If the idea behind a viral campaign for climate change group 350.org
is to make people take the threat more seriously having nine
supermodels strip to their smalls is perhaps not the best way to
persuade people it’s a bad thing.

If a warmer planet results in scantily dressed supermodels, some
might conclude climate change is a good thing. Notwithstanding that the
ad trivialises a serious subject; we learn nothing about climate change
and it might alienate a large part of the female audience, some of us
at Rubber Towers quite like this new viral. We can’t think why.

On a positive note, if the viral campaign is designed purely to
generate a bit of PR and easy headlines with a bit of harmless
titillation, it’s bang on the money. See what you think (thanks to Rev for bringing this to our attention) …

YouTube is on a roll at the moment, which looks like being a good
thing for users, advertisers and agencies alike after a period of what
felt like continual negative press.

The video-sharing website has revealed it got close to 10m streams
for a live broadcast of a U2′s Rosebowl concert on Sunday, meaning it
was the single largest event the site has streamed to date.

Given that the 20th most watched show in the US last week attracted
11.8m viewers (The Mentalist), the U2 YouTube audience gives you an
idea of the site’s enormous reach and the type of league it is now
playing in. Admittedly, the 10m figure, which was spread over 2+ hours,
doesn’t drill down to how many people actually watched the broadcast.

However, after repeated questions being asked about YouTube’s
ability to monetise its huge popularity, it’s nice to see things moving
in a positive direction.

The U2 concert comes hot on the heels of the Google-owned site
announcing earlier this month that it now serving up more than 1bn
streams per day. And don’t forget Channel 4′s  recent decision to put
its entire programming output on YouTube free of charge and the
introduction of Google’s AdSense for YouTube’s search.

With sites like Hulu breathing down YouTube’s neck, it’s great to
see YouTube fighting fit. Healthy competition between these sites -
unlike the search arena where Google has a far easier ride – is proving
beneficial for everyone.

I was
lucky to be part of a great panel moderated by Gordon at media140 on brands and
personality. A topic similar to the question I get asked most often by our
clients at H&K — “How should my brand behave in social media?”

So here are my Top 5 Tips for social success. Please add yours in the comments.

1. Listen
first:  People have always talked about the brands and
products they love or loath. The amazing thing is that now we can listen in
real time as these conversation happen in public. So we help our clients
explore the many free online tools, as well as using more sophisticated
listening platforms to track and analyse brand sentiment. For real insights, be open and truly interested in
what people have to say. Even when they are not talking about you.

2. Think
before you speak:  There are many examples of brand faux pas in social
media spaces. Which mirrors human foibles. If you don’t want those student
party pictures on Flickr, don’t post them. Better yet, don’t get drunk. The
brand version of reputation protection is to have clearly written social media
strategy and guidelines.

3. Be
hands-on :  The only way to really understand web 2 tools is to use
them yourself. So I run Digital PR Acceleration training for clients as a
fast-track way to experience social media the way consumers do. We are also big Yammer fans at H&K. An enterprise
microblogging platform, it’s a great way to connect staff across offices,
while organically learning best behaviour in a private community.

4. Share: Try some internal crowd sourcing or fun events to
bring your tribe together. For example, WPP Digital holds the yearly Stream
unconference where everyone must lead a talk or workshop. Brand teams can learn
a lot from new ways of working together that can apply to how their brand can
bring something of value to the social media party.

5. Embrace
beta: Here’s one secret you probably won’t hear from your
agency. There is no such thing as a social media expert. Digital is not a
channel. Better to view it as a river. By the time you think you understand the
Twitter phenomenon, along comes Foursquare and Gowalla. You’re a pro with
Facebook, but have never tried FriendFeed. So my advice is to keep up with the
tech platforms, but with all the enthusiasm of a perpetual student. Party on!

You should follow me, my agency and all the smart
folks from the media140 event on Twitter

 - – - -

Adapted from an article written for Marketing
Magazine 14 October 2009 Issue13

Bristol has always been passionate about its creative scene and in a smaller city sometimes you have to fight a bit harder to protect it. I think the up side to this is it that brings a much stronger community ethos to the scene than we might otherwise have.

So I wasn’t surprised to see that Jamaica Street Artists (Bristol’s biggest art collective) are auctioning off some of their finest work in the hope that they will save their iconic headquarters, and one of the city’s major landmarks – The Old Carriage Works in Stokes Croft. They have over 43 artists in residence at the moment and are a collective with diverse skills including internationally established illustrators, film makers, and fine artists. In advance of the auction on the 3rd December, and building on the success of the Banksy exhibition, there will be a month long preview exhibition at the Bristol City Museum and Art Gallery.

The auction itself is invitation only and there is more information on how to get a ticket at the Jamaica Street Artists website. The preview at the City museum is definitely worth a visit, and you never know you might find a unique piece of work to buy.

laura@3sixty.co.uk

Yesterday I was reading Peter Mandelson’s latest attempt at trying to keep the big media distribution businesses going with a mixture of frustration and resignation. Ever since the advent of recorded music, the powers that be within the industry have been predicting every step forward in technology would end their business forever. Yet every time the industry has eventually managed to find a way to only to live with new technology but ot proper because of it, think CD’s and DVD’s for example.

So is file sharing really going to wipe out the music and film industry leaving tens of thousands of musicians and actors penniless?

Of course its not. These industries produce content and content has value.

This argument has never been about recording artists or actors. It has been about distribution. In the traditional media world, the company or entity that controls distribution controls the industry. The real threat that both file sharing in particular and the internet in general represents is the loss of control over distribution for the big music publishers and file studios.

Bands like Nine Inch Nails, Radiohead and the Arctic Monkeys have all used social media in different ways to either promote themselves or make direct revenue. Online services like Sellaband www.sellaband.com that Public enemy are now part of, show a completely different business model for music without the need for the majors.

Not only can bands directly promote themselves through social media and file sharing but it has also been shown that music pirates actually buy more music, in fact according to a study earlier this year by the BI Norwegian School of Management; http://tinyurl.com/d24bvx, music pirates are on average 10 times more likely to buy music legally.

The music industry however, has been very slow to produce the sorts of legal download services that consumers want.

As A consumer, I don’t want to pay as much or more for a digital product, which has no shipping or packing costs as I do for a physical disc. I certainly don’t want some form of DRM that prevents me choosing what platform I play my music on. At the moment it is so much easier for the average consumer to use pirated music then there legal alternative. 

There are some signs of change with platforms like Spotify appearing, although not that long ago another service Pandora was in effect banned in the UK so this forward march is by no means a certainty.

In Britain we seem to be missing the example from American were the RIAA has been using legal mechanism to attempt to stop piracy for years and despite a number of high profile cases piracy is still prevalent there.

The answer is to give consumers what they actually want and charge them a fair price, not to try convince, coerce or bully lawmakers into trying to prop up a business model that is doomed to fail.   

Recent events in the idea crowdsourcing world herald a new business model for agencies. As the person responsible for putting Peperami on the internet in the first place (peperami.com 1996 for the historians amongst you) I’m well placed to comment on the recent move to find ideas using the internet. And as Jon Winsor and other (about to be ex-Crispin Porter) colleagues have announced in the early hours of this morning, it’s time for a new model that takes crowdsourcing to the next level. And that involves asking you, the creatives out there working for other agencies, to contribute to their briefs. Transparently. And at your risk.

Are you up for it? Is it the end of the agency model as we know it? Everyone seems to agree that there is an enormous challenge in the agency group mentality of silo and sausage factory. We make our money in the wrong way, from downstream process transaction rather than from upstream advisory. We fight with each other constantly over budgets. We don’t have enough people to handle the workload when we’re busy. Or we have plenty of the wrong people who can’t handle the workload because the work has changed. 

Is the problem about size? The bigger an agency gets, it moves from selling ideas to selling meetings. This seemed fine, as clients have diverse needs and there are a myriad of ways to find service levels for those needs. The creativity of agencies moved into describing cross selling, to build scale and business relationships. And the creativity that clients actually want, ideas for better ways to engage consumers to sell more of their products and services tended to be a delegated and downstream service. Ideas became lone wolves that had to be ‘fought for’ by the creative department, instead of exciting ‘cool’ product developments that galvanise everybody involved.

Now there’s an answer. A new model where brands owners can publicly describe their problem, and can garner public responses. There’s been a few start ups that endeavour to capture this trend – idea bounty and so on, about which the naysayers claim they can’t make money, they are estate agents for ideas, isn’t it just like freelancing and so on. Well it does reflect all those things, accusations very easily levelled at any agency by the way, but the difference is that the ability to share and re-share briefs and answers quickly though the internet brings agility where previously there was treacle.

As Stuart Elliot put it in the New York Times – agencies should stop worrying about selling the status quo and start being a force for change. A ‘catalyst of record’, not an ‘agency of record’ – I love that. And believe that too. I worked on a pitch last year where the client invited five agencies to test drive their cars and pitch for their business. It was an expensive and overwrought process, on everybody’s part. As we were hanging around having coffee, I said to one or two of the opposition – you know what, this is silly. They should just hire you, me, her and him. Each from a different agency – a ‘dream team’ as they say, as between us we’d provide the best answers, the best work, and it would be a laugh. Everyone agreed that it would be, but went home to prepare for the pitch battle in their own P&Ls. Ho hum.

I wish Jon and crew luck with their new venture. Watch that space!

follow me on twitter

I used to work for a publishing house, producing a number of monthly magazines and annual handbooks. We found that it was relatively easy to hold to the rate-card when selling ads for new publications or features but when it came to renewals the situation was much reversed. One of the main issues was that although a publication is essentially a form of localised marketing, the ability to measure response accurately was not available, meaning that there was no leverage for re-negotiation. We face a similar issue now when choosing the (if any) print magazines for advertising Aardvark Media, we approach them with a high level of doubt simply because we’re accustomed to the online accountability of advertising campaigns.

Although we’ve been in business since 1996 I remain constantly amazed by the ability of online marketing at a local level to return dramatic, measurable results for client marketing.

A client of ours, who are a major player in the bar and club sector, was opening a new bar in London’s theatreland. Usually for the opening night they operate at capacity and like to have a healthy queue of people patiently waiting outside to join the party. However, on this occasion, with less that 36 hours before the opening they needed to find over 1,000 people to add to the guest-list. We sent an email to their registered customers with a simple ‘click here and we’ll add you and a friend to the guest-list’. This approach meant that people didn’t have to go through the hassle of logging in or remembering their password. Within 2 hours we had added over 1500 people and within 12 hours the number on the waiting list had grown to over 2,500.

At a local level, efficient online/email integrated marketing really does have a proven dramatic effect on customer behaviour. Because of this, whilst I like print media as a tactile medium, I remain unconvinced about it’s long term prospects as an effective tool for response driven marketing. Amazon’s Kindle and other ebooks are an interesting mid-way between print media and online and I’m following their take-up with interest.

Welcome to eModeration’s digest of all that is intriguing, alarming or odd in the world of social media. We’ll be posting bite-size morsels of nourishing news not once, but twice a week – so check back soon!

THE HEADLINES…

The Web 2.0 world was reeling this week, after Microsoft slapped it round the chops with a real-time search double-whammy.

Whammy one: Microsoft has inked deals with both Facebook and Twitter, allowing status updates to be integrated into the Bing Search engine.

Then, while the social world was rearranging its expression to read ‘not in the slightest bit surprised, saw it coming a mile off actually’, came whammy two: Google is about to do precisely the same thing.

The CIA has invested in social monitoring company Visible Technologies. Now the guy who manually checks through a zillion ‘u comin 2 mai partee?’ posts in the hope of one which reads ‘the quick coyote has met the cunning fox’ can finally go home to his wife and kids.

A Tory govt would jack the 50p tax which the present govt say will bring rural broadband up to urban speeds – in apparent contrast to the speech David Cameron gave in January. Oh dear – there’s nothing Middle England likes more than a snipe bid on a pair of BNWT driving-gloves – and you can’t do that on a 1meg connection, you know.

Meanwhile Culture Secretary Ben Bradshaw confirmed that persistent file-sharers would not be ‘cut off willy-nilly’ – news which might reassure the British public, 70% of whom oppose an internet ban for file-sharers. Kudos also to Mr Bradshaw for a unilateral revival of ‘willy-nilly’ despite grave risk to his gubernatorial dignity.

THE LOWDOWN…

Some companies do find this Woman thing so hard, don’t they? At a Yahoo-hosted hack weekend for developers in Taiwan, company-hired lap-dancers provided the entertainment. Really, What Were They Thinking? (We’re going to have to agree on an acronym for that, aren’t we? I like DERBRAIN – you?)

Quick, come and see Bill Clinton through X-ray Specs! A twitter bug left the former prez accidentally exposing his tweets – click here for the twitillating details.

Twitter is now the platform of choice for Slebs who are up for a ruck. “Giving some celebrities Twitter is like giving a kid a loaded gun,” says a PR firm chief. In the case of Perez Hilton, whose first tweet to Rumer Willis was “welcome to Twitter, Potatohead”, more like “a loaded gun and a kilo of Skittles”.


This is more like it. A gamer customized a Super Mario World level so that “Lisa will you marry me?” was spelled out in gold coins. See? Romance isn’t dead. It’s just not so good with, you know, face-to-face interaction these days.

According to Netimperative, 1 in 10 UK adults is ‘not interested in getting online’. Right… Got it… No, sorry, you’re going to have to run me through that again.

AND IN OTHER NEWS…

Interesting times for Yahoo. Though revenue dropped, net income is up by a whopping 225% due to fierce cost-cutting. What’s more, they’re launching a rival to the Huffington Post, which will use a combo of smart tech and smart humans to offer link excellence and tip-top writing.

Apple is still the people’s darling – the company saw a crunchy 47% rise in profits in the quarter to September – news of which bounced shares by 7.5% to an all-time high.

Amazon is also confounding the recession, with a Q3 profit surge of 68% year on year. Founder Jeff Bezos lays the laurels at the feet of Kindle, which is now at the heart of Amazon’s strategy.

Channel 4 is offering targeted ads around its YouTube programming; meanwhile speculation that Hulu may start charging for content next year is starting to look like concrete fact.

Microsoft and T-mobile now claim they have recovered most, if not all, of its Sidekick users’ missing data.

Finally: when display ads do badly, it could simply be that they are pug ugly. Aesthetic failure is often to blame for limp performance, according to Dynamic Logic.

ON FACEBOOK…

The ‘Book’s deal with Bing, which will integrate status updates into search results, is expected to go live within two months. As the Telegraph points out, the thought of unseen millions reading “wooohooo – trolley’d!“ should give a sense of urgency to those who have yet to master Facebook’s privacy settings.

Facebook’s graph is so steep they need crampons: in the US, it now gets an astonishing 1 in every 4 page views. Market share is up 194% since last year, and there are now over 45 million updates a day.

It won’t come as a dreadful shock, then, to hear that MySpace’s new CEO has conceded defeat in its battle with the social colossus. Owen Van Natta says the company now aims to be a music hub.

ON TWITTER…

Twitter, meanwhile, appears untroubled by Facebook anxiety: CEO Evan Williams nonchalantly declared last week that “the world is big enough for Facebook and Twitter”.

Despite flat-lining stats, Williams was pretty chipper about a near-future revenue stream – and indicated that mobile is looking very alluring to the microblogging service, which last week celebrated its 5 billionth tweet.

Each one of which will now be accessible through Bing and Google: According to Venturebeat, Bing’s Twitter search will have tag clouds and organize results according to both age and popularity. Retweets will move an entry up, as will embedded links – the most popular of which will be sortable too.

GOOGLE…

It’s not yet entirely clear what Google’s Twitter/Facebook search will look like – but news of the deal tops a great week for the search powerhouse.

It reported an 8% revenue increase for Q3, and announced plans to spend heavily on long-term growth. The first pennies go on a six-nation roll-out of its enterprise-aimed ‘Gone Google’ marketing campaign.

Google is also dipping a toe into the smartphone market, with a branded Android phone of its own – and launching a music service, which according to Wired will offer streaming, and enhanced search.

ON YOUTUBE…

As if there weren’t enough real-time excitement turning our pretty heads, YouTube announced Comments Search, which will allow real time search of conversation topics on the network.

It’s also testing a new advertising model, which melds AdWords with YouTube videos and allows advertisers to target video ads via keywords.

BRANDS GET SOCIAL…

Run, kitty, run! Petco has launched a ‘Howl-O-Ween’ comp, which allows owners to upload photos and videos of their Halloween-bedecked pets.

Ask.com launches a Facebook-integrated microsite, which asks users to celebrate their greatest deal.

Cheez Doodles wants to expand its share of the teen-market, and is offering them the chance to “Rock the Cheez” by creating virtual bands online.

Honda’s ‘social experiment’ – its ‘Everybody Knows Somebody Who Loves a Honda’ Facebook page – has been a roaring success. The page, which allows owners to connect with Honda-lovin’ friends and strangers globally, has topped 2 million fans.

ArmyStrongStories.com, a blogging system that lets anyone in the service make a post, is letting soldiers’ voices be heard and driving recruitment for the US Army.

Ford’s latest wheeze is the Fusion 41 social media campaign, which is seeking 8 socially-savvy fans of the Ford Fusion to compete in a relay race – the winner gets their vehicle paid for.

Lonely Planet is testing an App which uses Google Wave to give independent-minded travelers recommendations and reviews, which they can transform into content-rich itineraries.

Coca-Cola has sent a team of young Happiness ambassadors to visit each of the 206 countries where Coke is sold, and share the secret of each nation’s happiness, via social media.

Procter & Gamble’s marketing team is flushed with success: they’ve launched a search for 5 people who, for the not-at-all-bad salary of $10k for a month’s work, will man their ‘Charmin Restroom’ in Times Square.

Arsenal and Spain midfielder Fabregas took over Nike’s Football Page on Facebook last Thursday, answering questions and posting behind-the-scenes photos.

UNDER THE GAVEL…

A judge in California has provisionally okay’d Facebook’s settlement of the class suit arising from its Beacon ad programme.

Another in New York has ruled that Facebook is protected by the Communications Decency Act, in a teenager’s defamation suit.

conix Brand Group has settled – to the tune of $250,000 – the FTC’s complaint that they illegally collected children’s data.

And two former Yale students have settled the suit they brought against anonymous posters whom they allege defamed them on law-grad site AutoAdmit. They weren’t able to sue the board itself, but managed to identify some 8 or 9 of the bloggers.

SOME SOCIAL STATS…

The numbers who post or read status updates on social sites has shot from 11% to 19% – that’s almost a fifth of us – in under a year, according to Pew’s new report.

63% of online mothers regularly use socnets, against 11% three years ago – and 44% look for recommendations – and complaints – before buying.

UK e-commerce growth slowed to a snail’s pace this year, up only 7.6% against last year’s 15%.

US ad-spend figures were even less perky, with a predicted 2.9 % drop from last year – the first since 2002.

ON MOBILE…

The rate at which Africans are buying mobile phones is breaking world records with a rise of 550% in 5 years – changing lives across the planet.

Volkswagen is marketing their new GTI via an iPhone app, and nothing else. In 2006 they spent $60m introducing the marque – the new app will cost $500,000.

Out of the lab and into the market – smartphones will help grow augmented reality from a $6m to a $350m industry by 2014, says new research.

VIRTUAL AND GAMES…

Virtual goods sales in the US and Europe could expand by as much as 150% this year, with more growth to come, says Business Insider.

Pocoyo, the Spanish preschooler cartoon series, is launching a virtual world, with some free zones and premium content by subscription.

Civilization – one of the all-time Gamer Greats – will next year get a Facebook version, under the name Civilization Network.

Open virtual world Meez Nation is to integrate with the MySpace platform – reaching even further into its teen user base.

That’s all folks!

These social media updates are painstakingly put together by our research consultant Kate Williams.   If you’d like to listen at the horse’s month (so to speak), she’s @emodkate on Twitter.

Last week Dell hosted an event intended to unite the worlds of fashion and technology bloggers. Their goal was to discuss how technology could be re-positioned as fashion in order to sell it to women.

With Microsoft’s research highlighting that technology is as important to women as fashion, should tech brands be positioning their wares as fashion accessories? Does it correlate that women love fashion and therefore if you position technology as fashion, women will want to buy it? Is a netbook the latest fashion accessory? Would women rather have the new Dell Adamo XPS rather than a pair of Jimmy Choos?

It’s not an original idea to try to sell technology as if it were a fashion accessory. LG’s Prada phone was the first time a major fashion brand put it’s label on a phone. Despite it’s modest capabilities it sold well, proving the allure and reach of the Prada brand.

Few woman have a strong attachment to technology brands – in such a vaccum a strong brand like Prada can help shift products, even if it does seem out of place on the shelves of the Carphone Warehouse. I suspect that the Prada label puts off as many women as it attracts, since there is something frivolous about being seen to flaunt a label, especially on a something as conspicuous as a phone.

There’s a big problem with the technology as fashion proposition:

Firstly, fashion is by nature short term. After a single season your old fashion is out of fashion. That’s perfectly fine for a £20 top from Top-Shop, however it’s not so fine when you are locked into a two year contract on a fashion-phone which is no longer a-la-mode.

If the networks are going to sell a phone on a 2 year contract they need to continue to offer value over this period or risk alienating the customer.

Secondly, the reasons I buy technology are very different to why I buy clothes. Technology enhances my life, builds real and intimate connections with people. It gives me a voice. And amplifies my voice to those closest to me. Fashion is transitory. I get immediate gratification but its fleeting. Its fun but not meaningful. Brands risk trivializing themselves by positioniong themselves as fashion.

Lastly, every tech brand seems to take this approach to women. Samsung’s Genio talks about it’s exciting colours but does not mention what value it can add. Dell’s “my colour is pink” tv-spot looks like a mid-90s’ shoe advert. This is clearly not a way to generate sustainable difference.

As one Lady Geek said,
“What my phone and shoes do for me are very different. One connects me with the world and is about relationships. The other is solely just for me”

To truly understand women, tech brands must research and understand how women engage with technology.

Fashion is about ‘me,’ technology is about ‘we.’