Dutch marketer Martijn van Osch did something that's counter intuitive in our industry (where the orthodoxy is be as informed as possible) and shut himself off from all but one news website, two magazines and taped TV documentaries.
Five months on, he found five changes for the better including feeling generally more optimistic:
"Around the world a lot of bad things are happening. I can’t deny that. But if you put all those bad things in newspapers, TV shows, news programs, magazines and on websites, you start to believe that the world around you is a bad place."
I noticed this myself this morning when reading a copy of City AM (a free business paper handed out in central London) while on the tube. Pretty much the whole issue was cover to cover filled with dire financial warnings and commentary - you can't help feeling despondent or anxious when being exposed to a constant drum beat of bad news.
I didn't pick up another paper for the rest of the day - and actually felt better for it.
Anyone who spends a lot of time in the social media echo chamber will know, there's a great deal of chest beating that goes on about followers, accolades and rankings.
Though a lot of A-Listers are there by merit, if you go to the bottom of the league tables you will often find blogs and sites that are just as insightful, if not more so, than their higher placed peers. They simply haven't promoted themselves as hard, or are just there by chance.
Over Christmas I tested this out by going to the AdAge Power 150 - it's actually more like the power 1000 - the index of the most read marketing blogs in the English speaking world. I wanted to expand my reading list, but rather than doing the obvious thing, I went to the second half of the table.
Many are there for a reason - they are defunct, or are blatant sales sites.
Others are excellent reads, and I wanted to put forward five examples that might not have thousands of subscribers, but I recommend book marking. By doing so, you get access to thoughts and opinions that most others don't.
Here are my five in no particular order. With the exception of Yaybia! I hadn't read any of them before this week.
Yaybia! I am cheating a bit here as I already link to them via my blog roll on the right. Based in Minneapolis, Erin, Libby and their co-writers are, I gather either looking for or have just got jobs in advertising.
It's well written, contains interesting little observations and the team at Yaybia! show what any graduate wanting to get in the industry should be doing. Give these people a job before someone else snaps them up!
Pure Thinking. An interesting agency and an interesting blog to boot.
I should add two important caveats to this post:
This definitely isn't meant to be patronising to the blogs concerned.
My point is that it's good to break away from the herd and look outside of the standard reading list.
Case in point, one of the scores used to put together the AdAge list is Todd Andrlik's (the guy who created the league table) own perception of the quality of each blog - it's the first figure you see beside each site listing.
Yaybia!, Cultural Fuel and Pure Thinking all have a maximum score of 14 from Todd - higher than the 12 that this blog gets. And if you invert the table based purely on what Todd thinks is good, you get a few of the "gurus"...along with plenty of people you've probably never heard of before.
Secondly, yes I display my AdAge badge on this site. Absolutely - I like having readers and people linking here. At the same time, I've always believed that if you are in this purely for the numbers you are on a hiding to nothing.
Anyway, happy hunting! I can almost guarantee you will come away better read and informed as a result.
Virtual worlds pundit and blogger Dusan Writer points to two pieces in the US and Canadian press about virtual worlds gaining greater acceptance in 2009.
It’s also been an enduring mystery to me why this sector has – quite frankly – underperformed to such a huge degree.
It’s a truism that every day millions of people look for escape from their daily lives, ranging from slumping in front of the box and watching mindless telly, to substance abuse. Giving you the chance to recreate yourself, virtual worlds are the ultimate form of escape from what for many is the desert of the real and so should in theory be enormously appealing.
Why it’s not performed is the subject for an entirely different post, but in summary I believe it’s down to a combination of it seeming too complicated, the toys out of the pram reaction from marketers when SL consumers didn’t buy into their virtual ads (and the resultant media backlash) and what you could call the ‘Sadville’ meme – a perception that it’s for people who are socially deficient in some form (see one blogger's account of explaining virtual worlds to colleagues).
Onto the recent press articles. Today’s Washington Post talks about Arlington County (part of the Washington DC metro area) setting up an office in Second Life. More interesting though are the other two examples mentioned in the piece.
The US National Library of Medicine has created ‘tox town’, an environment in Second Life to encourage visitors about everyday health hazards. Meanwhile at the University of the District of Columbia, criminal justice students practice investigations and patrols in a virtual setting.
Meanwhile the Toronto Globe and Mail calls the age of the avatar one of the big ideas of the year, saying: “Avatars will enjoy greater mainstream acceptance in 2009, and although convergence is not likely to happen overnight, expect certain sites to begin thinking about partnering up to allow character crossovers the way social networks are trying to make profiles more portable.”
The prompt for the Globe & Mail’s prediction is the creation of an avatar portability system being trialled by German software company Weblin, which allows you to create one avatar to be used across all virtual worlds (e.g. The holy grail of interoperability, something similarly being tested by Second Life owner Linden Lab and IBM).
The Globe & Mail article is incidentally well worth reading for it’s full range of predictions, which includes ‘reality check for social networks’ - just like they found with virtual worlds two years ago, advertisers are discovering that littering social networks with apps and ads isn’t producing results.
According to Maggie Fox from the social media group, quoted in the article:
“The reality is that when you look at that type of revenue model, all we're doing is slapping an old model on a new platform and it's clearly not really working.” Indeed. Or as commentator Joseph Jaffe put it back in the summer, too many of us are still stuck in what he called the fireworks business.
Image - Morpheus to Neo in the film the Matrix, "welcome to the desert of the real"
Using the Tokyo metro system as a guide (with Google in the place of Tokyo Central), it's a great visualisation tool that shows how the world's top web destinations are connected to each other.
The A1 poster is currently on sale for US$55, though you can download an A3 PDF as well as desktop wallpaper from the Information Architects website for free.
Emma filmed DJ Giles Walker's pole dancing robots installation. These were filmed at the Mutate Britain exhibition where these amazing creations supervised the bar area. The robots were built from 12V motors found in cars (windscreen wiper motors etc) and controlled via a PC.
Australian social media blogger Gavin Heaton uses the example of a piece of 'Jesus Christ Pita Bread' to remind us that "marketing is based entirely on emotion", i.e. that as consumers we make decisions based more on a connection that a brand makes with us, rather than choices based on rational data.
Hamilton_11 announces that one day he decided to heat up some pita and - hallelujah! - a single piece came out like the face of Jesus!
Hamilton_11 provides a lesson on getting people to hand over their cash purely by engaging with his audience, via auction questions such as "Would you be prepared to swap it for a sack of onions that looks like Madonna?" and "Just like Dolly the sheep have you tried to replicate your masterpiece by "CLONING?"
Hurry, that unique piece of Jesus bread could be yours, but you have only five more days to bid!
Oh, and if bats aren't your thing, there are some Amazonian Turtles up for grabs too.
Perhaps, rather optimistically, the University was hoping to get a whopping $250,000 (£140k) for its wildlife conservation efforts. However the top offer as of Christmas Eve stood at a much more modest $5100. That means bidding is being reopened in the run-up to Valentine’s Day.
Just think, the possibilities are endless. Who needs one of those fake buy a plot of land on the moon schemes, when you, or a loved one can be immortalised in zoology textbooks and have your name called out at academic conferences for years to come.
Or if you are a brand, maybe the bats – which apparently subsist on flying insects (Raid or Rentokil anyone?) - could front a new ad campaign. You could even unveil the bats at the annual shareholders meeting. How awesome would that be!
Of course we are talking bats here, and not everyone would consider a bat naming entirely complimentary (see picture). So you could also use this as a great opportunity to throw some mud at a competitor, for example maybe British Airways should bid and name the creatures Virgin Atlantic.
According to the Chicago Tribune, this kind of thing isn’t unheard of in wildlife conservation circles. A gambling website outbid actress Ellen De Generes in 2005 to get the naming rights to a Bolivian monkey, while when you consider that a fish naming auction in Monaco raised $2 million, then perhaps Purdue University’s 250k goal isn’t so outlandish after all.
An article on Design Mind about random encounters on Paris public transport reminded me of a story we issued for a previous client, Gumtree, two years ago.
An online classifieds service, one of the main features of Gumtree is 'missed connections' (you know, 'you were the woman in the dark brown coat on the 1.05 Ryanair to Gatwick etc).
Anyway, we went through all the missed connections onsite so that we could proclaim the Northern Line in London as the - ahem - 'tunnel of love' and that the bus route with the highest number of connections was the no344 from Liverpool Street to Clapham Junction.
In the same vein, Design Mind links back to an article in The Australian from the summer, about a study in Paris called L'Amour Mobile, which showed that while 12% of Parisians had struck up a lasting relationship (platonic or otherwise) with someone they met on public transport, the more usual meeting spots of the museum or the park were less fruitful.
The study author, the wonderfully named Frank Beau, said that commuters who met were: "often reading books or listening to iPods - activities which, far from isolating travellers, seem to unite them.
"Romantic tension ran high because of the physical proximity of passengers...In such circumstances the slightest contact - a glance, a word, a jacket brushing against your shoulder - becomes an "extraordinary experience", he said, adding that the folding seats by the doors were the best spot for romantic encounters."
Apparently following the study, transport executives are considering platform cafes where you can carry on flirting, or location based mobile services - which is one reason why location based social networks like Bright Kite have such potential...even though, as Hol Kinz, one of my Twitter friends pointed out, it could also be a magnet for creeps!
Postscript - Happy New Year to everyone who has had the patience to read the sometimes random thoughts on this blog. As Kelly over at Kelpenhagen rightly says, doing this gives you the chance to meet some really great and insightful people you'd never have the chance to otherwise - so thank you!
Image - From Mark Hillary, the Northern Line aka 'the tunnel of love.' Yes, the image really says it all
Some more excellent stats that are useful to dip into when it comes to talking to brands, come from TNS Global, which has published its Digital World, Digital Life study.
Conducted in 16 countries, the study featured 27,000+ people aged 18-55. The report is available as a PDF from here. I definitely recommend downloading it as it’s a goldmine of information. Some highlights:
Virtual friendships the norm
Linking in with my previous post about the impact virtual networks of friends can have in spreading moods and ideas, TNS shows that in the UK we have on average 17 online only friends, representing 25% of our friend total.
Perhaps surprisingly, 35-44 year olds have a higher proportion of online friends (33%) than 18-25 year olds (24%). However, this could link into stats that I’ve seen that both virtual worlds like Second Life, and the micro-blogging platform Twitter have more of an appeal to a 30+ demographic.
For Americans, around 20% of their friends are online only, while for Australians it’s actually pushing 40%.
Granted, we often multi task and watch TV / spend time online at the same time, but based on TNS’s data in the US 30% of consumers’ free time is being spent in a medium where they have no exposure to traditional big bucks marketing campaigns.
For Australian consumers the figure is 29% and for Brits 28%. However looking specifically at British housewives, 47% of their leisure time is spent on the Internet – a higher time % than for the Chinese (44%) and Koreans (40%). This link back to other statistics about women at home representing a huge online growth area.
Blogs lack credibility
Meanwhile TNS’s global stats support the recent US only Pew Research report about online overtaking print media as a preferred source of news.
Globally, 41% ‘trust’ TV news, 40% online news and 39% newspapers. In the US, the results were 38% trust online vs 33% for TV news and 34% newspapers, while in the UK trust in print media was even lower at 23% compared to 40% for online news sites.
Finally, the definition of ‘trusted online news’ does not extend to blogs, which as the previous Forrester report showed, has a very low credibility level among consumers. While between 20-40% of consumers in Western countries read and contribute to blogs, they by and large take what they read with a pinch of salt.
The study found that happy people tended to be clustered together (and similarly that the 'social norm' of obesity is influenced by your group). And that happiness is not only reliant on the happiness of your friend, but to an extent also on your friend’s friend and their friend’s friend’s friend. It spreads like a ripple through an extended community.
Not only that, but a friend who lives several miles away is 6x more likely to infect you with his / her happiness than your partner. Although social contagion like this only works to three degrees of separation (because on the periphery, friends of friends are unlikely to be a constant group), that’s potentially quite a large number when you translate it to online networks.
As a tool like twinfluence shows, to take a fellow Cow as an example, someone with 208 friends on Twitter has a second order network of 300,000+.
The obvious take out from this is that it proves how you can 'broadcast' moods, concepts and emotions through a group of people from one to the other. But there’s another, and to me more important conclusion.
It's about the fans, not the 'super fan'
Personally I tend to favour a clusters or what I call a 'hobbyist' strategy for certain clients – pick off groups of otherwise ordinary consumers who have some kind of common, shared interest. And who are so into their hobby that, assuming what you have to offer is relevant to whatever it is they are into, they will buy into it and spread the word.
If you are a construction company or a public works body, I’d say this is a good group of people to co-opt and tap into. After all, these are people who spend their free time checking out manholes. For sure, that’s kind of niche, but they are also more likely to be more receptive to whatever it is you are putting out (and yes, possibly more critical too).
And that’s actually reinforced by other research quoted in the New Scientist. Spreading thoughts and ideas virally is not about schmoozing the influencers, or gurus, or super fans or whatever you want to call them.
Instead, according to Duncan Watts of Colombia University, “seeding localised social groups with certain ideas or behaviours can lead to the ideas cascading across entire global networks....the key for the spread of anything, from happiness to the preference for a particular song, is a critical mass of interconnected individuals who influence one another.”
Published last year, Duncan Watt’s research paper is in fact available on the Colombia University website, and in the introduction he states:
“A central idea in marketing and diffusion research is that influentials — a minority of individuals who influence an exceptional number of their peers—are important to the formation of public opinion.
"Here we examine this idea, which we call the “influentials hypothesis,” using a series of computer simulations of interpersonal influence processes. Under most conditions that we consider, we find that large cascades of influence are driven not by influentials but by a critical mass of easily influenced individuals.”
This contradicts ideas put forward such as in Malcolm Gladwell’s Tipping Point that you need to look out for certain key people who can make things happen for you.
And serves as a warning for those of us in this space, that we should spend less time obsessing about whether this or that person has the greater ‘influence’ and ‘authority’, as otherwise we miss the real picture of what can be achieved if you drill down to a grass roots level.
Some great stats from Internet research firm Hitwise about how, amidst all the gnashing of teeth from retailers over Christmas, social media continues to boom.
In the UK, for the first time, YouTube overtook Windows Live Mail (hotmail) in web traffic. You Tube was also the third most visited site in the UK, behind Google and Facebook.
Similarly for the first time ever, 'social networking and forums' accounted for more than 10% of UK Internet visits, topped only by entertainment, search engines and shopping / classifieds.
Meanwhile, Australian blogger The Zakazhuka Zoo from social media agency DP Dialogue has this great picture of (what I am guessing is) Brisbane to illustrate: "Anyone who thinks their customers don’t use the Internet should look out their window…"
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