The Tannoy: Digital Advertising News and Views

iPhone Saves Lives on Subsequent Saturdays

2009-10-17T04:39:00.000-07:00

Two weeks ago, to the day, a viral went around a corner of the web about the Heimlich manoeuvre, and I watched it with some interest as these seemed to be a good thing to know how to do. That evening my Mother-in-law came over to our place, as usual, so that myself and El could pop out for a pint and a bite to eat in our favourite locale. We’re spoilt – what can I say.

So, I’m minding our youngest - Felix, with other various children of various ages clambering over me. Total Wipeout USA is on and this can transfix the kids with slapstick hilarity, which is useful if you’re getting ready to jump ship; or hype them up, which isn’t. It had done the latter. ‘Emmet,’ I hear in cross sounding tones. I consider options and causes. Something has split. Kid has fallen over. Close the clasp on my necklace. There may have been another ‘Emmet’ as I tried to heave my progeny from my belly... but then came a crystal clear ‘EMMET!’ I’m off.

Mother-in-law walking lost and directionless around the kitchen, and then leaning against the wall – lips blue, with a green tinge around her mouth and nose. ‘She’s choking,’ say’s El in a mysterious calm. On auto-pilot, I take over. ‘Kids out... Out! Everyone out!’ I shout, and they leave. ‘Can’t do mouth to mouth, or emergency tracheotomy while explaining why I'm stabbing nanny in the neck to traumatised tiny people’ I say to myself. ‘Not ideal at least’. I spin Mother-in-law around... knot my hands, feel under the ribs, front and side aiming for the diaphragm and say into her ear ‘I’m going to do this... OK?’ She agrees. Two or three violent hoicks later, her feet leaving the ground and I hear the strangled whistle of air through a barely open pipe. ‘You’re breathing now. You’ve got a breath. You’ll be alright now I say...’ She recovers in minutes, and, in shock, pretends nothing happened. We all do. But, on the way to the pub I say to El... ‘It worked. Isn’t that amazing! A simple technique has saved us from a very different Saturday. I watched it on the web, and it worked!’

(It also crosses my mind in true Les Dawson fashion... 'You had your chance, Mother-in-law choking already. No witnesses. Blew it. You had to turn into Superman... Didn't you! Then again... Think of the babysitting! She owes me big-time!)

A week later, to the day, El has gone to upstairs after lunch... not feeling well. She comes down and announces. ‘I don’t feel well at all. Look at me! I’m all red!’ And she is. Ears bright red, very flushed, eyes even seeming to bulge a little, and lips a shade of cherry Max Factor would patent. ‘I think it’s an allergic reaction. Anaphylactic shock!’ There was a film I saw a while back where the main actor looked similar and had to be rushed to the chemist I remember, but Ellen had never had anything like that before. Out comes the iPhone, and Dr. Google informs me these are indeed the symtoms, and also the symptoms of an allergic reaction to fresh mackerel which hasn’t been cooled down quickly enough. We had mackerel for lunch. I’m off. Just going to the chemist you need some strong anti-hystamin I call as the door shuts behind me. The chemist tells me that indeed, it sounds like anaphylactic shock, but I’m to get back quick in case the breathing starts to go. The car roars away from the chemist but as soon as I get in the door, I’ve been gone maybe 3 minutes, Ellen tells me... ‘I can’t even breath properly.’ Kids are flung bodily into the jeep, some still in PJs with wife propped in the passenger seat. The lights are with me as we belt for St. Michael’s Dun Laoghaire and I drop her at the door. She hobbles in to safety, an injection, and recovery some hours later. Phew. Typically perhaps I say to El... ‘Isn’t that amazing. Dr. Google had the symptoms. That bloody mackerel.’

Why am I telling you this? It’s Saturday, and I’ve suddenly become quite worried about being any distance from my iPhone and the instant, life saving information it provides. In fact, this week, it’s probably my turn! L

Google Defends it's Turf from Apps

2009-10-14T06:34:00.000-07:00

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- Google wants to own the search experience across every mobile media platform, and its latest offering is a universal search box that lets users of Android-based smartphones look for apps, contact information and web content right from the device's home screens.

The Cloud, Collaboration and Polaroid Glasses

2009-10-12T06:22:00.000-07:00

I was watching Richard Dawkins last night on TV and he made me ask some important questions about the Net.

He asked what is it when individual neurons act together – millions and billions of them collaborating to produce a person, with intelligence and the capacity for self reflection – and something that some may call a soul?

And following on from this I ask, what is it when tools of collaboration - such as a fluid for messages to flow through serves this function, permitting a physical, social, psychological and educational quantum leap for a group of individuals within a body, or for entire echelon within a social group. Each person plays the role of a neuron, and the body is an echelon otherwise known as the digerati or a part of it. The lubricant of collaboration (closing the gap between the synapse) is social media and tools like Google Wave, file-sharing and torrents or open source software.

As the Roman army well knew – the essence of social advantage arises from collaboration, genius and good communication. Over-stretching the supply chain leads to failure.

And I further ask: what is it when elements of human society take on (inherit), this advantageous, favourable gene – each neuron, both selfishly and generously, using it to their advantage, growing more influential, quicker and more efficient through the communication with other similarly favoured neurons (twitter/facebook through smartphones/mini-pc’s). And what becomes of this group of super cells when they exist within a milieu of similarly favoured or not so favoured ones? Do they become a cancer, a brain, or a new speciality organ charged with information, educational and development?

Is it true that access to information and learning together with the capacity to process, understand and reproduce that information – to appropriate it – gives advantage and success?

I suspect so, and this in essence, is what twitter and social media and Google wave are doing and providing for individuals within the digital society, and the power of these individuals is not their own access to information, (anyone who can search Wikipedia or Google has this), but their group access to a larger cloud of individuals who filter an even greater reach of information. In a world which truly is overloaded with data and facts, intelligent filtration is everything.

Seeking facts through a cloud brings clarity out of confusion, like looking at the bottom of a pond through Polaroid glasses. The better and stronger the glasses, the deeper and clearer you can see. So being part of a good generous cloud of bright people is more advantageous for information processing and finding the fish, than being a blind boffin in your own right, swamped by light from every angle, and without any dinner.

Experts and agencies remind individuals of their weakness and ignorance and dependency, and act as a source of disempowerment and alienation. For example, the days of adverts for household cleaners with an ‘expert’ in the white coat saying ‘It’s Vortex’ are long gone. His place is being taken by a cloud of product users who profile and report on product qualities. All are empowered, inclusive and seeking a better truth.

The net has always embraced the cloud and the multitude and its growth has been explosive as a result, since the days of Usenet and AOL, through to the likes of facebook, twitter, Linux and Wikipedia. These have grown more quickly, and been more successful than any individual or company could ever have hoped to be. The growth of the cloud has been simply exponential and collaboration is its fuel.

Clouds are now the source of news and truth and growth and development. Cloud members trust the recommendations of friends and colleagues above any other source. People always did, we just couldn’t see it, or measure it the way we can in a digitally mediated space. Collaboration takes place in social media, twitter, and file-sharing spaces, and through development tools like Google wave, open source software and open APIs. Fluency in the understanding and use of these collaborative tools gives advantage to the individuals within clouds in their access to information through and collaboration with the other larger ones.

In 1976 Richard Dawkin's wrote his influential book 'The Selfish Gene'. In 2009 the net and social media have shown that 'The Collaborative Gene' gives a model much closer to the truth.

Analytophilia, Analytophobia and Social Media Weather Forecasting

2009-09-30T07:21:00.000-07:00

I was introduced to a new word today. Analytophilia. I love it. Analytophilia is the addiction to (or love of) checking how connected you are in social media: - how many tweets, DMs, facebook contacts, Linkedin connections and comments on your status, or others. This is a world where agoraphobics feel safe, but can also feel really social, without leaving their desk or iPhone (and entering the physical agora or marketplace).

I’d add another term. Analytophobia. This is the fear that your analytics would reveal, with cruel accuracy, that you’re a ‘nobody’, - not even a ‘somebody’ in the digital sphere. This would lead the sufferer to fear the login, like pressing the answerphone button and hearing ‘You have NO new messages’ too often. It’s not good for the old ego Sir. Time to join an online role-play game (MMORPG), like World of Warcraft. They’ll fix the fragile ego in a jiffy because anyone will play with anyone, and they do so in their millions.

Analytophilia and Analytophobia are, in fact, two sides of the same digitally mediated psychological coin, like pride and shame. Welcome to the Sociology of Social Media Emotion.

There are important implications for businesses which need to figure online, and have figures to prove it, in the growing cloud of online social buzz. There are loads of ways of doing it... if you know how and have the time to do the reporting and tracking, and sifting and monitoring. Trying to do it without the right tools to hand and operatives to use them, is like buying a pile of hammers and saws and nails and trying to build a house. You might actually succeed in building a hut of sorts, which will keep the rain out for a while. But you’ll never build a house or a good one at least. And think of the time, and injuries; and it might fall down in a storm! That’s when you call the likes of my good self (shameless plug). Yes we can! (Bob the builder, not Obama)

Prediction/observation: The net, and all communication is, and will be, driven by data, and those who can handle data and present it in a beautiful, simple, meaningful and actionable fashion... will always be busy.

It’s strange to admit, but I love numbers and the challenge of becoming a social media weather forecaster because weather is interesting, and the language of weather is taking over the language of surfing and sea that haunted the web since its nascent beginnings (from surfing and waves to clouds etc). And did you know that the biggest computers were built, partially, to handle the billions of computations necessary to predict the weather? Eniac for example. That chaos theory arose out of the big shift in weather prediction shown because of a few decimal points being omitted? Physics, maths and the computing that facilitated them were largely driven by the simple need to know what the weather is likely to do next. Well, now is the time for the Social Weather and forecasting, and the computing is being done already, but not by one machine, by the cloud of users and their computers. Businesses and people need to know the temperature outside, before they leave the building.

The driving equation and goal for social media: -

(messages ↑, efficiency↑, news/information/gossip ↑,freedom/mobility ↑, work/life-balance ↑) = (time spent↓)

The online clouds, (word of mouth/public opinion) are moved by the seas (offline people whose opinions (temperature) move much slower, but they hold their opinions for much longer). The net is a much more promiscuous, impatient and ephemeral space than the real world. Always has been. Within the clouds there can be hurricanes (like when MJ died), smaller storms, (#Lisbon2), and little squalls (#Luas). The online activity, in a storm, can strike offline public opinion like a bolt of lightning too, when the fact of the online news being so busy has a huge impact on the news of traditional media, and ALL public opinion (reflexively). The weather is also driven by the medium (the air, or platform (PC/iPhone/Facebook/twitter), and the sun (the Internet connection).

OK. The analogy is getting tired. But, it might still be useful.

In short! What can be done with this? Well, we can:

Monitor social media: Any topic, issue, group, industry category, sector... whatever. This includes forums, blogs, YouTube, twitter and news sites. We can graph, present, analyse and output for you and yours
Put scale on the storm: how big, how busy, how powerful, who’s involved
Forecast: where it’s likely to go next. How big it’s likely to get
Take part: setting up a social media portal/outlet for your business, and maintaining it
Alert you: When the unhappy or unruly come knocking at the door of the office.
Give you an Umbrella: Protecting you with online PR advice and provision

So, don’t be afraid of the Social Media weather. Let us give you the forecast and provide you with an umbrella!

Is Social Media a Fad?

2009-09-25T04:10:00.000-07:00

It seems not.

Best iPhone Apps: The Must-Have Downloads

2009-09-22T02:46:00.001-07:00

I thought this was a good presentation, though everything may not be relevant to the UK and Ireland market. I've used many of these, and am likely to explore those I haven't. I'm dying to see Yelp on my phone for example.
Enjoy!

Best iPhone Apps: The Must-Have Downloads

View more presentations from Josh Clark.

5 Digital Developments in the Past Year

2009-09-18T08:35:00.000-07:00

Too many blogs of this type are predictive. I, or they, generally say what will happen. The truth is that, for advertiser and researchers at least, many are more interested in what has already happened, and how many are doing it, whether that is to watch a show, visit a website, or use a new medium. Of course, you need both, but for me, who’s heritage dates pre-dot.com bubble days, the whole game has always been to work out what might happen next, and build it, service it, understand it. The Internet business developers’ answer to the land grab, or gold rush mentality. But in the recent past, many became wealthy doing exactly this. Then again, if you are a person who thinks of new businesses, and services, and offers them, you need to have both approaches running en train.

So, with that in mind, today, I’m taking stock.

Digitally speaking, here are five of the biggest things that have happened in the past year.

1) Social Networks - Personal Home-life Profiles
Social networks embody web 2.0 thinking, and have changed the way we use the net. In the past the Internet was used in several key ways, described in previous posts. Adding the truly social mechanics of Facebook, and latterly twitter, have helped it realise the potential as a truly digitally mediated social space that it always had, but which in the past, was the stuff of the geeks and the young, or both. Now using the net for building profile pages, and connecting with others is child’s play. Today, with 300,000,000 users (that’s 300 million, but the noughts help us remember that’s a really big number), there are twice as many people using Facebook than live in Russia and the FB population is at least doubling every year. Twitter’s growth is similar. In fact, 10% of all net time is spent tweeting, something discussed at length in previous posts. If social network use were to approach the popularity of similar Japanese social networks, proportionately, one in two people in modern western democracies would be using it. I don’t know what that number might be... but it’s in the billions (nine noughts). There’s an advertising and research opportunity if ever I saw one.

2) Personal Work Profiles

Linked in and similar sites provide all of us a simple, clean, pervasive mechanism for maintaining our CV and reputation, which, in the recent past, was controlled by undeserving employers. Imagine having to get a reference from the likes of David Brent? Lots had to. Now they don’t have to. A simple change, but it opens up a psychological power shift in the workplace. Staff can also work out what others are getting paid for similar work and search for and find fresh employment from the comfort of their existing desk, and job. Again, this leads to confidence, empowerment of a workforce, and control for the individual over their working history and their reputation. It’s also true that Linked in makes CV’s largely irrelevant. Let the prospective employer link to you, and they can see all they need to know. Balance!

3) iPhone and 3G
Despite similar functionalities in the past (my favourite XDA IIs for example), the iPhone has revolutionized digital communication. Soon, everyone will have one, or similarly fully enabled 3G devices, which will push broadband Internet penetration and use to equal that of mobile phones, at around 100%. The joke about the iPhone, is it’s not a phone at all. It’s a tiny, flexible, powerful laptop. It’s optimized though, and only does what you’d use a laptop for, not the other bells and whistles you never use, or which get in the way when you want to use something. Virus checkers and the many Microsoft programs rarely, if ever, opened, are a good examples. Virus checkers on an Outlook are a special bug bear of mine... But, of course, the iPhone is not stuck to a desk, it’s mobile. In star trek terms the iPhone is a communicator, the screen on the bridge, the location scanners (maps/gps/lbs), the character Data (Google), the simulator (roleplay and other games), the school (iTunes u), the contact with earth (email), and, of course, the captain’s log. It’s also much more, and, all these are included in this one tiny light communicator device, if you understand me. In my experience devices or programs that offer this sort of efficiency always win in the end, if not in the beginning - despite begrudgers and luddites that abound.

4) Shopping Online
Shoppping has changed forever. The Internet is the consideration medium. If you’re doing something big, or spending non-grocery money, it’s where you consider where you should send your hard earned bucks. Having quick unobtrusive access to your social set and industry sector, especially when times are tight, makes net access a must. This changes the way we shop, of course, but also the way we think about shopping. We never liked to have the wool pulled over our eyes, and be tricked into over spending, but now we can take steps to avoid this. And, if we are tricked, the over-charging or dishonest supplier can be punished, not by the courts, but by public opinion. Reviews, blogs and tweets that tear strips off this person, or that company who behaved in a less than forthright manner, are common place. So, watch out pedlars of shoddy merchandise, or poor service. What goes around comes around, and what may be going round is a tale about you. Ya crook!

5) Time Shift, Convergence and Content items

Convergence, a dreadfully over-used word, is now a digital reality. It kind of snuck in the back door without knocking. We did apply the word to hardware, and software, and media and all sorts in our three dimensional world, but never included the fourth dimension, time.

In the end of the day, winning the race of survival of the fittest often involves getting their first, so Time for humanity is everything. But, with so many media items and formats around, the solution is not so much getting all of the information immediately. It would be too confusing and distracting. It is more about getting all of the information, but in a manner that you can choose to consume it at a time that suits yourself.

Time shift requirements have been the key driver for convergence in my opinion, from the early days of the Tivo, a personal video recorder popular among the Sex in the City characters, to Google alerts linking to blogs, video and newspaper text, through to Sky +, stop, rewind, record, remind, series link. But actually, time shifted content consumption goes back to the early days of the vinyl record. We’ve always been after where we are today. It’s just digital makes content reproduction infinitely simpler and more successful than say wax rolls, or cassette and video tapes.

The growth in portable media, and podcasts make the point. And consequently, the digital language of formats, delivery and media buying have steadily pervaded all other media sources. The pervasiveness of twitter on the mobile phones has made citizen journalists out of all. I got the news about the Luas and Bus crash yesterday, in a twit pic four minutes after the collision. However, I could consume it when I chose to. I wasn’t going to miss anything, so it’s a stress free process to be open to a vast array of data inputs, or news, as we call it. And it’s a reality, here, today. In relation to the Luas crash, I could see, by refreshing the picture, that it was getting over 100 views every minute and the rate was growing steadily.

All the theories of media and political communications I studied at University (gatekeepers, agenda setters and the like) are largely obsolete and any new ones better be written and published quickly before they go out of date too. Unless the academic sets up an alerts system so other can see what they’re working on of course.

A rapidly changing landscape and too much news would cause a glut, if it weren’t for splitting away of news and content from the news source, or sender, and the chunking of it into podcasts, video casts, tweets, digital program downloads or similar content items. Content items are king. And almost all can be consumed on any device. iPod, iPhone, laptop, iTunes etc, etc. And look at the ‘i’s. That’s convergence. And Apple appear to be at its epicentre.

51 Great Ad Ideas

2009-09-14T06:47:00.000-07:00

Internet Co-operating beats Competition and ensures Twitter Will Last

2009-08-05T03:58:00.001-07:00

Twitter is such a silly word, better suiting teeny birds. Silly little ultra cute vulnerable ones that you might step on by accident. It reminds me of a Tweetie Pie and Silvester Looney Tunes cartoon. Poor ‘ittle Tweetie Pie. And it looks like silly software too... with people ‘tweeting’ where they are, what they’re doing and what they’re thinking to those who are following them. ‘Followers..?’ I hear you say. ‘Sure, who’d want to follow me and what would I ‘tweet’? If I want to ever talk to someone there’s mail, or SMS, or, God forbid, why not just pick up the blasted phone?’

I have to admit, the first time I saw twitter, I didn’t get it either. Why would anyone bother programming such a piece of software and why would people use it? And, when I looked at the updates from some big digital computer company boss saying ‘Hey, I just met Brad Riprock at Digi 3D Valley Conf Q1/07,’ I thought, this is software for geeky sycophants. Nonsense! Not for me. I didn’t ‘update’ and as I’d no ‘followers’, I didn’t read other updates, and all of this served the not-getting-it problem. Then, because someone said I should, I started following Stephen Fry.

This was the real Stephen Fry. The Peter’s Friend’s/QI/Fry and Laurie Stephen Fry. He’s brilliant. So, what’s he doing on twitter? Someone must be doing it for him. But then Stephen got stuck in a lift. He posted photos and was typically amusing, and without noticing, I was starting to get some of what twitter was all about. Real-time multi-media updates from the very famous or interesting. Immediacy!

It’s obvious now that the reason I didn’t get twitter is – I wasn’t using it. I reminded me of my lovely late Gran who owned one of the first rotary Bakelite telephones. She never used it, never gave out her number and as a result, didn’t ‘get’ the whole telephone thing. Not very social really. Twitter, similarly, is merely a communication platform that is part of the social media phenomena but talking and engaging with others is the point. So, if you’re not feeling social like my Gran was, it’ll make absolutely no sense.

The phone analogy over simplifies things considerably, but makes an important point for the newbie or Luddite. It over-simplifies things because, unlike a phone or email - twitter carries other media. All sorts of messages are carried via twitter, in different formats. Yes, short text messages (140 characters) not unlike SMS, but also links to video and TV, audio and radio, news articles, blogs, podcasts, adverts, sound files, pictures and even links to software. And mainstream news too. Good professional stories from SKY news, the BBC and the Belfast Telegraph indeed are tweeted around the web. In fact, many more Wall Street Journal news articles are read via twitter than by people going to the Internet homepage.

This diverse multi-media content would not be likely to be consumed by you - the twitter user - if you didn’t have a twitter account, because no one would be sending you the links to this Internet content. If, for example, you are following the BBC on twitter, they are sending links to you like an RSS newsfeed. But the people who you are following on twitter are the real boon. They are the ones sending an endless stream of their own news and views and the fruits of their own net surfing. They act as a special interest filter for the hobbyist clique. They are sending links to a like-minded group of which you are a member. They’re posting to people who are following them because these are interested in similar stuff or they wouldn’t be following in the first place. Twitter chat is fun too, because people can be very funny. Banter to lighten the day. It’s all excellent stuff to be honest, but the best part of it all is - I think twitter will last, and here’s why.

People often see business and technology in Darwinian terms. Something new is born, so the old stuff dies out. In fact, this rarely happens in a digital world and those who enter it with this attitude are the ones with the short life. Rather, the technologies that work together with other technologies, co-operating rather than competing, are re-born as part of a larger more efficient entity, which is more resistant to the mores of social and technological change. The Internet ecosphere has more in common with the Gaia philosophy view of reproduction than the ‘Survival of the Fittest’ one. In short - co-operation and inclusion is more effective for survival than competition. Bebo, for example, is made up of lots of existing bits of older software, like flash, website development wizards, blog hosting etc... I’m sure there is some bespoke software somewhere, but it hides, permitting the user to organise all the bits of their existing information and favoured formats in one space. It is the fact that it works with what people already know works that makes it work so well. Twitter steps back even further, providing the simplest platform possible, before formatting. Text and links. That’s it. It’s what the earliest HTML provided. It’s not about content formats, like YouTube, or your profile, like Facebook, or your CV, like LinkedIn. It’s about what you think, have to say, or what you’d like to read, see or hear. It’s about ideas - looking out, rather than people and personalization - looking in. And twitter users form an infinitely richer idea and creativity cloud together than they could ever embody if its members competed. A symbiotic relationship full of idea buzz that is quite addictive to be part of. Something new and hundreds of times more efficient, richer and more resilient than its constituent parts could ever be. But it’s only a talk platform but this simplicity is its strength. Twitter will become obsolete, perhaps, when a simpler platform exists, but with a similarly open API, (application protocol interface), which permits anyone to design software to run on the platform. Twitter is co-operative to its philosophical core and is likely to last, or become part of something else – and that will last. The people who use twitter and their ideas are its life and its longevity rather than the platform upon which those ideas are expressed.

The uses of twitter are similarly diverse, and should not be seen in a vacuum. Initially, tweeting may not work for you! For example: did it work for your marketing campaign? Well, if used in a vacuum, probably not. Especially, if the message was given to a profile with very few followers, or it was not compelling enough to be sent on or ‘re-tweeted’. If it was used with other formats and media, with whom it could share a healthy symbiotic relationship, it probably had a good chance of being effective. It’s common sense really.

But, to gain its full marketing potential, I feel twitter should be acknowledged as a platform that requires a level of skill and technological literacy and fluency that is perhaps in inverse proportion to the apparent simplicity of its appearance. When it works well it’s amazing, if you consider the Obama election, but when it’s done badly, it’s a total, if seemingly inexpensive, flop. In fact, a bad campaign could raise the ire of the addict/geek who feels (s)he owns the space and is insulted by the presence of the offendingly disingenuous ad message, and could, in fact, do considerable brand damage. Twitter is easy when you know how, so, until you do - give it to someone who does.

The number of twitter apps that exist has grown at a similar rate to its usership. Hundreds of apps and sites that interact with, measure, map and monitor twitter and other social media messages seamlessly on PCs, phones, desktop widgets and GPS or location logging gadgets of all description. Again, this is co-operation and not competition.

Emmet Kelly (twitterID: emmetkelly)

Audience, Publisher and Publience

2009-07-08T09:21:00.000-07:00

Audience

The potential efficiency for peoples consumption of new and information content has improved exponentially with the advent of twitter. On my iPhone, I can consume 50 messages, and click through to maybe 10 pictures or articles in about 5 minutes. I can’t do that any other way. I wouldn’t know where to click, what is of interest, or what is good. If I was to try to do that actively, by visiting blogs, news and scanning, I’d be burnt out in 30 minutes. With twitter, it’s a passive experience, and stimulating rather than tiring. On twitter, I have a filter of likeminded individuals who will scout out good or relevant content for me, and say, ‘look at this’ and give me a hashtag to identify its nature. And, of course, I do the same for them.

Having 200 hand-picked sub editors at your beck and call is a great thing. Not only can I consume perhaps 10 times more efficiently than before... what I can consume is 10 times more pertinent, relevant and of interest. That makes 100 times, of something. There’s no need for surfing. This way is so much quicker, and just works much better.

Publisher

Publishers have fragmented the access to their content, and their content. Newspapers with 30 pages have become headlines to articles from a certain category tweeted to the interested. They are more interesting to the consumer because of this filtering. I’m not interested in Irish party politics at the moment, but I get tech news articles tweeted to my iPhone from the Guardian, and a host of other mainstream sources... ones I’d never buy. One ‘publication(s)’ has 100 articles in 20 categories tweeted to a couple of million readers... Now, that’s a business model... if it carries even a tiny logo from a business. Think about it. Eminently trackable. Eminently costable. Eminently consumable. And so turn-on-and-offable.

Publience

I tweet therefore I am. Tweeting and reading and @ing and DMing. SMS, meets Email, meets Blogging, meets feedback and CRM meets advertising, networking and social media. Where do you draw the line between the audience and the publishers when the audience is a publisher in their own micro or macro blogging or social media , or forum posting right. You don’t. Bloggers and tweeters become journalists too, (cf. Persiankitty and many other examples.)

The Mix of Sliding Scales

Through the twitter filter of follower and following sub-editors, the capacity to engage with the world grows, but the exposure to linear, non-filtered content shrinks.

The remit of the public service broadcaster involved creating content to educate and enhance the population. It involved making programs they may not actually have asked for, or want, so that their exposure to ‘educational’ content would be increased, something impossible in a wholly commercial environment. The twitter fan-base of friendly followers and tweeters has no such remit.

But, it’s a sliding scale. The capacity to get content not offered by a mainstream source increases hugely and a lot of this can be educational and enhance a population.

Also, the capacity for states to control a nation’s view of the world, as soviet Russia did for its own population for perhaps 50 years, has shrunk. Propaganda is a much more difficult game than it used to be.

But, it’s a sliding scale. The capacity for the creation of factions, with an intensely ideologically driven micro view of the world... however inaccurate that may be, has increased. Twitter creates cliques, and not all cliques are hobby driven, or benevolent.

The capacity for slanted or misinformed views to fly around the world has increased too with twitter. But, so too has the capacity for the correction of incorrect or misleading information. It’s six of one and half a dozen of the other. It’s a sliding scale.

What is Twitter and Will It Last

2009-03-05T04:04:00.000-08:00

Who cares? It’s popular and it works’ – you say. Or, alternately, ‘I’m glad you asked that question, I was afraid to ask because everyone seemed to know all about it’. Well, in the spirit of working out why things are popular and what they do that works so well - so that at some stage we can all spot, or develop the next big thing... I care. Here are my thoughts.

Short messaging combined with blogging

Blogs have suffered from long messaging... this one included. Wannabe writers wittering on about their inane existence ad nauseam. Some go nuts writing their super work of philosophical politico treatise in public... waiting to be discovered by another genius, like the soap box geniuses shouting at Hyde Park corner. While others give a sometimes boring, sometimes entertaining kitchen sink real time Shirley Valentine drama. Some shock, writing about their job as a hooker or psychiatrist, while others muse amusingly on this and that or shout angrily populist sentiment to the gathering mob (they hope). The one problem with all of these types of blogs is they are self indulgent, self centred and full of both pride and shame in equal measure. It’s like watching a manic depressive slowly unravel their shattered character in front of you. A slow motion personality car crash... and there’s nothing you can do to help, or would necessarily wish to. OK. That came out harsh... and I'm a blogger, so I can say that. No?

But for Twitter, 150 characters per message is short, but it’s enough to say what you’re doing. Micro-blogging. Not much time for self indulgence in each message, though you could with several message, and some do tweet far too often. The size per tweet is also a challenge. It’s very short. To answer this challenge, a friend of mine has taken to tweeting short stories for Twitter. ‘It was a simple plan, but then they were simple people and so, it didn’t quite work out as it should have. Pity that!’ A mini haikuesque saga. (Thanks Jo.)

Following People

So, twitter messages are like text messages really, but you can get messages from famous people. Jonathan Ross, Barack Obama, Stephen Fry are leading the way, but the Dalai Llama, Brian Cowan and probably the Pope aren’t far behind. Ratzinger @ emmetkelly You are going to hell because you don’t believe in hell, or heaven. emmetkelly @ ratzinger See you there?

This is fun. It’s efficient. It’s novel and it’s new... so, it will join the ever increasing gamut of media messages we can choose to expose ourselves to.

Advertising

In amongst the tweets are the ads. This means Twitter has a business model. The ads are small, not interruptive or irritating but yet they cannot be ignored. As long as there aren’t too many, this will work. Oh, and they click through too to whole webpages. SMS can’t do that.

Pictures and Media

TinyURL has never been so busy, because long internet page locations need to be minimized. Pictures, sound, quotes, videos... all with your tweet. SMS can’t do that either. It’s easier than MMS, and takes up no memory because the files are hosted on the wonderful interweb. Very efficient, novel, new and fun... so it will last.

Connectedness and Belonging

We are social beings. We need to be connected. If we aren’t, we get lonely. Being alone for even 40 days and nights is likely to get you in the bible. Loneliness drives Internet communication because it solves the problem. Twitter takes it to another level, especially when it’s on your phone. People don’t like to be seen to spend too much time at their PC living their virtual life because it’s obviously visibly solving some need, or something lacking in their real offline life (unless its work of course). But, with twitter, it’s on your phone. You get little funny text messages from your friend Stephen Fry. How cool is that. And you can tweet him back, and he might even reply. Hilarious. You belong. You’ve arrived. You have friends... Famous ones. Lots of them. And, you’re not in front of a monitor, unless you choose to be.

When twitter is combined with the excellent Locle.ie and Facebook... you’ve arrived. You have friends, you can see everything about them, and they can you, and you can follow them, and with Locle, you can see where they are on a Google map. ‘Oh, look, Sean’s at home.’ SMS to Sean. Goggin’s in 20? (why do my posts always involve pubs... hmmmm). Tweet: Dart is broken down. But, look at the bird at the station. I may be some time: twitpic.com/*&JJ(*UFRGF. When you update your Locle status, it tweets automatically. Again, very efficient and very clever.

Open API

The mini techie bit of this post. Twitter has an open API which means that anyone can program a widget for the program, and thus ensure its vast potential will only grow. More add-ons, plug-ins and enhancements and we’ll be tweeting for a very long time to come.

So, soon, we’ll all be Twitterers. Soon, we’ll see TwitterAds. Twitter has big advantages over SMS and may be the answer many issues in the mobile marketing quandary... ‘how do I give my recipients the change to see my products and services. Semi-impossible with SMSs. Perfect for Tweets.

Happy Valentine’s Day iPhone

2009-02-13T05:03:00.000-08:00

Happy Valentine’s Day iPhone. Never leave my side. I’d be lost without you.

OK. As you can see, the honeymoon period isn’t exactly over. It’s been six months or so since we met, but I’ve grown accustomed to her face and can now gauge how my life is different since I met her, and how I want it to stay this way forever.

A few months back a friend called me and said... ‘Hey Mr. Kelly, want a new iPhone for €99,’ and I said, ‘Hey. Yeah. Why not? I hear she’s something special.’ It was a blind date. I had no idea...

When we met it was strange. I held her immediately tightly. She was so small, and light in my hand, I found myself exploring her surface in disbelief. She was so beautiful. I kept finding new things, touching, swiping and pinching, and I instinctively and immediately felt like protecting her in case she got a bump or scratch. A cover, a guard. Oh yes... if something happened to her beautiful surface I would have blamed myself and I couldn’t cope with that. I wasn’t good enough for a smartphone this beautiful. But I knew nothing of her power.

A mate introduced me her App store... Wow. I hadn’t even noticed the funny little icon skulking shyly beneath the calculator. You see, when she was a doddle to integrate with Outlook, iTunes etc, etc, etc. I thought great, that’s it. What’s all the fuss about. But I was so wrong. It was just the beginning. The early days were halcyon though. Everything worked, if you read the instructions, but they mostly said ‘plug it in and don’t touch anything!’ which is exactly what I did.

The most incredible thing about her I think is that everything does work, which is strange if you’re a techy like me and used to the challenge a new machine offers for setup, tweaking... optimizing. That used to be both the frustration and part of the fun. Tempting a new machine into working for you. The chase. Not being beaten. Conquest. But the iPhone was such a pure doddle I ended up doing things I never thought I’d do. Just for the hell of it. Waiting to be let down, to confirm my insecurities, but no. We had such fun. For example, I’m not a big music collector, but I had to use the iPod, simply because it said it worked and it did work. Immediately. The early Leonard Cohen sounds just didn’t fit though because I was too happy with my new machine, not sad... So, I moved on. What else worked? Well... let me tell you.

Social network applications work perfectly without opening your Safari browser: Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Twitter and a few others. When a mate I haven’t seen for 20 years say’s ‘I’m bored’ I know he’s bored immediately. (OK, that’s a bit sad, but you take the point). When Stephen Fry is stuck in a lift, I can see him in the lift. It was pretty funny actually. He’s a big tech head it seems and he tweets fun stuff around. (E.g., ‘devolve-me’ - see what you look like as an early human -http://tinyurl.com/9tacnt)

Then there are the email accounts, SMS, WiFi, Contacts and Phone, Maps, Around Me, Vicinity and Google Earth.

Then there are the free retro games (Submarine, Pacman etc) and the widgets which use the angle of the machine, (Biiball and Topple). Then fun marketing ones like Carlsberg and Zippo.

Then there’s the music apps (Piano, Guitar, minisynth (kids love this one)) and Ocarina (a wind instrument believe it or not. You blow over the mic and put fingers over the virtual holes.) It all works

Then there’s the Television app, where you can.... em, watch TV for free, another one where you can control your SkyBox at home and then there’s the Radio (200 or so categorised stations (no BBC though). Reference (Google, Wikiamo, WorldWiki). YouTube is great too, and works really well, with full screen and good sound. eBay too if I had something left to sell.

Then there’s the academic stuff. Stanza (1000s of copyright expired classic books), Translaters (Ultralingua, French, Italian). The language phrase books actually say the words for you so you’re pronounciation is good. If someone answers you’re stuffed but you’re half way there. (‘Help. I need my inhaler!’ ‘Τι είναι μια εισπνευστήρ? ‘Uggggggghhh?’ 'He say's his hovercraft is fully of eels!' 'No, can I change this record, it is scratched.' 'Ahhhh... Second turn on the left, The chemist is on the corner.')

Then there are the utilites. Stocks n shares, Notes, word and spreadsheets, super clock, calculator, calendar, text, blog writer and pic grabber and poster.

And, that’s only the start. One of the joys of my new friend is finding all the rest of the stuff you can download and run for free, or nearly nothing. It’s also the weakness. She can eat up time. It’s a work machine, a toy, an education and finally, did I tell you? It’s works? That’s the bit I can’t believe. 5 rewarding minutes spent with her is like a week with another resulting in failure. You choose.

Loyalty grows and she never leaves my side. My laptop is in a jealous sulk and my workstation is ready to dump me and isn’t even talking to the network. ‘But it’s only a phone...’ I hear you say. ‘There are plenty more phones in the sea.’ Yeah right! Thought you’d say that. Well, I can’t listen to that now. I just have to check to see if Stephen Fry was up for the ISDN linked voice over in London before filming this morning. He shouldn’t have had that last voddie! I suppose, after a night shoot, you’d need something to help you sleep. Twitterific!

So, Happy Valentine iPhone. Listen, are you doing anything on Saturday? You see, I’ve found this lovely restaurant... What do you think? Don’t worry. I’ll plug you in for a re-charge later afterwards... Whatya say?

Very Short Story: Friday Night Mobile Marketing: Dublin 2012

2009-02-10T08:22:00.000-08:00

Keith left the front door of his apartment and tweeted.

Keith: ‘OK. I’ve left.’

Fachna: ‘Stuck in a lift, should be there in 20.’

Sophie: ‘I hate snow. Who knows. 1 hour?’

Keith @ Sophie: ‘Come when the kids are down.’

Sophie @ Keith: ‘I’m hardly leaving when they’re running around. Am I...’

Fachna: ‘It’s decided. Goggins’ at 9.30. So sick of this lift guys. Something smells baaad and it’s me. Not this time anyway! J’

Passing the Cineplex Keith was vouchered. ‘Mermaids of the Caribbean with Bradly Armpit and Sterile Creep. 30% off with this voucher. Offer till 9.30pm, Dun Laoghaire Branch.’ ‘Damn’, thought Keith. ‘I need to leave BrightKite on so the crew can follow. I’ll be voucher central by the time I arrive.’

He was right. 5 minutes walking - 5 vouchers. One a minute. Vouchers for tyres, burgers, holidays, a charity and bizarrely, free dog grooming had found his iPhone and entered it as he moved toward his local. ‘How did they know I have a dog?’

Text from Sophie: ‘Where are you? I’m at the back – smoking section. Guinness?’ Reply: ‘Yep. There in a bit’.

iPod time. Girl from Impanema retro-electro. Free iTune with a Big Mac. Quite good really, he thought.

Hitting Goggin’s he went straight to the smoking section. Empty. Panic set in. Did they go somewhere else without telling me? Text to Sophie: ‘Thought you said Goggins’ smoking section. Where are you’ Reply: ‘Patience pet. I’m on the loo. Are they there yet?’ Keith breathed a sigh of relief and sat down.

‘Heya!’ It was Shelley. ‘Hey Shells. Sophie’s in the bog. Drink?’ said Keith. ‘Thought she said an hour?’ said Shelley. ‘Sophie O’Neil, not Sophie Sophie. Look. Fachna’s stuck in a lift, but he’s on cam.’ ‘Hilarious,’ said Shell, and clicked ferociously on her screen.

Both Sophies arrived at the table at the same time and joined Keith and Shell. Fachna cammed from the lift with the help of Hotel wifi. Keith sat back and surveyed the crew, taking the odd suck from his pint.

‘So. Any news?’

There was a short pause while they all looked at each other, then at their phones and then they exploded with laughter. ‘Not in the last 30 seconds ya eejit,’ said Sophie Sophie. ‘But we’ll keep you posted!’ Then each, in turn, picked up their respective phone from the table and started tapping. ‘Another monosyllabic Friday in Goggins’,’ thought Keith and gestured the barman for a fresh pint. ‘I should’ve stayed at home!’ Then he took out his own iPhone and joined them… each in their own respective personalized mobile silo lifeworld interconnected by messaging, tweets and status updates; separated by a few feet of table and a few drinks, or in Fachna’s case, a few miles and the wall of the lift stuck between the 14^th and 15^th. Videos and pics passed. Occasional snickers and the odd… ‘Get a look at this! Have you downloaded this one?’ ‘That is so cool. Send a link.’ And then back to tapping.

Tweet: Sophie @ Keith: ‘This is so ****ing boring. Let’s get out of here. Have some fun if u want to.’ Keith @ Sophie: ’15 mins. Your place.’ Sophie got up suddenly and speaking as she left said, ‘I’ll see yous. Don’t wait up.’ Keith @ Sophie ‘Kiss kiss – Mwah!’ Sophie @ Keith ‘J’

Keith was vouchered again on the way back to Sophie’s and annoyingly one was a ‘Buy 1 get 1 Free’ for Guinness at Goggins’. ‘Reliability in a World of Change. Offer closes midnight.’ ‘Might have numbed the boredom,’ thought Keith.

Reaching the door he got a text from Fachna ‘Hey mate. Out of the lift now so off cam. Where are you guys? Physically I mean.’ Keith replied: ‘Sorry mate, you missed it, home now’. ‘Bo**ocks,’ texted Fachna. ‘What a Friday night that was!’ Keith felt guilty. Poor Fachna. So not fair on him.

But as he shut the door to Sophie’s apartment he heard a baby’s distraught cry. ‘He’s up,’ called Sophie. ‘Damn it!’ Keith looked up the stairs and listened as Sophie picked her infant son up from his cot, and carried him to the bedroom. He looked at the TV screen flashing away in the front room, and he looked again at Fachna’s text.

Text to Fachna: ‘Feck it mate. Goggin’s in 10 mins it is. You need a Guinness. It’s on me.’

10 Digital Attitudes to help your Company Survive the Recession

2009-01-21T07:49:00.000-08:00

1) Big Online Brand Lessons for Offline Brands

The brands that will weather the recession are online brands like Amazon, Google and Pay Pal. Web only brands, great market share, and they know what they are doing. They are also flexible, and do not need tonnes of bricks and mortar to do business. Did you ever see that documentary on Amazon? Huge warehouses... thousands of miles of conveyor belts, millions of books and almost no people. All brands have to learn from these and become more efficient, and by efficient, I mean net driven. A little investment today creates great efficiency and a recession proof path to market. Not doing digital means not being flexible, efficient, modern or competitive in today’s world of marketing. No digital front door, no digital communications and a huge limitation on the number of customers.

2) Carrying out your own research

First class of Bus Org in 1984, and Greg O’Conner asked what the most important element of any business was. He wrote the school books on Bus Org at the time. No one guessed... The answer? Market research... A lesson I never forgot it... probably because I slept through the rest of the course.

Research online is more efficient than research has ever been. But, be warned, buying software is no more likely to make you a researcher than booking a hotel room makes your chat with drink softened strangers a research focus group. Still, I recommend buying the best software you can, not the cheapest, and make sure there’s training and support and you can save thousands on expensive market research options. Inquisite is good but costs a bit. Cheap/free software like surveymonkey is just too simple, and will never give you the outputs you need. Like everything else, you gets what you pays for! Use other software to research word of mouth online. Quick, efficient and clean. Net Behaviour can also help here with our funky new buzz monitor service.

3) Added Value

More for the same money, especially when services are bundled together. More impressions, more tracking, more reporting, more data, more customers delivered to the client. We just have to work harder and we’ll make the same money!

4) Inspiration and the Multi-disciplinary

Now is the time for multi-disciplinary people on the pay roll. The set that can turn their hand to most things, but most importantly have special interests of their own, which constitutes them as experts in one or two sectors. Someone is good at video games in the office, someone else can blog, another has a keen eye for good viral marketing executions, while someone else can get stuck in the backend of data driven systems and get outputs that are in plain English. These are the people for today’s marketing team. Quirky originality and talent is good. This is the age of the nerd.

5) Packaging and Bundling Reductions

We’re seeking to bundle our services to create efficiencies for our customer base, and think you should do the same. Advertising, brand tracking, creative and blog monitoring with a single all-in value cost. Also you should explore such things like content generation, customer relationship management, but above all, make sure that any mix you come up with is innovative and creative and exciting, but simple and buyable too. Fix a price people can afford above inviting a negotiation which ever increasing costs that will make a customer nervous. And, stick to the price.

6) Digital Literacy

Without foreknowledge of the scale of the disasters that would hit 2009, I did loosely predict in a previous post that the digital literacy divide would grow, and today staying on the right side of that literacy equation for the modern marketer has become both an imperative for themselves and for their companies. The most efficient way of doing things is also the best value, and computer driven solutions are 1000s of times more efficient than others... especially for advertisers. The net is more efficient in terms of time, cost, value, flexibility, effectiveness and consequently gives better ROI. The super Google PPC bidding system for example has revolutionised ad buying for all media in my opinion and it works because of giant computer silos munching all that valuable search/need data. What we’ve seen from these guys is only the beginning, but understanding and learning how to get the most from Google inventions is only at the early stages too. When you hear someone who says ‘I know a guy who knows all that stuff,’ they don’t! No one does. It is the utterance and wishful thinking on the part of the net illiterate who wants to persuade you they are safely on the digital bandwagon.

Indeed travelling today’s digital landscape is an ongoing battle to speak new languages and understand new concepts as you progress. It’s an ongoing exploration of such scale it would have made the likes of Alexander the Great or Marco Polo stay at home and stare at the wall. But then again, these guys were at the forefront of the technology of their time. Siege engines, war machines, cartography and natural science maybe, but there's a lesson there too surely.

7) Experimental Marketing

With new challenges come new approaches. Innovation is the cornerstone of successful marketing in 2009, and this means mixing old modes of communication, and coming up with killer ideas which explain the essence of a brand in the modern context. (Easy to say, hard to do, has to be done.) There is no time for new marketers to say they don’t understand the net, or don’t believe in digital, because it is just too efficient and turn-on-and-offable to ignore. People who think this way are as inescapably on the verge of extinction as those who defended the steam engine. Yes, other things work, and will get you there safely, but if you don’t see it, you don’t get it or don’t want to because you haven’t the time to take to understand why digital is better. Maybe you’re afraid of going too fast?

From a pure advertising point of view, lessons from the Walkers crisps in recent times show that this could be the most creative and exciting cross mode, including digital, marketing time this century. I want to taste Cajun Squirrel crisps, to see if they do taste better than my flavour, New York Pastrami and Gherkin and I’ll buy a pack as a result as will about 3 million others in a similar predicament. That's clever marketing, and who'd have though it would be for the humble bag of crisps.

8) The Opportunity presented by Needs Must

We all must still do business despite the incessant news of doom and gloom, and we just have to be cleverer about it. And if budgets have been cut, you still have to do something. In fact, I’d say that those who can’t afford today’s digital solutions probably can’t afford anything... and have probably already gone bust. But, for those who haven’t... seek and you shall find and who dares wins and other clichés. With digital comes a myriad of opportunities. Those who were there when the dot com bubble burst and got the net bug knew there were opportunities then despite the almost total lack of business. Things are infinitely rosier now thanks to broadband, iPhone, Social Networks and the rest of the tech developments that exponentially expand the reach of this most versatile two directional medium the world has ever seen.

9) Cheap Luxuries Mentality brings the Masses Online in Droves

An economic truth: when times get tougher people still need to cheer themselves up with luxuries and the cheaper ones grow in popularity. Pizzas and takeaways replace the restaurant, cans in replaces pub nights out, lipstick and knickers are sold by the truckload instead of that gúna nua. Video rentals also increase. Well, the net has cheap or free music, video, TV, films, chat, dating, games, Skype, web text and even porn... and all-in for a single cheap monthly charge. So, this is where your customers are going are spending more and more of their spare time and they’re likely to have much more of this too. Net use kills time so more effectively than TV or radio, and young hardly ever buy newspapers these days.

10) IP Society

And best of all the Internet is a social activity. When you maybe can’t afford to be physically social, virtually social beats solo every time. TV used to be social, but now people are watching videos in bedrooms, on DVD players, or other devices, so they’re not sitting getting embarrassed in front of their parents when something rude happens on the box in the corner.

These days, things are much less family oriented and much more solo and this where the net comes into its own. It’s a physically solo, virtually social networking balance which seems to satisfy the social needs of humans in this progressively solitary age. Sitting alone at home with a can chatting or playing a game or watching videos with mates on the Internet feels much less sad and lonely than the same evening spent staring at Desperate Housewives, ER and QI. Your mates are home alone with you after all - texting, chatting and calling you for free.

And, for the business man, since your customers are online, you need to be there, or they won’t even know you exist.

Listening to the Blogosphere

2009-01-12T04:33:00.000-08:00

Listening, I was taught as a child, is an art. Quite strange really, for a house where all seven of us kids had something to say that was just so important we all had to say it at same time while getting steadily louder and louder until either the food was gone or someone lost their voice, or tempers frayed and it ended in chaos. In fact, dinner in the Kelly house resembled less the orderly meal of the model of the civilized South Dublin society than the scene from a Rwandan refugee camp when the UN are flinging rations to the heaving, starving, roaring masses.

That being said... there was a lesson to be learned. If you want to say something, find a calm quiet forum to say it, communicate it in a clear, calm, consistent manner and if it doesn’t get heard, write it down. That’s what blogs are for. They are for writing something down for others to read in their own time. If readers don’t agree with what you’ve written, they can comment, again, in their own time, and you can reply in yours. The problem with the Irish blogosphere however is that it is as crowded as the aforementioned refugee camp, and though everyone is writing it down instead of shouting, few are listening. There’s just too much noise. The quality of what is written varies hugely too. Few have the time to sift through the good, the bad and the ugly of the thousands of blogs out there to find the relevant and interesting discussions that they’re looking for. RSS feeds help, but I find with these I still miss out on new blogs and relevant discussions that I haven’t got tagged for my reader. To be frank, I think the Irish blogosphere is a lot like the Kelly Kitchen to the power of n. Some things never change.

Well, that’s not quite true... because one doesn’t listen to the Internet, (yet). One has to search, find and read, and this is what a lot of people do when they have an issue, like a health issue like a child with Down’s Syndrome or a pregnancy maybe. Or otherwise if they are making a big purchase, like car insurance or a house a house move. Or alternately if something has made them angry or emotional they may want to find other people in a similar state. Times like these are when the blogosphere comes into its own.

But what if you are a company and you need to listen to what’s being said about you, your products or services. Well, this is where you need help.

There are many ways of searching the net for blogs, and finding them... of course. Everyone knows that. But there are just a few ways of listening to what is being said on the millions of blogs that live, are born and die every day in cyberspace.

Net Behaviour has some funky software that helps us do it for you. We can listen for any mentions of companies or topics of interest, or people, and give reports on the level of noise, or buzz around specific topics or items of interest. We can then take all the comments about a topic, and categories and organise them into a report for you.

So, if you’re concerned about what’s being said about your company, or a company you represent online... talk to us about helping keep things kosher blogwise. It is important because it is so easy for a disgruntled employee, or client to mess things up for you in blogspace... or even a sly competitor for the matter. It’s always better to keep tabs on these things especially if you are planning a clear marketing message. The last thing you want is for banter on the blogosphere to pull the rug out from under you before you begin. Forewarned is forearmed after all. We can help because we know how these things work, and if we know what you want to achieve, we can ensure that if something is going on behind your blog back you’ll know about it and you’ll be able to get your message across.

Now that you’ve read my blog post and seen what I had to say, can you please pass the ketchup? Sheesh!

Make that 26

2009-01-05T03:14:00.001-08:00

...and Instant messaging!

25 Reason’s Why Faceboook and Linkedin beat Email hands down

2008-12-11T06:16:00.000-08:00

1. No Spam
2. No Spam filter
3. No storage issues
4. No mysterious blocked message issues
5. No backups necessary
6. Connect to friends and family ONLY
7. Connect to work colleagues and peers ONLY
8. No visible contact details to those who don’t need to know
9. Syncing with Outlook
10. Twitter style widgets for light hearted and serious updates
11. Log in anywhere
12. They’re free
13. No downloads needed so no compatibility issues
14. They work really well with iPhone and smartphones: work/life balance mail on the go!
15. Confidential messaging when necessary
16. Seamlessly mashes with Location Based Systems on smartphones
17. Linking and networking!
18. Your CV and History in your own words
19. Pictures and Tags (Flicr meets Ma.gno.lia)
20. Send documents, files and links with no spam filters
21. A few perfectly targeted, non-irritating and relevant ads
22. Blog link dissemination
23. File hosting (PowerPoint and Typepad so far)
24. Link to relevant industry groups
25. Smaller computer memory and less processing needed because it’s all online

There will always be email, for work communications, sending documents and keeping track of communications, but it is becoming less and less popular.

There are only so many people you can speak to in a day and more of this speaking is happing through online social networks like Facebook and Linkedin in. The Bebo generation take this for granted and they are right. The truth is that mail is being destroyed by spam as a work and social tool. It doesn’t matter how much storage you have, or whether your Gmail account will ever be deleted or not. If there is too much spam, it gets in the way. Even permissible communications can get routed in error to the Junk or Spam folders because there is a URL in the mail or a bad word or a picture or whatever. It is really irritating and happens all the time. (A wholly innocent holiday snap of son Dick riding in the Donkey Derby is unlikely to reach the recipient by email. How times have changed.)

Also, a big hassle when getting a new machine is transferring the mails over. It shouldn’t be, but it is, and legacy machines often lie around offices because they’ve got all those old mails on them. It can all be fixed with PST on the network, backups, transfers and the like, but for the small business person, or SME, it’s a serious inconvenience and requires some skill. Wizards rarely work first time and if you’re not techie enough to find a workaround, you’re stuffed! Social net communications have no such issues. These aren’t used for ‘serious’ communications at the moment, but I think it’s a no-brainer that they will be soon enough.

As machines get smaller and more mobile, or are ignored altogether in favour of iPhones and Blackberries, social nets will come into their own. The bigger machines (laptops and workstations) will be used for larger document typing, accounts, pictures, music and storage, rather than fulfilling the every minute of every day communications role they have done to date because once the phone syncs well with your machine, and everything is backed up, job done.

Also, as documents get bigger and the net gets slower or gridlocks altogether, (have you noticed the terrible 3pm slump in broadband speed when the US logs on?) social nets may become, of necessity, a realistic alternative for dependable net facilitated communication. It’s more technically efficient if everyone talks in the same location, rather than talks to each other where each has their own peculiar addresses and associated mail routers. We are all tied to a thing called bandwidth, and access to bandwidth, may become so valuable it could be seen as wealth, akin to money.

To get a big techie for a minute, as I see it, if people copy a typical mail with an attachment to several people the size of the mail is increased 100% with each copied person, so it impacts hugely on bandwidth available for everyone with large SMTP facilitated communications (SMTP is the email protocol). Senders are not only copying the same document to each other, they are also copying its format, pictures and loads of other information that isn’t used by each reader of the document. The doc in its most basic form is a text file after all. Very small indeed. However, if they send a doc to a shared webspace using FTP once (file transfer protocol) or better still HTTP (the same thing for webpages like blogs), rather than emailing several people, it is read with HTTP (hypertext transfer protocol) in a more spread out way or read and not copied or transferred with all its formatting to each user machine. It won’t clog up the bandwidth nearly as much. I’m pretty sure that’s how it should works. Techies among you feel free to correct me as I’m a day tripper in sys admin land and to be honest I haven’t even considered TCP/IP and Winsoc and all that malarkey since about 1996, so I’m sure to be a bit rusty L.

And finally there is that strange and mysterious ‘email blocked’ problem - the ultimate failure of the email system. And no it’s not my fault. No, the mailbox isn’t full. No, we’re not on a spam list. No, our Internet connection isn’t down because we can communicate through Facebook, Linked in and Gmail no problem. And yes, we get our mails from all our other clients… no problem. Mysterious, problematic, confusing and a total pain in the arse!

So, as Email fails Social Nets will win. Bring on the Nets!

Why the Golden Spider’s is important

2008-11-26T09:03:00.000-08:00

The Golden Spider awards? Important?

OK. The truth? A part of me say’s it isn’t. A bit say’s it’s a beauty parade of sites, large and small, some of which no one has ever heard of. Part of me says it’s an excuse for late night drinking in a once super-posh south Dublin hotel. Part of me say’s it’s an excuse for competitors to sneer at each other across a crowd, or for employees and bosses to have sort outs, clearing the cigarette laden air.

But then, aren’t all awards ceremonies like that. And are they the worse off for it? No. It makes precious little difference to their importance. The Golden Spiders is a forum for an industry to meet and greet, share a pint, clap and slide off home... Very therapeutic. It’s an opportunity for an industry that has taken more knocks than others to take itself seriously for once and not take itself too seriously at the same time

OK. This is where I sound older than I am, or, about the right age, but I’ve been to all of them so far (I think?) Not a grand claim, but it gives me an overview of them... and an opportunity to point out some trends.

Before the dot com boom it was a nascent awards ceremony, where a small room could contain all the major players in Ireland each person being one-third techie, one-third entrepreneur, one-third person who couldn’t get a job anywhere else. Then the Nasdaq struck a tone which shook all, and if you were on the right side of the investor fence, you were an instant multi-millionaire – on paper at least. The atmosphere of the awards had changed. An un-earned smugness and swagger crept in, accompanied by breathless ambition, greed, and some misery at missing out. The bursting of the bubble decimated the attendees and this was a time where those at the awards who were involved in the industry and who’s experience pre-dated the dot com crash could be counted on the fingers of one hand. There were five of us! The lingo and buzzword vendors had fled to fairer pastures, and the tables were populated by ‘industry’ rather than ‘internet enterprise’. The sales guys were still there, but worked for telco’s and portals, rather than tech SMEs. Then in the early 2000s, things limped along until Google fixed the net for us all. Search engines worked, things could be found, and PPC made sense and was cheap. Bebo and social sites cemented the advantage won and now we’re in the age of the iPhone, and very high levels of broadband net use for all, if you want it.

That was the difference about this year’s awards. The mobile content providers. The winning entrant involved a mobile phone system for keeping tabs on minors. I’m reliably told it works on very few phones, but I haven’t checked it. That’s not the point. The point is that the net has left the office, or home, or SoHo business model. Facebook can be conceived in the same breath as outlook, or a contacts database, without spam email. Bebo.. . the same. The buzzword is the mobile phone App. This concept was almost unimaginable even a few years ago. ( I know I’m always banging on about how things have changed, but it never ceases to amaze me, and informs views on the trajectory things might take in future). But Locle takes things a step further, marrying Facebook with location based services. The full integration of the latest developments of the social net online, with local society offline.

There was another difference with this awards. Maturity. The Internet has slowly but finally arrived in Ireland as an intrinsic and fundamental force in the media landscape. Not as an add-on for nerds and geeks, but as a centroid around which old media rotate and learn... eating audience share and headspace like a black hole. Netspace: -engaging, entertaining, informative, efficient, flexible, customizable, cheap, upgradable and full of innovation and creativity. There were few times for other media that you could make any of these claims, but most importantly, the last two – innovation and creativity. Radio Luxembourg for Radio? Hall’s Pictorial Weekly for TV? Maybe a few others, but these old media have been suffocated by top down civil society, from governments to the church with academic confusions about the role of the public service broadcaster, who owns the media in question and who is more important – the content producer or the audience. But for the net, innovation and creativity are a commonplace and for this reason the net is where I think the future of our media landscape must lie – with great ideas and the chutzpah to do something about them. Because what stood out to me about this year’s Spiders was that the creative media thinkers, innovators, inventors and entrepreneurs never seem to tire of the netspace and this is likely to be true for the mobile net too. There were loads of them there; clever, clever people doing really cool things that stretch the boundaries of communicative technology and its relationship with modern society on very limited resources. These are things that will create considerable societal change while they make a buck. Very few new enterprises do things as important as that. The vast majority make money for a single individual, but very few indeed change the way we all interact with each other.

So, why are the Spiders important? Well, if it’s only because they are a haven for Ireland’s enterprise and good ideas - that’ll do for me.

Moore Street on the Net. The Trader Segment of Netizen will Grow in Importance

2008-11-14T08:42:00.000-08:00

A recent segmentation I ran on Internet behaviour showed several groups.

Dolittles (6%): This group don’t do much and could be termed low intensity Internet users. They report that they all use the Internet for email and chat and they will use all of the other Internet categories, but much less often than the other groups.

Media Consumers (31%): These are the consumers of net content in all its forms, and from all form of traditional media online (RTE, Irish Times, Sky etc), so I’ve called them the media net. Yes, but they’re net surfers with a purpose rather than aimless geeks enjoying the beauty of things digital. This group will go to read news of all sorts. They’ll be financially savvy and are well educated. They also have good jobs and incomes too. These use the net as an information resource and a career enhancing tool to aid decision making and economic communication.

Networkers (8%): Perhaps once considered the ‘sad’, depressive net addicts this group is now recognized as a growing segment of net activity, and they’re using the net tool to help extend their overt social nature... (or over compensated social phobia) and they love it.

These are the group who are into chatting and networking. They like to be linked and bring on the buzz of chit chat and juicy gossip. Yes, more girls in this group, but only just. They like chat, user generated content, bulletin boards and dating. These are the net socialites who get their fix of friendships and talk online.

I think this group are especially important as the trend towards a more digitally mediated social existence and staying in contact with ‘everyone you ever knew’ to feel part of the community is a strong one. It may just be a new stage in reaching maturity, or feed into broader psychological needs, but its there and will only become more prevalent in society and persistent in nature.

At an extreme, it gets silly. Is someone with 14 contacts less happy or socially or economically adept than someone with 100? Or 500? Doubt it, and studies would indicate that 50 is the max number of relationships people can handle at all. (For Lions its 30). Business contacts may be different of course and it will be quality not quantity that is important there too. Get this for a wheeze. There’s a cheat on Bebo so you can pretend you have 100s of friends. (Hope there’s one for LinkedIn L)

Mappers, Restaurants and Cars (42%): Then, there are those who use the net for restaurants, car trading and maps.

They might use email, but the net hasn’t impacted on this group socially or economically at all really. These tend to be older men who perhaps don’t have the time or the need to be chatting to their peers who aren’t that net savvy anyway. The net makes sense to them when they can print off a map or a timetable, but the rest of the stuff? Well, really! It’s more for the kids isn’t it, though he doesn’t understand what exactly it is that they do when they do it. But, he’s (as it typically a he) is proud of his net connectedness nevertheless. This group you won’t see on the web that much really except for newspapers, Google and main stream media.

Traders (13%): This is the group that are the main focus of this post. These use the Internet like an ATM... a ticketing machine for flights, banking and shopping. Functional stuff. 13% of Internet users are in this distinct group. Doing things without having to queue for less money, or when they need to upgrade their phone.

But, within this group are those that use eBay and Classifieds. The tech savvy ‘trotter’s independent traders’ of the great web boot sale in the ether. This is one of the most important sectors to Ireland Internet economy. The invisible spivs, the attic hunter gatherers, the ebayerati.

What exemplifies this group from the others is their need to make money from the net rather than spend time on it or buy things on it, though they will be include those who do. They ‘make’ money either in savings on goods purchased in other markets, or by selling and trading. And, I think in the current economic climate, this group is set to grow...

eBay consider people to be basically honest, and they’ve been proven right. Yes, there are always some people who’ll try to sell fake goods, but we don’t blame the platform, but rather the seller, and that’s the way it should be.

For example, I’ve always known that if I buy a €5 watch when I’m on holiday in Tunisia and it turns out not to be a real Rolex it’s totally my fault for being such a mean muppet – thinking I can take the piss in a third world country and even haggling him down from €20 and thinking I was clever. God, I so deserved it. (‘Wanna buy Rolex, Tag, Swatch? Reel Gold! Verry good price for you my friend. You Ireesh? My Mother she ees Ireesh. I write letter to her in Ireesh.’ And I thought I had the upper hand. what was I thinking?)

No, there’s is no such thing as a free lunch. And, the same applies online. But, on the other hand I also know that there are good carpets to be bought in Turkey, or art, or whatever, so I’ll have few qualms about taking that risk. eBay is a bit like that for me. Great bargains for the discerning purchaser. It’s just like the real world. There are millions of things to buy online, if you look and it doesn’t take long with a little practice. eBay should be a primary port of call before you shell out full whack for new goods with all the VAT attached. Very often, the only difference between an eBay purchase and a retail one is the box and Styrofoam it’s packed in, and even that can be an inconvenience to get rid of. Then there are tickets, brand new goods, antiques and all sorts of stuff you will only be able to buy online - if you look that is.

There’s a new breed of Irish seller to join the street sellers of Moore’s Street and Camden Street, and they’re waiting with their wares to sell to the highest bidder on the net.

This group don’t look like traders though. They are homemakers, women with kids, men who look for car parts online, fixers, menders and make doers. Oh, and a few petty crooks of course. These are the people who keep the family budget ticking over and make sure the car gets the kids to school. These are the head down and work hard bunch and these are the group I think are kind of recession proof, philosophically speaking anyway. It’ll be hard alright but they’ll manage, and if they don’t remember a recession themselves, their parents and grandparents won’t waste any time in reminding them.

And finally, I think we should all take a leaf out of the philosophy of the net trader. For the giant Irish middle class there’s no shame in saving money in Lidl any more is there. It’s a competition for how much you’ve saved, rather than being concerned about how much you have to spend. And to sell and trade things you don’t have to have a stall on the main street and the voice of 10,000 Woodbines - it can be done from your front room. I think it’ll catch on.

And Finally...

And finally, though these groups add up to 100% they are not ‘discrete’ groups. They cross over each other and almost all use email and Google etc to some extent (there are those that don’t believe it or not). So, there will always be exceptions, that is, groups that don't fit into these bands, but these groups represent a statistically valid generality with whatever insight that can provide. If you know a find a different group not described above they may reside within one of mine, or the Dolittles, or they are just new, or strange. Or indeed, they maybe have been so niche the weren't picked up by my sample. Gamers, for example, are omitted, and they are becoming steadily more important. But, they fall between stools in my breakdown... somewhere between social networks and chatters including behaviours of both. Why do they fall between stools? Well, because the stats told me they did. And, what does that mean? Well, if you think about it gaming is a social communicative practice after all, but there is no typical ‘gamer’ behaviour online on sites other than gaming sites that differentiates the gamer, as a type of Internet user, from the others. In other words, gamers are normal, just like the rest of us or there’s a gamer in all of us. Gamers don't use the web any differently to the rest of us... at least not yet with any statistical significance anyway. That will probably change in the coming years.

But tell me what you think? Do you know some groups that need exploration? Is there more to this than meets my eye? Let me know. I always listening, very interested and keen to learn.

And in the meantime why not get an eBay account and check it out. You know you want to and you could maybe save a bundle! J

Stacked Media Consumption with Internet Protocol

2008-10-07T09:17:00.000-07:00

Picture the scene. Person sits at the TV, some music station, with significant other who’s playing a game on Xbox with the headphones on. The mobile is on the arm of the chair, and the laptop on the lap. (S)he is downloading music, transferring them to the iPod on the iPhone while checking the Bebo page, changing the flashbox for the new Kaiser Chiefs vid, answering mails, (emails that is) and scribbling on the wall (on the social network, not the actual wall. OK?) (S)he also uploads some pics from the night before that a mate MMSed to the public email account. (S)he got them on the phone that night ffs. What a laugh. Select list: Friends: Send. Then, they’re done. She waits till he’s killed and then shuts the lappy, kills the telly but hits record for later and the partner stops and drops the console on the shelf. They head off for a walk by the sea, hand in hand, sharing the newly downloaded album, one earpiece each. Ahhh. Sweet.

This is a true story, it really happened, just the other day, and just like I told it. But what does it tell us? It tells me that the way we see media consumption is totally out of date. Radio.. one measurement. One type of consumption... ¼ hours. TV... one measurement... OTSs. Newspaper... One measurement and daily slots. And, then comes the Internet. Don’t get me started. Other non-Internet media see their consumption in a vacuum. You are watching TV, and not doing anything else, like reading the newspaper, or checking your emails, or texting, or having the radio on at the same time. As if we are back in the 1950s when whole families would sit around and listen to the wireless because it was the only medium in the house. Those days were over in the 1950s

But now all of these media can be delivered over IP, and it doesn’t matter what physical client was used to deliver the message. It is just media consumption. Not Internet. Not audio-visual. Not multi-modal. If it’s news, it’s not TV news or radio news or newspaper news. Though it might be each of these. And what is Internet news exactly? All of the above? It’s just news.... The barrier between the different delivery vehicles for the message have got so blurred, they’re largely irrelevant.

Worked example: Let’s think of TV news. TV over the TV, or the TV on the PC streamed or podcasted, or recorded TV, which isn’t the same as Video or DVD or PVR or PPV. Is it WiFi? Ariel on the house? Cable? 3G? Broadband? Or is it good old analogue, with rabbit’s ears sitting on the top of the box as we use in Galway three channel-land (one is in Irish though L). And what about TV over the iPlayer, or TV news on my 3G iPhone. It that no longer TV? You say potayto, I say potahto. You say it’s TV, I say it’s mobile video 3G news content from RTE.ie with text and video delivered over my local WiFi broadband hotspot for free. Oh, and I went to irish-times.com as well and sent a webtext. Ah, let’s call the whole thing off!

Does it matter? Does it make me different if I have a different way of receiving the message? Does it make the message different? Em... No. It doesn’t.

The truth is that all of the different delivery mechanics for the TV news are getting confused with the physical boxes used to consume them, the signals and codes they are communicated in, the methods of paying for them, the way they are watched – recorded or live and where they are watched – stationary, on the move, work, home, car etc... So confused, they are almost un-researchable, and un-countable.... unless they are all over IP. And, in a short time, this will be the case. IP can tell if the TV content consumer is mobile, interactive, recorded or downloaded, or pay per view because IP all comes from servers, with ads and creative’s that are requested, sent and tracked, counted and billed. It isn’t simple stuff mind. The exact opposite in fact. But IP will win out in the end of the day, because IP knows what is requesting the content, where, and in what form. IP is the only ‘it’ that knows this. Analogue will never know it. DAB, digital audio band, knows it, because it too is digital and IP(ish). IP doesn’t know everything, but it knows a lot.

So. Questions: What is the Internet? What is on the Internet? What is it used for? Where is it used? What about people consuming Internet and other media at the same time? Well, these are all kind of the wrong questions. The Internet isn’t a thing, like TV, or radio or a newspaper. It’s a vehicle for things like TV, radio and newspapers, and a whole lot more, like social nets, email and phone calls. When we measure the Internet what do we count? Answer: The lot.

The truth is that it is possible to measure what media people consume, even if they consume lots of different media at the same time, but, we’ll have to do it in a whole new way. Not with the existing structures of national media measurement, because these are out-moded and obsolete, and imply a way of living that isn’t the case anymore. They are pre-digital. They also imply nationally bounded media consumption, something that hasn’t existed now for many years and will never exist again. Sadly, this is also the rationale behind the Joint National Internet Measurement, as if the Internet were a nationally bounded entity rather than being something that contains all of the other media, and is global. It’s kind of the whole point of the net I would have thought.

Anyway. Back to my two friends. The modern media consumers. Well, they don’t care about any of this stuff. Music? Free. Video? Well there’s online, TV, iPhone, iPod, Video Pod, laptop, PC, Cinema, DVD, PVR, SkyBox, iPlayer.... and who cares. News is just news, whether it’s print, on paper, or on a screen, or aertel, or a text, on the RTE website, or a newspaper site, or an RSS newsfeed, or an email subscription, or a paper flyer.... and again, who cares. They don’t. But they do care about the news, and sometimes they even know where they’ve seen it, but that isn’t the point. They don’t say, I saw the new Kaiser Chiefs video on the analogue TV the other day. They say they saw the new video. They say ‘did you hear the news’, and often don’t remember where they heard it, exactly... because they were doing loads of other things at the same time, and it doesn’t matter where you heard it, as long as you heard it. The delivery mechanic, the medium... isn’t the messag.e in a digital world.

So, we need to start counting messages, not media, and then work backward and infer, with probability the medium they were consumed on, by, for example, counting the media that a person has access to, and their propensity to use them. And what happens to measurement then? Audiences increase hugely for content, but maybe individual media audiences are vulnerable, because maybe, in truth, they are dropping. This is the case for newspapers for example. In the fullness of digital time we’ll know more about the media used when we look at IP. We won’t know everything but we’ll know a lot more than we do right now and it will stack up. And, when the content is consumed, over IP, from servers, will be able to track where it’s consumed, and measure the efficacy of the broadcast... just like we do in Internet land every day. Simple (kinda).

Economic Downturn Impacts on Irish Online

2008-10-03T08:25:00.000-07:00

Purchases of Goods & Services - New Report
Drop in quantities of products and services bought online since 2007

Online research for products down by as much as 10% for some goods

Fall in online purchasing activity linked to decline in economic activity

Dublin, IRELAND - September 22nd 2008: Irish shoppers are spending less money buying good and services online and are spending less time on the Internet doing research on their favourite products, according to a landmark report that has just been published by Dublin-based digital communications consultancy, Net Behaviour.

The Net Behaviour Report - the most extensive research that has been carried out on Irish internet usage - contains the Net Behaviour (NB) Consumer Index, which looks at the propensity of Irish people to research and purchase goods and services online.... read more

How the Internet is Changing the World

2008-10-03T07:57:00.000-07:00

OK. I’m indulging myself here... so, sorry if it’s boring. These are just some ideas, so skip this post if you’re looking for a quick hit of Irish net data.

Take yourselves back, 2300 odd years and Alexander's conquests have expanded the size of the known world from Europe east to India, Afghanistan and beyond. New trade routes, language, communication and the opening of the library at Babylon are the result. 2000 years and the Roman’s are building roads all over their Empire, and walls and aqueducts - paths for language, culture, post and armies to travel upon. 1700 odd years and Emperor Constantine’s coinage has the invincible sun on one side and the Christian holy labrum on the other.... (perhaps the first mobile marketing campaign) bringing together diverse peoples behind common symbols. The Renaissance and the Europeans re-discover the classical age after the desert of the dark ages, and printing begins. The 20th century and things speed up apace. Trains, planes and automobiles combine with post, telephone, Marconi’s radio and TV... all shrinking the world. And then comes the net.

The net may be more important to the growth, development and perpetuation of human civilization than all of the other changes mentioned combined. I’ll give five reasons, though there will be others...

Global communication of ideas, instantaneously... across media. No need for roads, or tickets, post or paper... and (almost) everyone can use the net. The democratic idea generation and dissemination much feared after Gutenberg almost 600 years earlier, has finally arrived
Central publishing and self publishing makes social and political control and ownership of ideas and knowledge almost impossible. Even powerful knowledge like how to make a neuclear weapon requires merely access to Google. Government propoganda has never been so difficult and may indeed become largely obsolete
Mobile internet makes idea generation and dissemination instantaneous and moves them from the post office to the pocket.
Learning and idea generation speeds up by perhaps a factorial of 10, every six months. Wikipedia is 7 years old, has 10 million articles (at least) and it’s updated every day by thousands of authors. Brittanica takes a lifetime to write and the paper edition at least is a little bit out of date even before it goes to print. There’s a quality difference, but still...
Internet protocol takes the best from all the media that have gone before, and centralizes them seamlessly. The medium isn’t the message, and neither is the format. The message is the message and anyone can produce one. Listen, read, see online or on your mobile... regardless of whether the initial content producer worked for a TV station, radio, newspaper or was a blogger. And then readers can comment on the message for all the other consumers of the message and the comment... a whole new broadcast message. And with web 2.0 this is only the beginning...

The net is the warp drive for human exploration, idea generation and communication, where TV was merely a pulse. Blogs carry the Gutenberg revolution to its extreme, while mobiles democratize the moving images of TV, and turns them into moving images on the move generated by the mover. Need to see pictures from Mars? Need results from recent medical trials? Need to say I love you to someone on the other side of the planet? Need to secretly broadcast a war in some far off corner? Need to develop a new idea with experts scattered hither and yon? Need a pizza? Enter the net. And anyone can do these things all by themselves.

I really think we live in incredible times and we take them for granted because we’ve got too used to amazing changes in the way we live, how we learn, how we talk to each other and how we listen. We suffer from Internet exhaustion as it’s too difficult to keep bothering to pluck up the energy and see the implications of the newest gadget. The iPhone is the latest... but there’s another gadget along every six months. And most of us are just too busy with the buzz of everyday life to sit down and play with these machines and see what their very existence implies. But it is truly awesome, inspiring and humbling stuff and once in a while I think it’s just good to sit back and soak up some scale.

Visiting the Mobile Marketing Conference

2008-09-26T08:38:00.000-07:00

I went to the excellent Mobile Marketing Conference in the Gresham yesterday, organised by Dan Morrissy, it was a real eye opener, and a great conference.

Picture the scene: cynical media measurement guy (me) sits at back of hall with no less than four net connection tools at his finger tips. I was at a conference, but I was ready for anything. My shiny new and oh-so-lovely 3G iPhone which requires a blog post all of its own; my recently out-of-date XDA orbit, which I still love for all its windows mobile features, though it only connects at the speed of Edge, or GPRS unless you're borrowing someone’s free WiFi; my funky little Vodafone 3G modem for the lappy, and the Gresham free hotspot I wasn’t banking on. Vint Cerf would’ve been impressed. What could go wrong? Well, I forgot my power cables and as luck would have it I would be offline in approximately 22 minutes, if I didn’t use the machines for anything. At all. If I did? 3. OMG. I quickly get them couriered to reception and it was a good job... as emails needing immediate attention streamed in throughout the day like a child’s runny autumn nose. Everytime I thought I’d got it all mopped up... there was another little drip starting that was only going to get bigger if I didn’t get a good blow in right now.

All these phones and connections and I was at a conference about phones, and connections. Christ. I really thought I’d had enough of technology as a whole for one day, but the quality of the speakers was nothing short of utterly compelling. They were all saying different things. All were coming at the topic from different angles and all agreeing somewhat while defending their own patch as if there was a siege on, but I felt they were just not putting all the bits together to get a wholistic view. That was for the audience. It’s not an industry that meets often, which is why such conferences are important. And, it’s a new industry, which means that, with a few notable exceptions, many have been working in isolation to carve a business out of their slice of their vision of how the business of mobile advertising and market will work, and works best and, of course, trying to put bread on the table. New businesses need to turn a buck, or they quickly become no businesses. Quality of note came from Ogilvy, Parvenio, Puca, Return2Sender and Peter McPartlin and many others were inspiring, interesting and entertaining.

One speaker (Mark Congiusta from Irish International if I remember rightly) started by saying... “Just so you know, Google is getting into the mobile space, so everything is going to be OK.” All laughed, because thats what most of us felt. If the big G is getting involved, they have a plan... a huge one that governments couldn’t even afford, couldn’t even understand in fact. A plan that will fix the mobile phone market just like they fixed the Internet. And Google is even bidding for radio spectrum in the states. Oh... Those guys. It’s so scary when people that are so rich and successful do stuff we haven’t even thought of. You have to love them or hate them... and they don’t care either way. How cool it is to have a kid in your class who’s that big and smart and potentially dangerous. Stockholm syndrome is inevitable.

There was some confusion initially as to whether the GPhone was a phone, or an operating system. Bit of both? Well, no. It’s a phone that has the operating system – Android – on it. Google seems to be trying to pull the MS Dos trick from yester year out of their wizard bag. Get everyone using the same operating system, or one of a few, and, as happened with choo choo trains, then we’re all sitting on the same gauge line and can start to concentrate on designing better rolling stock. Think about it. Isn’t it wonderful for home computer users there are only really three operating systems? PC (with Microsoft, windows, XP or Vista), Mac (with Mac OS), and Linux (with open source resilient free systems so popular for notebooks in the developing world, on servers and with the Asus eee). We have Bill Gates and MS DOS to thank for that. It’s an utter disaster in the world of the mobile on the other hand. Someone said casually there were around 1500 handset types. Jesus wept.

And the carriers don’t talk to each other, so there’ll be no joy soon from there. Each carrier will have god knows how many phones they’re selling, or has sold in the last few years. When you speak to them, they know everything about their users, but there are two problems. They’re only talking about their own users, not the users of other carriers. Of course, I hear you say... but no. It’s a mess. And worse than that. They can’t really text all their users with ads. It’s against the law. Users have to go to the mobile home page portal. Wisps of memory come to mind of the sunny Internet days of the Internet hompage giants, Oceanfree, IOL and Eircom.net. Back when everyone was on dial up. In fact because there were only three pages that almost everyone had to go to at some stage, the JNIR online sample was an extraordinarily valid one for its time, and the online more robust than the offline. But, thank god, all of that has changed. People choose their own homepage, because they know how to use the net and because they can access it in so many ways, and they’ve discovered the wonders the web has to offer, not just the quality of the default telco portal.

One speaker from Parvenio cut to the truth this fragmented mobile landscape gives us. Let’s say there is a campaign with a cool creative. Carrier: “we have 134,000 users for this target market”. Advertisers: “Wow, so, I can reach 134,000 with my ad then?” Carrier: “Em... no. Not all visit the homepage. 18,000 do though.” Advertiser: “Oh, 18,000. Big difference. And they’ll be able to watch the video too?” Carrier: “Em... no. Not all the phones will be able to show the video.” Advertiser: “Oh, right, of course. Different phones have different capabilities. So, how many will be able to see it? 15,000? 13,000?” Carrier: “Em.. no. Not that many.” Advertiser : “Aren’t you going to tell me?” Carrier: “Do I have to?” Advertiser: “ I think you do actually.” Carrier: “OK. Be gentle. Nine.” Advertisers: “Nine thousand?” Carrier: “No. Nine. JUST NINE OK?”

With all those phones, and different formats of creative, and different operating systems, and carriers that don’t talk to each other and agree some general standards – things could be seen to be a bit of a mess in the telco portal arena.

OK. But I have an iPhone. (Yey!) It’s my mini-Mac, my iPod in my pocket and I can choose my own homepage. And, I think, come Christmas time when hundreds of thousands, of iPhone style mobys are sold, most people will have left the portal homepage too, and will just Google and YouTube throughout the day. For example, I read the Irish Times on my phone on the bus on my way home while listening to the inbuilt iPod... very comfortably. I checked my mail. Sent and received texts. Simple, happy, and all with the one device. So, because there is a much better way, this homepage mobile portal situation just can’t last. Can it. It’ll get a whole lot better very quickly. Digital technology is like that.

Definitions:

3G provides enough bandwidth to allow users to stream video, receive TV signal, send large files and of course make voice calls.
3.5G provides improvement to voice calls, two way video calls, mobile TV, mobile broadband to laptops, and lots of other stuff requiring a superfast download and upload speed. 14 megabites per second download. Its fast!

You have to think of what thing that mobiles do best. If it’s not a full 3G mobile web smartphone, like the iPhone, that thing is SMS. There are opt in short code campaigns. Bar codes pictures and vouchers too. Enter Eamonn Hession and Donald Douglas who swept any cynicism out of the room and down the corridor. Response and Targetting SMS. Great campaigns, case studies, wonderful entertaining creatives, targeted advertising for small groups, interruptive and not, and, especially when mixed with other media, a great investment with a greater return. And not much investment too. Small beans when it comes to a full media mix, but it could be the plum on the icing on the pudding. From my point of view the best bit is its all elective. Opt in, free cool content. And, it should not be the result of the one big idea, Donald Douglas was keen to point out, but the result of dipping the toe in, or exploring, experimenting, trialling... having a go. Because sometimes when people are trying something new they try too hard to guarantee a success, they totally mess it up. They’ve over sold it internally, and they look really silly, or worse, they’ve blotted their copy book. Better to just do it, not expecting or investing too much... and, they assure us, you won’t be disappointed. It makes sense though. As with search engine advertising online when people are clicking when they are actually searching for something – elective mobile visitors are a better class of visitor. And someone electing to have something sent to their phone will be engaged, totally. It’s on their phone for heaven’s sakes. How could they not be engaged. Free content to be enjoyed, informed, shown.

Did anyone out there get shown the Carling ad on the iPhone. It’s really cool. It’s perhaps the first truly mobile viral video, the prize John West Salmon won in the netosphere back in 1998. It’s a simple, cool, cheap idea. All it took was innovation from someone who sat down and said... “What does this iPhone do? How can we use it to our advantage? And that’s what we ad agency heads have to think about for mobile phones. 120% of us have phones (some more than one) so what do they do... and how can we use it? What makes an iPhone special? It knows when it’s tilting. An internal gyroscope. OK. That's what sparked the Carling idea. But what’s special about phones? They’re in your pocket? Everyone has them? They’re mobile... and can be used in conjunction with location based systems or LBS (Big Brother can see the phone's location on a map).

Is that it? Is there an idea to spring from the obvious? People text their loved one? They buy new phones every year? Is that where the next bit of inspiration is that will make the big difference when mixed with the rest of a campaign – outdoor, TV, Radio,? It worked for Walkers recently. Text in your new Walker’s crisps recipe. This reached 5% of the English market. 5%? That is actually a huge huge number when you think about it. Especially for a crisp campaign. 3 million people actually. Yes, it was mixed with all the other media, but that’s fine. Mobile doesn’t need all the credit. But it made the whole campaign work really well. That’s the point.

OK. I was enthused. I was there... on song and my foot was tapping out the tune to a ringtone, the most expensive music on the planet. It was all going in, and then the venerable Peter McPartlin took the podium, and apologized in advance for the news he was going to impart to the floor. He put mobile in the context of all the other media available to advertisers. There were so many choices including outdoor (with maybe 20 formats), TV, Radio, Internet, Social Media, Google and more and more and more. His slide showed media planets spinning around the advertising budget sun, and I don’t think he used any other slides. It spoke both clearly and very loud. It stared at us. Mobile... that little planet there, on the outskirts of the solar system, like Pluto before it was demoted from being a planet to the status of 'big lump of ice'. The little freezing ex-planet Mobile. Spinning enthusiastically... and all alone. If it was a mobile, it would be out of coverage. This was a shock, and the very opposite of the all pervasive medium message we’d just received, but the point was along the lines that, all media compete for big budgets and like the Internet recently, mobile just doesn’t come out of the big bag, but rather the lets-give-it-a-go bag. The couple-of-grand-can’t-hurt bag. The will-make-me-look-open-minded-and-innovative bag. It was a great bit of clarity, there was no doubt.

And he was right, of course, but IMHO (in my humble opinion) he was wrong too. (Sorry Peter.) We shouldn’t see Mobile on its own, like a planet, but as part of a system, or a galaxy. On its own it is like looking at bus sides, or the back page of a regional mag as the risk, or the new thing when they all should be part of the system (campaign) that is part of a product's brand and market traction (galaxy) and all in turn part of the advertising universe. Typically its a single format. That is the point I would have thought. And sometimes, if a planet like cold planet Moby doesn’t have the creative gravitational pull to the central sun, it will drift off into space. And yes. Then the media buyers will say to themselves... Well, that didn’t work did it. I won’t be doing that again. But it won’t be the fault of the little moby service provider, but rather the fault of the planner, or the plan, or the strategist. Everyone has a mobile, so it’s up to all to come up with ideas that bring its strengths to play, and makes the campaigns better and improves the relationship with the brand. That’s the point. And there are lots of people, like Donald and Eamonn out there to help, but they too must keep things simple. They must make it turn on and offable. Simply buyable. Clearly reportable. In fact, Net Behaviour aim to find processes to make it possible to put mobile on every plan it suits, as we do with online advertising, search, SEO and research.

We need to step back. Recognise everyone has a mobile, and integrate. Not the creative from TV (though it can go on many mobiles), or the homepage portal into the digital buy, but rather integrate the thinking of the whole idea. Join up the dots so that the planets exist as a wholistic system. Ask some obvious questions. What’s so special about mobiles? Why does everyone have them? Why are they so important in people’s lives? Why are they using them while watching TV, or for listening to music or the radio. And making movies too. Recent research showed that if someone loses their wallet, they might report it missing within a day or so... maybe longer. If their mobile goes missing, the loss is reported within the hour. Other research showed that when women go on holidays, they were likely to be more upset if they left their mobile at home, than their boyfriend. We just need them so badly, so, how can advertisers, communicators and service providers leverage that need. What makes them so special? There must be a million good ideas out there, like there are little lumps of ice around the Sun. They just need to be linked. Do we have to wait for Google to link of them first? Will they promote mobile from being the distant lump of ice on Peter's chart to being Jupiter-sized planet a pervasive media yardstick indicates it deserves to be? Sheesh. I hope not. But if they do, I’ll congratulate them and secretly be sickened that I didn’t come up with the same idea or a better one sooner. Won’t you? So, for all our sakes. Think people. Think mobile. The future is out there... and it’s on the move.

Categorically Up the Creek: - What's Wrong with Google?

2008-07-18T02:05:00.000-07:00

I just picked up a new(ish) telephone book and I said to myself - Silly me. The Internet is so much quicker. I’m an Internet guy. I can do this. So I went to Google instead.

I looked up Indian Restaurants Dublin because I had a babysitter for Saturday, and I got a list of all of the services which mentioned Indian and Restaurant, and Dublin in the order of who’d visited them most often. Interspersed with actual restaurants which provided Indian cuisine was an encyclopaedia reference for India, a Bollywood site and a bloody map of India. Then some joker had written a site slagging off Indian restaurants. I gave up and made a coffee and a sandwich.
I then said to myself. Silly boy. You’re not using it right. So, I looked up Java, the country west of Krakatoa (not east as in the movie title). Another disaster! In order of who’d visited them most, or linked to them most I got hundreds of sites on the software language, called Java, some coffee beans, another software called ‘Java Beans’ more encyclopaedia references and more maps, some programmers ones too that didn’t look much like the Island, near Krakatoa.
I then thought… wait a second. I’m stupid. I need to go the country search engine. There wasn’t one. What about the Restaurant in my region database… but Google doesn’t supply one.

That’s the problem. The list. As there are many, many more websites in the world every month. One for every company really and most things people talk about too. But Internet users are still going to Google and looking briefly down the list, which in all fairness is so much better than the old search engines we used, but it’s still just a list. And no one goes to the second page. (Well, some do rarely). All the categories that might be something to do with the keywords you put into the search box, in order of site size, the state of the site SEO, the links into the site (and out), the blogs associated with it, and a host of other algorithmic magical measures like code to keyword density and other bits are included and then Google pop out a relevance statistic that says… ‘this is what you were really looking for, with the two words you input…and here’s some other categories you may have been looking for. There you go.’

So, it’s my fault. I should have gone all Boolean – adding And and Not and But and other words to filter my search, and I should have added more and more words. But, eventually, you are writing and correcting and limiting and filtering till the cows come home, when you could just pick up the Yellow Pages, go to Restaurants, go to Indian, and glance through the 5 relevant listings that aren’t take-aways and pick one near you. You can’t go wrong really can you. And if there isn’t one in my area, it’s not that I haven’t put in the right boolean definitions and specifications, or that they haven’t SEOed their site, or that they have been banned for black hat coding… or that they don’t have a site (it’s a restaurant after all, they specialize in food). I’m also unlikely to get a map, distractingly, of India, or an encyclopedia page… or any of that. Because, the book, the Yellow Pages, has something called ‘Contents’ and something else called ‘Index’. Simple really. Genius. Why didn’t Google think of it?

In short, the world’s most popular search engine isn’t helping me, or letting me help it. It’s chucking in all of the categories in its index into one super clever list…. And I don’t really care if it’s searched 1.5 kazzillion sites in 0.5 of a milisecond… I’m still too impatient to go to page two. People are stupid. What can I say.

Time for balance. I really really really love Google, because I really love the web, and it’s one of the best things to happen to the web and computers ever in my opinion, on a par with the invention of DOS, or TCP/IP, or HPPT, or HTML. The Google link algorithm is right up there with them. And the company itself has revolutionised advertising for ever, and this promises to continue with their new optimisation tools. If I ever get a cat, I’ll call it Google. Google is well cool… but we, silly human’s need more help than the magical algorithm can possible imagine or compute. We need to be allowed to help the great Google do its good work. We need to be able to steer the behemoth. To be the captain of the ocean liner. We don’t need the machine to think for us all the time, foisting its ideas down our page one throats. We need to be able to choose, just a little bit, and give over more information more easily. I want my search engine to be more like when I’m phoning dial a directory, and saying something like.. ‘it’s an Indian restaurant, in my town. I don’t know what it’s called’ and the nice girl says ‘here’s a list of them. Is it Tandoor? Chaian… Sindar?’ and I choose. The search engine chat on the other hand would continue with me saying… ‘no, my town, in Ireland, not the one in Wisconsin with the same name. No, I don’t want a map, or driving directions. I know my town, I just can’t remember the name of the blood restaurant. I was there last week. It’s called Rajpuri or something. Sindar was a character in a film. That really interesting, but totally irrelevant. I’m hungry. I need a restaurant. A history of Indian restaurants you say? No thanks. Actually… Feck off. I’ll just bloody walk and won’t book. It’ll be quicker!’

But, there is a search engine which tries to do this. I think it’s going in the right direction and I think others, even Google, will have to follow. The site is an old one, and it’s changed its name recently. I used to sillily be called ‘Ask Jeeve’s’ (what a funny joke that was), but is now simply called ‘Ask’. Better! When I put Indian restaurant into Ask, I still get lots of categories, but they are in little boxes or along the side bar, so I can see them. I still see I can have maps, encyclopaedia bits, recipes… all sorts of information, but I can now see what categories these sites are in. They’re not in a single bloody list running to 50 pages. In Ask, I can then click on the appropriate category, and it's filtered. (Just like picking restaurants in Yellow Pages).

Why am I talking about Ask. Well, because I was reminded of it recently when visiting the new Ireland.com. The programming behind Ireland’s newest, biggest and best search engine ever, and it’s similar to Ask, not Google. And, I really like it. I think it will work. I think it’s cool. Ireland.com reminds me of what Local.ie aimed for in 1998 years ago, with its little Bebo style publishing tool, and super categorisation system but Ireland.com is doing it better, and it’s the right time for Ireland and for the state of social and net development. And, best of all, it’s automatic. Clear categorisation, great professional content… all organised, all neatly laid out. This is something you can’t see from the front page of Ireland.com, especially if you are looking for Irish-times.com, but as soon as you search, there you go. It doesn’t matter how many pages or sites are generated in Ireland, the findings for this search engine won’t be cluttered, ever. Because they are categorised.

We humans need categories, because we have too much stuff called the same thing. We don’t have category words in our language (or symbols as with Japanese). This is why we have a Dewey Decimal system for libraries and IBAN numbers, and that’s just for books. We need categorization for everything humans think about, need, talk about, make, say, eat, lust after, go to… all of it. It’s a classification nightmare. Too many categories to think of, but I think it’s what the net needs.
Great categorisation.

You see, when I’m honest, I don’t there is a chance in hell that any mathematical algorithm can keep pace with all the information on the web. I believe that the term bandied around time and again in the late 90s –‘information overload’ needs to a reintroduction. I think that shortly, very shortly, humans will notice that they’re missing out by seeing the web through the blinkers offered by Google page one, and some pay per click ads, which, by the way, are getting a bit too snappy and salesy and generic for my liking… (Though, when managed well these do work, and are a super efficient spend. No doubt about it. The proof is there.)

So currently 99% of some age groups use Google almost every day. The reason is that Google is the best search engine. But, the job isn’t done. Much more to do… and hopefully, Google will get more like Ireland.com. Like Ask. Categorically.
And as a happy conclusion to this barrage of frustration I looked up Indian restaurant in my home town on Ireland.com. Bingo. There they were. Perfect. And the one I was looking for. And then I even got the menu and the prices for each dish on Menupages.ie indexed by the Ireland.com site, the phone number, and the maps... all perfectly relevant, neatly laid out, and more than I could ever have hoped, or got, from Google or Yellow Pages for that matter. Howsat! I’ll so be back to Ireland.com.

Oh, and as a PS, when I showed Mrs. Kelly the map, ‘we’ decided ‘we’d’ prefer to eat Italian! The search engine that can include woman-think into its algorithm will be seriously popular, but mus remain the stuff of science fiction for now. We live in hope.

Irish Broadband Penetration Reaches 83% of Internet Users

2008-06-09T04:11:00.000-07:00

I just did some trending on Broadband a bug bear of mine. Why? Well, people keep telling me there’s a broadband penetration problem in Ireland, and on the radio at least, they keep interviewing someone living well out of reach of roads, never mind a broadband connection. Everyone I know has access to broadband, so, it just didn’t feel right. It didn’t stack up. And, it turns out, it doesn’t stack up. It’s simply wrong.

The reason is the research is concentrating on home broadband connections and not home and work and school/university and café’s and the like, people were being given a false and damaging impression of Internet use and penetration in Ireland. The reason for this is the research is done by the traditional door to door method, from traditional research companies. It’s all they can count with the method. For the background to the discussion see my old post, Broadband by Any Other Name Would Work as Fast. My point is simply that in a time of increasingly mobile Internet use, the use of ‘any broadband connection’ is broadband use, and ‘at-home’ broadband, isn’t the point.

As I said, I did some trending, including the latest Net Behaviour Report data, Wave I 2008 and the findings are fantastic, and make a whole lot of sense. Pay special attention to the last column.

In 2007, 83% of Irish Internet users reported that they had access to broadband, and they used it. In 2008, this is 86%, and if we trend this out to 2011, it’s 95%. At home broadband is also growing, according to broadband users. So, 83% of 2 million, means that 1.66 Million Irish Internet users, access the web at broadband speed, from various locations. Good news.

But why, when I ask 1600 Internet users what their Internet connection speeds are like do many more of them tell me they have broadband connection than are reported in the mainstream media? Why, when I trend this on a 3000 sample, with sampling points over 2 years, is the news so good in the long term?

Well, I could bore you with 20 reasons, and get passionate about the whole thing. But, the statistician and researcher in me tells me not to be too defensive. To take the data as it is presented by the sample, interrogate its validity, and once it passes the tests, acknowledge its statistical truth. This is what they said. These findings are significant. It’s not only true for my sample, its true for the population. Job done.

Common sense told me there’s loads of broadband access out there for those that want it, and that everyone who needs it, can get it, and they do. The stats back this up. There is no broadband problem in Ireland. There’s a measurement and perception one however.

There’s also a need to push the debate along. Most broadband in Ireland is painfully slow. Many ‘free’ broadband packages give not much more than 1mbs. This works, but you couldn’t, for example, watch a video on YouTube. Here, at work we’re using 16mbs, which is as fast as it gets in Ireland, more or less, and we can do what we need to do. At home I use 3G 3.6mbs, which, again, does the job, but its so much slower. 1mbs means that big pages will make the browser time out. Big mails will also time out, especially if you’re using webmail. Many people use the Internet to send or upload pictures, and 1mps precludes this use for anything over a 3mg attachment.

So yes, we have broadband, but for most, no, it’s not quick enough. So, let’s move on the debate, and concentrate on what’s really at issue. Not just any broadband at home, but good broadband wherever you can get it.