The latest research I have conducted with Syracuse university
highlights some interesting findings.     Whilst most younger women
under the age of 21 feel comfortable with technology and rate
themselves at 6 out of 10 on a tech literate scale, they are not
confident to buy technology without seeking reassurance from others.
They will rely heavily on the advice of either the sales assistant or
a friend.  Women want to know they have made the right decision.  They
want to see the product.    Touch it, feel it, imagine using it.   Is
it going to enhance my life?  How does it fit into my life?

Men do not rate themselves much higher than women, 7 out of 10 on the
tech literate scale but do not need any reassurance at point of
purchase.  They are more likely to have researched products online and
checked out online reviews.  Men are gamblers.  They more likely to
take risks when it comes to technology.

The process is completely different both in terms of perception and
behaviour.  Yet tech brands know nothing about these  gender
differences.  Tech brands support a very male and traditional buying
process.  A great emphasis is placed on traditional review sites such
as CNET and IGN. These sites are almost exclusively read by men.

Tech brands spend little, if any time, understanding how women and men
are different.  Currently the retail experience supports what men
want: a transaction.   Stores like Game and Dixons continue to be a
“vending machine” which relies on you knowing and be confident about
what you want.  Rather than provide encouragement and expertise, the
sales assistants try to flog you a certain game or piece of kit that
only increases need for reassurnace.  And I wont even mention PC World
as I will come out in an allergic rash.  I need therapy to get over
the ‘experience’ of trying to buy a hard drive there.

Tech retailers must create a culture of reassurance which is present
in the attitude of the staff and the way women buy.  Forget the Genius
Bar, bring in the Reassurance Bar where you can sit and have coffee
with a  member of staff.   Have a Try Before you Buy section where you
can see your kit in action.   Make the stores feel like women’s ideal
home, not their idea of hell. 

And for heaven’s sake, wake up and smell the female pound.   

Likely to be one of the more mind-bendingly spectacular performances of the year in London, Martyn Ware, the founding member of 80s bands The Human League and Heaven 17, brings his Future of Sound/Future of Light event to Goldsmiths College in London next week on Tuesday, 24 March.

Martyn Ware

On the bill are animated rock band The Sancho Plan, body>data>space, Tal Rosner United Visual Artists, Scanner, Sophie Clements and Andy Cameron.

The event promises to be part presentation, part performance, and part audience interaction, and will explore the future of experiential art and sound. A production of Illustrious, which is Ware’s creative venture with Vince Clarke, the co-founder of Yazoo and Erasure, guests will be treated to an evening of ambient compositions, piped through a ground breaking 3D surround sound system capable of transforming a conventional room into a sports stadium or a concert hall into a cubicle.

“This is the holy grail of audio; 3D sonic imaging that challenges audiences to embrace a new take on experiencing sound,” Ware said.

The event includes an afternoon symposium from 2pm – 6pm at Goldsmiths College Media Resources Building.

Both events are free, but to assure your place, email your RSVP to z.arabadji@gold.ac.uk

Listening to the future,

-Lisa

Not to sound like a broken record or a teen following trends, but Facebook is totally heading down the same path as the likes of MySpace in my opinion.

The new layout sets the path for more paid advertising both on the homepage and profile page, removes any white space that the previous version had & has even gone to the extent of removing elements that allowed one to easily customize what they see. Too take it even one step further downward I would love to know who is concepting for the platform now. Functionality on your profile page below each of the “commercial” banners, allows one to skip forward and see another banner. I mean, are we developing for the 1990′s or are we moving forward…? Thumbs up, down and skip on a banner?

I for one liked the recent version – it was simple, allowed one to customize and navigate easily but this time round – usability and personalization is out the window. Has Microsoft taken over?

 News inside the mobile industry is that one of its information centrepieces, the blog Mobile Industry Review (MIR) is taking its content to a subscription-only business model, and will offer no more free content from March 27th onward.

The volunteer run site has provided the mobile industry with daily packed content, including podcasts, beginning as its original title SMS Text News since January 2006, and is the branchild of entrepreneur Ewan McLeod.

McLeod reports that hustling to keep the site running, with up to 400,000 visitors daily, is a costly operation that requires funding of about £20K per year that he has been financing independently. He’s welcoming the new corporate angel that has stepped into buy MIR’s content, and provide it to others, for annual subscriptions of £12K per year. MIR’s content model will be transformed into an industry research resource, beginning with the upcoming April mobile trade show CTIA in Las Vegas.

“I’ve done a lot of work around trying to work out a model for covering the cost of bringing MIR to you every month. I failed — it didn’t work. I’m delighted that one company put its money where it’s mouth is and said ‘yes, please’. The fact that they choose to demand exclusivity is just the way it goes. They’re entitled to do so. They’re paying,” commented McLeod.

Always the entrepreneur McLeod is also raising capital by selling Twitter followers for $100 a month.

Good luck Ewan,

-Lisa

It appears one online publication is not waiting for the rest of the industry to begin charging subscriptions for their content, but isn’t £12,000 a bit steep?

Mobile Industry Review, an online news portal for the mobile telecoms biz, was recently acquired by an unnamed company, with plans to transform the blog into a private research company.

The company plans to charge a staggering £12,000 per year to access the website, “plus applicable taxes”, yeesh.

On the company blog, website admin Ewan McLeod said: “Our new client is unwilling to subsidise our existing audience of readers (300-400k last month) so the content that we’ll be creating — reports, video interviews and day-to-day industry news and analysis — will become proprietary from 27th of March. After this date, the public version of MIR will no longer be updated.”

Besides offering their congratulations (cha-ching), the soon-to-be-former MIR readers baulked at the exorbitant cost for a continued subscription.

Reader barneyc wrote: “I can well understand the need to move at least in part to a subscription based model – after all producing this stuff isn’t free. BUT I seriously think the value of MIR will be eroded without the contributions, attention and goodwill of everyone who makes up the extended community.

“Industry news, reviews and such are NOT worth 12k a year to anyone in my humble opinion — no matter how good they are. These is stuff out there in the public arena already and is best left as is so that said community can augment it — i.e. add value.”

Ewan, in reply to a number of the “sell-out” comments being made, responded, saying that MIR cost about £20k to run per month, saying “fiscal reality hits us all in the face – and we move on”.

Last night, as a guest speaker at The Future Laboratory’s idea networking event, I had the opportunity to chat about who is doing what in social media, and the pros and cons of big brand’s moves into the social media space.

Love it or hate it, with Facebook fast approaching 200 million users worldwide and Twitter adding thousands of new members daily, not to mention the popularity already established with platforms such as Linkedin, YouTube, Flickr and MySpace, the social media channel of influence can make or break a brand. Discussed was the fear factor that big brands have now toward the social media monster, and the question of whether to enter the arena, or stay out, for fear of losing control of a brand. As The Future Laboratory’s mission is to look ahead and keep ahead of the curve, my counsel last night was that big brands need to define social media strategy now, rather than wait for a point in time when they may have to be re-active rather than pro-active toward the medium. 

Whether it is a comprehensive strategic plan to making a brand’s presence known among social media channels, or a short-term experiment into the space, such as a contest or other promotional campaign, brand’s need be bold and step into this brave new world where consumers are hanging out and, in some cases, stirring their own little revolutions. In considering a few examples we discussed:

Mars recent campaign for its Skittles candy, a courageous approach that saw the website homepage transformed to showcase the brand’s live streaming Twitter feed along with its Facebook, Flickr and YouTube pages. Usage triggered was so high for this campaign that at one point Twitter crashed, and the brand discovered that turning things over to consumers opens up to a challenge when not everyone played nice with the Tweets they sent along. In the end, the fantastic publicity received around the experiment, has made Skittles top of mind and won new enthusiasts for the brand, even if there has been a bit of brusing.

 

Comcast, an American cable and broadband provider, has been using Twitter to supplement customer service responses. They’ve posted a guy named Frank Eliason to man the Twitter customer service site, positively giving a corporate brand a real human being to interact with in real time. Customers simply Tweet their queries to @Comcastcares and quickly receive response.

 

Other big brands that are stepping into social media with a variety of approaches include: Dell, Starbucks, JetBlue, TheHomeDepot, Southwest Airlines, Whole Foods Market, HRBlock, Best Buy, Popeyes, Forrester Research, Ford, Samsung and Kodak, to name a few.

Here’s a few quick tips I shared with folks last night in thinking about approaching social media for a brand:

Be Seen: What do you look like to your social media audience? Are you human, or are you something off a shelf? People want to see other people in the world of social networking so in reaching out to your audiences pay attention to showing them what you and your team look like. Upload images to your Facebook group of your brand in action — people at events, people using your products, people in your office. Use Flickr to build an image trail of both products and people. Use YouTube to seed videos, integrating several visual tools to showcase the human side of your brand.

Be Real: Don’t piss off your audiences by engaging in blatant heavy promotional use of Twitter, Facebook or other social networking sites. Show a personality and offer up a variety of information to your audience, pointing them to helpful or quirky items.

Be Brave: This is new territory for brand building, and it takes an adventurous sort to take some risks in approaching social media. Think out common sense approaches to using social networking for your brand, and don’t be afraid to experiment out there. 

Be On It: Assign a member of your team, or several, to be monitoring and watching for responses that come back via Tweets, Facebook, YouTube and Flickr comments, and blogs. Response to people’s comments should be swift and effective, helping those with complaints and thanking those with praise. 

Be Interactive: It isn’t enough to hang up a billboard in Second Life or set up a Facebook group or Twitter account, unless you think out how your approach should interact with people. Think about what you can offer up to your audience that will be of interest and relevance to your brand. Can you host a virtual conference in Second Life with prominent speakers? Can you run a contest through Twitter? One company called Going.com created one of the most popular Facebook applications called Naughty Gifts, a slightly cheeky way to give adult gifts to your friends, that has produced millions of exchanges. To promote Going.com, they took the popularity offline and held adult-themed parties throughout America, promoting the events through the Naughty Gifts Facebook application.

For more about future branding trends, sign up for The Future Laboratory’s Lifestyle News Network (LSN). 

Thinking about social media branding,

-Lisa

Brave Brands With Social Media Strategy:

Google seems intent on flexing its telecoms muscle once more with the introduction of Google Voice, a new product that creates transcriptions of  voicemails and archives SMS messages.

The service mingles Google’s Gmail product with mobile phone voicemail, storing the transcribed document in the Gmail inbox, using speech recognition technology that it developed for its Goog-411 directory service.

The product, which also allows low-cost international calls, is currently only available to users of GrandCentral, the mobile start-up Google acquired two years ago, however a public release is expected in a number of weeks.

It’s a nice companion to Google’s Android product, and will no doubt feature prominently on the new Google phone, the HTC Magic, which is being launched via Vodafone in April.

There doesn’t appear to be any immediate benefit to Google for offering such a product, as no revenue would be acquired from simply transcribing voicemails, besides the international call thing.

Which is sure to fuel speculation that Google could be culling this information for more nefarious purposes, bringing up the same argument about online privacy and Google’s all-conquering reach across the internet.

As far as privacy goes, you would have to be an idiot to have Google transcribe all your voicemails if you’ve got something worth hiding.

It would appear Google is aware of this, as shown by its tongue-in-cheek video explaining how Google Voice works, in which a voicemail is transcribed, reading: “Hey, I left the secret plans for the project on your desk, keep them safe.”

The product is pretty handy in a number of ways, for example, when voicemail-inept callers leave a longwinded message, only mentioning their phone number at the beginning, Google can send me a text of the transcribed voicemail.
Same goes with addresses, emails, etc.

Oh, there’s more, like being able to send an ex-girlfriend a transcribed recollection of her 3am drunkdial voicemail. Instant humiliation and gratification, which I guess can be used vice-versa. Perhaps someone should develop a drunkdial blocker for Android’s app store.

Follow me on Twitter