SRSLY?

Yes, SRSLY!

Okay this is the deal, the kind people of Good Year are giving me four tickets for a Zeppelin flight on the 3rd of July. Which happens to be the day of the Tour De France prologue, and that’s exactly where we’ll be flying, above Rotterdam.

This should give you a feel of what it should be like: http://www.goodyearzeppelin.com/

In my infinite goodness I’m giving away two of those tickets. (okay, this was imposed upon me)

To be eligible to win a ticket you have to do the following things:

1. In the future, and for the remainder of your lifetime, say nice things about me to other people.

2. Click this button:

and pay with a tweet. (A: there’s no money involved B: ignore the download part, there’s nothing to download, as soon as your tweet appears you’re good)

3. In the comments here, post a link to your favorite Wikipedia entry.

About #3: This is what the judging will be based on.
Tip: It’s a wonderfully strange and exciting world out there. And Wikipedia documents even the tiniest, obscurest, arcanest, weirdest fleckle of it. Pick one that will learn me something I didn’t know or make me gasp in awe at what a weird/wonderful/strange world we live in.

Sort of like these, but not these:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whipping_boy
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mamihlapinatapai
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acoustic_Kitty
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metal_umlaut
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity_tractor
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_hardest_logic_puzzle_ever

That’s it!
The flight is on the third, so the contest is closing, say, next Tuesday (29th).
Have fun!

Okay, these are social times, it’s all about tribes, connecting people and whatnot.

But Marketeers are always interested in the Disney, hands across America, Up with People kinda group dynamics. It’s all very nice and friendly and sweet.

Also incredibly boring.

And every time marketeers come up with a new schtick it causes a land rush. Which means that there will soon be such an enormous amount of brands enabling me to connect with other people that it’s bound to become static. Just like mass media advertising became static.

They have a way of doing this them marketeers, creating static.

Now the pendulum swings both ways. So I’m looking at the other extreme. But I don’t think anti-social brands are the answer. (actually as I write this I kinda start to like the idea : )

What could be worth exploring though is group conflict.

Which, if applied rightly, can be constructive.

It seems to be especially effective when it’s done without asking, when you don’t ask people which side they are on, but tell them what side they are on.

A wonderful example of this is the classic “divide the crowd in half” trick rock bands do. (marketeers less rock ‘n roll than I am would refer to this as segmentation )

Here’s a memorable example from last year’s Pukkelpop.

Now if Gary Lightbody would have asked the crowd to sing along, it would have sung along.
But what he did was set one side up against the other one.

Bam! they’re in a competition.

And if you watch the video above it’s pretty clear they’re taking the competition seriously. Every time one side sings it’s a lot louder than what the other side just did. It’s just friggin’ amazing.
They didn’t ask for it, but now that it is that way, they’re not going to be outdone.

The amount of engagement created instantly by creating two rival groups is enormous.

There are some marketing examples out there too. Of course Seth’s got one.

Nike has been been sponsoring Run London, a 10 km race, for years. But what they did in 2006 was massive: They divided the whole of London in two teams: North and South. This not only got engagement up, as you can tell from this quote:

This Londonista has joined the Nike 10km Run London event and will be running for the North London team. Who is with me? And more importantly… who is against me?

(source: Londonist)

But it was also a very smart way to promote Nike+, as the result was based on the collective Nike+ times both teams did. So to win, you didn’t only have to run fast, you needed to have your run count by having Nike+ equipped shoes.

So smart it hurts.

Another interesting phenomenon is the Spanish and Dutch lotteries. In Holland it’s called postcodeloterij (zip code lottery) and in Spain El Gordo (The Fat One).

The difference with the regular lottery is that it’s not one person that wins.
It’s every participant in the village that issued the winning ticket that wins.

So the way that works is it divides the village in two groups. A group that might end up being filthy rich. And a group that will not but will have to continue living among filthy rich neighbors.
That’s a pretty scary thought.

A pretty scary thought you can avoid having to have by buying a lottery ticket.
So they’re not playing to win, they’re playing to not lose.
Completely different dynamic that a lot more people buy into.

It’s not called The Fat One for nothing.

Divide et impera.

Now you can basically divide the blogosphere (love how by now this word sounds so quaint) into two categories. You have the blogs on which content is created, and you have the blogs that curate that enormous amount of content and present you the “best of”. Some of these curating blogs are niche, they might only be about the best of gadgets or cars, some of ‘em are about everything and anything, like BoingBoing.

Now the reason I liked BoingBoing was because the people behind it, the curaters, where more or less into the same things I am. But, as noted above, that has evolved, and is no longer true. Now it was only a matter of time until someone was going to come up with an algorithm that finds out what kind of things I’m into and curate the web for me.

Well that moment has arrived, and unsurprisingly, it’s owned by Google.

http://www.google.com/reader/play/

Now it’s basically built into Google reader, so the algorithm probably already has a good idea of what I’m into. But you can also star, like or share items. You do this for yourself, but it obviously also helps the algorithm to finetune it’s opinion of what you’re into.
So this would mean that the more you use it, the better it gets.

(Sidenote: I think that star, like and share, are great way of measuring how much I like something. Star is sort of a bookmark thing, so I like it enough to want to be able to retrieve it someday. Like is, well like. And Share basically means that I like it that much that I want to share it with my followers. So by using these features, which I do because they have added value, I’m unconsciously educating the algorithm. Very ingenious.)

Now through using reader/play I’ve learned quit a bit about myself. It’s been showing me a lot of stuff that I really really like and find very very interesting. Now the scary thing is that it’s been a lot of lolcats, silly infoviz and America’s Funniest Animated Gifs.

Google knows me allright. I’m just not that proud of what it’s telling me.

But, as I said, the more I’ll use it, the smarter it’ll get, and I’ve only been playing for a few days.

Now the thing is, the reader/play algorithm has been around for a while, it was always there in your Google reader under the tab Explore.
But it’s only now that they’ve changed the user experience that I started to use it. It’s just very nice: easy nav, big images, autoplay video. It’s really a joy to use.

And it’s obvious what they’re getting at with the user experience of this app: this is made to measure for the iPad.

I can see my son playing with this on his iPad, flipping through stuff he likes and just taking for granted that the iPad knows what he likes.
Without ever having known what a curater blog is.

Nu, het eerder aangehaalde artikel is in sé niet slecht. Er wordt zoals gewoonlijk veel onzin verteld over social media, maar blijkbaar moet je het hele fenomeen zelf niet begrijpen om er een mening over te hebben die te verdedigen valt.
Maar toch, hieronder dus het artikel met mijn bedenkingen:

Sociaalnetwerksites als Facebook, Netlog, Twitter en LinkedIn hebben een plaats veroverd in het leven van vele Belgen. Recente cijfers tonen aan dat 60procent van de Belgische internetgebruikers (zo’n 3,5 miljoen Belgen) lid is van Facebook. En dat aantal neemt nog elke dag toe. Daarmee wordt het een potentieel interessant communicatiekanaal voor adverteerders.

Dus Facebook is een communicatiekanaal? Ja je kan iets communiceren via Facebook. Maar waarom zou ik luisteren? Dit is hetzelfde scenario als bij de opkomst van het Internet. Ja je kan een site online zetten. Maar waarom zou ik hem bezoeken?

Maar springen die al voluit op de sociaalnetwerkkar of kijken ze de kat uit de boom?
Uit een recente studie van InSites Consulting en The House of Marketing blijkt een grote kloof tussen attitude en gedrag. Marketeers schatten het belang van sociale netwerken hoog in: bijna 60procent van de ondervraagden staat open voor het volgen van merkenconversaties tussen consumenten op sociale netwerken, 42procent wil er zelf aan deelnemen (DS 2 maart).
Maar die cijfers staan in contrast met het daadwerkelijke gedrag. Slechts 14procent van de ondervraagden volgt de sociaalnetwerkconversaties tussen consumenten effectief op, 10 procent neemt eraan deel. Zeven op de tien bedrijven leggen de gesprekken echter volledig naast zich neer. Ligt het aan de behoudsgezindheid van de Belgische marketeer of is het gewoon een kwestie van nuchterheid en wat gezond verstand?

Misschien hebben ze zich gewoon laten inspireren door de The Vitrue 100 the Top Social Brands of 2008. Met op 1 de iPhone op 4 Apple en op 5 de iPod. Men kan dus gerust stellen dat het meest sociale merk van 2008 Apple was. Nochthans, Apple doet niet van “engage in conversations with consumers”. Integendeel, wat ze wel doen is, communities sluiten, cease and desist brieven schrijven naar fansites, enz. In ‘t kort, ongeveer alles wat je volgens het social media marketeer handboek vooral NIET mag doen. En toch het meest sociale merk? Hoe zou dat komen? Wel, volgens mijn bescheiden mening ligt de kracht van sociale media in wat de mensen (aka consumers) zeggen over een merk. Niet wat dat merk zelf zegt. En blijkbaar, zoals Apple bewijst, is “wat de mensen zeggen” niet gebaseerd op wat ze lezen in/over social media, maar op wat er gebeurd daarbuiten.
De Belgische Marketeer heeft dus een punt.

Onbekend maakt duidelijk nog altijd onbemind. Naar schatting is minder dan één marketeer op de drie persoonlijk actief op een of andere sociaalnetwerksite. In Nederland loopt dat op tot 40procent, ook niet echt overweldigend voor zo’n toegankelijk medium. Sommige marketeers zweten wellicht ook de kater uit van de Second Life-hype enkele jaren terug. Bovendien is er elk jaar wel iemand die een nieuwe revolutie, lees in vele gevallen hype, uitroept: van mobiele marketing over ‘augmented reality’ tot iPhone-applicaties. En tussendoor nog even ‘twitteren’. Het wordt allemaal wat veel voor Corneel.
Nochtans ontbreekt het niet aan ‘peptalk’, zelfs in gerenommeerde vakbladen. Zo berichtte het Amerikaanse marketingvakblad AdvertisingAge in zijn editie van vorige week op zijn voorpagina over een opmerkelijke stijging van het aantal Toyota-’fans’ op Facebook ‘met meer dan 10procent’, in de periode van de wereldwijde massale ‘recall’ van wagens. Het blad citeert een woordvoerder van Toyota die het wat pathetisch heeft over ‘fans’ die het ‘op authentieke wijze’ opnemen voor hun merk. Enkele pagina’s verder blijkt het in absolute cijfers echter over een stijging van 71.600 naar 79.500′fans’ te gaan, over een periode van vijf weken. Wat is de relevantie van 8.000 ‘fans’ als het merk op hetzelfde ogenblik in de massamedia dagelijks voor honderden miljoenen wereldburgers wordt onderuitgehaald? Wil iemand de prioriteiten weer juist stellen?

Wel die 8000 “Fans”, hebben allen gemiddeld 150 “vrienden”, dus bij deze dus weten 1.200.000 mensen dat hun vriend Toyota niet te beroerd vindt om er openbaar zijn of haar liefde aan te verklaren. Wat dat waard is laat ik in het midden. Wat wel vast staat is dat het niets kostte.

Marketing managers moeten hun uitgaven vandaag meer dan ooit verantwoorden en ze worden, zeker in een crisis, afgerekend op de opbrengst van hun investeringen. En daar knelt het schoentje. In tegenstelling tot de klassieke massamedia kunnen de zogeheten sociale media niet uitpakken met hoge return-on-investment-cijfers. En daar draait het vandaag in essentie nog altijd om in het bedrijfsleven.

Ik zou zelf niet weten wat hier bedoeld wordt. Hoe zou sociale media moeten uitpakken met ROI cijfers? Is dat zoals het ROI cijfer van geroddel op de trein of kletsen met de buurvrouw?

Sociale media bevinden zich voor merken vandaag nog vaak in het stadium van het experiment: eens testen om te zien wat het resultaat is. Marketing op sociaalnetwerksites doet denken aan het loze vissertje dat een hengel uitgooit en zich ’s avonds maar wat gelukkig prijst dat er een visje heeft gebeten. Gelukkig is er dan nog de visboer om de hoek om de lege maag te vullen.

Hieruit blijkt toch dat Fons niet door heeft waarover het gaat.
Sociale media marketing is niet spelen met dingen op het Internet. Sociale Media marketing is erkennen dat wat de mensen over uw merk zeggen veel belangrijker is dan wat dat merk zelf zegt. Dit is altijd al belangrijk geweest. Maar nu die conversaties publiek zijn, gearchiveerd zijn, en geordend zijn door Google, moet de invloed van wat een merk zelf zegt, reclame dus, nog meer aan belang inboeten.

Ongetwijfeld zijn er vandaag en morgen tests die effectief geld in het laatje brengen. Mogelijk is er sprake van een zogenaamde ‘long tail’: enkele blockbusters en dan een lange staart van nichesuccessen. Het zullen in elk geval alleen die toepassingen zijn die zich duidelijk inschrijven in de doelstellingen van een organisatie of merk die de hype zullen overleven. De speeltijd is straks voorbij.

De “speeltijd” vind ik nog goed gevonden.
Eigenlijk is de essentie van deze hele column dat Fons, een klassieke reclameman, het beu is dat valse profeten steeds weer een nieuwe wereldorde komen verkondigen. Een nieuwe wereldorde die minder inkomsten voor de klassieke reclameman impliceert. Dus probeert Fons hun theoriën te weerleggen door in hun jargon ook dingen te zeggen die niets willen zeggen.

En als de klassieke reclameman er even bedreven in is geworden als de valse profeet, dan is de speeltijd voorbij.

De valse profeet weer aan zet.
Na Web2.0, Second Life en Social Media wordt de spurt naar het volgende buzzword ingezet.

De volgende speeltijd.

Om maar te zeggen, het wordt hoog tijd dat er een derde hond met het been gaat lopen.

Also: from an advertising standpoint it looks like the gaming industry is now at the point where advertising was in the sixties: they’re figuring out that on top of game designers, they need game planners. People who’s task it is to find a psychological insight into a game.

These are interesting and exciting times.

(via ettf)

Now what happens at the end (for those without the patience) is this:

The goal of this video is, well obviously raise awareness, but also to direct traffic to the Robin Hood Tax website where there’s a poll about whether this being a good idea or not.

Now if you see this video on the new Youtube (if you have it already, I do), there’s not even a link to their website, ’cause apparently you can only put outside links on your channel page.
So you have to click through or type the URL.

This can be done better.

How?

By using the video as the poll itself.
Because with the annotations editor you can make areas (buttons) clickable.
So if you click the yes button you go the the yes video, in which you can continue your conversation/conversion/whatever you have in mind.
And if you click the no button, you obviously reached a banker and can go on selling him a gold Rolex.

But the cool thing is of course that the number of views each video gets, is the number of people clicked yes or no.

Instant Youtube poll!!

I quickly hacked up an example:

Go on! What do you think?

It’s been a bit of a mantra that good brands or products have the marketing baked into them.
Yet the theory is a lot easier than the practice and apart from Hotmail and Nike+ most people can’t cite any success stories from the top of their head.

Of course that might be because in those cases the marketing is a tangible thing, the tracker in my shoe’s sole, or the line “Get your own free Hotmail account” at the bottom of every mail.
In the era of social media however, doing whatever that makes your product become a conversation topic, is baking in the marketing. Coke’s new soda fountains, selling socks by the three.

Those are smart.

But what’s even better is when you don’t even HAVE to resort to efforts like those.
Because your product or brand is already a conversation topic.
Just because _it’s so damn good_.

Google search.
Almost everything Apples does.

Yet, oh the irony, Apple does advertise.
And Google became the mogul it is now without ever advertising…. until last night when it aired it’s first TV commercial.

Now I could go on about the why, but what interests me is the how.

What these ads have in common.

The Google ad above and the iPhone ads hereunder.

What they have in common is the following: they’re product demos.

They tell a wonderfully crafted story, through a product demo.

And they can, BECAUSE THEY’RE SO DAMN GOOD.
They don’t have to use shiny happy people and show how their product made those people even shinier and happier or try to make the ads funny so they’d be remembered.

Product demos.

Period.

So it seems to me that what we got on our hands here is a New Marketing World Order of Awesomeness.

And the hierarchy is the following:

I’m not really into new stuff, my furniture, while not being antique, is always bought used. My house is built with reclaimed materials. My car and my bike are from the seventies, my pepper mill is the one my mom used when I was little and I named my daughter after my grandmother.

I like stuff with a past. And I like it when that past shows, like the patina of a pair of 501’s or a dent in a car that must have a story.

I always associate traces of extensive use as a sign of quality. Stuff that has stood the test of time, must be good quality stuff, and if it lasted till now, it will last a lot longer, maybe even outlast me. The guy behind Hermes handbags once said “Le luxe c’est ce qui se répare”: A luxury item is one that you repair, rather than replace.

I miss all this in digital media. A website might have been around for over a decade, used by billions of people, yet it always remains as brand-spanking-new as the day it launched.

What a lot of start up web apps do now is show usage by having things like a profile pic of the latest three users that signed up, or the 10 latest added whatevers. Stuff that’s meant to convince the visitor this site must be good, because it’s being used.
Should there be a way of showing usage the analog way, like the picture above, it shouldn’t have to do this.

Apart from the emotional association of signs of usage with quality, it can also have advantages on a different level.

Usability for instance: when you want to flip through the channels at a friends house, you know you have to use the buttons on the remote where there’s no pictogram left. Or when a door scratched a quarter circle in the floor, you know whether to pull or push.

If there’s a way to do this with digital buttons, that would solve the same problem: Where do I click here? What am I supposed to do here?

I’m sure there must be more, this post was the “put-my-finger” on it post, now comes the quest for possible implementation.

Update: Grant McCracken also has some thoughts on this.

I guess everyone has heard about Pepsi not advertising during the Super Bowl but instead spending that money on their “Refresh project”. The Refresh project being an online effort where cause marketing meets social media meets crowdsourcing meets accolades from the usual online marketing suspects before it even launches.
One would expect that I, as a “digital guy”, would cheer for more money flowing towards online than towards the evil Super Bowl 30 second spot. (which was dead anyway remember)

Instead I’m skeptical. For a myriad of reasons.

When you reverse-engineer this campaign it’s pretty obvious it’s rooted in the contemporary planning insights such as:
People are not consumers waiting to be advertised to.
Or
Do stuff instead of say stuff.
And
Have a world view rather than a category positioning.
etc.

Yet from where I’m standing it looks like they managed to interpret most of them wrongly.
No, people aren’t waiting to be advertised to, but it seems to me they also aren’t waiting for yet another platform to engage on.

And I’m all for brands doing stuff instead of saying stuff.
But obviously it’s very hard to figure out WHAT to do and HOW to do it.
Awarding money to people wanting to improve their community is a noble cause. And I applaud any company doing that. But since it’s the money Pepsi used to spend on TV ads, it’s obvious they’re expecting more sales out of it. And the fact that it IS obvious already puts the whole thing into perspective doesn’t it. There’s no noble cause in the process, experience or product of Pepsi. It’s not fair trade coffee, it’s not health food, things that would justify Pepsi as a do-good brand. So Pepsi, out of nowhere, going down the “Do Good” route just feels contrived.

It feels like what we got here is a not too distant cousin of greenwashing.

I’m not buying it, and I’m not the cynical marketing guy that thinks “consumers” are less smart or less pragmatic than I am and will buy it.

In short, I think the “do good” trend might be worth exploring, but it’s too far removed from Pepsi’s DNA to be credible.

Another plain on which they missed the ball is the social thing.
This is not a social idea.
It’s a social media idea.
It’s not an idea worth spreading, it’s a process that’s constructed so people will have to use their online presences to spread a marketing message.
Case in point:

So, not a fan of the idea, their marketing disguised at “Doing Good” remains just that, a disguise, a means to an end.

On top of the idea, the execution also has it’s faults .
At it’s core Refresh is a contest, you come up with an entry, I guess there’s some work involved in presenting your case, and than you have to get people to vote for you.
I think this is very dangerous territory for a brand. If the whole purpose of the thing is to create a positive feeling towards the Pepsi brand, they better hope that the people that participate are good losers. Because there are going to be a lot more losers than there are winners. And the social media tactic (that’s a pejorative) of having a public vote means that participants are going to contact all their connections to vote, which will make their eventual “loss” very public and all the more painful.
Now I know there’s more eyeballs to this than just the people participating, but if you expect people to use their network to spread your message you have to accept they can also use it to spread theirs, and it might not be what you want to hear.

And in the red corner we have Coca Cola.

They recently announced they’re abandoning the build of ever-more networking platforms in favor of harnessing existent platforms such as Youtube and Facebook. I’m not going to say that’s smart, I’m going to say you’re not the brightest bulb if you’re not already doing that.
And what are they using the attention they get through these platforms for?

Advertising.

Old. School. Advertising.

They’re not pretending to be something they’re not, they’re doing what they’re known for, advertising. But not big idea, bring-on-the-trumpets, stop the presses advertising. Smart, small ideas such as this one. Cheap to produce, easy to engage with.
The amount of engagement it took from me is proportional to the importance of soda in my life: not a lot.
I liked it. Done. Next. And if I didn’t like it, nothing’s lost. Just with their Youtube channel they have a decent attention base on which to launch ideas that might or might not take off. I’m pretty sure that their Super Bowl commercial will be anything but small and cheap to produce, but after that initial broadcast it will most certainly be found on their Youtube channel, allowing the whole channel to bask in it’s glory, and gather even more momentum.

So, as an advertising strategy, I prefer this one to Pepsi’s.

But Coke is also up to something very smart.
These soda fountains pictured above. (more here).
People value products that are taylored to them more than big corporate one-size-fits all products. These fountains allow them to compose their own soda. Fanta, Cola or vitamin water with added flavor (cherry please), carbonated or not, caffeinated or not. Possibilities are endless.
This is a very innovative idea.

But it’s also a very social idea.

Soda preference quit being a conversation topic ages ago. But these machines put soda right back up there with Starbucks’ secret menu and In-n-Out’s triple triple.
No longer Coke or Fanta, but everyone his own blend of soda. How big a game changer is this? People won’t be able to refrain from talking about their personal blend. Every “Whaddayawanna drink?” is bound to turn into people comparing recipes.
And I shouldnt even mention it anymore, but yes, it will all reflect online, just like breakfast does.

Contrary to most marketing blog posts who are written after the facts, this one’s written before, so It’ll be very interesting to follow both cases.
I’m putting my money on Coke, knockout in the second round.
The Internet will declare it’s winner.