Only Dead Fish

Farming On Facebook

2009-11-13T16:20:55+00:00

So, gaming is huge. $50Bn huge. And it just gets bigger. This week's release of Modern Warfare 2 sold almost 5m copies (or $310m dollars worth) on it's first day. The producers are saying that it's the biggest entertainment launch of all time.

But apart from MW2, the big story this week was about EA's acquisition of the social gaming company Playfish which produces games like Pet Society and Restaurant City, that sit on social networking platforms - in a deal that could be worth a cool $400m. It's the first time that the realms of social and video gaming have truly come together - Mashable said it could be 'a watershed moment'.

Social and gaming work. Facebook has effectively become a huge gaming platform. The biggest social gaming company, Zynga, is estimated to have annual revenues around $200m. The Top 3 make an estimated $335m. Virtual goods and transactions have been around for a good while (the US market for virtual goods is believed to be worth $1Bn, the Asian market $7Bn) but Zynga claims that a third of its revenue comes from them. It's biggest social game, Farmville, allows you to manage a virtual farm on Facebook. Since being released in June, 60 million (yes, that's 60 million) people have downloaded the app. Over 21m people play it daily.

The secret of Farmville's success, apart from the fact that it's pretty addictive, is that it's the kind of game that you can dip into for short periods of time meaning that, as The Guardian says, "it isn't really a game at all...it's an online hobby". To progress quickly in the game and accessorise your farm, you invite other people to join the community. So whilst there's been some griping of late about some of the ways in which Farmville makes its cash, there's no doubt that it is an excellent example of spreadable media.

I can't help but think: How many content and brand owners would fall over themselves to acquire the kind of reach and engagement that a simple virtual farm game on Facebook has achieved?

The Socialisation Of TV

2009-11-10T16:48:07+00:00

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Predicting the future of media is a bit like herding cats but like Faris, I believe that a key trend for communications is/will be the socialisation of 'mainstream' media. Simon wrote a rationally-minded post last week with 5 predictions about the future of TV including how the majority of viewing will remain passively consumed, linear-scheduled broadcast television and how simultaneous social media activity will remain niche.

In the comments, Graeme responded with the thought that scheduling will likely become more socially enabled and survive by being more like movie releases ("an opening weekend, a couple of weeks of cultural relevance, and a long tail"). Tess Alps followed up with some good points that in DTR homes (as a reasonable surrogate for on-demand), DTR's still only account for somewhere between 15% and 20% of viewing (in both the UK and the US), and that BARB data showed a relatively high level of time proximity for on demand to point of broadcast and that social media was enhancing the desire to watch at point of broadcast scheduling.

It was kind of ironic that on the same day as reading all this, twitter went into complete overdrive over the X-Factor with 8 out of the top 10 (and at one point 9) Twitter trending topics being X-Factor related.

X-Factor is a great example of socially enhanced TV - the Facebook fan page has over 850,000 fans and the wall posts generate thousands of comments each both whilst the show is on and off air (Nick has done a great run down of just how socialised the X-Factor is). Whilst people's primary social interaction around programming will likely always be with those in the room with them at the time, it'll be no surprise to anyone who's watched TV and been on twitter at the same time that social backchannels can add a lot of value in enhancing the viewing experience.

The success of the Facebook/CNN Obama inauguration coverage showed that combining compelling content with platforms that make it easy for people to comment and share with their established networks works well, particularly for event TV. The BBC are developing an iplayer app for Facebook , Hulu are streaming TV shows directly to their Facebook page using the Watch Now application, and Channel 4 are doing deals with You Tube to host full length Channel 4 content and experimenting with Test Tube TV (a service that "lets Facebook and Twitter friends watch, talk about, rate and recommend their favourite TV from 4oD and You Tube" - HT to Simon for reminding me of it).

So my question is this:- I believe it's inevitable that scheduling and viewing will increasingly be influenced by the shared interests of networks of friends - but by how much?

Post Of The Month - October '09 - The Winner

2009-11-09T09:09:42+00:00

Well, this months vote rather turned into an AKQA / BBH face off but after a spirited race I'm delighted to announce that the winner of Post Of The Month for October '09 is Ben Malbon and Greg Anderson for their post on Adaptive Brand Marketing for BBH Labs. Well done both. You get the props of your blogging peers and are entered into the ThinkTank Hall of Fame. Thanks again to everyone for taking part and don't forget to bookmark your good reads to nominate for next months vote.

Post Of The Month - October '09 - The Vote

2009-11-06T09:50:29+00:00

Thanks everyone for some great nominations this month. Couple of notes:- thanks very much to Michael for nominating one of my posts, but I've not included it in the shortlist this month solely because we had such a long list of nominations - this is not done out of false modesty, but only because I'd like to keep some kind of cap on the number I shortlist to keep it manageable - but thanks anyway - I'm flattered. And Pratap, I (usually) don't allow people to nominate their own posts so haven't included your nomination I'm afraid. OK, so our shortlist this month is:

So What Exactly Might 'Adaptive Brand Marketing' Be? Ben Malbon and Greg Anderson for BBH Labs

Stop Buying Customers by Helge Tenno

The Myth of Social Media Monitoring from Sean Howard

Behaviour Change, Revisited from Johnnie Moore

Pulling Off The Optimal Platform Job by Tim Malbon

Branding Landmarks from Mark Hadfield

Ten Signs That You're The problem by Neil Charles

AKQA internal beliefs by Nicholas Moerman

The 11 Fundamentals of Online Communities from Richard Millington

And you can vote below:

Which of these do you think should be Post Of The Month for October '09?(survey)

Post Of The Month - October '09 - Nominations

2009-11-05T10:10:57+00:00

More great reading to be had in the month of October, evidenced by my starting five nominations below - please do nominate any good posts that you've read that were posted in October in the comments and I'll stick them all up for a vote in a few days. A nomination from Charles (thanks Charles) for Johnnie's excellent post has been carried over from last month so I've included it below. OK, so my starting five are:

So What Exactly Might 'Adaptive Brand Marketing' Be? Ben Malbon and Greg Anderson for BBH Labs

Stop Buying Customers by Helge Tenno

The Myth of Social Media Monitoring from Sean Howard

Behaviour Change, Revisited from Johnnie Moore

Pulling Off The Optimal Platform Job by Tim Malbon

Please nominate your favourites in the comments below.

Making Content Pay

2009-11-03T21:40:24+00:00

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"We're not going from a world of Business Model A to one of Business Model B, we're going from Business Model A to Business Models A to Z." Clay Shirky

Every now and then you read a post that really stays with you. In early January last year, Ian Rogers (ex Head of Music at Yahoo and now CEO at Topspin media) gave an account of his talk to the CAA music industry conference in Aspen. It was one of those 'wake-up-and-smell-the-coffee' kind of presentations, but it contained loads of nuggets that I've referred to again and again ever since.

Like Ian, my view of the future of media is an optimistic one. Like him, I think that what's happening in media (and music) is full of change but is also full of opportunity. Ian talks a lot about ubiquity and scarcity, and refers to a deck that Umair Haque put up on Bubblegeneration all the way back in 2005 in which he writes about how mass media captures value from scarcity - particularly scarcity of distribution (costs of broadcasting, transportation, inventory) and retail (limited shelf/screen space, spectrum scarcity) - and how if old media was about 'blockbusters', then new media is about 'snowballs'.

In the Blockbuster world, says Ian (and Umair), there’s a point where investing more in quality delivers diminishing returns and marketing delivers the audience:

"If you are making Pirates of the Carribean 12, do you spend $2M extra dollars on that actress or on getting Johnny Depp’s face on the cups at Burger King? Burger King, of course, you’re not trying to make the best movie in the world, you’re just trying to get people to go to theatre A instead of theatre B this week"

In the Snowball world however the opposite is the case - there's a point at which you get diminishing returns from spending more on marketing, especially when attention is the scarcity, but quality is "hyper-efficient". If something is good enough, people will see it.

The relevance of all this to making money from content is right there in that balance between ubiquity and scarcity. Quality and relevance have never been more important - as Ian says: "Our jobs are still the same...making stuff people love". Making content ubiqitous - making it easy to find, scalable, portable - enables it to be spreadable (as opposed to 'viral') and act as cultural material for people's own conversations. The sweet spot is where content meets context.

Ubiquity gives you the platform from which you can create a new kind scarcity, and creating scarcity is important because when something is scarce it has value. Ian talks about the 'digital packaging' of music. Scott Karp talks about how media owners need to be experimenting with new ways of packaging content:

"An individual content item on the web, without a package, has marginal value approaching zero - and attempting to charge for an individual item of content is unlikely to change that. What you CAN charge for is the package."

This is not about applying print subscription models to digital content. It's likely not putting up pay-walls around existing content either (at least not without adding other value of some kind). Its a new kind of scarcity. The kind that adds value, rather than subtracting it. The kind that is more enabling than it is restricting. What I'm talking about is turning content into a service. About how you apply producer expertise in new ways. About making content useful as well as entertaining. If it is of sufficient value, people will pay for it.

As Gareth has pointed out before, culture is what we all compete with for people's time. Which is partly why, I suspect, a lot of focus is going on trying to crack THE model, or THE idea that will change the world. But to quote Clay Shirky "Culture is a huge thing to be worried about...there's only one thing that you can posit as almost universal: Start small and experiment from there...you can affect culture in a small way". What Mark calls 'lighting lots of fires'. One thing's for sure though - it ain't nothing without the platform.

Why Clever People Believe Stupid Things

2009-10-28T20:32:01+00:00

This is the title of a chapter in Ben Goldacre's excellent book 'Bad Science'. In it, he talks about inherent bias - the kind of false beliefs or 'cognitive illusions' that come from the shortcuts we use to simplify complex problems when we reason informally, and that can often mean (to paraphrase Ben):

1. We see patterns where there is only random noise

2. We see causal relationships where there are none

3. We overvalue confirmatory information for any given hypothesis

4. We seek out confirmatory information for any given hypothesis

5. Our assessment of the quality of new evidence is biased by our previous beliefs

Another very real form of bias of-course, is the tendency we all have not to change our established behaviours unless there's an extremely compelling reason. Status Quo bias. Loss aversion means that our preference is to avoid losses rather than secure gains. Our tendency is to underestimate the advantages of the new, and overestimate the disadvantages of giving up the old.

I think it was Marshall McLuhan who said that we tend to see new media through the lens of the old. I was reminded of this reading John's post:

"The industry's reaction to the realisation that people are ignoring their messaging is seemingly to search for an alternate way to control the message."

Commonplace thinking on the way that ideas and behaviours spread talks about 'influentials' - that elusive minority who can influence an exceptional number of other people and so are disproportionately more important to the formation of public opinion. This thinking persists, despite evidence to the contrary. Duncan Watts has shown that in a connected world large scale changes in public opinion, or 'cascades of influence', are typically not driven by influential individuals but rather by a critical mass of easily influenced individuals. Other research (using a dataset of over 250,000 Facebook pages and their associated fans, no less) has shown that the number of friends, user demographics or activity have no bearing on how ideas spread through social networks or how popular they are. Exposure on the other hand, does. As Mark says, its not about inflentials it's about emulation. And further studies have shown that time, differences between people, and relative context also play their part.

We simply don't know enough about this stuff. So the IPA's recent focus on behavioural economics makes sense, not least because (to quote Rory Sutherland):

"We spend almost all our time attempting to change behaviour through overt persuasion - while paying no attention to influencing the other, barely conscious ways in which people behave."

I believe that this has the potential to change the way in which we all work. But then I'm biased.

Bots And People

2009-10-23T18:54:18+01:00

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"Ask yourself this: do you think Wikipedia ever hired an SEO consultant in order to get its high rankings on Google?" Jeremy Keith

I posted this quote (via armandoalves) over on the Tumblr the other day because it makes such a good point about the rounded benefits of good, people focused content.

There are of-course many ways to attract people to content (notice I didn't say 'drive traffic'), not least by ensuring it is as well marked-up and relevant as possible (what Jeremy calls 'optimising for people'). But whilst many owners and producers spend an awful lot of time, money and effort focused on optimising their content for Google bots and algorithms, the inherent value that socialised content has for search and referrals through its associated richness of in-bound links, is often forgotten.

Similarly, many owners and producers underestimate the value that socially distributed content (what you might call 'social syndication'), and socially based personalisation, has for getting your content in front of more people.

The real game changer here of-course is Facebook Connect. Facebook now accounts for 1 in every 7 page views in the UK. It may still be second to Google in terms of visits, but it accounts for over twice the share of UK page views (14.5% compared to 5.8%, and, as James has so eloquently pointed out, has a level of user trust and scale that has enabled a richness of data like nothing we've ever seen before).

Earlier this week Gordon posted on how The Huffington Post (which has just surpassed The Washington Post in scale and is now second only to USA Today and the New York Times) has used a wider breadth of content combined with social tools based on Facebook Connect that allow users to personalise as well as comment on and share content easily with Facebook friends, to increase its unique users by 50% year on year. Its worth noting that underneath that headline figure, Facebook referral traffic is up 48% and 15% of all comments on HuffPo now come from Facebook.

Similarly, many owners and producers underestimate the value of a distributed but engaged community in attracting referrals. When it was announced that SamFry (the company that manages Stephen Fry's website) were launching their network of celebrity sites earlier this week, the co-Managing Director Andrew Sampson talked about the huge surges in traffic that come as a direct result of Fry's tweets and blogs. Not surpising perhaps, given that at time writing he has over 885,000 followers on twitter. But Sampson used an example, saying that when Fry had tweeted the URL to his "Poles, Politeness and Politics in the age of Twitter" post earlier this week, the site had received five times the number of daily vistors which typically averages about 1.1m unique users. If every single one of Fry's followers had followed the link, it wouldn't have even doubled the number of visitors. I'm not advocating that Twitter should be used as a glorified RSS feed, but when a piece of content like that spreads, it really spreads. And if it doesn't spread it's dead.

Hands From Above

2009-10-21T12:20:52+01:00

This is genius. From artist Chris O'Shea. Fun, interactive, doing stuff with people rather than at them. Wonder how long before an advertiser uses this idea...

Hand from Above from Chris O'Shea on Vimeo.

Via

Planning For Streams

2009-10-20T15:42:33+01:00

“We applied the lens of advertising (interuptive, message-based) to new media. Instead we should apply the lens of new media (interactivity, iteration) to advertising”

This challenging presentation from Gareth and Jason was doing the rounds on twitter yesterday. I think it asks some good questions, and picks up on a theme I've written about before, and one on which there's been a couple of excellent posts recently - the need for a more agile, iterative, and adaptive approach to creative processes.

Jason and Gareth talk about the flow of information over time: "ideas as unfolding stories, a stream of iterations and interactions that invite people into the process". This makes sense in a world in which people are becoming content creators as much as they are consumers, and where content increasingly needs to be free-flowing and responsive, and services and applications need to be both scalable and portable. It's What Russell Davies once called 'designing for streams'. As my Mum used to say, it's all about the journey, not the destination.

Connections Planningness

View more documents from Jason Oke.

Content And Community

2009-10-19T09:15:00+01:00

I spoke at the Oktoberfest Innovation Seminar (organised by the smart folks at Brainjuicer) in Munich at the end of last week, sharing the bill with the Herdmeister, David from Ag8, Simon Blyth at IDEO, and John Kearon (Chief Juicer). It seems there's much talk of the death of this and that, so I chose to do my talk on the opportunity I see for content owners and producers in a connected world, if they think in the right way. Some of the points (and a few of the slides) will be familiar to regular readers of this blog, but there's also some new stuff and I was keen to include a selection of examples I think exemplify what I talk about. I thought it might be useful to share it here, so here it is.

Content And Community

View more presentations from neilperkin.

Britain's Got Talent

2009-10-17T16:39:33+01:00

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“In the knowledge economy all staff are volunteers, but our managers are trained to manage conscripts” Peter Drucker

I've been thinking about this quote ever since I read it over at Johnnie's place. I did a webinar the other day about social technologies, and there were a number of HR professionals on the call. The discussion turned to how employers might best attract and retain talent in the connected world. The point was made about the need for companies to resist the temptation to impose too many controls on employees in their use of such tools, and how many bright young things have a level of expectation about the use of such technologies in everything they do (including their work).

But it felt like there was a big point that was in danger of being missed - that corporates have already become far more transparent to everyone, prospective employees included, whether they like it or not. A networked world creates choice and leverage for individuals. It's easier than ever to find inspiration, start something interesting. The barriers to entry have never been so low. My sense is that talented young people coming onto the job market for the first time have a very real sense of their connectedness and the possibilities that that enables.

So the question should not be about which organisations 'allow' the use of such technologies, but rather which are the ones where the employees are visibly empowered by them. The awful state of the current job market allows organisations the luxury of choice, but for how long? As Hugh MacLeod rightly said the market for something to believe in is infinite. And this, to quote Seth, is "where the real truth lies, where growth occurs regardless of the state of the economy". My hunch is that when we come out the other side the future will belong to those companies that are visibly driven not only by a strong sense of purpose and a culture of transparency, but empowered and connected employees.

Blog Action Day 2009 - Climate Change

2009-10-15T09:00:00+01:00

September 25th was Earth Overshoot Day. Just over three weeks ago, humanity began living beyond its ecological means for this calendar year. Since that day, we are in the ecological equivalent of deficit spending, using up resources at a rate faster than what the planet can regenerate.

Today is Blog Action Day - the annual event that unites the world's bloggers in posting about the same issue on the same day - and this year's issue is climate change. For my post, I'm going to point at an interesting initiative from those smart guys at IDEO to apply 'design thinking' to help imagine what life will be like 20 or 30 years from now. Thanks to global climate change this is a question we all think about, but the talk about our impact on the environment is often framed by abstract statistics. Living Climate Change is described as an "open forum for sharing solutions to these problems". What I like about it is that, as Tim Brown describes in the short video below, it moves the conversation away from what we have to give up, and toward what we can create. It attempts to "ask the good questions an then bring them to life in an optimistic and real-world way", which is no bad thing. Go take a look.

Post Of The Month - September '09 - The Winner

2009-10-13T09:42:47+01:00

In spite of a late run on Helge's post, the early leader held out so I'm delighted to announce that the winner of this months Post Of The Month is Michael Litman with his excellent post on social media measurement. Well done Michael. You get the props of your blogging peers and are entered into the ThinkTank Hall of Fame. Thanks everyone for taking part. Don't forget to bookmark your good reads to nominate for next months vote.

Post Of The Month - September '09 - The Vote

2009-10-07T15:42:29+01:00

Thanks for the nominations (and thanks to AdLand Suit for nominating one of mine). Our shortlist this month is...

How To Be A Better Brand Planner by Julie Cottin
This is Not The Time For Big Lazy Brands from Helge Tenno
Why Not Take A Moment To Define Success Before You Pursue It by Alex Bogusky

When The S**t Hits The Fan, It's Time To Innovate by Alan Moore

A Brief Message For European Marketing Directors from Gemma Teed

Kate Moss & Me by, er, me

Is Social Media Measurement Really Meaningless? by Michael Litman

And you can vote below...

Which of these do you think should be Post of the Month for September '09?(answers)