Digital Stuffing

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)

An interesting email came through today, about Idea Bounty, where brands can put forward briefs for creatives to send in their ideas for a reward. The blrub says:

Clients: Get thousands of minds thinking about your brief and only pay for what you use.
Creatives: Get paid for your best ideas with no long term commitment from you.

So brands are basically crowd-sourcing the creative process and probably paying a reduced amount of money then employing an agency. I’m ambivalent about the concept, I can see that for a brand it is a great way to get a huge variety of new ideas and for creatives it means they may be able to work on brands they normally would not because they don’t have the brief. Subverting the agency process can be a good idea, I’d be curious to see if the brand think they miss something or if this a sustainable process. You don’t actually have to produce any materials for the entries to the brioef, it’s just the idea that they are after.

The last bounty was for Levi’s who paid a grand total of $3000 for the idea, which is pretty cheap but fromt he brand but may be more than the creative would normally get, so it can be a win-win for both parties.

The current brief is for Red Bull, which I think is a pretty exciting brand to work on. For a bounty of $5000 you get this challenge:

Red Bull has been available for 21 years in several countries and has always remained the number 1 Energy Drink since its launch. Drinking Red Bull in your favourite club, bar or restaurant symbolises fun, activity, open–mindedness, and an eagerness to meet people. We want you to develop a concept for a new Red Bull drinking ritual that captures all these values.

I’m guessing they want to move away from the vodka-Reb Bull tag and introduce something different.

They’re also announcing the winner of the last brief, which was for BMW cars. Gary Willmott, of creative production company Urbian, won $3,000 for his idea to answer this brief:

BMW – asked for ideas to create a branded BMW activation and mechanic that would entice potential new drivers to opt in for future BMW communication

I’d tell you more, but the press release (which is embargoed until now) has little information on what was actually presented and lots of puff about the concept!

What I think

As a pitch, it was a little short on social media aspects, I got a press release which was short on details and a link to the site. As an idea, I liked it; I’d not seen it before but I can see the advantages for both parties. The proof is in the development and I’d love to see how the previous winning ideas have been executed.

The NMA this week has a special about social media – so I’d thought I’d comment on some of the comments. They’d spoken to some of the heads of the top digital media agencies to get their opinions.

I really ought to set the scene – this is an advertising journal talking to people who buy advertising space for a living. Everything they see is through a lens of paid media, something that doesn’t always sit well alongside the social aspects of the online world. I came to this business from a social media perspective, how tools and sites can be used to foster a dialogue between customers and brands, so my point of view probably starts off the opposite from many of the quoted people. (Update...given that, as Stefan says in the comment, I do agree with some of them. I should really write these in 1 session instead of over the day!) Given that context, here’s my favourite bits and my response.

the best social media campaigns are ones which add something to the user experience and therefore leave people with a positive brand association….we take it on a campaign-by-campaign basis. Josh Krichefski, BLM Quantum

Entirely agree that a paid media campaign should focus on adding to the user experience, to give something back. But treating them on a campaign-by campaign basis can backfire, if people think they are being used again and again without the chance to feed something back to the brand. Listening is as important, if not more so, than broadcasting.

People are figuring out that social media isnt’ just a media buy… Andrew Walmsley, i-level

People who are not in the advertising space figured that out a long time ago. Social media for them is more about the social site, the media (especially the paid stuff) is secondary at best, downright annoying at worst. A brand may do better participating in the social side than trying to dominate the media.

There’s a genuine lack of understanding from clients as they don’t use the sites themselves. Robin O’Neill, GroupM

Social networks are in the same place the web was in the late 90′s/early 00′s. Many brands could not work out why they should be on the web as the people holding the budgets did not use the web. we’ve got the same now with social networks and will have the same with whatever comes next. It’s a long hard slog to get that understanding.

…two uses of social media: generating huge numbers of impressions through display and as part of a campaign, which is the exciting part. Stefan Bardega, Director of Digital, MediaCom

The former can be useful – lots of brand measurement figures improve when online advertising is in the mix of a campaign. Providing some utility, some piece of fun, something else to do can have a far bigger effect (and be more fun to create!)

Find the right insight and develop the right idea, then look at how to implement it. If it happens to require social media, then great. We don’t want to a return to the old online obsession of using a medium just for the sake of it. Keven Murphy, Zed Media

As someone who has spent far too much time on the receiving end of being pitched the latest agency obsession, amen to this (just look at the current lust for Twitter). You have to have the right idea, audience AND brand culture to use social media effectively.

The other articles are really just about social networks – Facebook, Bebo and mySpace, which are only a subset of the social media out there. But I guess you can only mention so much in a dead tree format.

(As an aside, I wonder how many of the people mentioned do ego searches?)

Facebook changed their Terms and Conditions this week, to strengthen their licence to display your stuff on the site. But in the opinion of many, including me, they’ve gone too far. Even though I’m not a lawyer I still have a good grasp of what they are trying to say. For a lawyer’s opinion, see Paul’s post over at web.tech.law

The license which you, as a Facebook user, grant to Facebook is very broad and it covers not just your content on Facebook but content you may have linked to from outside Facebook. What the terms don’t do is grant ownership but the license is so broad Facebook may as well own your content. What alarms me the most is that Facebook takes a license to the content you may only link to on Facebook and don’t upload to the service. This covers photos you may have stored on Flickr, videos on Zoopy or Vimeo and more. This virtual land grab makes these terms of use a particularly invasive set of permissions.

They used to have a clause that states that when you deleted your account (although with Facebook you can never, really, delete your account) then the licence is revoked. No more, they keep it forever.

One complication I see coming up is how brands are going to react to this. Facebook is used by many brands for both campaigns and for connections. It has to be one way that FB can gain revenue. I’d love to see what the lawyers of, say, an entertainment property or film say about the new terms.

Hamleys (screenshot from site)

Databases, they can cause all sorts of problems. Somewhere, in the depth’s of Hamleys listing, someone has missed a field!

A really detailed study from Paul van Veenendaal and Igor Beuker from viralblog.com. It examines how Obama used online media to connect with the voters in a way that has never been seen before and takes a little look at how brands can learn lessons from the campaign. Superb research here.

Earlier, I wrote about the Virgin Atlantic Red Hot ad, mentioning that it was annoying that there was no embed available for the video. Alison from Virgin came back with this comment

we didn’t have full usage rights for the advert to enable the file to be embedded but this is now resolved.

In this day and age, where the web is such a strong component in word of mouth and influencing, how can this have happened? How can any brand deliver an ad, create some video, take some images without getting the digital rights? This isn’t just a complaint about Virgin, because I’ve seen it in plenty of places but today, there is little excuse. But here’s a couple of reasons why they may not be obtained:

• Marketers – and lawyers – who do not realise the impact of the online space. They just don’t understand that almost all forms of advertising can have a digital element and forget to include the rights. Why would you want global digital rights for something that is going to be on the TV or just in a national paper? Because you have to assume that everything can be digitised, put on the web and spread around. One solution is to review all your standards and policies and make digital rights mandatory.
• Cost. Global digital rights, especially perpetual ones, can be expensive, especially if you have a piece of music, which can get pretty ridiculous, or have a piece of someone else’s video. Most rights tend to be time-limited when it comes to traditional advertising which is why you often find that brands never display old campaigns. There’s also the problem for ‘classic’ ads, the web was not around so the rights have to be renegotiated, so it may not be worth the effort and the cost to do so. I had experience, for example trying to put up some of the old Guinness ads. Why do you need perpetual rights? Well, basic web principles, don’t break the web! If you put stuff up, it should stay up. But most brands never play this game, throwing up campaign sites, ‘microsites’ or burying things deep in flash with no permalinks. If you make something you want to be considered as a classic, make sure it can be found.

Any other reasons that you’ve come across?

Via Order-Order, I get pointed towards a lovely post from Nicolas Kayser-Bril, a student in media economics, on the Economics of Comments

Economics of comments (used under licence CC-BY-NC, Nicolas Kayser-Bril)

This is something that any brand has to face, when trying to distribute content on the web, the value of the comments. I’ve worked on a campaign where a video was released onto YouTube as part of a campaign, with open comments. The subject matter (a young, bratty teenager) meant the comments quickly dropped to the basest YT commentry. A decision was made to leave them as is BUT when a further video went up, which included a ‘real’ contest winner, not just the actress, we closed them. The comment quality tended to be low and potential for defamation too high to be comfortable leaving them open.

For any brand, commentary moderation is a high cost if all you are going to do is ‘moderate’. either pre- or -post. If you’re going to be around for a while (ie it’s not just a short term campaign), I’d be focusing on supporting and empowering your readers and commenters, to set the tone and encourage self-policing. A community manager can go a long way to help reduce reactionary moderation costs. For short term campaigns, if you want your content out on sites that are not your own, your going to have to live with it if the commentary turns bad, it’s a consequence of the web.

There’s a whole bunch of lists been published by blogging friends, what you don’t want to hear in various situations. So here’s a round up of the ones you should be reading – and my favourites (it’s also a way to keep track of them all in one post). I was going to write one myself, but by the time the weekend came, they’d all been done!

First was Jeffrey Zeldman, with 20 signs that you don’t want that web design project. Things I’ve heard myself:

7. Client can’t articulate a single desired user goal. He also can’t articulate a business strategy, an online strategy, a reason for the site’s existence, or a goal or metric for improving the website. In spite of all that, client has designed his own heavily detailed wireframes.

13. The client wants web 2.0 features but cannot articulate a business strategy or user goal.

Then there’s Chris, with his 20 signs that you don’t want that Social Media Project

2. Client has a “hilarious” viral they want you to “seed”, which turns out to be their latest TV ad on YouTube.

9. Client insists that you anonymously post links to their site on a range of forums.

16. Every Tweet you post to client’s official Twitter stream has to be OK’ed by the brand manager first.

There’s 21 signs that you don’t want in your online marketing pitch from Tom

4. Pitch includes the phrases “the new Facebook” or “Facebook for X” (where X is some niche group that nobody cares about, not even the people in the group).

6. You refer to your video as “viral” when it hasn’t even been made publicly available yet.

15. Your website is a single Flash entity that takes an hour to load, contains no permalinks, and has content that isn’t embeddable or shareable in any way apart from a link pointing to the root URL.

And Suw has signs that you don’t want the internal social media project

1. Client wants to code their own blog/wiki software because “we want total control”.

6. When you ask how much experience staff have of social media, IT replies, “Oh, we block all those sites.”

And finally, 21 ways to tell if your social media expert is a carpetbagger from Beth and Geoff

1. When asked about listening, gives you a blank stare.

4. Doesn’t understand how social media integrates into larger corporate communications or business strategy

18. Defines social media as only tools (Facebook, blogs, Flickr <INSERT SHINY OBJECT HERE> ) as opposed to conversations with communities

They’re all great and the sad thing is they’re all true. Too many people jumping on the shiny bandwagon, because it has press, has buzz, because everyone is doing it without having a key understanding of what is needed. So try not to fall into any of these mistakes- and if you’re already there, how are you going to correct your course?

I love this Christmas Card from AKQA. At the start, you have no idea where it is going, but it builds to a satisfying conclusion.

AKQA Christmas Card (screenshot from site)