Archive for April, 2009
This morning, for reasons I’m blaming on the time of day and the lack of caffeine, I watched Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore, plus a few friends broadcast live to the world over UStream as he reached 1 million followers on Twitter. You may have noticed over the last few days a competition has broken out between Kutcher and CNN for the first account to reach a million followers, with both parties promising donations to charity when they make it. Kutcher was first, probably as CNNbrk has been slightly more reticent in the publicity drive, although they were very close behind in the ‘race’.
Whist some may trumpet this as a victory of new media over old media, it isn’t. You could call it old media building on new, or old just plain co-opting and taking all the digital stuff for themselves. Via Doc Searls, I see a piece that describes what is happening in some places where brands, companies and celebrities are all playing in the space, from Steven Hodsen
As a result people are beginning to think that social media is nothing more than a round table with corporations, marketers and public relation people deciding on what the conversation is all about. Once more we are finding ourselves being talked to even though it is carefully couched in terms of openness and transparency.
This isn’t what Social Media was meant to be. Just ask people like Doc Searls, or Chris Brogan, or even newcomers like Mark “Rizzn” Hopkins. They’ll be among the first to tell you that Social Media isn’t about the tools or the services. It is about empowering the voice of the individual above that of the companies. It is about the socialization of all types of media in such a way that any individual if they try can be heard like never before.
The plain fact is that neither Kutcher nor CNN could have got this number of followers without old media, either in broadcasting pleas to follow on the news or in the years of mainstream coverage to build a fan base. This is not an either/or situation, this is new media being lassoed and brought into the fold so that it can be used in the same way. 1 million followers is not a ‘social network’, it’s a broadcast channel bigger than many newspapers or TV audiences. It does not empower the voice of the individual above the celebrity or company, it just ties them into more of the same.
Brands too could follow this model; they’ll think if these people can do it, or if Oprah can do it (she is going to do her first public tweet ‘live on TV’ today). But the reality is that brands rarely have anything to offer in the same league as celebrity ‘gossip’ (or an insight into the lives), or news. Broadcast mechanisms won’t necessarily work for them and the exchange value of a follow is not on their side. So I think all the current publicity about Twitter should not go to the marketers head. You still have to think very carefully about why you would use Twitter, how you can use it and what value you are adding to it.
JetBlue bring you a website just for bigwigs, those rich, 7 figure bonus earning bigwigs who run the companies. It’s supposedly selling the brilliant Jetblue service to the CEOs, so they don’t have to lose their perks when travelling.
Welcome to Bigwigs (screenshot from site)
This follows up from the JetBlue print executions, where they were welcoming all the former first class flyers to their services. It’s a nice, tongue-in-cheek execution, as expected from this airline.
That would be me, at least according to WE Magazine for Women and their list of 101 Women to watch in 2009. All I can say is thanks very much for the listing (even if I’m now here instead of at my old blog)
Woman Blogger to Watch (logo from site)
Here’s yet another ‘flashmob dancing’ video, this time from the Centraal Station in Antwerp, in what looks like an ad for a TV show to find a Maria (I’m guessing for the stage musical, similar to what happened in the UK).
Yes, it’s another one, they’re becoming unoriginal, but for some reason, I still like them, as do many of the commenters on the video People get surprised and have some fun watching them, even when it seems that almost all the people in the place are there for the dancing – the cameras seemed to have to look hard for spectators in this one.
However, where’s the follow up, where’s the website. I’m not sure this asset is working as hard as it could be to let people know what it is for and when the TV show is without some online content to support it.
Update: Just realised that throughout this piece and when I’ve been talking to people I’ve been calling this Smart Thinking Soldier when it’s actually Start Thinking Soldier. Think my way is better 
In the past, the Army have delivered some really smart campaigns that take you from the TV ad (or other offline channel) back to the website where they can immerse you in the story and get you spending a lot more time with their content in an effort to sign you up.
Their latest campaign, Smart Thinking Soldier, does exactly that again. The TV ads leave you with a scenario for you to choose what to do next. Online, the story continues with some smart gameplay in tagging IEDs and navigating tunnels. But that’s as far as I got. In a similar way to Lucy, writing in The Guardian, I’m defeated by technology. A combination of too heavy content that freezes my machine on occasion, a very fluid mouse interaction that leaves me sea-sick when I’m hunting around a room for IED elements and a navigation system that leaves me not being able to direct my player round a maze.
The site looks good, has great content, brilliant interactive elements, downloads a lot of information for you but leaves me wanting more – wanting to actually play it! I’m wondering if they would have been better off making the whole thing a downloadable app?
The only ranked product video last week was one of the new Windows PC computers. They challenge people (well, actors) to go out and buy something on a budget, pushng back at Apple with their high prices. I think this is the third in the series, in previous ones they have been challenging Macs directly, with the buyer looking at them and declaring them too expensive. Here, it’s just about the features.
Love this, a meta viral.
I received an email from Samsung the other day. Apparently, having bought a TV from them is enough for them to think I like football as well, so they’ve sent me some news about their site Samsung Football and a competition to play at Stamford Bridge against ‘football legends’.
Samsung Football (image from email)
Let’s see what’s wrong with this.
- The only contact I recall having with Samsung is when I registered by new TV. Although I ticked the ‘send me news’ box, the sending of a a football based email suggests to me their segmentation is not brilliant. (I could be wrong about this; I;ve written about Samsung a few times before so I may have given them my email for a different sign up)
- The email asks me to ‘click here to enter’. I do and get taken to the generic welcome page for their fan section ‘The Terraces’, with an autoplay video. Where’s the competition? If you want me to click through, take me where I think I’m going.
- Click on the most obvious video and I get a 30second promo (I guess by some footballer) talking about uploading images. But where?
- Eventually work out that at the bottom of the page is a series of images and a form to submit my own. But the calls to action, the call to upload images, the sell about the prize, the reasons why I may want to do this are all missing. I landed on this page and had no idea what I was supposed to do. Putting the briefest of messages in a video puts a barrier up. Maybe I have no sound, nor the time to watch it. Having the call to action in text is always a better option than video alone.
Don;t get me wrong, I think this is a good competition and prize for someone who loves football and Chelsea, but I just think it’s missing a lot in the consumer journey from email to site that would not take too much to fix the next time.
Samsung Football (screenshot from site)
Twitter Partners (screenshot from site)
Update: It seems that NMA just got far too excited about this story and forgot to check with Twitter, who have issued a statement saying there is absolutely no affiliation between them and this new company.
However, the name, branding, and suggestion that Twitter has some kind of equity partnership or an agreement of any kind in place is misleading and wrong. We’ll be working with Peter and his team to clear up this confusion.
Twitter backs first UK partner. Or so says the front page headline on the New Media Age (no links to them..they do not appear to like links). It’s all about a new company called Twitter Partners, which is ‘affiliated’ with Twitter and has apparently signed up some UK companies such as Gorillaz, Paramount, Universal Pictures and Lionsgate.
From the site they are:
building a suite of apps, tools and services to help brands, media companies, and celebrities harness the power of the Twitter ecosystem
So it’s a high profile launch of a branding and social media consultancy agency, which will be building stuff on the Twitter API for companies to help manage their reputation on the service. The only reason I see this being front page news is that it has a lot of interesting people on the ‘About Us‘ page and NMA have got blinded by the word Twitter. There are a lot of tools and companies out there that already do what they do. But with backing and a profile, they are in a position to go out to brands and sooth them, tell them it’s all OK, this Twitter thing is scary but they can help them through it.
Help and outsourcing of experience and skill is the reason why companies employ advertising and marketing agencies in the first place – but is there any reason to have a Twitter agency only? No, not really. Twitter is just one tactic in a whole sea of social media; it needs to be seen as part of the larger communication structure and built into the communications plan. Hiving it off to a separate agency can only lead to difficulties if they don’t work well with the others or if it’s not considered as a customer service route (that’s in towards the company) as well as a marketing route (out towards the customer). Although, if they are focusing on consultancy, maybe that’s one of the messages that Twitter Partners will be saying.
PS: it’s obviously a new company that has not yet got enough Googlejuice to register on search yet. But they’re at least savvy enough to buy the ad
Ad for Twitter Partners on Google (screenshot from site)