News from the Herd

UK newspaper body to marketers: Pay money to share our links and bring us traffic

2009-07-11T12:00:00.007+01:00

Last year a fuss broke out in the US when the Associated Press talked about making bloggers pay for quoting any of its stories - and using as few as five words.

At issue was the principle of 'fair use' and whether bloggers were actually doing the AP a favour by cross promoting its content. The reaction was predictable, for example: "AP sets up a toll booth for bloggers citing its stories", until AP backed down (kind of).

Fast forward a year and a body here in the UK called the Newspaper Licensing Agency is doing something that makes the AP's moves look positively benign. It is thinking of charging agencies and their clients for sending around coverage links by email. That's right, if at work I want to send someone a URL from a newspaper website, directing them there, I will need to pay a yearly fee.

The NLA represents Britain's newspapers and hands out licenses allowing organisations (in practice press cuttings services, marketing agencies, marketing departments) to legally copy articles. Every year we cough up and we get a license in return.

I can just about accept why, with more and more newspaper content appearing online only, the charge also extends to me and my clients cutting and pasting articles from the web (or taking screen grabs) and sending them around.

But charging me to send links? Let's just think about that for a second. For me to forward on a link is clearly to online publishers' benefit as it brings them visitors. It is also something millions of people do every day, it's kind of core to how the Web works. For the latter reason I'm not even sure this scheme can be enforced.

Twitter good / Email bad

I'm coming to this a few days late, but that has the benefit of seeing what the NLA had to say to the back-lash. The PR Bristol blog has a good run down of the debate in the comments section, including a few responses from an unnamed NLA representative.

The NLA calls the links issue a 'red herring'. It says that because as part of my job I read its members' websites and then share that content, I should pay, with the delivery method being irrelevant.

In other words, it doesn't deny that it's a case of cash for links.

It also says that "it will not apply to Twitter and social bookmarking sites." So wait. I send a client a link by email and it costs money. But I send them the same link on a Twitter DM (which gets forwarded onto email), or via Delicious, and it's free. Reckon this proposal has a few holes in it?

What about if I send it from my personal email? You know, Dirk Singer just happens to send a 'friend' an interesting link! Or what happens when, as Stephen Waddington of Speed Communications points out, we compile feeds via services such as Netvibes, a service both our agencies use extensively. Does that cost money? How about URL shorteners like bit.ly as that's indirect?

And oh btw, this only applies to UK newspaper websites. I can carry on sending around links from the New York Times or Sydney Morning Herald to my heart's content - and may well do that, as these days no one is restricted to national paper websites when sourcing general industry news or trends.

From my site logs, I know that 2/3 of visitors come from outside the UK, and I imagine that's even higher for Social Media Today where this post is also being published. As a result, I'm hoping that this issue gets a bit of a wider airing as there is a fundamental principle at stake.

Which is: Is it right to charge me for pointing someone else to a website where the content is free anyway, and which makes its money by exposing those same visitors to advertising?

Last year in response to the Associated Press furore, The Online Marketer in the US had this to say:

"In the era of Google juice, link love, and a wealth of online information, the AP chose the path of restriction, as though this greediness would result in keeping all of the information under their roof.

"It took only 24 hours for the back-peddling to begin and it now appears that they will wisely drop the call for restrictions. They had the opportunity to engage their readership, even empower the bloggers and other outlets who were distributing their content free of charge, but they trotted out the lawyers instead."

Wise words and ones the NLA might want to consider.

Image - Zizzy Baloobah

Online word of mouth outstrips every other form of promotion / endorsement

2009-07-10T08:12:00.001+01:00

Two surveys that I picked up on that draw somewhat different conclusions. First of all (via Marketing Charts) comes this study by WorkPlace Media which says that 96% of employed consumers won't think less of a brand if it has no social media presence.

Moreover while 25% recommended a business or product on a social network, only 18% have actually acted on recommendations. Phew, that's ok then, I knew all this social media business was all a bag of b*llocks. Switch off the computer and get some fresh air like most normal people!

Or maybe not. Another study by Nielsen involving 25,000 people in 50 countries shows that 90% of Internet consumers worldwide (so in the developed world, that's most consumers full stop) trust recommendations from people they know, while 70% trust consumer recommendations posted online - I am assuming this means recommendations from people you don't necessarily know via sites like TripAdvisor.

Information on brand websites elicits a high degree of trust at 70%, as does (as you'd expect) editorial endorsements at 69%. My take on the brand website score is that by the time people visit it, they are already at least curious about the product or service and so are looking for validation.

And at the bottom? Text ads on cell / mobile phones (24%) and the much maligned banner ad (33%). The point is that according to Nielsen, word of mouth online recommendations outstrip every other form of marketing and even a good (editorial) review in a newspaper or magazine.

Commenting on the study, Jonathan Carson, President of Online at Nielsen says: "The explosion in consumer generated media over the last couple of years means consumers' reliance on word of mouth in the decision making process, either from people they know or online consumers they don't has increased significantly."

So going back to that first WorkPlace Media study, I wonder if it's simply a case of how the questions are phrased. Most consumers won't think less of you if you don't have a social media presence....and so what? Will they however think *better* of you if you communicate with them online?

And if the stat of only 18% having acted on online recommendations is true (I doubt it), that's still arguably a very high number in a recession filled climate where margins turn on single percentage points.

Communicators: Twitter a 'fad'

2009-07-09T08:04:00.001+01:00

Or at least that's what 54% told online publisher Ragan Communications and Pollstream in a study on the micro-blogging service, saying people will soon tire of the hype and move on.

"“[It’s a fad] because everybody’s doing it,” said one respondent . “Ashton Kutcher and CNN have a steady supply of fans who want to know what they do. People like us, people with a job to do, every so often we do something of interest to the general public [but] we don’t have that steady supply of stuff that the public is interested in.”

Well, you might or might not have a steady supply of stuff the public is interested in, but I am sure you have personalities and opinions that fit the bill. More to the point, at least some of the 30 million worldwide users (or 1.5 million heavily committed users) will be talking about things of relevance to you.

Waste of time = time waster?

The study also found that while 28% use it, 40% have no future Twitter plan in place (I'm surprised this % was so low), a key reason being fear of senior management who see it as a waste of time - that age old problem of social media at work being seen as skiiving off.

Another factor was that organisations are just not geared towards social media. For example, communicators at one New York architectural engineering firm cited in the survey "are required to pre-approve all communication with clients, so the spontaneity and transparency made possible by Twitter would be muted by approvals." Each tweet going through an approval process before being posted, now there's a thought!

Get back in your box?

However, I've often wondered whether it isn't so much about whether Twitter is a fad or not. Rather whether it's simply a case of there being a ground swell of opinion from people who want it to be. In that sense it is like the virtual world Second Life, which it is often compared to in terms of hype.

There were indeed flaws in Second Life's model, but the key factor in the air going out seemed to be that a lot of pundits tired of hearing about it and decided it was time to put it back into its virtual box.

Hence, a lot of statistics rolled out showing how Twitter is under used, in decline, are actually being interpreted in a fairly selective manner. For example:

Another survey says that "only" 22% of GenYers (born post 1980) use Twitter. You could just as easily invert those figures around to reach a completely different conclusion.

If we agree that 62% of Twitter's worldwide user base is in the US, that gives us 18 million Americans - which is far from one in five of the overall population. So by the standards of that study, Generation Y is if anything OVER and not under represented.

Image - Pick up JoJo

A round up of Twitter stats - 3/4 joined Jan to May 2009, 60%+ in US

2009-07-08T10:02:00.004+01:00

Erin Lamberty pointed me towards this 'in depth look inside the Twitter world' by Sysomos, which involved the company looking at 11.5 million Twitter accounts. The full report is here, but a few key points:

Most - in fact almost three quarters - of Twitter users joined in the first five months of this year with a particular spike in February and March.

Something that's done the rounds a lot already, a small number of users account for the lion's share of Tweets - 5% account for 75% of activity. Assuming a user base of 30+ million worldwide, that would translate into a core of 1.5 million committed users. With Twitter having previously been tagged as the 'new Second Life' in terms of a bubble, it's worth noting that 600-700k people log onto Second Life every month (not the same as power users, whose numbers would be lower)

'The more followers, the more you tweet' - when you pass the 1000 followers mark your average tweets per day doubles from three to six. So Twitter works a little chicken and egg. When you start off and don't have anyone listening, the motivation to essentially talk to yourself is low. Once your follower numbers increase you imagine there is a point to using Twitter.

As expected, the US is the biggest Twitter country by population, dwarfing all others with 62% of the total. The US is followed by the UK (8%), Canada (5%) and Australia (3%). In fact, something that struck me when doing research for a European client was how English-speaking biased Twitter is. 100+ followers is not unusual in the US, UK et al, but it is high if you look at (say) continental Europe.

The statistics on age can be treated with a pinch of salt. Sysomos says that "65% of Twitter users are under the age of 25", which flies in the face of other studies as well as most users' personal experience. However Sysomos admits that this is based on the 0.7% who actually disclose their age on Twitter...I wasn't even aware of anyone actually doing so.

Finally, even people who call themselves social media marketers on Twitter are sometimes not as social as they make out! While 85.3% of the general Twitter population posts less than once a day, the same is true of two thirds for self proclaimed social media specialists.

Novel road safety campaign features Bill Gates and Brad Pitt

2009-07-08T00:36:00.004+01:00

Found completely randomly while doing research for my last post, is this article from Mosnews about Brad Pitt's latest role...as a cardboard cut out traffic policeman.

According to Mosnews, authorities in the Siberian city of Omsk have installed the Brad Pitt and Bill Gates (eh?) cut-outs at dangerous intersections to slow traffic.

You'd think that drivers gawping at the celebrity policemen would actually cause more accidents, but not so. Mosnews says that, "The campaign seems to be working. Omsk officials say accidents are down as star-struck drivers ease off the gas to gaze at the unusual images."

As an aside, Mosnews.com is full of bizarre little gems, like: Lithuanian WCs auto lock if you spend more than five minues inside, Russian artist bites air hostess after getting drunk on liquid soap and, er, Russian woman sets world record by lifting 14kg glass ball with a part of her anatomy...

Useful chart - the top 20 countries for social media engagement

2009-07-07T16:51:00.005+01:00

Comscore has published a fascinating chart looking at the top 20 countries worldwide in terms of social media engagement - i.e. the amount of time users on average spend on social networks.

The leaders include some surprises and one name that crops up again and again. Russia comes top with an average of 6.6 hours per visitor per month, followed by Brazil (6.3 hours), Canada (5.6 hours) and Puerto Rico and Spain tied in 5th place with 5.3 hours.

The figures for the UK were 4.6 hours, the US 4.2 hours and Australia 3.4 hours.

Canada usually scores near the top of these surveys, beating the UK into second place in an OFCOM study on the % of the population in social networks, and also coming top when it comes to online video usage (what is it with Canada? More friendly? The weather? Or simply more advanced than the rest of us!).

Russia is an interesting case though as well. Though Comscore says that 616k Russians now use Facebook, up 277% year on year, that's still tiny compared to the numbers attracted by home grown networks Vkontakte.ru (14.3 million) and Odnoklassniki.ru (7.8 million).

In fact, recently Vkontakte announced that it was doing a Facebook in opening its platform up to developers.

Talking head quote:

"Social networking has become a popular online pastime not only in mature internet markets like North America, but also in developing, high-growth internet markets such as Russia." (Mike Read, SVP & managing director, comScore Europe)

“In a country as geographically large as Russia, social networking represents a way of connecting people from one corner of the country to the other.”

Source - Marketing Charts

It's not only newspapers feeling the digital chill - book publishers hit too

2009-07-07T12:33:00.003+01:00

According to Paid Content, Penguin has made 100 staff, equivalent to 10% of its workforce, redundant.

The reason? Based on a memo by CEO John Makinson, it's not recession led:

"We have to think about what kind of company we might have in five years time if we sat back and changed nothing...Penguin has been in the vanguard of many of the changes sweeping our industry - the rise of the digital economy and the impact of emerging markets are just two current examples."

According to Paid Content, publishers are facing some of the same problems as newspapers - how to make money from the web for digital content where 'free' is the norm. Apparently illegal file sharing is an increasing problem for audio book publishers, with five Swedish publishers having to resort to court action to stop a file sharer downloading 2000+ titles.

At the same time, today's figures from Britain's Office for National Statistics show that the continued drop in (UK) output in May was actually driven by the print and publishing industries...a real sign of the double whammy of increased digital engagement and the recession taking their toll?

Certainly, there is some evidence that increased Internet use has an adverse impact on book consumption, something I personally am sad about, but I guess another sign that people get their information in different ways.

Last year's Digital Entertainment Study (UK) found that 14% of respondents using social media read fewer books.

Meanwhile the way we consume information is changing as well as the medium - according to Nicholas Carr in his seminal piece in Atlantic Magazine, 'Is Google Making us Stupid', a study at University College London identified a trend where researchers now 'power browse' relevant work.

Image -Florian B

Over a third of Facebook users now 35+, use by seniors at record levels

2009-07-07T06:52:00.003+01:00

From Inside Facebook come the following charts looking at the latest demographics for the social network. The over 35s in the US now account for 36% of all users with over 45s making up 17%. Meanwhile usage levels by the over 55s has reached "all time highs", in particular women 55+, who now number 2.5 million users.

And younger users? Use by 18-25 year olds went down 3% in the last month. Whether that's simply due to the summer break, or whether that's a tentative sign of younger users starting to tire of the service, this research is yet another stat to file away for when someone tells you that 'it's not for us, it's all about kids' (which even in 2009, I still hear!).

Images - Inside Facebook

Agencies and Twitter - The good, the bad and the ugly

2009-07-06T16:30:00.003+01:00

AdAge has an interesting article about agencies using Twitter - or not as the case may be (thanks to Liz Nicole for spotting it). The article looks through agencies active on Twitter, and others that advise clients on it but don't have a feed themselves:

"As Twitter moves into the business mainstream -- nearing some 35 million unique global visitors, according to ComScore -- it's increasingly clear that one community has yet to fully embrace the social-networking tool du jour: agencies.

"The irony is that the same people clients hire to erect communications and social-media strategies often appear uncomfortable using Twitter themselves."

The piece by Rupal Parekh also has some good advice about how brands and agencies can use Twitter more effectively:

Don't over promote (don't hit people on the head with press releases), be human, remember - Twitter is public (and your clients will spot what you tweet), keep clients looped, listen, respond.

From personal experience I fully admit that at Cow we could do more in terms of getting the first two points right. Because the same person (me!) maintains the company and a personal feed, what more often than not happens is that the 'official' feed is used for fairly run of the mill announcements and my own one for stuff that interests me - result, that one (not surprisingly) has 5x as many followers.

It's a question I've talked about before, does a company feed without a named individual behind it giving the stamp of his / her personality have value?

In our case, the solution we'll probably go for is for me to give up the Cow feed to one of the other Cows on Twitter and to follow the lead of a company like Kodak, which does use a company ID but also has an identifiable person behind it.

Image - Mykl Roventine

Yes I blog...what you mean it's useful for work?

2009-07-06T13:23:00.002+01:00

Heard this one before?

"Very surprising also – and I would have thought newsworthy – is the attitude of regional media and journalists to online and social media. Many of them blog, Tweet and are active on informal online channels, yet few seem to recognise the influence of social media on perceptions, and indeed news."

The comments come from the chief of the Middle East PR body, Dave Robinson, responding to a less than flattering study carried in Campaign Middle East on the state of the industry (the usual - sending out pointless info, not answering calls or emails etc).

However what he says about the disconnect between people using social media in the personal sphere and then the internal online switch going 'off' once they get into work is generally applicable. I am sure a lot of people reading this see it all the time.

Reasons why? A tendency to circle the wagons. And the fact that often no coherent internal sell has been made to internal clients: The decision makers behind the decision makers.

Good presentation - Motivating consumers online and 2009 trends

2009-07-06T00:45:00.002+01:00

Digital Research - Motivating consumers online - DNA09

View more presentations from Digital Now Australia.

Though it relates to Australia, the themes touched upon in this presentation by Jonathan Sinton of research firm TNS are just as applicable to the UK, the US, Canada et al. The presentation was given to coincide with the Digital Now Australia conference (via Get Shouty). Some highlights:

After introducing us to the 'Digital Needs Wheel' (slide five), the presentation goes through five digital trends (slide nine): The informed consumer, the year of the mobile, multi-tasking, voyeurism and one degree of separation.

Some useful stats for anyone who still tells you that online chatter is irrelevant:

An illustration of how TV and the web compliment each other in the way that print and online often don't: 68% of Australians said a TV show sparked online search, while 54% say an ad sparked online search.

At the end there are a few two minute talking head segments about the iPhone and the mobile Internet. The conclusion:

Although the overall market share is still small, the iPhone is changing the mobile Internet game. It's moving consumers from going online via their mobiles only when they have no other alternative and having a second rate experience, to creating a completely different online ecosystem.

How to promote a play: Up the number of actors

2009-07-05T12:19:00.001+01:00

While looking for (Sydney agency) Happy Soliders human website video for my 'what's your website good for' post, I came across this nice little case study that they put up on You Tube.

Happy Soldiers wanted to up audience numbers at Sydney's Spirithouse Theatre Company around their production of Maurice Panychs Vigil.

Their solution? Not advertising. Instead working on the principle that people are more likely to see a play if someone is in the cast, they added 25 additional cast members a night by putting in an extra five minute scene at the start.

A great campaign - and clever use of word of mouth and human networks.

What's your website good for?

2009-07-03T16:30:00.003+01:00

What's your website good for?

View more documents from Dirk Singer.

(6 July, see update below) This is a theme I've been meaning to post about for a while. The tendency of more and more sites (especially agency ones) to be social media based - either blogs, or mirrors of online chat (like Twitter feeds).

The most recent example - Ad agency CP&B giving a lot of its site over to news, blog and twitter mentions.

Is a lot of this a publicity stunt, a way to get people to people to coo about something they'd never otherwise, a website? Hell yes, but in the long run, who cares?

That's because long term the principle is I think sound - a realisation that especially online you are what people say about you, and that people don't visit run of the mill brand sites for fun.

Anyway, a presentation that looks at some agency examples and what some smart people are saying about it, is above.

Update (6 July) - Ben Kunz has a good take on Crispin Porter and social engagement sites in general, pointing out that they are potentially as much threats as they are opportunities.

For example, someone could create a site all about you, pulling in feeds and online chatter, and there is little you could do about it:

"Aggregation, it seems, opens the doors for anyone to erect an exciting hub about a topic. Google has become the world's largest case study of offering up content without ownership.

"If what people say about you has become more important than what you say, what happens if someone else gains control of your conversation first?"

How trends spread / taking real life dating into virtual worlds

2009-07-03T09:13:00.005+01:00

To coincide with the sixth birthday of the virtual world Second Life, two posts, one part-recycled from 18 months back:

How trends spread and the limits of social contagion

First of all a piece of research from the University of Michigan who looked at the virtual world to see how trends spread.

When you create an avatar in Second Life, the starting point is fairly basic - a rudimentary 'skin', clothes, shape, and gestures / moves. Hence a whole economy has sprung up where enterprising residents create add-ons that you can use to customise your AV. The University of Michigan researchers looked at these enhancements - in particular gestures - to see how things get forwarded on virally.

The full paper is available here, but a few findings that arose after they looked at 100,229 users and 106,449 gestures:

1 - Early adopters, the first 5-10% to acquire new 'assets' are by and large not the same as influencers who distribute things far and wide. This corresponds to offline research that shows that if you want a product to spread virally and by word of mouth, your first customers (so the ones who queue up at Midnight in front of the store for a new iPhone) are not your 'hero' ones.

2 - Existing social networks play a huge role in spreading trends, but at the same time the 'contagion' is fairly contained. On one hand, the academics found that 50% of these gestures were disseminated among existing social groups, but on the other hand, that once they were inside a circle of friends they tended to stop there.

According to Science Daily, "the researchers found that the gestures that spread from friend to friend were not distributed as broadly as ones that were distributed outside of the social network, such as those acquired in stores or as give aways." So there is a role for straight forward non WOM marketing after all!

The researchers say that this huge study gave them the chance to validate some hypothesis that exist in the real (non virtual) world: According to one of the authors Lada Adamic, "There's been a high correspondence between the real world and virtual worlds."

Using virtual worlds as a place for real world dates

In an interview around Second Life's sixth anniversary with V3, Tom Hale, Linden Lab's chief product officer floated the following idea:

"Linden Lab also plans to introduce more services, and to integrate with other popular social networks and online services, further associating the avatar with the person’s real identity."

"Hale gave the example of working with other online agencies, such as dating sites, to offer another step in the meeting process by letting users create avatars that could explore the world on a ‘virtual date’, allowing people to get to know each other even better before meeting in person."

I refer to a post I wrote 18 months ago after I pitched the very same idea to a major dating agency!

"A while back we posted on how our Vauxhall Corsa Guide could be used as the basis for practice dates in the virtual world Second Life.

"The idea was that Second Life dating could sit between getting to know someone on the phone, on IM or on email and actually meeting them face to face. We subsequently suggested this concept to a major dating site, putting forward the notion that they could offer a bespoke virtual service for their members.

"We proposed setting up a separate log-in site and orientation zone on Second Life for new avatars (characters), along with clothes, skins, accessories to choose from.

"Then, both parties would have had a kind of trial run, where they would have seen from their behaviour if they were compatible. And if they wanted to take it further, they could have then arranged a date in the real world - where, according to research from Stanford, they would actually have found each other better looking in the flesh if they selected ‘attractive’ avatars, thereby theoretically increasing the chances of a successful outcome!

"Overall it was designed to be a low risk, cheap and fun way to get to know someone before wasting three hours in a bar or restaurant constantly looking at the clock and desperately trying to fill dead air."

Good to see that the time for this idea has finally come!

Above image from Torley Linden, what you see when a starter avatar doesn't appear or 'rez' properly in Second Life

http://postrank.com/graphics/b.gif?s=qg95oeg

Out of all ad formats, display ignored the most

2009-07-02T18:18:00.003+01:00

Recently Comscore was commissioned to do a report on behalf of online publishers to show that online display really does work. Forget about the click through was the angle, what matters is that these ads drive awareness.

A piece of research out by Harris Interactive casts some doubt on that. A survey of American consumers found that when it came to ad formats found to be the most 'helpful' in influencing purchasing decisions, TV came top on 37%.

TV was followed by newspaper advertising on 17% while search engine advertising scored a respectable 14%. However at the bottom of the table, only 3% considered radio ads the most helpful, dropping down to 1% for Internet banner ads.

When it came to ad formats they claimed to 'ignore', only 6% of consumers ignored newspaper advertising (there is life in the old dog yet), 9% ignored radio ads, 13% TV and 17% search engine advertising. Internet ads? 46% claimed to have banner blindness.

For a more detailed response that I posted around the Comscore study, see here.

Time for a metrics overhaul

2009-07-02T15:12:00.003+01:00

New Strategies Require New Measurements

View more presentations from Helge Tennø.

Check out this excellent presentation by Norwegian digital strategist Helge Tenno, where he questions whether the way we currently evaluate and analyse web campaigns are in reality a few years out of date.

See also this presentation I put together on web metrics and the necessity of taking intuitive calls, despite the fact that this is often anathema to a lot of marketing departments.

I only wish that my presentations were as easy on the eye as Helge's but it's always good to have something to strive to!

iPhone users prefer mobile web over print newspapers

2009-07-02T07:07:00.005+01:00

You could read a number of things into this, but Comscore and admob has released a study showing that iPhone and iPod Touch owners use their device more than they read printed newspapers and (for iPhone users) magazines.

Does that stat mean that they read the news on their iPhone? Not necessarily, this finding could simply point to the trend of printed newspaper readership going down and smartphone usage going up.

Having said that, the fact is that after years of mobile newspapers being touted as the way forward despite people having to struggle with WAP (we worked for a client called Mobizines in 2006, which was sadly ahead of its time), the iPhone does finally make reading a paper on the mobile web a reasonably pleasant experience.

According to a CBC piece looking at the growth of iPhone apps, "Suddenly, content owners had the tools to create interfaces more closely tailored to what they had to offer. The result: A newspaper publisher's iPhone application could offer a better way to read its articles than the Web — or even print."

Indeed, while charging for web editions of newspapers might be doomed to failure, charging for iPhone versions could work. David Hunke, USA Today's publishers, was recently quoted in saying that he regretted the paper not charging for it's iPhone application: "I'm not sure we realized what we had. I think that's a value readers will be willing to pay for."

Source - Marketing Charts

All 'official' blogs should be like this - Copenhagenize

2009-07-01T13:00:00.000+01:00

A Day in the Life of Cycle Chic from Colville Andersen on Vimeo.

With all the talk recently about the future of blogs (Charles Arthur of The Guardian wondered if they were slowly dying, my response here), two simple and effective sites around Copenhagen's cycling culture show how what you might call promotional blogging can be done well.

Spotted via an Information Aesthetics post about the new Copenhagen public bicycle counter, I initially assumed that the Copenhagenize blog and the sister style site, copenhagencyclechic.com, were forward thinking pieces of communication by Copenhagen city council.

Actually the exercise seems to be semi-official, being maintained by cycling enthusiast Mikael Colville-Andersen, who in addition to being a Danish film director and journalist, now consults more widely on urban cycling policy.

The point is, official blogs - whether for brands or public bodies - are more often than not hamstrung by brand guidelines and internal bureaucracy. As a result, they could do worse than follow Copenhagenize's template for successful brand blogging, which I see as:

1 - Content counts more than bells and whistles. I am not saying cheap is necessarily good, but both blogs run on the free blogger.com platform (like this one). While blogger lacks a few extras, and may not be the best free system out there (see sub post below), the layout is functional and it's easy to update. And as they are blogs, they are link - and hence search engine - rich.

2 - Keep it going. You see a lot of official or promo blogs that just land in the blog graveyard due to a lack of interest. Both of these are updated frequently and regularly. Copenhagenize.com's last post is from Saturday while copenhagencyclechic.com had a photo post yesterday.

3 - Keep it free of brand speak. The toughest challenge for a lot of communicators who have internal clients looking over their shoulder wondering how many key messages they can shoe horn in. Both of these blogs are edited by a journalist and it shows - the style is engaging and (noteworthy as it's written by a Dane), it's in plain English.

4 - Produce content that's useful and accessible. In other words, don't run the risk of vanishing up your brand backside, or you'll face a big reader turn-off. By contrast, looking at Postrank, Copenhagencyclechic's posts have good engagement (bookmarks, comments or link back) scores - none languish at 1.0, the bottom score you get when noone reacts to your post.

5 - Go easy on the hard sell. With the tagline 'bike advocacy in high heels', copenhagencyclechic does a good job of promoting Danish cycling culture simply through the use of lifestyle led visuals. The posts speak for themselves without trying to ram the message down users throats, another mistake 'sales' blogs often make along with the messaging one in point three.

Any official blogs looking to get off the ground should take a thorough look through these two sites for inspiration about how to do the job properly.

Blogging is dead - long live blogging

As an aside, A List blogger Steve Rubel recently announced that he's done with blogging...actually not really as he admits himself.

What he's done is move his blog over onto Posterous. While he calls Posterous a lifestream, we're really talking semantics as Posterous is a blogging platform that's a few steps on from blogger in terms of functionality, in that it integrates better with Twitter, Facebook and video sharing sites.

It's something I'd been considering (and no doubt a lot of other bloggers) myself - moving this site onto a system that gives me a few more options - and no doubt with Steve's lead others will now follow. The point is, it shows that the blogging industry isn't permanently stuck back in 2004, but continues to evolve.

You've got to admire their brass neck

2009-06-30T11:13:00.009+01:00

...and their ability to turn a huge crisis into a potential opportunity.

Booked a ticket for one of the 50 Michael Jackson concerts at London's 02 (formerly 'The Dome')? Obviously you don't really want your money back, what you actually want is the ability to have your ticket as a souvenir keep-sake.

The owners of the 02, AEG, are offering fans these £50-£75 ($80-$125) tickets in lieu of a refund, claiming that they feature "special images which give them a 3D moving effect" (source BBC News Online).

This wheeze doesn't have anything to do with the £300 million insurance liability AEG is now facing, does it?

Below - What Buzz Feed says could be the viral video of the year, Filipino prison inmates in a Michael Jackson tribute.

The Iranian Election - 2,024,166 tweets later

2009-06-30T07:05:00.004+01:00

The other day I (and a lot of other people) questioned whether Iran might prove to be Twitter’s defining moment, the time when it proved that it is not just about inanity and ‘look at me’ chest puffing.

No, it wasn’t the ‘Twitter revolution’ with Twitter being very thin on the ground in Iran, but the micro-blogging service out ran mainstream news services to the point that you could catch the BBC 10pm flagship news having a correspondent monitor Twitter to see what was going on.

With the Guardian Council in Iran now having certified the so-called results, the Web Ecology Project, affiliated with Harvard and MIT, produced a report on the ‘first 18 days’ after the initial election results were announced. Some impressive stats in there including:

From 7 June 2009 until the time of publication (26 June 2009), there were 2,024,166 tweets about the election in Iran.

The Web Ecology Project says 480,000 took part in the Iran conversations. If we assume 20 million tweeple worldwide of which 10 million are active, then that would be almost 5% of the active Twitter user base.

As with Twitter as a whole, a small number of ‘power users’ dominated with the top 10% accounting for 65.5% of total tweets.

Will the usual Western disaster fatigue settle in now that the protests are dying down? The graph above shows that even 18 days later on 25 June the number of Tweets were still high. However as of today, Rick Astley, Paris Hilton and (inevitably) Michael Jackson dominate. Business as usual then....though Honduras has now crept into the list as well.

Top image - Mousavi1388

Teens online all the time? Not as much as adults says Nielsen

2009-06-29T20:46:00.005+01:00

A riposte to anyone who says that today's teens spend all their time in front of the computer comes from a Nielsen Report 'How Teens Use Media' (via the Witchita Eagle - amazing sometimes what the feed brings home).

Nielsen says that if anything teens have a fairly balanced media diet and its their parents who are online all day long. Based on US teens (though I don't suppose Australian, UK et al teens are that different), the report 'How teens use media', says that:

Teens spend 11 hours, 32 mins a month online, "far below the average across age groups of 29 hours, 15 minutes"
Teens watch more TV than ever, up 6% over five years. And that makes sense, I've always believed that TV has, ad recession woes aside, been able to co-opt the net successfully and that online video viewing largely consists of several minute chunks
Nielsen also quoted a 2007 Ball State University 'observational' study which found that less than a quarter of teens use media concurrently (ie watch TV, look at Bebo / Facebook, and SMS at the same time). However this particular conclusion has been met with some scepticism, David Kamerer, assistant professor of PR and new media at Loyola University Chicago comments that this is "contrary to my personal experience."

You don't need to be their Facebook friend

The conclusion? Online media is crucial when reaching teens but it's not the only route to go down. According to Nielsen director of insights, Nic Covey, "It's important for advertisers... and anyone who wants to communicate with teens, (to know) that you don't necessarily need to be their Facebook friend to reach them."

Image - Ernop

The slow decline of blogs? (again)

2009-06-29T09:50:00.008+01:00

Last week Charles Arthur wrote an, as you'd expect much discussed, Guardian piece on the long tail of blogging 'dying.' His rationale was that in the long term, people are turning to more immediate and concise services such as Twitter and Facebook updates to share their thoughts.

This is a theme that comes around time and time again. For example, last October, Paul Boutin wrote an article on Wired entitled "Twitter, Flickr, Facebook make blogs look so 2004."

The numbers don't show a decline

Charles Arthur quotes the Technorati stat from last year that shows that 95% of the 133 million blogs are basically dead - abandoned due to lack of interest or time. But that's still seven million+ that are alive and well.

And on his data mining blog, MSN's Matthew Hurst produced a series of graphs to prove that blogs aren't declining. He took a series of common (not news led) terms like car repair and birthday, things that you'd imagine to be fairly consistent year round.

Looking at Blogpulse (which Matthew co-created), he found 142 posts about car repair on 4 Jan and 144 on 21 June. Similarly, he took the term 'birthday' and found the trend to be fairly straight.

Does Twitter actually give blogs a new lease of life?

I'd also take the opposite view to Charles Arthur: Rather than spelling the kiss of death, Twitter and Facebook give a lot of blogs a new lease of life.

From personal experience and from looking through this blog's stats at Get Clicky, I know I get around 5% of my monthly unique visitors from Twitter. While that doesn't sound like a lot, that's 120 odd readers I'd normally not have and I know that for other blogs the % figure is much higher.

That's because in a lot of cases, Twitter is not a self contained place to have conversations (the stereotype being it's where people blast off 140 character thoughts about what they had for breakfast), it's somewhere where conversations kick off that get taken elsewhere.

So I predict that in a year's time we'll still be having 'decline of blogs' type pieces...and plenty of posts like this in return.

Image - Matthew Hurst / Blog Pulse

All you ever wanted to know about Social Games

2009-06-29T07:01:00.004+01:00

Justin Smith / Inside Social Games - Social Gaming Summit Talk Slides

View more documents from justinsmith.

Social gaming, casual games played via social networks like Facebook or smart phones (one example - Zynga's Facebook poker), is what Venture Beat's Dean Takahashi calls "one of the bright spots of the recession-pounded Silicon Valley economy...social gaming has seen rapid growth in users, revenues, employee hiring and the creation of a true ecosystem."

From last week's Social Gaming Summit comes this presentation by Inside Social Games Justin Smith, which neatly gives an introduction to the whole sector including stats about how it's broadened the whole games demographic to take in people who wouldn't normally be considered hard core gaming fans.

When the founders of Flickr, Twitter put their money into something, it is worth taking notice

2009-06-27T21:35:00.004+01:00

Hot on the heels of thismoment.com, the new online scrapbook allowing you to capture happenings or memories, comes another web start up worth looking at - Small Batch Inc.

And bearing in mind who is behind it, it is worth taking notice. According to Stephen Laughlin's blog, Small Batch raised an undisclosed amount of cash from a group of investors whose numbers include Twittter's Evan Williams and Caterina Fake, ex Flickr co-founder and now head of new recommendation search engine Hunch.

Wikirank - Wikipedia trends

Small Batch has two ventures on the go. The first, which is live, is Wikirank. A useful trending tool, it shows you what's popular in the online encyclopedia Wikipedia.

At time of writing, Michael Jackson hasn't cracked the 'most read' in the last 30 days list, with the table instead being topped by David Carradine with 2.2 million views.

Perhaps people thought that with his life laid bare in the media, Jackson was more of an open book and Carradine more of a mystery.

Typekit

The other venture, still under wraps is Typekit. Typekit enables designers to build websites with "web native typography" or fonts.

Apparently being able to pull on a database of available commercial and free fonts and use them online will be quite a big deal in web design terms. I'll have to take their word on that!

New social network - 'This Moment' Will it take off?

2009-06-27T10:33:00.000+01:00

Two years ago the talk was all about the growth of social networks appealing to niche interests, but more recently with (especially) Facebook, Twitter, MySpace et al sucking up all the oxygen, the environment to launch new networks has got a lot tougher.

I say this as Reuters Media File reports on the launch of a new venture, thismoment.co m.

The man behind it is games entrepreneur Vince Broady and the idea is to - as the name implies - 'moments.' So you group together any digital content, whether that be pictures from other sites like Flickr, You Tube etc, to create what I'd call instant memory snap shots or happenings.

Not surprisingly, at time of writing the site is filled with Michael Jackson tribute moments, but other 'moments' include travel, graduation, pets, firsts - it's obviously also tailor made to host scrap books for people who want to document their kids growing up.

In a field crowded with 'me too' competitors, there is always a danger that when launching a new site like this you will fall flat on your face.

Having said that, while you could in theory also create digital scrap books elsewhere (especially with Flickr allowing video), the site looks good and there is a need for it. The New York Times is also apparently on board to provide content and I could imagine brands - food and travel brands in particular - coming on board to create their own 'moments.'