Most readers will doubtless be aware of a certain kickabout that started in Africa on Friday.
Some brands have fallen into the age-old trap of spending $ms in official sponsorship, then throwing it away with an associated campaign that goes off the bland-ometer. Hello, Hyundai and Budweiser.
I was listening to a Canadian radio station the other day when I heard about the creation of Boobquake. Started by Jen McCreight a US blogger in response to Hojatoleslam Kazem Sedighi an Iranian Cleric how was quoted as saying that immodestly dressed women caused earthquakes. Jen’s idea was to get as many women as possible to dress immodestly on the same day and then track if this caused any noticeable difference to the number of earthquakes around the world.
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.
Over the past few years brands have become increasingly engage with using the big social networks such as Twitter and Facebook not only as a marketing and engagement tool but also as a home for their social media community.
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.
I was at MIPCOM last week and talking to the great and good of the TV industry got me thinking will the internet replace TV or does TV just need to adapt.
For 50 years, the TV industry has delivered content and generated revenue effortlessly along the way. But technology is in danger of pulling its plug.
Can it alter its business model to chart a course into more profitable waters? Or is TV irreversibly sinking?
Advertising revenues are down and news that UK online advertising has overtaken TV doesn’t make the picture any brighter. And look at these facts and figures:
• By 2010 Generation Y will outnumber Baby Boomers
• 96% of generation Y in the first world have joined a social network
• Years it took to reach 50 million users: Radio (38 years), TV (13 years), Internet (4 years), iPod (3 years).
• Facebook has added 100 million users in less than 9 months
• The second largest search engine in the world, based on number of searches conducted, is YouTube
• Only 14% of people trust advertisements
• Only 18% of TV campaigns generate a positive ROI for advertisers
Okay, TV is facing some serious challenges, increased competition from online channels, new technologies, lifestyle changes – call them what you will – but cheer up, the business model might be on its last legs, but there’s life in the old dog yet…
The answer for TV – embrace the online culture.
One billion consumers use social networks and the like. How can TV tap into the commercial potential of such vast numbers of people? The difficult part isn’t to create a presence; its knowing what presence should be created, where and for what purpose.
LISTEN CLOSELY
The truth is you’re involved in the social media space whether you choose to be or not. Listen in to the online buzz in sites like Twitter, Facebook, You Tube, Flickr, the various forums, communities and blogs. Social media search engines like whostalkin, Social Mention, Delver or tuSavvy are great to use alongside Google analytics to get a good overview of your social media profile and performance. But for a detailed assessment, get a social media reputation audit done by a professional – you’ll be able to use this score as a benchmark for improvement.
START TALKING TO PEOPLE
Word of mouth – one of the most powerful forms of marketing, and it works so well online. If you’ve got something great – everybody’s talking about it. If you don’t – everybody’s talking about it. Before getting involved in social media, think carefully about your approach. Be prepared to share information or even tell the behind the scenes stories.
START SHARING YOUR CONTENT
Social media channels have a rather large ‘Welcome’ mat don’t you know and getting involved in this space will have a positive effect offline too. CBS has attributed a 200,000 increase in viewers in one month to the strategic placement of sample content on YouTube.
USE VIDEO PLATFORMS (DON’T TRY TO COMPETE AGAINST THEM)
YouTube probably presents the biggest threat but also biggest opportunity for content owners. Did you know that currently an average of 20 hours of video is uploaded every minute? OK, some of it may be there illegally, or poor quality, but audiences flock in their droves. Google, YouTube’s owner, has very deep pockets, so while it continues to build its audience, the commercial pressure is off (for now). And legal wrangles over copyright issues are unlikely to derail them, a recent ruling in Universal Music Group’s copyright infringement lawsuit against Veoh Networks shows that social video sites may actually not be breaking any laws at all, at least not in the USA.
Then there’s Monty Python who placed free clips on their YouTube channel with click-to-buy links underneath. It’s reported that even though the online content is free, Monty Python’s DVD sales skyrocketed 23,000% on Amazon and reached #2 on the Bestseller list.
DISCOVER NEW REVENUE STREAMS
Content has an intrinsic value. Viewers will subscribe to watch it (if it’s good enough), advertisers will pay to be labelled alongside it (for the right price), but the online model is still evolving.
But take Facebook – it has 300m users – audience figures are potentially not the problem – it’s all in the packaging. Subscriptions models using Facebook apps are a potential money-spinner for content owners. Users don’t want to pay multiple subscriptions to access content (hello, Hulu!) so multi-layered content for niche audiences just needs to find suitable homes.
CREATE ONLINE ONLY CONTENT
Broadcasters can show content on their websites, but this is only the starting point. Bebo has a track record for commissioning its own content (KateModern and Sofia’s Diary), funded by tactical sponsorships and product placement.
Joe Hughes,
Yomego – the social media agency.
With the $50million purchase of Friendfeed, Facebook has
just bought itselfs a seat at one of the hottest tables on the internet – real
time search. Friendfeed arguably has better technology then anyone else right
now for real time and it is this and the talent pool Friendfeed has are the big
prize here.
Lots of people always try to quantify the ROI of social media, how many extra sales will it get me? How much extra traffic will it get my website? Are these the right questions?
There are certainly ways to measure the effects of social media but concentrating purely on these measurements misses the point. Social media is much more than just trying to sell a few extra products. Social media is about connecting with your audience and if you don’t know what people are saying about your brand things can go horribly wrong, horribly quickly.
Over the last couple of months the newspaper industry has seemed increasingly desperate to generate new revenue streams in particular from the internet. If you take a look at the revenue figures for newspapers it is easy to see why.
News Corp who own one of the worlds largest newspaper businesses saw Q1 operating profit drop 47% and they are not alone.
Since Murdoch initially mentioned the idea that newspapers should start charging subscriptions for their websites in May there has been a growing sense amongst the newspaper industry that a subscription model for online access to their content is the way forward.
So is subscription going to save the industry or is it yet another badly thought out attempt by an industry that doesn’t really understand what is going on around them to grab revenue where it can?
You can probably tell from my choice of words that I don’t believe this will save the industry.
Newspapers have done well up to now for two reasons, firstly the convenience of the format. Traditionally there where three primary platforms for absorbing news: TV, radio and newspapers and each of these had a very different format which where used at different times and in different ways.
Newspapers provided the ideal way to transport news. They where sized to be comfortable to read on a bus or a train, lightweight, cheap and easy to dispose of. You couldn’t take a TV to work with you; you couldn’t take a radio of a flight so the newspaper was perfect.
The second reason was the control and flow of information. In order to report news particularly news from a foreign country you had to get a reporter there, have researchers available to check facts and figures and a way to broadcast the information. This kind of operation cost a lot of money and required a large infrastructure. Newspapers where perfectly setup to take advantage of this structure and there where very few competitors.
Internet technology and in particular Social internet technology have been eroding away the need for large-scale organization and at the same time increasing the number of devices, that news is accessible on.
Think laptops, netbooks, iPhones, your computer at home, your computer at work, in fact for a good deal of people, they are never more than a few clicks away from huge stores of information. These stores of data are called websites and pretty much anybody can run one.
As soon as information is available on one website, it has the capability to be available on millions through technology such as RRS. Added to this platforms like twitter allow near instantaneous transmission of messages to potentially millions of people, meaning almost no information is unique.
The less unique information is the less valuable it is and information is newspapers currency.
Much like the music industry of the late nineties and early two thousands, instead of finding ways to use this new technology to their advantage the newspaper industry is mostly trying to either ignore the problem or threatening to sue anyone they can find, usually Google.
Now that it is becoming increasingly obvious neither of these strategies is working, they are trying to fall back to the offline model of subscription.
Why not try something new, how about add-ons to their service?
An example of where they might want to start their thinking is already here have a look at Techdirt a professional online blogging network that has come up with a range of add-ons to help their newsgathering and analysis business. I am not suggesting that mainstream newspapers follow this exact model but to me at least its seems a lot better than anything they have come up with so far.
If you want to read some more insight it is on my company website Yomego
The future of social media is extremely bright, taking internet users to a point where social sites cease to become a place on the internet and start becoming the internet itself.
The sheer momentum behind social media is unlikely to slow down anytime soon, while the convergence of a number of critical factors are creating a pivotal moment for the online phenomenon.
The end of the beginning is nigh – and more importantly the future of social media is starting to take shape.
We have mass adoption, ubiquitous technology and considerable investment into social sites. These key factors, which are now all converging, will force the changes that will see the last barriers knocked down and the final challenges overcome: cross-compatibility, and profitable business models.
These trends will lead us to a point, where social sites cease to become a place on the internet and start becoming the internet itself.
More and more conventional websites are now incorporating social aspects such as user- generated content or social bookmarking. It is not a huge leap from here to the point where the entire internet is based around social sites and functionality.
In this new world, niche social networks will proliferate, brands will ‘do’ rather than simply ‘say’ and the internet will be defined by your preferences.
As these social spaces become our gateways to more and more content and interaction, a traditional approach to online brand advertising no longer applies.
Banners are out. In come advertorial-style content, branded apps and brand-led community sites.
Furthermore, brands will need to embrace new technology in tailoring their message to the right audience. If they get it right, the benefits in terms of brand engagement and mass advocacy are mouth-watering.
Platforms such as Google Wave and Netvibes are already giving us a glimpse of a future where users choose what information and data they want; a world where users filter data before it’s delivered to them, and customize the way it’s presented when it reaches them.
The next phase of the social media revolution offers huge potential for brands that get their strategy right, as well as pitfalls for those who fail to adapt. For end users, the good can only get better.
If you want to read more on this, I have just written a more in depth white paper on the subject that you can find here
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