I had lunch last week with a client who had just returned from attending the Las Vegas Consumer Electronics Show (CES) before heading on to New York to visit a number of his own high-profile media clients. His impression was that many larger print media organisations in the US were waiting with great anticipation for the official announcement this week of the Applet Tablet, and were hoping that Steve Jobs would direct them forward through one of the most confusing business periods of their history, much like he did for the music industry. The same can be said of Australian publishers, although our market is about eighteen months behind the US because of the late introduction of the iPhone, Kindle and other eReading devices. That gap is closing rapidly and after tomorrow (depending on Australian access to Apple iSlates, iGuides or iPads) it could slam shut and the Australian publishing industry may end 2010 entirely transformed and shaken out.
I have included two recent posts from Mashable that summarise some of the current thinking about the Apple Table and its potential impact.
If you look at mUmBRELLA's top ten marketing disasters for 2009, five of these are mismanaged social media or digital marketing plays. I thought this was interesting given a video I just watched from the 2009 TED conference of Alexis Ohanian of Reddit complaining about social media experts, and then giving a brief example of how Greenpeace used Reddit to select the name for a humpback whale which was used in an anti-Japanese whaling campaign. The video says:
The lesson of Mister Splashy Pants is a shoo-in classic for meme-makers and marketers in the Facebook age.
Whether generated by "Social Media Experts", Traditional Agencies, Social Agencies or others, the key thing about these campaigns seems to be that they have failed or succeeded based on the control that the client's marketing department has been persuaded to give away.
Greenpeace Whale - SUCCESS - Greenpeace controlled the original three names they put up to the market for voting. They were decided in-house with branding in mind (perhaps!), however the team knew they would be happy with all three results. Even though they wanted the other two more sophisticated names, Mr Splashy Pants still worked and probably worked extremely well with the Japanese market which likes that type of branding. We don't know the details, but perhaps that was strongly embedded in the thought process.
Westpac – Banana smoothies - FAIL - It seems this was a breakdown internally over customer communication policy and digital strategy. Who gets to make decisions about sending information to clients and what to put up on the company website and let it "out there in the wild", to quote Stilgherrian.
Toyota Yaris – Clean Getaways - FAIL - This could be looked at as the opposite of the Greenpeace success. The Agency, Saatchi & Saatchi took complete control of the project. "Voting is done on hits and comments," said an email sent out to encourage submissions as deadline approached and entries were thin. So the authenticity that Saatchi's were playing to for their social media experiment was, we must select the entry that stirred the most hits and comments regardless of strategic positioning, thinking about the market for Yaris, comments from the marketers at Toyota etc. It comes down to social marketing experience. But also integration across the marketing and communication mix. How can you have a social media campaign that doesn't think about the market your talking to and your other communications?
Witchery – Girl with the jacket - FAIL - This is a story about so many FAILS. Poor production, poor strategy, falsehood, misunderstanding the market and then public bitterness, revenge and demise. Shakespearean in scope and scale. Aristotelian in tragedy. I think we all know this one. I don't know where Witchery was on this, though.
Tourism Queensland – Fake tattoo - UNSURE - Here's a case of Australia's media losing the ability to investgate properly and agencies happily riding on the back of that. That's as opposed to others seemingly going out of their way to mislead in order to tell their story of romance.
If you haven't seen the latest Google Chrome videos from the UK have a look below. From BBHLabs, they are outstanding. If you want something to go viral, this is the kind of work you should be aiming at. 367,461 views on the YouTube version posted here since December 9, 09. Of course, that's easy to achieve, you say, when you're Google - yet there are many other large budget players who are missing the mark with their online creative and producing product that is well below par. Or allowing agencies to convince them into UGC (user generated content for advertising, even) that will be seen by many un-targeted users and damage their brand. Want a recent example - Toyota Yaris. You knew I was going to say that...
Iggy Pintado identifies this Ikea social media campaign on his blog. On his YouTube page, Jimmy Wulff from IKEA's agency Forsman & Bodenfors, Göteborg, Sweden says:
For the opening of the new IKEA Malmö store, we created a Facebook campaign. The mission was to create something engaging that would have the potential of spreading by itself beyond the borders of the Malmö region. But at the same time staying relevant and focusing on IKEA's offer, their products. Without messing around.
As Iggy says, if you're not sure if Facebook is for business use, watch this 93 second video.
With the large number of e-readers and tablet products promised for the market in 2010, it seems clear next year will force print publishers to address their digital publishing strategy. If readers are investing $300-$400 in handheld devices that read magazines, newspapers and books, then they will want to maximise their value. Publishers whose titles can't work with these devices will lose out to competitors' titles that can.
Major publishers such as Time Inc are developing their own reader applications in collaboration with technology firms to ensure they stay ahead of the curve. News Corp has joined forces with Hearst, Conde Nast, Time and Meredith to try and control the e-Reader market by creating a common platform on which readers would pay for content from their publications. The business model is to create revenue from content and advertising sales, as well as from print subscriptions.
2010/11 will still be experimental as far as technology and business models are concerned, however, I believe during this period we will see consumption via mobile reading devices significantly pushing print sales in key demographic segments and industry sectors such as business and sport for magazines, and broadsheet / business newspapers. Womens' mass market magazines and books following over the next 2-3 years. Business books are already being heavily consumed on the kindle in the US. To see the rapid adoption rate of successful mobile products, think about the explosion of iPhone users over the past eighteen months, and now Android powered phones.
Although The Sun Newspaper UK viral I wrote about was amusing, it is a bit like the boy sticking his finger in the dike holding back the sea. Have a look below at the Time Inc video about their collaboration with The Wonderfactory. As the The Wonderfactory say, "it is an excellent example of how tablets will enable the creation of innovative, addictive experiences by publishers, media companies, and advertisers."
This video is a quick and easy way to follow the development of Google over the past eleven years, from Sergey Brin and Larry Page meeting at Stanford University to the recent testing of Google Wave.
Dr Mike Cadogan, our Digital Strategist: Health Care, has an excellent post on his blog, "Life in the fast lane", about social media and the health care industry accompanied by the video below.
Newspapers are fighting back against a digital onslaught on many fronts. Here is an online advertisement, ironically, for The Sun newspaper from the UK claiming they have been the best handheld device for the past 40 years.
Technology adoption has often caused painful disruption to the way people work as CIOs introduce new enterprise systems throughout organisations. It seems the opposite is occurring in the 2.0 age where employees are just as likely to introduce new technologies enthusiastically to the disruption and concern of senior management. The introduction of a wiki to manage one project, a forward thinking product manager starting to promote their latest campaign on Twitter, or a PA suggesting the CEO should have a blog can lead a company to evaluate their entire social media strategy. It is bottom up or top down.
McAfee has recently released his book, Enterprise 2.0: New Collaborative Tools for your Organization’s Toughest Challenges, which explores the ways leading organisations are bringing Web 2.0 tools inside the firm. McAfee calls these tools “emergent social software platforms”—highly visible environments with tools that evolve as people use them—and he is optimistic about their potential to improve the way we work.
Here’s what the publishers have to say about the book:
"Web 2.0" is the portion of the Internet that's interactively produced by many people; it includes Wikipedia, Facebook, Twitter, Delicious, and prediction markets. In just a few years, Web 2.0 communities have demonstrated astonishing levels of innovation, knowledge accumulation, collaboration, and collective intelligence. Now, leading organizations are bringing the Web's novel tools and philosophies inside, creating Enterprise 2.0. In this book, Andrew McAfee shows how they're doing this, and why it's benefiting them. Enterprise 2.0 makes clear that the new technologies are good for much more than just socializing. When properly applied, they help businesses solve pressing problems, capture dispersed and fast-changing knowledge, highlight and leverage expertise, generate and refine ideas, and harness the wisdom of crowds. Most organizations, however, don't find it easy or natural to use these new tools initially. And executives see many possible pitfalls associated with them. Enterprise 2.0 explores these concerns and shows how business leaders can overcome them. McAfee brings together case studies and examples with key concepts from economics, sociology, computer science, consumer psychology, and management studies and presents them all in a clear, accessible, and entertaining style. Enterprise 2.0 is a must-have resource for all C-suite executives seeking to make technology decisions that are simultaneously powerful, popular, and pragmatic.
Wednesday, January 27 