In case you were wondering which way The Guardian will jump in terms of paid content Alan Rusbridger has shed light on it and said no way to a pay wall.

Speaking at Coventry Conversation talk, run by Coventry University journalism department, Rusbridger said following Rupert Murdoch and News Corporation down the pay wall route was crazy according to a report on Journalism.co.uk.

“It would be crazy if we were to all jump behind a pay wall and imagine that would solve things,” Rushbridger said.

He added that while a Guardian.co.uk pay wall was unlikely he said it was good that publishers were experimenting “trying different things”.

“It would be crazy if we were to all jump behind a pay wall and imagine that would solve things,” Rushbridger said. His comments follow those of Emily Bell, Guardian News & Media digital director, who made her views on the subject clear last summer and also ruled out any pay wall.

“No, we are not contemplating a pay wall, nor as far as I’m concerned would we ever. They are a stupid idea in that they restrict audiences for largely replicable content.

“I don’t know how many times or how clearly I can say we won’t be charging for content on the site, but we won’t. Only six months ago we removed the last remaining paywall from web content from around our crosswords.

“Our strategy is entirely around reach and audience engagement — both if which would be irreparably damaged by pay walls.”

I’m betting that if it does anything at all (yes I did read what Bell said — but that was seven months ago) the metered approach that is apparently being adopted by the New York Times, a sister liberal paper, is what it will try.

That approach gives ample content away while heavy users pay something for what they read.

Related and part of that thinking about paid content is the blog PaidContent, owned by the Guardian Media Group, which yesterday indicated strongly that it is considering implementing charges.

Rushbridger’s views on pay walls come only days after Guardian News & Media, the publisher of The Guardian and The Observer, reported a £57m pre-tax loss (including a £11.4m impairment charge and £11m restructuring costs such as reduncancy payments). The previous year it lost £82.5m.

It has 100 job cuts on the way and the talk is that some of these will be compulsory. So whatever it does it will have to do something at some point having looked at membership clubs and already ruled out closing the Observer — the revamped and slimmed version of which will hit newsstands on February 21.

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Welcome
to eModeration’s round-up of all that is intriguing, alarming or odd in
the world of social media, compiled by Kate Williams (@emodkate).  We
had so much to say after our holiday break that this steaming helping
of social networks and brands in social media is following hot on the
heels of last Friday’s industry appetizer #20 …


In this update: Facebook’s annus mirabilis; Twitter’s job vacancies; and the most social brands of last year.

ON FACEBOOK …

According to ComScore, Facebook was the beneficiary of 5.5% of US online time
in November – a pretty impressive figure, to be sure. It was also the
most-visited website on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, say Hitwise,
as users rushed to compare presents (or possibly avoid Scary Uncle
Pete).

No surprise, then, that Facebook’s ad figures have sprinted past
those of MySpace a full year before they’d been predicted to do so –
and look likely to reach $605 million globally this year. MySpace,
meanwhile, is said to be staring at a 21% cliff-drop in revenue,
according to eMarketer.

For a full and frank assessment of Facebook’s Annus Mirabilis (and more on predictions that Facebook could file for IPO in 2010, with revenues expected to rocket past $700 million) it’s well worth scooting over to Mashable, who offer in-depth analysis, here.

Elsewhere on Facebook:

The ‘Book now offers a cunning feature
to combat persistent strangers or spammers who try to friend you. If
you’ve rejected them in the past because you don’t know them, their
friend request flags it up.

And recent Facebook privacy changes have had users scrambling to catch
up – and if you’re a brand with a Fan Page, you should be scrambling
too. You’ll find a useful guide to taking charge of your page’s privacy
settings, quick-sticks, here.

ON TWITTER …

Along with ‘Did you keep the receipt?’, the question on everyone’s lips
at the end of 2009 was ‘When will Twitter become profitable?’ – and the
microblogging site was at last able to respond that they already were,
to the tune of £25 million. The leap into profit, however, was entirely
courtesy of its real-time search deals with Google and Microsoft – and
commentators are iffy about whether the deals will be enough to sustain
a revenue stream in 2010.

So the question remains a valid one – as does the increasingly beady focus on Twitter’s horizontal stats, which appear to have flat-lined. Worth bearing in mind, though, that it’s only the Stateside figures which have stagnated – Twitter’s global figures
are doing just fine, with the 60m international user figure just
announced, and growth looking healthy in both and Brazil and the UK
(which now accounts for a 8.9% of tweets – a pretty twit-tastic tweet to population ratio.)
Other reasons for Twitter’s apparent halt: figures don’t include those
using apps like Seismic or Tweetdeck – and the fact that Twitter is
generally considered to have not yet reached critical mass.

Upshot: if you think that you’ve got the answer to Twitter’s tricky
revenue issues, the chaps over there are eager to hear from you.
They’ve launched a recruitment drive specifically
to address revenue generation, and are looking to recruit four new
staff members “to work on cutting edge monetization projects”; and
other new positions will also include a revenue element.

Elsewhere on Twitter:

Twitter and LinkedIn have hooked up – users can now update their LinkedIn status via Twitter, and vice versa…

The old way of retweeting – which allowed Twitter users add commentary to their RTs – is preferred by a ratio of 2 to 1…

Finally, the Telegraph reports that Twitter has banned 370 ‘obvious’ passwords.
So if you are the type to have ‘password’ as your password, you will no
longer be allowed to do so – though you are of course still free to
respond to emails informing you that a considerable legacy awaits you,
if you will only forward your bank account details by return.

ON GOOGLE …

Google’s dominion over the world of search remains unchallenged,
with both Yahoo and Bing wavering last month, according to Nielsen (in
the latter’s case reversing an apparently temporary surge earlier in
the year).

But the biggest news for Google was the release of its much-anticipated Nexus One. The Guardian put the iPhone competitor through its paces
and concluded that, while it lacked the glamour of the iPhone (and its
multi-touch screen) the Nexus One’s power was certainly impressive. The
smartphone’s launch was, however, shadowed by reports of customer service and network issues, and sales remained limp – a mere week after its launch, Google had ominously moved to slash the price of the Nexus One upgrade.

Nevertheless, despite some launch wrinkles waiting to be ironed out
(the version which will be available in the UK, for example, will have
a multi-touch screen) Advertising Age suggested
that the Nexus represents the final piece in an overarching strategy
which will be a game-changer for Google – giving it “a hammer lock on
the whole integrated process of consumer mobility.”

ON YOUTUBE …

UN investigators believe they’ve cracked the mystery at the heart of a macabre YouTube hit,
in which a recently-assassinated anti-government lawyer blamed his
imminent death on the Guatemalan president. In a twist worthy of
Hollywood, it seems the man, who was depressed about personal issues,
actually arranged his own murder in order to frame the president.

A recent patent application by Google has set tongues waggling that
YouTube is about to dip a toe into online gaming. The patent details a
‘web-based system for generation of interactive games based on digital
videos’. Translated, this seems to describe a level of interactivity
that would allow users to change the outcome of the video being shown –
“a video game, if you will,” as TechRadar points out.

BRANDS GET SOCIAL …

The big news of the New Year was Pepsi’s decision to nix its SuperBowl budget and push $20 million into social media. Now Coca-Cola and Unilever have decided to move deeper
into social media by using social networks to ‘break’ campaigns, as
well as relying on their own campaign sites. For example, Coca-Cola has
unveiled a new Glaceau Vitaminwater
flavour called Connect – the result of a competition run on the brand’s
Facebook site, which gave fans the opportunity to design the new
flavour.

Good lord – is it really Easter already?
Cadbury’s have launched www.cremeegg.co.uk, where fans are encouraged
to hunt down various Creme eggs to be found roaming the internet, on
sites including MSN, Yahoo and YouTube.

Lego has launched a campaign to celebrate what it calls those ‘click’ moments
– when the solution to a Lego build problem suddenly pings into a
user’s head. They’re offering an app which will ‘Lego-ize’ a photo -
available from a hub site called LegoClick.com, from which users can
also post descriptions of their own ‘lightbulb’ moments of creativity
to the Lego Facebook page.

Stateside social media star-brand Best Buy is launching in the UK
– and they’ve unveiled a British website and social media presence, to
prepare their passage. Content through both these channels will
eventually include videos, blogs and images from Best Buy’s bloggers –
plus details of the 8,000 jobs that the brand hopes to create in their
first five years in the UK.

Hoorah – a triumph for the mystery creators of the ‘bra colour’ Facebook meme,
which saw thousands of Facebookers updating their status according to
the colour of the bra they were wearing – successfully raising
awareness of breast cancer.

Domino’s latest ad campaign trumpets the astonishing turnaround
they’ve pulled off – by listening to their consumers. The daring
‘documentary’ – which features Domino’s staff taking on board many
negative comments about the brand, and working to improve their product
– was inspired in large part by monitoring consumer comments about the
brand on social media channels.

Evian’s taking Roller Babies – their 45m-views YouTube hit – to Facebook, where they are already effortlessly gliding towards 200,000 fans.

Following the 2007 return, due to customer demand, of the Wispa bar, Cadbury’s is putting social media at the heart
of its latest campaign. The brand is allowing fans to personalise its
Wispa webpage, suggest ideas for the content, and vote on how they
think the site should be developed.

Huggies wants proud parents to upload photos and video of their little darlings,
in a new campaign called ‘Everyday Discoveries’ – the ten winning
babies will star in a storybook illustrated by Disney artists.

Super-social brand Harley-Davidson called on fans to submit photos of
themselves and their bikes – and has now used 10,000 images to create a
giant mosaic of their logo.

Travelocity has launched another ‘Roaming Gnome’ campaign,
in which the touring elf encourages consumers to vote for one of three
of his trips on Travelocity’s social networking pages, as well as
upload photos of their own winter trips.

Trident has used authentic, unsponsored tweets from happy chewers of their ‘Trident Layers’ gum in their latest campaign – which they’re calling ‘The People Have Tweeted’.

Home decoration specialist Umbra will be giving a dollar to each of its Facebook fans who successfully refer a friend to the brand’s fan page. The campaign will run until the pot collectively reaches $1000.

Equator Estate Coffee, who make artisanal coffees and teas, are experimenting with turning their Facebook page into an online store: the public will be able to make purchases without leaving the site.

Guiness have teamed up with Google Earth to launch a social media campaign in which users can invite their friends to help to create a virtual version
of their part of the planet – until the entire globe is virtually
represented. The winner will get a year’s supply of the iconic stout.

Nivea want consumers to “have more love, hugs and kisses in 2010″ – and it’s asking them to upload a virtual hug or kiss
to build the Nivea XOXO Chain. The skincare brand will donate $1 to the
charity ‘Big Brothers Big Sisters’ for every each entry.

Visitors to NYC’s Times Square have been taking part in the latest campaign around Kodak’s huge digital display – an app that lets them upload their own photo to the mega-sign, and control when it appears.

Finally, to get you up and at ‘em for the new decade, take a look at Vitrue’s Social Media Index,
which tells you everything about which social brands generated the most
consumer buzz through social media over the last year (clue: iPhone
won.) And to top it off, here’s Netimperative’s list of the Top Ten online marketing campaigns
of the previous ten years. The winner, most fittingly for the social
decade, is the Mentos-Coke viral – despite the fact that neither brand
was involved in the making of the ads

SOCIAL STATS …

US internet users, who now number 80% of the adult population, spend 13 hours a week
online – up from eight hours in 2003. What’s more, half of them have
bought online in the last month, according to Harris Interactive.

Meanwhile, research by PostRelease and Synovate has revealed that one
in five Americans contribute to an online forum – and those that do are
more influential, both online and offline.
The 20% who are active forum members are considerably more likely to
recommend products, share links and advice, and help a friend make a
buying decision.

What’s more, 26% of UK consumers place online recommendations higher than those of friends and family in importance, according to Weber Shandwick – and

SheSpeaks reports that 80% of female Internet users
say they’ve fanned a product or brand on a social network in the last
year, and 72% had found out about a new product there. A full 50% had
made a purchase based on content they’d seen on a social network – a
considerable leap from 2008 figures.

Unsurprisingly then, a survey by Bazaarvoice and The CMO Club found that a hefty 62% of chief marketing officers planned to hike their social media budgets
next year. Industries polled including software, finance and insurance,
travel and hospitality, media and publishing, consumer goods and retail
– but over 50% of them were still uncertain about the precise ROI of
social media, and 63% were still ‘undecided’ about the extent to which data from social media sites helps them learn about their brand and its customers.

UK broadband speeds grew 22% in 2009, perhaps adding to a cheering 15.5% jump in the UK’s online spending figures, according to SpendingPulse. And eBay predicts that by 2020, 1 in 5 UK pounds will be spent online – with some categories like electrical goods and books overtaking off-line sales.

Across the pond, comScore reports that the figures for holiday e-tail were up 5% year-on-year, hitting an astonishing $27 billion in online sales – a humongous $30 million of which was spent on virtual gift-giving during November and December, per PlaySpan.

ON MOBILE …

Business users will be the target market for Google’s next Nexus smartphone – and the new version might even have an actual keyboard, according to Reuters.

Web analytics firm Compete report that nearly 2 in 5 smartphone users have used their devices to buy something
unrelated to their mobile. Books, DVDs and video games in the lead -
though a frustrated 8% who tried to buy via their handsets couldn’t get
the site to load.

They were most likely to be making their purchases using an iPhone 3G, which is currently the most popular single phone with US users according to Nielsen.

UNDER THE GAVEL …

Kodak has launched a US suit against Apple
and Research in Motion, the makers of the Blackberry. They claim that
the technology which both the iPhone and the Blackberry use to preview
pictures, in fact infringes Kodak patents.

And a US federal appellate court has confirmed an earlier decision that review site ConsumerAffairs.com was immune from liability
for posts by its users. The posts, which a New York car dealer claimed
had defamed him, included comments about prices and fees.

VIRTUAL AND GAMES …

Social gaming giant Zynga abandoned in-game ‘offers’ at the end of
2009, after a spate of accusations about scam ads signing players up
for goods and services which they had not agreed to. Now they’ve
announced that they’re bringing them back, albeit from a tightly controlled roster of eight advertisers.

Elsewhere, Korea has become the only country in which virtual currency is legally agreed to be equivalent to real-world cash – with sweeping implications for the online gaming industry, according to Massively.

THINKING …

Finally, if one of your New Year’s Resolutions was to spend a little
more time cogitating, why not dip into this smorgasbord of
food-for-thought?

360 Degree Digital Influence offer this comprehensive exploration of crisis management in social media;

Last Exit examine the pros and cons of Crowdsourcing – here’s what to look out for when using an online community to develop a brand, product or campaign;

And Brian Solis ponders
the story-so-far for Social Media, and looks at predictions that its
coalescence with plain old ‘media’ is coming sooner rather than later.

That’s all folks!

Welcome to eModeration’s round-up of all that is intriguing, alarming or odd in the world of social media, compiled by Kate Williams (@emodkate).

In this update: The end of privacy, ‘Avatar’ melancholy, and a spot of Bing bother.

Happy New Year!

 

THE HEADLINES …

In response to the catastrophic Haiti earthquake, Google has pledged $1 million to on-the-ground agencies – as well as encouraging others to donate by providing a satellite view of the devastation through Google Earth, and hosting video from Haiti on YouTube. The Mac and iPhone development community have also got together to donate a day’s worth of sales to Haitian aid organizations, so do get app-ing.

Baidu – the search engine which beats Google into a cocked hat in China – became the latest victim of the mysterious Iranian Cyber Army this week. The hacker group, whose previous attack saw Twitter taken offline for an hour in December, managed to effect a denial of service (DOS) assault on the search giant. Traffic was redirected to a message from the ICA – a considerable coup for the hackers.

This was also the week in which Google announced that it will no longer censor search results on its Chinese site, as China’s government demands. The turnaround is Google’s response to a spate of complex cyber-attacks, which it believes were attempts to gather information on Chinese human rights activists – plus a slew of increasingly draconian attempts to curtail its citizens’ free speech on the Net.

China has responded implacably to Google’s about-turn. Doing business in China, they say, means working within the law – and Chinese law means censorship. Commentators believe that Google’s stand is ultimately unlikely to be tolerated by the regime – and entirely predictably, news of Google’s stand has itself been heavily censored by the Chinese authorities.

Elsewhere, Google has snagged a patent which could allow it to carry real-time ads on buildings and billboards in Street View. Cunning new software recognises poster sites – and can spritz them up with new ads once the old ones are past their sell-by date.

Tory leader David Cameron this week warned marketers that they faced new legislation to prevent “premature sexualisation” and “excessive commercialisation”, unless they pulled their socks up in the way they engage with children. Kids, he said, “are being sold the idea that the path to happiness lies through excessive consumption”. But a leading academic warned that digital marketing for children is, in fact, “almost impossible” to police.

Meanwhile Gordon Brown announced a £300m campaign which will see 270,000 low-income families given free computers and broadband access. The Home Access project will attempt to narrow the digital divide by ensuring young people can access the net at home, to support their education.

Facebook’s 25-year-old founder Mark Zuckerberg this week suggested that society has undergone such a dramatic transformation over the last half-decade that privacy is no longer a social norm. His words coincided with a warning from UK academics, that people who post intimate details about their lives are destroying the legal concept of ‘a reasonable expectation of privacy’, effectively reducing the rights of us all.

Meanwhile, Facebook have instituted the Facebook Community Council – an app which attempts to deal with the thorny issue of offensive content and user complaints. The app allows council members – drawn from the Facebook community – to flag content with a variety of descriptions, including Nudity, Drugs, Attacking, and Violence. If a particular item attracts several identical tags, Facebook will swing into action, often in the form of a takedown.

Google has attracted the beady and unblinking eye of the estate of Philip K Dick, the author whose book “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” was brought to the screen as “Bladerunner”. The estate alleges that the name of Google’s latest phone is suspiciously close to that of Dick’s Nexus-6 cyborgs, the robot humanoids which feature in his dystopia. The search giant shrugs off the claim – but Dick’s daughter says that, in the context of the name of Google’s ‘Android’ operating system, the allusion is clear.

Hewlett Packard faced public outrage when evidence emerged which appeared to show that its facial recognition software can only recognise white faces. The flaw came to light when two friends – Desi, who’s black, and Wanda, who’s white – uploaded to YouTube a video which seemed to show the software ignoring Desi’s face – whilst working just perfectly for Wanda. “Hewlett-Packard computers are racist”, concluded Desi – sending HP leaping into action with swift assurances that they were immediately investigating the glitch.


THE LOWDOWN …

For all those of you who begin this brave new decade feeling mildly resentful about your working environment – perhaps the coffee is weak, or your manager a tad demanding – I present this little snippet, which purports to feature an ex-Microsoft employee recounting his sacking by CEO Steve Ballmer for not saying ‘Bing!’ in a sufficiently perky tone. I faithfully promise you will feel infinitely better after viewing it.

Fans of virtual-world mega-grosser ‘Avatar’ are suffering from a particularly postmodern tristesse. CNN reports that internet-users are flocking to dedicated online forums to express their dismay, in the company of similarly-suffering cineastes, at the fact that their ‘real’ online lives aren’t as thrilling as the film suggest they should be.

If you are similarly inclined, with a natural inclination towards doom and grump, best avoid this new iPhone app: it tells you, categorically and undeniably, each time someone de-friends you on Facebook. No good will come of it, you mark my words.

Ah, here is the first ‘What Were They Thinking?’® of 2010! The Outside Advertising Association and ad agency (Beta) were last week forced to pull a controversial poster campaign, whose slogan was “Career women make bad mothers”. The campaign hoped to prove that outdoor ads could drive consumers online – but backfired after infuriated mothers on parenting site Mumsnet launched a co-ordinated campaign against it. The ads were withdrawn – but not before ad company Transport Media announced they were pulling their business from the OAA, deploring the “infuriatingly sexist” campaign.

The long arm of the law has finally tapped the shoulder of a British prison escapee who has been taunting the police via Facebook for the best part of four months. The man had absconded from an open prison, and posted regular updates – on the steak he was eating, and his plans for New Year, for example – garnering a whopping 40,000 fans in the process.

The life of a social-media-roundup writer is indeed a jaded one, and it’s rare to encounter a story which does more than raise a weary eye-brow. But this little snippet had me peering over my pince-nez in shock: according to Mashable, the adventurous chap whose ‘glasses’ tattoo session went viral was being sponsored by RayBan.

Research from the frankly-named DivorceOnline finds that social networking sites like Facebook and Bebo are increasingly figuring in marital breakdown, according to the Telegraph. Lawyers claim that the huge popularity of SocNets is tempting users to be unfaithful – and also providing suspicious spouses with an easily-sleuthable record of flirting – or worse. One firm suggest that almost one in five clients cited Facebook in their petition.

If, as predicted, the nation is again snowed in next week, you’ll need something to occupy your time. Here, then, are instructions for connecting a laser tripwire to a webcam, so that it can tweet pictures of any burglars that should come calling. Now I like to think that I’m a doughty friend to fearless experiment, but I fear a laser-tripwire-tweeting-burglar-alarm-thingy is an innovation without which I might learn to live.


IN OTHER NEWS …

The BBC is beginning the hack-back of its websites a year earlier than previously announced by Director General Mark Thompson. It currently produces ‘millions’ of pages – many of which go well beyond its core output – and websites relating to entertainment, music and celebrities could all face big cuts.

France continues its quest to regulate the internet, with a new tax which would levy a charge on internet companies whenever a French user clicked on an ad. They wish to put a stop to what they call “enrichment without any limit or compensation” – Google alone has annual French revenues of £720 million.

In what can only be seen as the throwing-down of a giant paywall gauntlet, News International has told news-aggregator NewsNow.co.uk that it may no longer link to any Times Online content, and has inserted a robots.txt file to prevent search engines crawling its pages. The news comes hot on the heels of the announcement that FT.com subscription revenues look set to overtake ad income this year. Meanwhile, Google announced that content from Associated Press – among the most boisterous of news-aggregation critics – will no longer be available on its news platform. Interesting times indeed.

Guerilla internet site 4chan last week threatened to bombard YouTube with pornography, in response to the removal of the cultishly popular account of Lukeywes1234. The eight-year-old regularly uploaded his own version of Super Mario Bros and Star Wars, as well as intriguing clips of himself fighting with tinfoil on his head while being directed by his grandmother. His – erm – colourful and frank language was one element of his wide appeal, and he eventually attracted 15,000 subscribers, including many 4chan users. Last May, 4chan started a similar campaign after YouTube initiated a mass deletion of illegal music.

A new survey by Robert Half Technology finds that businesses still think of social networks as a productivity-slashing time-suck - and that they’re as worried as ever that employees will leak sensitive info. The net result is that 54 percent of them are blocking access to all social networks.

The State of Facebook for Business report by Hubspot shows that brand- and product-oriented pages represent 39% of all Facebook pages – the largest single category, by some margin.

AdNectar, which markets social media campaigns, this week announced that it’s served 2 billion virtual goods from its platform – including 1 million Malibu Rum branded drinks in less than 2 weeks, and a million Nestle Toll House cookies during the brand’s “Bake Some Love” campaign.

But for a real sense of the extent to which virtual goods and currency have become part of the digital landscape, look no further than last week’s news that a player of the MMORPG Entropia has dropped 330,000 real-life dollars purchasing a (virtual) in-game space station called the Crystal Palace. The investor – who met his real-life partner whilst in-world – hopes to recoup the cash (which could certainly buy him a bijoux dwelling in most global metropoles) by taxing each virtual transaction that takes place on his turf. Commentators wryly point out that the economy of Entropia is no more or less virtual than the one we’re all worrying about on earth.

Finally, The Observer predicts that the 2010 election will be won – and
lost – in social media. It points out that during the last election in 2005, Facebook was in its infancy, while Twitter had yet to twinkle in founder Biz Stone’s eye. Political bloggers, so influential today, were still below the radar – and the internet barely figured as a tool in campaigners’ armoury. This election will mark a turning point – for while the issues remain largely the same, the means by which all parties engage the public will be barely recognizable.


That’s all folks!

Bloody hell, a month goes by, and China and Google
split up. That particular debate centres on how
national governments interfere with cyber communities for their own,
possibly nefarious, ends. Not new, and we should pay attention to it here. Censorship is creeping
back in many Western countries as well as being sort of expected in
what we rudely describe as the ‘less democratic’ world.

One output from the Digital Britain report published in the
summer is the formation of bills to go through parliament to address
the issues of copyright, open access, digital inclusion and so on, that a
digitally literate economy needs to get right. In the first and possibly last effort before the election, not everyone thinks that the government has got it right.  Here’s Cory Doctorow on boingboing describing the assault on freedom that locking down your ISP account presents. And here’s Rebecca McKinnon in the Guardian
touching upon the French efforts to reject the Satan of Music
Downloading, in the context of Google’s legal battles with China,
France, Italy, etc. Mind you, Johnny Halliday isn’t exactly going to be
troubling my MP3 collection in the near future, but I’m lucky to live
in a country where you can say stuff like that and you aren’t marked
down by the authorities as a travel risk.

Good news today – the government is tabling a series of amendments that appear to curtail the most iniquitous clauses in the bill, including the one that gives a (currently unelected) minister
the right to decide on who and how to crack down on copyright
infringement without recourse to any other parliamentary process.
Whether they do or not remains to be seen.

What’s this got to do with marketing? The dripping irony here is
that in the world of brand communication, we’re almost desperate for
consumers to download our brand content for free and share it with each
other. We want our viral messages to go viral, and for our amateur
enthusiasts to make their own versions of our slick commercials. We
want to show that consumers care enough about the brand to bother.
Which makes it surprising (to me, anyway) that there weren’t more
agency people involved in evaluating whether this new law is a blocker
to innovation. It’s not just about digital innovation, but innovation
in all forms of communication. At CES, the big consumer electronics show in Las Vegas,
most of the new technology devices being showcased have social
technologies built in to them. This means that people will be able to,
if they can be arsed, link to each other, recommend where they are,
tell people where they are going and where they’ve been through pretty
much any device. If you think of Twitter as “what are you doing?” think
of the next wave of social tech as “Where are you?” Hmm.

And this brings me back to the slow post movement recently on brand republic, and the kind comments I’ve received on Twitter and
Facebook about the past month’s abstinence. Mad busy, that’s all I can say. And will be at the weekend too no
doubt. Plus ca change

Follow me on Twitter, if you cba. 

The New Year is a fresh start for everyone. Christmas is a time of deadlines, as marketers make a final push to drive prospects into the sacred domain of consumption before the holidays begin. As soon as Christmas day and all its excesses are over, the sales begin, and companies purge their stocks in anticipation of the New Year. We all make resolutions, in the hope of becoming happier, healthier, better people, but maybe it’s time to start making resolutions towards becoming a better marketer.

Social media sins have been discussed, preached and blogged about all over the web, but now it’s time to start making positive, actionable promises for the New Year ahead.

So here are the social media resolutions all marketers should be making this year.

I will realise that my brand is not a story

It’s a hard pill to swallow, but the fact of your existence is not, in itself, notable. Your high-budget marketing campaign, your new online community platform, even your hot new product, is not enough to inspire editorial, blog posts, and user-generated content. What will it take to make your brand into a story that people want to tell?

I will put down my marketing megaphone, stop being a spy, and realise that social media is a two-way conversation

By now I’m sure we all realise that social media is about listening to customer conversations and unearthing actionable insight. But you can’t be a fly on the wall forever. Your customers and prospects know that you’re listening to what they’re saying, and they want a response. To establish a presence on social media platforms and then fail to engage with consumers can be almost as harmful as not having a presence at all.
Is there someone within your company who has the necessary  sign-off and persona to represent your brand and interact with these people?  In addition, social media is all too often left in the hands of a single department, when there is a growing need for online customer interaction to be diffused across company functions.  Does your marketing department use Twitter? Probably. But what about customer service, IT and the finance department?

I will segment my social media target audience(s) in the same way as I target my offline audiences
(I will stop trying to be everywhere at once.)

Many companies view online marketing as an alien limb, completely unrelated to every other (offline) element of the marketing mix, when it is actually a natural extension of it. Online audiences can, and should be segmented in the same way as offline audiences, and not just by the social media platform they use.  You don’t have to be present on every platform, just on the same platforms as your target audience.

I will fuel my social media campaign with free content

It seems obvious, but a fire needs fuel. If a campaign is to spread, it needs substance, in the form of free, easily – accessible, interesting content. This could span from YouTube videos to iPhone applications.  This content should be seeded across the platforms where the target audience of the campaign already congregate; the old motto of “build it and they will come” no longer holds water.

I will understand the difference between quantity and quality, and adopt meaningful KPIs ( I will try to put CPM to the back of my mind)

The hot topic of the year has been generating ROI from Social Media. It is important to remember, though, that not every company can earn $3m from Twitter like Dell has managed to.
Whilst the old adage is “What gets measured, gets done”, with social media “What gets measured wrongly, gets done badly”, is closer to the truth. Taking Twitter as an example, number of followers will never constitute a useful measure of performance. Anybody who has ever used the words “Affiliate Marketing” or “Personal Finance” in a tweet knows that Twitter followers are easy to come by. Attracting and retaining quality followers presents a whole new set of challenges.

I will remember Pareto and detox my client list.

Customers create revenue, and revenue is the lifeblood of any company. But it’s easy to lose sight of the importance of attracting and retaining profitable customers. Is the amount of time / effort you spend servicing your clients proportionate to the value they create for your firm, and if not, why not? The feeling of elation and achievement at having attracted a new customer can sometimes make it difficult to accept that not all customers are the right customers.

I will break the rules

Average social media campaigns will return average results. Going against traditional ideas and processes can be a very costly and time-consuming venture, but breaking the rules is how virals are made. No market analysis would ever expose the urgent need for a Meerkat-based advert, and no focus group would identify the influence that a drumming gorilla could have.

I will accept that where I plan to go with social media is almost never where I will actually end up

Nearly every social media advocate and strategist will try to emphasise the importance of planning a social media campaign. Of course it’s important to co-ordinate your efforts and establish a gameplan which is tailored and appropriate to your brand and your message. However, the very nature of social media means that the message you send out will rarely be interpreted in exactly the way you intended it to be: and that’s not necessarily a bad thing! Engaging with social media can give all manner of unexpected outcomes, and only a truly switched-on company will be able to recognise and respond to the opportunities and threats that social media can create.

Joe Hughes and Kirsty Bell

Despite millions joining up for more and more social media, there are some people who would rather commit social media suicide than face 2010 sharing status updates, photos, tweets and mafia war games with everyone online.

Personally, I know a number of folks who I like to describe as being The Digital Invisibles, who opt out of being present online much at all. Two services are trying to offer people who want to be more private online the option of killing their digital selves, but Facebook has now blocked access for these applications.

Seppukoo.com invites you to kill your social media self, and leave behind a memorial R.I.P. stone, that your Facebook friends can leave parting messages to you.

They say: “As the Seppuku restores samurai’s honor as a warrior, in the same way, Seppukoo.com deals with the liberation of the digital body from any identity constriction in order to help people discover what happens after their virtual life and to rediscover the importance of being anyone, instread of pretending to be someone.”

Facebook blocked this application on December 16, 2009, after several hundred people killed off their accounts, and now Seppukoo.com is facing legal threats from the social media giant.

The Web 2.0 Suicide machine created by a media group called Moddr attracted nearly 1,000 people before Facebook shut it down recently as well. They offer a service that can delete your Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and Linkedin accounts permanently.  

I’ve seen people on Twitter mention that they are thinking of committing Googlecide this year, and many people I know are increasingly concerned about how much access Facebook is giving the general public. The word on the street is that if you don’t set your Facebook, Twitter and other accounts to private view for only friends and people you want to see your profile this year, your information will show up in Google search engine for anyone to find. Managing your online reputation is something every one of us is going to have to think more carefully about as we all embrace the Internet and all its entertaining offerings.

After thinking through the pros and cons of being open on Facebook, I’ve now made use of the privacy option. I’m saying no more to embarrassing fancy dress photos getting posted and shared to my network of family, friends and business associates. I’ve never felt entirely comfortable with the mixed up world of Facebook, where now my Dad has become my friend, along with long distant school friends who I never had a lot in common with in the first place. In 2010, I’m keeping my Facebook network limited to a small group of friends who entertain me and who I see often in real life anyways. For the rest of my connections, there won’t be a lot of Facebook action seen from Lisa Devaney.

I struggled with this decision to go private on Facebook, because I believe in transparency and love how the Internet and social media is opening up so many opportunities for people to share knowledge and have public conversations. I will still be engaging fully on the Internet, but, at least for now, I’ll be keeping Facebook all to myself and a handful of friends. 

This year the place I’ll be hanging out openly for all is Linkedin, and I’m encouraging and driving all my business associates to connect digitally with me on Linkedin, where I am open and willing to share. I’ll also be posting publicly to my personal blog where I am honing the art of transmedia storytelling, and I’ll be sharing plenty on Twitter. And I’ll be blogging here on BrandRepublic.com and contributing posts to other outlets as well.

Not killing digital self in 2010, but treading more carefully,

-Lisa

 I’m a big fan of Basecamp, the online project collaboration tool plied by 37 Signals out of Chicago. We started using this ‘software as service’ ten years ago and have kept with it as our company has grown. We’ve found it to be a reliable and friendly tool that clients can easily get to grips with, and it’s proved invaluable in helping us to manage multiple projects, milestones and disparate team members. Over the years Basecamp has become assimilated into the daily life of the business and assumed a higher status than the phone system, which to be frank, has become principally a vehicle for recruitment agencies to cold call us.

A few weeks before Christmas a letter arrived with a Chicago franking mark. It contained a hand-written personal letter from Jason Fried, the CEO of 37 Signals, thanking us for using the service for ten years. ‘Wow!’ I thought, I’ve never received anything like that from a business before. Impressed, I posted about it on Twitter as we passed the letter reverently around the office. Also included were the personal business cards of Jason and his head of marketing so I could contact them should I so wish.

A couple of weeks ago another letter arrived, this time from Tampa, Florida. This letter had a dinosaur (T-Rex) sticker on the back of the envelope and inside was a handwritten note from a developer at Wufoo (the online survey supplier) introducing himself and personally thanking us for using Wufoo. Not quite the CEO but then we haven’t been customer’s for a decade.

Perhaps these two letters indicate the emergence of a new trend of personal notes thanking customers personally for their business;  the power of the handwritten note trumping the less-than-personal, manufactured emails that are automatically churned out by eCRM systems the world over. Will we soon get thank-you notes from the likes of BT and London Electricity? Will it extend to the shadow-faces at HMRC thanking us for filing their coffers every year? Some how I doubt it, but in an age when we’re constantly pushing the digital boundaries it is great to see that those leading the online revolution are the ones reverting to good old pen and ink.

Gawker Media blog network boss Nick Denton is ditching his much beloved page view bonus targets and is instead telling his bloggers to aim for lots of unique users and stories that score well on social media sites.

In a memo leaked to theAWL.com website, Denton described the new target as “US monthly uniques” representing a measure of each site’s domestic US audience. Read More »

After the disappointing N97 it was all to easy to dismiss Nokia as a fading star of mobile phone design. The flagship which failed to float was the perfect excuse for a whole horde of doomsayers to predict the end of the once-greatest mobile company. A common quip was that unless Nokia were to pull off something entirely miraculous it would be “the end”. Fortunately the N900 is the miracle we had all hoped for, a truly remarkable combination of new software and hardware. It’s hard to disentangle all the novelty in this new phone: Not only is it the first of a brand new form-factor (the sliding landscape keyboard-phone), but it’s also the first phone in Nokia’s huge portfolio to feature Maemo, an operating system entirely new to the world of phones. That’s not to say that Maemo is new: It’s been on the market since 2006 but only on Nokia’s ultra-niche tablet computers.

First of all, lets deal with the easy stuff- the hardware: Nokia vastly simplified the slider mechanism compared to the N97. Instead of the elaborate slide and tilt, this keyboard simply slides out from behind the screen. While it doesn’t look so impressive it makes for a device which is both more comfortable and rugged. The new keyboard is slightly wider than the N97s since they ditched the somewhat useless D-pad. I guess they figured out that users don’t actually need a d-pad and a touch-screen if the touch screen is good enough.

Ony of my big criticisms of the N97 was it’s insensitive touch screen (I called it a “punch screen“). At the time I put this down to the fact that Nokia had chosen the older “resistive” technology rather than the more trendy “capacitive” screens used by the iPhone and most android devices. The N900 has not switched to capacitative, and yet the screen seems a great deal more responsive. I’ve not yet encountered the frequent false-clicks of the older model. Nokia claim that the advantage of a resistive screen is that you can be more precise. This is why the N900 has a concealed stylus which slides out of the front. It’s not actually possible to use a stylus on a capacitative screen, so Nokia clearly see this as giving their customers wider choices.

The other major criticism of the N97 was that it seemed sluggish compared to the high-end phones: Once again this has seems to have been fixed. Even while multitasking the N900 seems to have the processing power to stay lively and responsive. This is no doubt a consequence of the shift to Nokia’s next generation operating system. Maemo is the phone’s biggest new feature: It’s an operating system unlike anything I’ve seen before on a mobile, but oddly similar to almost everything I’ve used on my desktop.

I dont want to give the impression that it was entirely perfect: The biggest problem with Maemo today is a complete lack of commercial apps. None of the official Google Apps (e.g. Mail, Maps) have been ported to Maemo. It also lacks some of my favourites such as Spotify, BBC iPlayer and Last.fm. There’s no technical reason to doubt that these applications will eventually be ported to Maemo, however early adopters might need to beware that they might have to do without their favourite apps. As compensation for the lack of apps, the web-browser is really good: Good enough (for example) to use the web-versions of Twitter, and BBC iPlayer. The built in multimedia conceals some pleasant surprises, such as the fact that that the it can handle high-definition DivX movie files and Ogg audio files. No other device I can think of can play all of these non-commerical formats despite the fact that they are hugely popular in the free-software world.

So is the N900 the “iPhone Killer” that everybody’s been pining for? No, and thankfully not. I think this product represents an entirely new territory for the mobile phone industry. Rather than replicate Apple’s model of a tightly controlled environment, Nokia are emphasizing openness by borrowing a strategy which has worked so well for the open-source movement. This is the most open mobile platform on the market today, and I feel that proposition alone will draw in the “core” of developers who will in turn deliver the novel applications which will usher in a wider audience.

In summary, the N900 is intuitive, responsive and a joy to use. A true star in the Nokia family.

 A couple of months ago I looked at some initiatives for keeping a permanent record of information on the internet.

Today the Guardian reports new legal powers
being pushed through to allow the British Library and 5 other libraries
to copy every free UK-based website in an effort to preserve the
cultural content of the web for future generations.

According to
the Guardian, about a third of all published work only exists in
digital form. The powers to allow the key libraries to copy content
were originally established in 2003, but delays in putting this into
practice mean that millions of web pages have effectively been ‘lost’.
Approx 13% of internet references in scholarly articles become inactive
after only 27 months.

The
new powers would only apply to free UK websites ending with the .uk
domain (and the forthcoming .sco and .cym domain for Scotland and
Wales). However, the archiving of paid-for and restricted content has
been delayed until after this year’s election for “legal and technical
issues” according to the Culture Minister, Margaret Hodge.  Certainly
the issues relating to paid-for web content, especially around news
and  will be one of the hot topics for 2010.