According to some recent YouTube research, your video has:
- a 3.1% chance of getting over 1000 views
- 0.3 percent chance of getting over 10,000 views.
- 0.001% of getting over 100,000 views

On the flip side, you’ve got more chance of getting over 1000 views (3.1%), than you have of getting 0 views (2.8%).  Just.  Interestingly, the mode average for a YouTube clip is less than 50, with a staggering 65% of videos failing to get more than 50 views.

Of course, these stats cover all videos across YouTube – so you’d guess that a professionally created viral ad would fair significantly better than a bedroom video.

Additionally, these stats don’t take into account the unfair advantages of seeding – using something like the Viral Ad Network and the “big seed” seeding strategy that increases the chances of getting over 100,000 by literally factors x10,000′s.

So, eBay scrapes the bottom of the advertising barrel, with an online banner / MPU combination listing results for Patrick Swayze memorabilia including a 99p video of Dirty Dancing – available now on eBay UK. I do hate advertising. In fact, there seems to be very little to redeem it these days. Ever since our ad breaks were transformed into zippy topped and tailed bits on Sky+, I’ve not missed it one bit.

And on the few occasions recently when I’ve actually had to sit through advertisements on the telly I’ve been shocked at how bad it is. To whit, crass ads that seem to have been created by morons from cheap advertising agencies, with no hint of irony. Bad acting (Peter Jones, there’s no excuse), bad editing, bad voiceovers, bad construction, bad branding… has nothing moved on since the 80s? I’m aghast.

Anyway, the dross and unforgivably tacky online aberrations like eBay’s let the few redeeming campaigns stand out, simples.

According to the Guardian, Frank Warren and Amir Khan are threatening to sue Facebook over derogatory comments made about them on the social network.

Facebook allows any user to set up private or public groups. You can go onto Facebook right now and search for Johnny Depp, which will bring back 500 groups dedicated to the actor, but these user groups can just as easily be set up to deride people – like the recent example of the Dixons employees who set up a Facebook group and proceeded to make fun of Dixons customers.

Amir Khan and Frank Warren are not objecting to fan pages, but to abusive and racist comments posted on Facebook.  Facebook has a policy of removing “abusive, vulgar, hateful or racially and ethnically objectionable” comments which violate its terms, but, as the Guardian points out, the sheer volume of content makes this a difficult task, relying on users to police comments themselves. It also states that this language would not be accepted in a newspaper.

The ease with which someone can set up a group or post a comment which is specifically designed to bully another person is frightening. Unlike Amir and Frank, most people who fall victim to this kind of behaviour do not have the financial means to threaten legal action unless the content is removed.

The newspaper analogy is an interesting one. The Daily Mail recently announced that it was not going to pre-moderate user comments, but rely on users to flag abusive content that the paper will then assess and remove if necessary. (In my view, by doing this, the paper risks its reputation by association with abusive user comment.) But the fact is that Facebook is not a newspaper: it is a ‘social utility’, and merely provides a conduit for individuals to publish their own material and thus could not be viewed as a ‘publisher’ in the same way as a newspaper.  However, it does have also some responsibility for its content.

 To be fair, the fact that it has a user policy at all means that it is going some way to realising this responsibility. Facebook terms state: “You will not post content that is hateful, threatening, pornographic, or that contains nudity or graphic or gratuitous violence.” But just having a policy is not enough. From a moral standpoint, you have to implement it, and relying on user reports obviously isn’t enough: if a group is set up specifically with the aim of abuse, members of that group are unlikely to report abusive content. I accept that it would be prohibitively expensive and against the whole set-up to pre-moderate the whole of Facebook’s content, and indeed, the legal defence  under Section 1 of the UK’s defamation Act 1996, or the ‘European hosting defence’ would rely on material NOT being pre-moderated by the human eye.  But the development of sophisticated filters means that it is now possible to automate moderation of abusive or illegal content, and set up a ‘warning’ system where potentially harmful content could be passed to a moderator to assess and take appropriate action.  This would surely be construed as application of “duties of care, which can reasonably be expected .. in order to detect and prevent certain types of illegal activities”i rather than re-classifying Facebook as a publisher responsible for all content on its sites.

Khan and Warren are not complaining about an unfair remark, or a comment about their performance. They’re complaining about racist abuse, which is not only against Facebook’s terms of use, but is both morally wrong and illegal. It is unclear at the time of writing what action Facebook will take to fulfil its legal obligation to take down the offending content following Khan and Warren’s complaints, but there is no doubt that it must do so. If it is Facebook’s policy to remove this kind of abuse, it must take steps to implement it.

_________________________________________

i) Recital 48 of European Directive on electronic commerce (2000/21/EC)

Whenever we’re given a viral campaign to seed we have a bit of internal banter as how well we think it will do.  And as a rule, opinion is always divided.  Kirk’ll like it.  Ian won’t.  Rory will think it’s a viral turd.  Chris will think it’s a viral work of genius . . .

And someone’s always wrong.  They’re wrong because in each case we’ll be judging it on our personal preferences.  What one person likes isn’t necessarily what another likes.  And when it comes to the internet, there maybe a whole of community of “Kirks” out there – a tight-knit highly internet active community of (for example) dog lovers who like nothing better than seeing a dog dance to Gangster’s Paradise.

Luckily we developed processes not to judge campaigns on personal preference.  Three key factors in objectively predicting the virality of a campaign are understanding:
1) Does the campaign “have an audience”?
2) Is this audience also an active community online?
3) Is the content relevant community in a “pathetic” way (i.e. does it have pathos / does it connect in some way)

And once these three factors have been judged, we can plan our seeding strategy – making sure we approach the relevant audiences with the right “pathetic approach”.  

Sounds simple.  Well, the theory is.  However, the execution is a little more challenging – mainly due to the fact that you never 100% know where all these “community influencers” are hanging out.  So for that reason our execution strategies normally include using our Viral Ad Network – which allows us to reach out to broad communities (and niche communities) at the click of a button, allowing us to flush out the lurking relevant influencer gorilla’s in the mist.  Pathos is a strangely unpredictable thing to judge correctly, and the unobvious route is often the best route to viral nirvana. (more on that later)

(+ N.B. I apologise for that terrible last gorilla in the mist mention.  It’s cheap I know.  No more gorilla mentions I promise).

Whilst preparing for a recent presentation I was giving, I found myself questioning whether innovation in ecommerce had ground to a halt. Now I’m not talking about innovations in technology here, there’s a lot of that going on. I’m talking about retailers embracing these innovations and applying them to commercial ecommerce websites.

I look back at 2007 and think about all the exciting things we were seeing/doing for clients. From the initial appearance of the single page checkout; to ‘shop the catwalk’ pages; look books; video product detail pages, etc. 2008 was all about optimisation and best practise; squeezing every last drop out of a site visitor. All good stuff of course, although it still amazes me to think how some retailers are still not doing these basics right.

But what has 2009 brought us? Outfit builders? Well, yes, but that’s not really caught on yet. Social Commerce? Blogs are great at engaging and drive traffic, but that’s certainly not new to the web (just to some fashion etailers). Luxury brands selling direct? Painfully slow. Twitter Commerce? hmmm.

So you see where I’m coming from. Not quite the heady days of two years ago that’s for sure.

Why has this happened? It’s certainly not because creative agencies have run out of ideas that’s for sure. (I can only speak from our perspective as an independent ecommerce agency trying to earn a buck of course). And there are all sorts of great new opportunities out there on new and exciting platforms like Magento Commerce. What we’ve found is that firstly, retailers have been extra cautious this year and are opting for the ‘safe’ option. Budgets are going to systems that do the basics really well, but aren’t going to set the world on fire with new functionality that customers are demanding. There’s also a shortage of brands actually looking to change platforms right now. We saw a massive increase in ecommerce platform deployment in 2007 and 2008, but this year it seems to about getting those systems to pay back on the initial investment. No new systems mean little progress in innovation. I’m pretty sure this will be the same story for the rest of the year as Christmas is around the corner and no retailer will dare do anything to their very stable (and very vanilla) ecommerce website.

Fair enough you might say, but at what expense? Well the reality is, to stay competitive in the ecommerce space, you need to stay ahead of what every one else is doing. There are more and more websites out there that are selling the same thing. Why would a customer prefer one over the other?

So there you have it. Four more months of struggling to get out of bed and living in hope of that brave client that wants to take the next step in ecommerce. One that understands the endless possibilities that something like open source can bring. One that allows it’s agency to really pull out the stops, using budget to do something creative, exciting and innovative in our wonderful world of ecommerce.

Or so says the result of a Penn State study in the States.

Researchers
led by Jim Jansen, associate professor of information science and
technology, and Twitter chief scientist Abdur Chowdhury looked at half
a million tweets. 20% of them were apparently people ‘asking and
providing’ product information. Assuming three million tweets a day, that would translate into 600k posts daily of direct relevance to brands.

I initially found that % on the high side, though ‘providing product information’ is a definition that’s wide enough to include any
tweets about a product or service – I went to this restaurant today, I
bought this mobile phone and so on. I guess it is true that as a
personal broadcasting system we do use Twitter to talk about stuff we
buy or like / dislike a great deal.

Case in point I’ve – almost unconsciously – made some kind of comment about four different companies since the weekend.

According
to the study authors, the large amount of brand data on Twitter can
pretty much provide you with a sentiment map if you monitor and analyse
tweets over time: What do your customers and non customers think about
your product, what features are going down well / not so well, and how
are your competitors faring.

One to add to our list for internal clients of ‘what is Twitter good for?’

Image – marc.benton

Monday morning we all woke up the news that Kraft Foods had
made a £10bn bid for Cadbury, a bid which Cadbury quickly rejected the offer as
it ‘undervalues the company’. Who says
no to a takeover bid with a 31%
premium on top of share price? – A brand which knows it can get a lot more.

Cadbury is the world’s second largest confectionery company
with a stronghold in Britain and emerging markets which account for over
one-third of the company’s
revenue. Kraft is strong in markets such as Scandinavia
and Brazil, where Cadbury has small presence.

Kraft is looking to use Cadbury’s strong brand presence in
Britain and its positioning in emerging markets to create ‘a global powerhouse in snacks,
confectionery and quick meals’.

I am not suggesting that a strong brand name is all a
business should be about, but Cadbury’s decision to decline the Kraft bid had a
lot to do with the strong brand Cadbury has created through innovative ad
campaigns. We all know building a brand / brand equity requires huge investment
and a long term commitment (not to mention a lot of creativity and market
intelligence) and unfortunately the performance and return are never as easy to
measure as they are with a direct response campaign. In the last couple of
years, Cadbury has grown their brand through brilliantly planned and executed
campaigns such as the ‘Gorilla’
and ‘Trucks’ spots – campaigns
so persuasive we all forgot about the huge Cadbury product recall in
June 2006. This means that, if they were to purchase Cadbury, Kraft would be
able to focus on growing sales in Cadbury’s existing markets rather than their
current conundrum – how to build Kraft’s own brands to be more personal and
meaningful.

Kraft executive Michael Osanloo suggested that Cadbury
was only worth what someone was willing to pay for it – as the world’s second
largest confectionary company with average
12% growth per annum in emerging markets and a strong brand identity
Cadbury doesn’t have to sell. Whether Kraft decides to put in a new (higher)
bid or Hershey’s and Nestlé propose a counter offer, Cadbury is in
the fortunate position of choosing when to sell.  Osanloo would perhaps have been closer to the
mark then if he had said that Cadbury is only worth what someone is willing to
pay when (and if) it actually decides to sell.

Being able to laugh at yourself is an important part of social media etiquette. Last night the London Twestival
event took place at Vinopolis, where twitterers from politics,
investment, media and music come together in support of charity. It’s a
global event, a great show and a true demonstration of the need for
people to combine their social computing habits with the human need to
congregate, chat, drink and be merry. And in the morning, as this report shows, we find a little time for diversity and amusement, as this report shows. 

follow the ever amusing @imlondonbridge and if you can be bothered @Alastair Duncan 

I have sat in numerous meetings where clients and agency people alike have spent hours talking about what the rational unique selling point (USP) is of a product. Very rarely have any of the products I have sold had a truly unique feature or benefit. And in technology, any unique feature is quickly copied and therefore unsustainable as a long term strategy.

Whats much more unique is the emotional features of selling a technology product. How it feels to the user. The retail environment in which it is presented. The feeling it creates in others who see you with your gadget. And ultimately the meaningful human interaction and creativity it brings.

So why then do we insist on spending hours debating the rational USP of a product? Comparing every tiny feature of a product with like for like competitor comparisons? And talking about one specific rational feature as if it is going to solve every problem you have ever had in your life?

I propose we are asking the wrong answers and therefore coming up with the wrong solutions.

Take my previous article about Nokia’s N97. Imagine the engineers and the marketing team’s conversation.

“The n97 has so many USPs. Its sure to be an i-phone killer.”

“For a start it has a 5 megapixel camera. The i-Phone only has 2.”

“Not to mention the FM transmitter…”

“And the fold out keyboard.”

The list goes on. Nokia got so hung up on rational USP’s; they forgot about how people use the phone and the feelings it creates in the heart not the head. A great product is more then the sum of its features. The tragedy of most products is that despite the brilliance of their specification, these features are not how women engage with technology.

One woman told me last week;

I love my i-Phone. It somehow manages to capture the human expression of technology; whether its flicking the screen like i would with paper or browsing through my photos. It just feels more human that other tech gadgets”

Pretty Little Head talk about how most marketing focuses on the Achievement Impulse- a male strategy which delivers competitive claims framed through a product advantage (largely based on Baron-Cohen’s work).

Most advertising claims talk about how technology helps men succeed. In advertising we use ‘male’ language- military language of targets, strategies, campaigns, deployment and so on.

With the missed financial opportunity being at 0.6billion according to Jupiter, as a consequence of failing to connect with women, technology brands need to build marketing programmes around a female mindset and agenda.

Forgetting about USP’s is a good place to start.

In the context of Senator Obama’s radical and successful use of the internet to win the Presidency, commentators wildly speculated about how President Obama would then use the internet to govern.  Having amassed 1 million+ followers, would he run the first ever Twit-ocracy and use Twitter to solve his country’s problems?  Would he run an enlarged collaborative People’s Cabinet via Facebook?

Months into President Obama’s period of governance, we now have a good sense of democracy under Obama looks like.  And both government policy wonks and web 2.0 geeks have reasons to be pleased with the direction Obama’s taking American democracy.

Policy wonks should be excited about his declaration, on day two of being in office, that he was dedicated to transparent, participative and collaborative governance:

“My Administration is committed to creating an unprecedented level of openness in Government.  We will work together to ensure the public trust and establish a system of transparency, public participation and collaboration.  Openness will strengthen our democracy and promote efficiency and effectiveness in Government.”

Cue excitement from 2.0 geeks too – as obviously public participation and collaboration are values at the heart of the web 2.0 movement.  So the next question from the 2.0 community was “so what’s the big man going to do?”  Given the precedent of Obama’s election campaign, and the fact that the US are the richest and most tech-savvy nation (inventors of Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Amazon . . .), the expectations were certainly set high.

The reality has certainly been a lot more muted than most geeks would have liked.  Nothing overly glam and technologically ground-breaking, but instead a steady stream of pilot e-democracy projects and iterative improvements using an array of different web 2.0 tools.

A quick list of these innovations in participative and transparent governance include:

• White House Open for questions: an interactive question and answer session with the President.

• Recovery.org dialogue: a crowd-sourcing process designed to tap the IT community for ideas for implementing Recovery.gov.

• Open Government Directive collaboration: a collaborative policy-writing process to openly develop a draft of the Open Government policy.

• Data.gov: a web portal providing access to Federal government data sets.

For policy wonks the most interesting ongoing issue is how to make the concept of participative policy making work in practice – given the practical issues around integrating public crowd-sourcing into the formal policy making process.  Certainly the Recovery.org dialogue indicates that focused “expert-based crowd-sourcing” works, however there’s still a question of how to make more broad “citizen-based crowd-sourcing” work effectively.

For geeks the democracy 2.0 money shot is around Obama (via his Federal CIO Vivek Kundra) opening up government data and providing data standards – meaning that government data can be more easily mined and mashed-up, handing power (in the form of structured formatted data) over to the people.

And if I were to rate Obama’s democracy 2.0 so far?  Well, I’d probably give him a B+.  A promising positive start, but definitely not the finished article.

N.B. for a more in-depth account of Obama’s democracy 2.0, read my briefing paper below:

Obama’s democracy 2.0