First day at the new office, pop to Starbucks to write a speech. No plugs for the laptop. Grr. That’s why Starbucks is so annoying. You think you’re going to get decent coffee, but it’s a bit random. You think you can work wirelessly, but unless you have an account with T-Mobile, it’s expensive. Roll on local authority funded wireless networks, like they have in Islington. Or free wi-fi, like they have in most of the cafés in Stoke Newington and Valparaiso. Come on Starbucks. Catch up with the modern ‘knowledge-working’ habits please, and provide more than one plug for the low battery life mac users, and free wi-fi with the skinny caps. Loved the John Coltrane backgroud music though. Credit where credit’s due in educating the world that A Love Supreme is not an ice cream at McDonalds.

Last January, I could hardly imagine myself uttering the word “twitter” without a hint sardonic irony, or even a little resentment.

However, come 2009, it’s become such an important part of my daily lexicon that the actual meaning of the word is beginning to fade away in a blissful fog of web-induced ADHD.
Frankly, it’s growing tiresome, saying the word. We need something new, something refreshing.
Will Twitter be as popular come 2010? Yes, very, very likely.

But what’s the next scrappy up-and-comer with a catchy name and “don’t know how we functioned without it” features ready to take the world by storm?

In a word, it should be: Loopt.

With the staggering number of iPhones being sold across the globe (4.4m in the past three months) Loopt will simply become essential.

Loopt is pretty cool and ridiculously easy to use, not unlike Twitter.

It shows users where friends are located and what they are doing using interactive maps on their mobile phones.

Which a lot of mobile applications are capable of. However, Loopt has the social networking zeal that any successful internet phenomenon should.

The app can detects businesses in the vicinity of you and your friends and makes a suggestion based on your preset preferences, it also recommends it to your friends, and lets your friends comment back so you can organise a get-together, for a proper boozer.

As if nipping out after work for a quick pint wasn’t tempting enough, now your phone is going to tell you to as your guiltily sashay past the gym.

Oh and it’s not just for the iPhone, it works with over 100 other mobile handsets as well.

The other four websites to look out for?

TV.com, which we mentioned here before, should be at least as popular as hugely popular Hulu;

Qik, a YouTube for mobilephone video is incredibly handy;

Blip.fm, Twitter-like social networking for the musically-inclined;

and finally Cooliris, image based web searching that is addictively helpful.

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Following on from our recent compendium of social media traffic growth, Robin Goad has posted Hitwise’s latest stats about Twitter’s phenomenal growth in the UK:

Twitter was one of the fastest growing websites in the UK last year, and it shows no signs of slowing down. If anything, the service is even more popular than our numbers imply, as we are only measuring traffic to the main Twitter website. If the people accessing their Twitter accounts via mobile phones and third party were included, the numbers would be even higher. Many people seem to find Twitter addictive: the average amount of time that people spend on Twitter.com has more than trebled from less than 10 minutes a year ago to half an hour now.

Twitter receives the largest amount of its traffic from the USA, but its penetration is greater in the UK market. For the week ending 17/10/09 twitter.com ranked as the 291st most visited website in the UK, accounting for 0.024% of all Internet visits; while in the USA it ranked 350th, picking up 0.020% of all Internet visits.

Twitter is still most popular with younger users in urban areas, but its appeal is broadening as it grows. The fastest growing age group of users is 35-44 year olds, who now account for 17.3% of UK visitors to twitter.com.

Twitter is becoming an important source of Internet traffic for many sites, and the amount of traffic it sends to other websites has increased 30-fold over the last 12 months.

This follows on from yesterday’s US Hitwise data from Heather Dougherty, pointing out that Twitter is now more popular than Digg.com:

While we’re on the subject, you could find out why people use Twitter, see Chris’ commentary on why the British tabloids are so hostile towards Twitter or even follow me on Twitter.

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Obama’s success is being celebrated as the triumph of ‘digital cleverness’ over the old fashioned slagging TV strategy of the Republicans. Even I got an email from Obama. In the end though, I believe he was selling hope, and a vision for the future. Much of the corporate world sells the past, and it’s tiring being a change agent (I know several) in companies that don’t want to change at their heart, or just will take too long. Observing trends is one thing, adapting to them is another. And there are some deep changes brought about by the internet that I think companies must adapt to.

I was interviewed by McKinsey some years ago about how the digitisation of media would affect the agency business. I was pretty clear about the opportunity and the challenge. Digitisation would eventually expose the pricing structures of media and the agency infrastructure that sat in between the advertisers and the media properties that put messages in front of consumers. Media owners seek the highest bidder for access to their distribution; brand owners seek the lowest bidder for their message distribution. Agencies are in the middle, trying to make a cut both ways. Obviously it’s more complicated than that, and the creation of memorable brand imagery and content for distribution has been where agencies create value for themselves. This relied on having ‘the best people’ and ‘top creative talent’ and an industry of awards recognition emerged to build rank and competition.

The world has moved on. One of the deepest and potentially destructive trends is neatly described, again, by McKinsey. The Internet and related technologies give companies radical new ways to harvest the talents of innovators working outside corporate boundaries. High tech, consumer goods, and automotive companies have to involve customers, suppliers and small specialist businesses, in the creation of new products. By distributing innovation through the value chain, companies reduce costs and get to market faster by eliminating the bottlenecks that come with total control.

Agencies struggle with this concept. They want to control everything, and take credit for everything. The advertising agencies have long known that the ability to marshal the co-creation process has been a competitive advantage, and the role of orchestration creates value, as well as the control process. This meant that in awards ceremonies, the production companies get awards too. I’ve heard agencies from the direct marketing world tend to be less collaborative, as they don’t have the same self-confidence perhaps, or the associative glamour that shooting with Paul Thomas Anderson or Aki Kaurismaki brings in seductive conversations with Clients.

The d-word tends to make all this rather confusing. Developing a programme for a brand to live successfully on the internet forces a way of working that requires a strong collaborative culture at the heart. That is hard to understand without experience. It’s not clear cut who is responsible in the development process. Ideas do, literally, come from everyone. That has to be a good thing, especially as the words on every marketeer’s lips are ‘the consumer is in control’. But it is not something that the old model of agency self-aggrandisement likes very much.

PS I watched the Obama inauguration with my children, (politely encouraged
to switch over from Phineas and Ferb) rather like I had been allowed by
my parents to stay up for the first moon landing when I was tiny, and was delighted to
hear him speak up for the workers, rather than the greedy, and for the
doers, rather than the credit bandwagon. Let’s hope he continues to.

Whoop whoop whoopie! Joy, joy, joy. I’m among the millions of Americans who are expressing enthusiasm today for the inauguartion of Barack Obama as President.

I’m in the overly optimistic camp toward Obama and I’m counting on him to fix everything! The economy, the war, healthcare and the list goes on of wrongs that need to be made right. 

Yes he has a daunting huge job ahead of him, but yes he can do it.

Happy Obama Day to all,

-Lisa

A purportedly genuine Cinderella story, about a distressed Aussie damsel who met the man of her dreams in a Sydney café, and tried to track him down using YouTube and local media outlets, has been revealed to be an apparent marketing hoax.

The story, which was meekly covered by Sydney’s Daily Telegraph yesterday, follows a young blonde who met a man in a café (“their eyes met over scrambled eggs,” barf) after a waiter had mixed up their orders.

Bang, sparks, love, etc.

However, the man then leaves, and without taking his cracking black dinner jacket, which the young blonde confiscates for her own keeping, and through a soppy YouTube video, dedicated email address and a series of racy photographs, tries to track down The Man In The Jacket.

The video itself has received over 100,000 views and was witness to almost immediate scepticism.

One day later, thanks in no small part by those damn clever YouTube commenters, the story has been revealed to be a viral campaign for an Australian fashion label.

The Daily Telegraph updated their story, taking a closer look at the label on the jacket, and found it read Witchery, a womenswear line.

However, Witchery is rumoured to be launching in imminent line of menswear.

Witchery denies the claim, but the public, that being the YouTube community, isn’t waiting for the jury, and is staging an unprecedented revolt.

Some commenters go as far to call the young blonde a “cheap, lying, hussy” and “there is such a thing as bad publicity – its called infamy. Naked Communications and Witchery will certainly see the backlash.”

Naked Communications is the marketing group which has been associated with the campaign through an unattributed publicist.

Jonathan Pease, the presenter for Australia’s Next Top Model is apparently the executive of ideas for Naked Communications, but he denied any knowledge of any campaign.

Watch the video for yourself, that is if you can make it all the way through (it is rather cringe-inducing), and decide if it’s a hoax or not. YouTube “body language experts” (oh, God) are saying it’s obviously an act, and I would have to agree.

This is the 21st century right?. I pick up the T3 2009 calendar and can’t believe what I am seeing. I check it is 2009 and I have not found a vintage copy of the 1979 edition. Each month has a gadget of the month with a erotic shot of a girl ‘wet’ with excitement holding a strategically placed gadget in her legs, arms, breasts. January we have a woman with a see through slip on in water holding an android phone. February we have a women kneeling in hot steam holding an ‘eco gadget’. March shows us a women with a touchscreen strategically placed in her bikini. Do I need to go on?

In my previous post, I demonstrated that women are a growth market while male markets are saturated. Marketers missing out on a £5billion pot of gold (a conservative figure according to Jupiter), I predict T3 will be out of business in a year. Their magazine relies on its core audience of “sexually repressed nerds” according to Wikipedia. All of whom have the skills to download real porn from bit torrent and don’t need this half-hearted house tech-porn.

Showing the calendar to some male colleagues, one told me the only place he could see the calendar was “on the wall of kwik fit”. Hardly an aspirational image for your average man with disposable cash. If you are trying to woo a girl, and she walks into your bedroom and see a copy of T3 or worse, the T3 2009 calendar, what sort of signal does that send? Even a sexually repressed nerd can think that one through. Some of the advertising in T3 is no better, this Asus ad being a good example.

Rather than default to a out of date, lazy way of selling technology to men at the expense of attracting women, technology brands need to be more innovative with their media strategies. Technology has become so accessible and embedded into our culture, that the hard sell of technology is no longer needed. There is no such thing as Early Adopters.

Tech brands need to think innovatively about to communicate to both men and women and buying a media strategy of tech porn like T3 just ain’t going to cut it. What brands need to do:

1. Leverage the blogging community as they are the key influencers. Panasonic are doing this at CES. Who are you more like to trust for a product review- a blogger or a paid for reviewer?

2. Connect your audience to like minded people. This is a great way to earn their respect and ultimately their trust. At Hewlett Packard, we connected artists to others artists rather than advertise in tech magazines and talk about features of printers. This generated so much positive goodwill to HP.

3. Be brave. Be rebellious. And dont waste money on advertising in magazines like T3.

Goodbye T3 and Good Luck.

Lord Carter’s interim report on Digital Britain is due out next week. I was at the briefing he gave to the Westminster forum, which made the front page of the FT at the weekend, along with a few TV luminaries. There are a few big unanswered questions. First, is it really ‘universal’ access? Second, if ‘free to air’ is no longer viable, how do you create a framework that allows quality public service broadcasting to continue that isn’t singly funding the BBC? Third if there is no publicly supported creative industry, how will programmes that sit low down the commissioning table (investigative public interest programmes for example) ever see the light of day? As the government continues to bail out the banks with our money, government investment in the ‘digital content’ industry pales somewhat into a relatively small proportion of the £3.5bn BBC funding. By comparison, the Government injected £37bn into RBS, Lloyds TSB and HBOS in October, and
pledged £450bn to guarantee banks’ debt. It’s now adding another tranche of money for the bankers. If we are to become a serious digital player in the world, the government needs to put its money where its mouth is.

You’re going to be bombarded with lots of buzzwords in this post – don’t be put off. By the end, you’ll have a vision of the future of the web you never thought possible. Let’s start with Alisa Leonard-Hansen‘s presentation explaining portable social graphs:

Now, let’s move on to Jesse Pickard and Shiv Singh‘s presentation imagining their potential, using the example of Facebook Connect:

They gives us a glimpse of what the next few years will bring in terms of the whole web becoming social. To quote Charlene Li:

in the future, social networks will be like air. They will be anywhere and everywhere we need and want them to be

We’ve already implemented Facebook Connect on our site, allowing you to use your Facebook identity to log-on and post comments and for your Facebook friends to get told about those comments in their news feeds (when Gawker Media did this, user registrations were up by 45% and comments up by 16% compared to the previous week).

To really begin to see the potential for yourself, have a look at how The Insider is using it, JC Penney’s recent Beware of the Doghouse campaign or the early efforts from Vimeo, Brightkite and Eventbrite.

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Facebook has pulled the plug on Burger King’s clever Whopper Sacrifice application, citing privacy issues, after the app was used 233,906 times by 82,771 users in less than a week.

The application, created by Crispin Porter + Bogusky, allowed users to delete 10 of their friends from their friend list in order to get a free Whopper.

It was also, frankly, brilliant.

As part of the campaign, the application also notified the deleted friend that they had been removed from their users friend list using the Whopper Sacrifice app, something that Facebook doesn’t do.

Facebook stopped the campaign for this reason, saying the notification of the de-friending act breaks its privacy rules.

But really, it was the whole crux of the application, what a slap in the face for BK and CP+B.

Especially CP+B.

Finally, when a decent, humorous and clever campaign is developed for the Facebook platform, Facebook shuts it down.

Ouch. Isn’t this supposed to be the future of advertising?

Hopefully the company has some more ideas up its sleeves, as they have been going from strength-to-strength (in my opinion) with their previous burger-scented cologne and Whopper Virgins campaigns. Chin up!

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