Planning in the naughties

Vote Crocombe for digital for the 2012 elections

2008-04-22T22:52:18+01:00

I opened up the London elects candidate booklet earlier and saw the motley collection of candidates for London Mayor. I've put a date into ical for early 2011 to start my plot for candidacy, but if I was running today I'd campaign on a user centered platform:
1) full recognition of avatar marriages
2) push for an EU agreement on a 960 px standard for web layouts
3) be tough on the causes of click fraud, phishing & flash microsites
4) re-zone the borough of Hackney as a data haven
5) free 240 Mbps wireless cloud within the M25 (called "default", unprotected)

Leveraging the hive mind

2008-04-03T11:54:15+01:00

This digital media stuff still has the power to suprise and delight. The recent twitter resurgence has demonstrated how micro communities are sharing links and banter. Russell Davies showed how this is starting to impact brands in a recent twitter based experiment which I unwittingly participated in.

Despite a much hyped new platform Linkedin is still feeling a bit clunky (where are the 3rd part widgets?), but there's signs of it's potential for niche communities and people with shared interest. I've been playing with the Questions and Answer application, and posted a pretty broad questions yesterday. Within hours I had 8 open responses and a couple of private messages, some good, some bad, but a pretty good snapshot of what the hive mind is thinking (see the question and responses here)

Youth research insights from project Edge

2008-03-19T16:10:49+00:00

Project Edge (from Synovate) is a continuous global study of contemporary youth culture and they were kind enough to come into our office and give us their insights on 18-24 year olds. There's lots of good information for FMCG & technology brands, but a few quick insights that tickled my fancy...

On Booze
More than any other country in Europe, British youth cite ‘drinking alcohol’ as the activity that they most enjoy and 53% of young people cite it as an activity that they do regularly. This is higher than the number who talk online - 49%

“I spend a lot of my spare money on beer – most of my student loan, in fact - but I’ve never been to a website of an alcohol brand. I don’t really see what the advantage would be.” James 19, Portsmouth

On social networks

“The majority of young people are not using these things. For those that are, they’re still using them as a means for facilitating existing friendships rather than meeting people from across the world. It’s partly about belonging, but it’s also about people regarding you with a certain amount of respect or even awe”

Dr Paul Hodkinson

Grand Theft Auto IV widgets

2008-02-25T22:42:47+00:00

Everyone's gone widgety crazy, Ministry of Sound have stopped doing microsites for each release and are going to concentrate on an uber-widget that can be updated with new music, artists blogs, images and stuff to buy whenever new product or content becomes available. On a slightly more exciting note GTA IV is out later this year and Rockstar games are trying to whip the web into a viral frenzy with ... you guessed it...

p.s. you can download more GTA IV widgets here.

China: Dragon Rising

2008-02-21T23:18:28+00:00

I've just been through this Fallon Brainfood piece on China, I take back what i said about the Fallon blog, lots of nice stuff... slideshare is best if you zoom in.

| View | Upload your own

More Chinese users access the internet than Americans

2008-02-10T22:28:05+00:00

China's online population is growing at the rate of 6 million people per month. It is expected that sometime in February 2008 they will overtake the United States stagnant 255 million users to become the biggest online population. This surge in uptake is driven by a younger average age audience (35 as opposed to America's 42) with a thirst for movies, games and chat (more stats here).

There have been some amazing homegrown internet success stories, with Baidu destroying google's dominance in search and video sharing site Tudou serving up 1 Petabyte of video data per day to 7 million users (that's five times more than our beloved YouTube). Yahoo's performance in this market is another good reason they must look so good to Microsoft at the moment. They own strategic slices in popular internet businesses such as Manufacturing Directory Alibaba.

Although China has made substantial efforts to curb freedom of information (great New York Times article) a slow user generated backlash is developing amongst some of the 50 million blog writers, although it looks like things will get worse before they get better with the pre-Olympic crackdown in full swing.

Buzz monitoring: Sentimentmetrics evalution

2008-01-25T11:22:13+00:00

I've recently completed a 2 week trial of Sentimentmetrics, http://www.sentimentmetrics.com/ a tool for monitoring blog, forum and website buzz around brands. I set it up to monitor buzz around "Bahrain", which is a Gulf state looking to promote inward investment and shift external perceptions. Over a 2 week period it found over 3500 mentions of the country, 1500 rated as positive, 1200 neutral, and 800 negative.

So is it any good?

On the plus side

- whizzy graphics that make client services staff go "oooh", a dial for sentiment and some nice bar and pie charts.

- measures number of mentions of brand and sentiment (positive / neutral /negative)

- gives a top stakeholders chart, so you can identify key sources

- lets you run queries on keywords (e.g. "investment") and drill into the individual posts

On the negative side

- the way it measures sentiment doesn't seem very sophisticated (is there human intervention here?)

- the news doesn't seem to move very much, e.g. we had the same top items last week as next week

- flickr overindexes, so this morning's results were dominated by flickr (although you can find some quite good stuff here http://www.flickr.com/photos/mahmood/2191846359 ).

Summary

Useful for pitches or at the early stages of research to get your head around what's "out there", but probably not accurate / sophisticated enough for serious ongoing monitoring and response work.

(afternote: customer service is good and my free trial was cancelled quickly without any problems)

Best biro review in the world ever

2008-01-08T13:17:47+00:00

Those user reviews on Amazon are normally pretty useless apart from for search optimisation, but this one and the thread that follows had me in stitches the other evening. Is this a new form of self expression for aspiring comedians?

Top 5 trend lists

2008-01-07T14:42:59+00:00

Detail from the book 'The Neverlutionary', Sam Dargan, www.rokebygallery.com

It's a bit lazy, but at the turning point of the new year technology and media bloggers pull their lists together of highlights and predictions and there's a few nuggets out there:

1) 10 Mediashifting moments of 2007 (pbs)

2) Top 10 start ups worth watching in 2008 (wired)

3) Online TV sites (guardian)

4) The year in deadpool 2007 edition (techcrunch)

5) 2008 b2b marketing forecast (b2b online)

enjoy!

Personal Media Optimisation

2007-12-27T15:40:52+00:00

Me and You (aged 102), Sam Dargan, www.rokebygallery.com.

It used to be called vanity searching or ego surfing, sticking your name into a search engine and seeing what results come through. Pew research claimed that in 2006, 47% of Americans "admitted" to this flaw, but suddenly they look like early adopters of a new trend, Personal Media Optimisation (PMO).

With the reliance on search engines by users to find their way around the internet, Search marketing for brands and corporates will have accounted for around 60% of digital media spend in 2007. Individuals reputations are increasingly valuable to them, if they're looking for a new job, meeting someone important for the first time or showing their level of connectedness and style.

Startup Spock is hoping to ride this trend with a search engine based around peoples personal media footprint (although it currently gives the same results as google). You can see that in the metaverse of connected social networks and fragments of long forgotten digital information there's a lot of information available about you (also check out Bigsight and Wink)

If you type my name into google the top results are a slightly dodgy profile from an old agency, a couple of other ian crocombes and links to old profiles on ecademy, linkedin and an old twitter post. With a few more complementary items lurking around on pages 2 and 3. Traditional SEO experts could fix this with a a bit of interlinking, code hacking and posting (Trevor Ginn seems to have got the linking sussed with a mix of PR & reviews / posts in his field ).

Social network Badoo encourages users to "rise" their profile so that they're pictures are temporarily pushed into visibility. This isn't just a feature, promoting your level of connectedness and style is their business model (ad free, but you pay a few euros for a "rise").

A whole string of previously corporate services (art direction, copyrighting, strategy) could be rolled out to consumers if their online reputation became a higher priority. By the end of 2008 will we see the mass market be as worried about their online reputation as their hair cut? Maybe not, but it's more likely we'll see Personal Media being optimised in boutiques and hairdressers rather than agencies.