the resulting solution be rooted in the needs and desires of the target audience or community. Eric Ries’ celebrated “Lean Start-Up” method talks of releasing a interactive design product before its ready. The product is built to think but launched to learn. Initial feedback on the product is viewed as only one source of information, so can only allow for only one design solution. So Ries adapted the product to the opposite of that requested in feedback for the next round of testing. Just like Obama’s UX designers tested web button copy and positioning during his electoral campaign, Ries promotes running behavioral experiments on your audience, focusing on the data of behavioral results. With data based on a scientific approach to interactive design, your success will be determined on your ability to listen to multiple sources of feedback and turn this around quickly and effectively.

5. How iconic brands tell stories.

If a brand exists within the experience, then storytelling should play a key role in enhancing that experience. Clever and iconic brands understand this through not only playing out different chapters in different media channels but also reconciling the tension within the story. Nike tell their story through the experience and identity of sporting heroes, moments and events. They understand a great story cannot be sustainable if constantly shrouded in tension. Sometimes, with Nike you don’t win silver, you lose gold and as such, audiences want to see what will happen next. Amazon is another great example, though not so much telling it’s own story, it allows the stories of it’s customers in the form of reviews to create the experience. As content begins to play to play more of a role within the strategies of brands, it will be interesting to see brands and their custodians design stories that can offer real value to their audience.

6. Data is beautiful…

Good data visualisation enables you to take information very quickly and process it. You can architect pause for thought by controlling the speed to which the viewer digests the story. As data becomes real-time and open-source platforms allow for mash-ups to answer any need or desire, data visualisation offers brands another opportunity to tell their story. Whether it’s using circulation data from the Harvard library over the past 100 years http://librarylab.law.harvard.edu or the incredible stories that Scandinavian-based production house Miuta create using data http://vimeo.com/miuta brands have the opportunity to harvest another channel for storytelling. Data that is relevant, useful and or entertaining will allow for a deeper, richer brand experience.

Paul Adams (Global Brand Experience Manager for Facebook) says this scenario is an all too common problem faced between two users (the initial conversation between two friends) and a brand (who is the interruptive 3rd person in the scenario). This is due to brands adopting old fashioned interruptive marketing techniques (that work on old, above the line advertising mediums such as TV) which disturb individual’s conversation on Facebook, ultimately creating a negative user experience & negative sentiment towards a brand.

So what does a ‘typical’ brand do on Facebook and why it’s not the best space to do so? We reckon there are three big mistakes:

1. Post updates about current and future promotion/sales/products: There are a plethora of mediums out there that already interact with the audience with these messages. Further to this, the audience expects these mediums to have advertisements in them and accept that.
2. Emphasise the advantages of their products/services and brand: fans of the brand know these advantages, that is why they are fans of your brand!
3. Push their ideal brand image: The brand image will come through the conversations and interactions that the community has with a brand. No amount of self-promoting can outweigh the power of individual experiences with a brand.

Brands do need to update their fans on deals & promotions, but these kinds of updates should only take up a small portion of the content calendar. Brands should predominantly focus on posting contextually relevant updates and open ended questions which stimulate conversation between a brand and its followers. So what should a brand do to create this harmonious relationship between the brand and its fans?

Here’s a few guidelines we work to:

1. Give your brand a personality: every brand has one, whether its quirky, cool or a suit, personality will make the page seem more like an individual. This can be portrayed through a brands updates and the content which is uploaded on to the page. Good examples of brands that do this include: Pringles Australia and Skittles fan pages.
2. Post unique updates: Facebook’s Mark D’Arcy (Director Global Creative Solutions) insists that to engage your audience a brand needs to post updates that an individual will care about and want to share with their friends. This may include unique promotions but more often than not, updates that are contextually relevant, funny, transformative, fresh, immersive, sexy, shocking, spectacular, random, touching or illuminating evoke people to share a brands updates and generate positive responses.
3. Interact with your community: Individuals do it daily, so if brands are to be more like individuals shouldn’t they interact with their fans? Replying to fans comments on the page as well as throughout status updates is a great way to interact with a pages community.

Final words – the web is being “re-designed around people”. Brands need to evolve to be part of an individual’s everyday conversation. By creating constant “lightweight” experiences between a brand and its fans it can increase its share of voice, all while integrating itself in to the social experience of the individuals online.

The digitalisation of products is a trend that is likely to gain momentum over the coming year as everything from washing machines to our cars come online and can communicate with us. And this isn’t a future pipedream; at CES in the Las Vegas last week, Samsung revealed a washing machine that is Wi-Fi enabled, just one of many new digital-enabled products we will see emerge over the coming year.

Big Data has come to the fore as our data collecting capabilities have increased exponentially since the dawn of the internet. Collecting, recording and sharing data has become easier and more affordable than ever before, resulting in incredibly rich data now existing on a hugely diverse range of subjects; millions of bits of data everyday are being recorded on everything from the weather to healthcare. All this data collecting is great, but it does beg the question, why are we collecting it?

The answer in short is that we don’t necessarily know…yet. The challenge of Big Data is how you use the data – how do you understand what it is telling you, what you can learn from it and what can you do better or differently as a result. With such a broad brief, knowing which data is or isn’t important is not necessarily immediately obvious. Humans will therefore have to rely on powerful models to try and make sense of all of this data to provide us with learnings and understanding that are actionable.

These two trends are interesting in themselves, but it is when you look at a practical example of how these two trends will impact on our lives that we see the real value. And where to look for such an example? Look no further than the glamorous world of parking!

As populations in cities continues to grow, the challenge increases as to how to manage an increasingly burdened infrastructure. Streetline is a Company in San Francisco that is aiming to use data that it acquires from around cities to help manage complexity, increase efficiency and ultimately to help us live better quality lives. Streetline have started by focusing on parking.

Parking sensors are installed in parking bays around a city and connect to the network via repeaters housed within street furniture (lamposts, telephone poles, etc). This network relays information on whether a parking spot is being used to the network. Anyone looking for parking can then use a mobile app to see where and how many spaces are available in real time, as well as allow users to book certain car park spaces in advance of their arrival. Eventually this technology will integrate into sat nav, allowing directions not just to a location, but to the nearest free car parking bay to their destination.

Whilst great for the user, the data being collected on parking habits in cities can also be used to make better informed decisions on traffic management systems moving forward. And parking is just the tip of the iceberg, in the future Smart Cities will be able to track pollution levels, power usage, traffic patterns, and more. Streetline is a great example of how the digitalisation of things and big data will work hand in hand in the future to deliver tangible results.