Point ZeroMagazine Issue 2 October 09

magazine

ISSUE 2.0

WEb 2.0’S NEW ONlINE MagazINE

Also in this issue: A Marketer’s Guide to being Anti-Social Online > P.6

Former BBC Director of Knowledge Management, Euan Semple, shares his thoughts on cloud computing and a possible shift in the relationship between organisations and their employees. > P.46

gOOglE’S OS Just what are GooGle’s plans for its Chrome os? > P.22> P.22

WE lOVE MObIlE’S simon liss asKs is there a future in ad-fundinG mobile appliCations? > P.30

TaMaR’S NEIl JaCKSON Comments on the battle of the searCh enGines > P.29

theTAMAR’s NEIL JACKTAMAR’s NEIL JACKTAMAR’s NEIL JACK JTAMAR’s NEIL JACK JTAMAR’s NEIL JACKTAMAR’s NEIL JACKTAMAR’s NEIL JACKsON ON CKSON ON CKSON ON ON ON COMMENTS ON THE BATTLE COMMENTS ON THE BATTLE theCOMMENTS ON THE BATTLE theCOMMENTS ON THE BATTLE COMMENTS ON THE BATTLE COMMENTS ON THE BATTLE

F THE SEARCH ENGINES F THE SEARCH ENGINES F THE SEARCH ENGINES F THE SEARCH ENGINES F THE SEARCH ENGINES

Does cloud computing mean stormy weather for managers?

Is digital killing traditional media? With more digital categories in this year’s awards than ever before, then maybe so. Give us your response by joining the debate at twitter.com/2009DMAs And don’t forget to let your work do the talking by visiting our call for entries, now live, at www.dmaawards.org.uk

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www.pointzeromedia.com 3point zero • MAGAZINE

Welcome to Point Zero Magazine.Welcome to the 2nd issue of Point Zero Magazine.

Issue 1 was extremely well received and we look forward to building on this moving forward.

Issue 2 we hope to be equally as successful, with special thanks to all of our contributors for their input.

The feeling from within the Point Zero Media office is that we are on a journey with this publication and we hope that you find the articles and comments included are insightful, relevant and interesting.

Over the next few issues we hope to continue our development of the magazine and encourage feedback and discussion from our readers wherever possible to see how this could and should be developed.

Many thanks,

The Point Zero Magazine Team

Contact the team at:[email protected]

Connect with us:

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ISSUE 2.0







theTAMAR’s NEIL JACK JTAMAR’s NEIL JACK JTAMAR’s NEIL JACKTAMAR’s NEIL JACKTAMAR’s NEIL JACKsON ON CKSON ON CKSON ON ON ON

theCOMMENTS ON THE BATTLE theCOMMENTS ON THE BATTLE COMMENTS ON THE BATTLE COMMENTS ON THE BATTLE COMMENTS ON THE BATTLE F THE SEARCH ENGINES F THE SEARCH ENGINES F THE SEARCH ENGINES F THE SEARCH ENGINES


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F THE SEARCH ENGINES F THE SEARCH ENGINES F THE SEARCH ENGINES F THE SEARCH ENGINES


contents»Socialmedia6 A Marketer’s guide to being

Anti-Social online8 Mind the Social Media gap10 Creating Engaging Communities11 Starting a social media project?

– Ask these 4 questions first12 The Future of Facebook15 Businesses need to see past the

social media scare stories and start to reap the benefits

16 Google Wave – what it means for brand reputation management

17 How to do mission-aligned twittering19 Have Style and Class been replaced

with Blackberrys and Reality TV?20 When the Music isnt enough...21 How the web is changing

news consumption 22 Google’s Chrome OS to kick-start

cloud computing23 Is The End really near?25 Breaking down the barriers:

A new way of thinking about advertising27 Social Networking starts its

transition to Visual Networking29 The Search battle is on

»mobile2.030 Is there a future in ad-funding

mobile applications? 32 Making mobile advertising happen34 Pssst… don’t you want to

buy my Betamax? 35 Asia: the lucrative mobile

media playground36 Do operators control the future

growth of mobile media?37 Ubiquitous, premium, measurable

mobile advertising»enterprise2.039 Adopting Social Media in the Enterprise43 “May you live in interesting times”

with Corporate Social Networking45 Drains, Strains and Pains: Four

productivity risks Enterprise 2.0 defeats46 Does cloud computing mean

stormy weather for managers?48 Social Media and your “Return

on Engagement” (ROE)

16

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www.pointzeromedia.com6 point zero • MAGAZINE

POINT ZEROSocial media

Everyone wants you to be social. If you’re a marketer, you have heard about a million times in recent weeks, months and years about

the power and necessity of social media. Get a blog, get on Twitter, create a fan page ... every piece of advice seems to point towards being more social, more open and more transparent. Let’s take a deep breath together. This article is not the kind of advice you’d expect to get from a “social media guy” like me. In fact, it’s downright antisocial. To put it more accurately, it is about the right times to be anti-social.

This is a strange article when many brands are struggling right now to even find the right ways to be social online. Engaging

A MArketer’s Guide tO...

Being anti-Social

online


by Rohit Bhargava

Being anti-Social

online

with social media is an imperative for most brands (though the way you do it can and should vary greatly depending on your business and goals). There is plenty of good advice online for how to do this well, though.

I like to think I have shared a decent amount of this type of advice here on this blog. But as marketers we also want to avoid the landmines. The situations or instances in social media that may be likely to blow up in our faces. Those are often the situations where being anti-social is the best strategy.

Here are a few situations and pieces of advice I have gathered on how to be anti-social online and help your brand succeed at the same time:

1neVer allow Youtube comments. I have had the opinion for some time now that allowing

people to comment on your YouTube videos without moderating is an idiotic thing for a brand to do. Why? Because the vast majority of YouTube comments lack substance, include uninformed or somehow offensive remarks, and offer little context or real discussion. Instead, if you want to foster dialogue on your videos, create a video blog

and embed the video into the blog. Then allow people to comment on the video in the blog. This will generally result in far higher quality comments, and less infantile useless banter.

2don’t friend/follow everyone. As a brand, the temptation is to friend and follow everyone who contacts

you or requests to be your friend. Resist that temptation, and instead make it the

job of someone on your team to actively monitor these requests and approve them based on criteria that you set. This criteria can be lax (not a robot account) to more specific to your industry or area of concentration. The effort will pay off, though, when it comes to using a particular social network as a marketing platform and tool for collaboration because you will only be talking to people who really matter.

3 moderate your profiles actively. What is written online is not written in stone, and as a brand

you have the right to set the ground rules for your own profiles and sites online.

What this requires is clearly posting your policy about what is ok and what is not ok for people to post and share in your environments. This doesn’t mean to try and delete anything negative or critical... but off topic or offensive comments or posts can and should be moderated. And in cases where people are posting incorrect or flawed information, you have a right and obligation to correct them (but allow their comment to be posted if it meets your criteria).

4 Separate private content. There are legitimate reasons why you might want to share brand

content among a small subset of users or internal users online. Just because content is online doesn’t mean that everything needs to be open and public. If you feel you have a legitimate reason for sharing password protected private content, you should do it. And if it is extremely sensitive, make sure you take the right steps to protect it and prevent it from getting in the wrong hands.

5 promote yourself and your brand. Part of the benefit of using social media is that it does allow

you an authentic place to share branded offers or promote your products and services. Unfortunately, some brands are advised that just because they are on social media they should never consider using it for marketing reasons. The fact is, if you are using social media in an authentic and not overly promotional way on a daily basis, you can earn the right to share marketing information at various points and not lose your audience. The real trick is to strike the right balance.

» rohit Bhargava | Senior Vp, digital Strategy & marketing | ogilvy 360 digital influence | www.influentialmarketingblog.com

“ Part of the benefit of using social media is that it does allow you an authentic place to share branded offers or promote your products and services. Unfortunately, some brands are advised that just because they are on social media they should never consider using it for marketing reasons.”

IIt is often said that marketing helps consumers decide which product they should buy, and the customer service and operations department

of any company is where this work can come undone in a flash. As rightly identified by Dave Evans in a recent post titled “Social Business: the New Black”

Marketing sets the expectation, marketing creates demand, marketing helps a consumer differentiate why one choice is better than another choice. Operations delivers. Any gap between the two drives a conversation on the social Web.

Hence the title of this article: “Mind the (social media) gap”.

Social media is going mainstream, giving customers a voice like never before, and if there

is a huge gap between the marketing promise and the actual service delivered then the whole world will know about it as a result of just one angry tweet. This gap is something that is driving conversations online in a way that was not even conceivable just a few years ago.

A good example of this is the now infamous “United breaks guitars” incident, where Dave Carroll watched helplessly as his guitar was broken by United airlines ground staff, and in turn United looked on as $180million was wiped off their stock price almost instantly as the story spread around the world.

Companies need to understand that they no longer have control of their brand – all they can hope to do is to manage how other people treat it by using the power of social media.

It could be argued that companies need to invest more heavily in the tools, people and processes to monitor, measure and manage what is being said about their products online, than is spent advertising the product in the first place.



by Andrew Grill


You wouldn’t interrupt a conversation with an ad would you?

Companies wanting to “advertise” in social media channels don’t get that this is the old way of doing things – driven by 50 years of a broadcast mindset where companies decide the messages they wanted to project. Advertisers still assume that consumers will receive and act on these messages in just the way they planned. Social media is proving that this is no longer the case.

In the last few years with blogs, Facebook, and now Twitter emerging, this way of thinking

by advertisers is likely to disappear altogether. Peer advocacy is taking hold, and consumers are now turning to their real, or online “friends” for advice on products and services.

This means that it is more important than ever for companies to actively listen to these new social channels for mentions (both positive and negative) of their brand – and act accordingly.

In the old PR world, indentifying the “influencers” was a matter of having a decent journalist and analyst Rolodex. Today though, almost anyone armed with a blog or twitter account becomes as important to a brand as journalists once were.

The impact of poor customer service can not only completely undermine the latest marketing campaign, but as was seen with United, wipe millions off the value of an entire company.

My advice to companies looking at investing in social media is to actually start with the customer facing areas first – operations, support & customer service. Interaction by consumers with these areas of the company will drive most of the “noise” online – much more than any new marketing campaign.

Sadly, most companies starting out with social media seem to be focusing their efforts on PR (an extension of existing clipping services) or marketing – trying to understand the impact of social media on “their “ brand.

What they don’t realise is that the operational areas of a company are where most of the customer interaction is taking place – and this is where the initial efforts with social media are likely to bear the most fruit.

Step one for any company wanting to dip a toe into social media is to listen. There are a number of free tools that allow companies to start to listen to what is being said about them online. A good place to start would be to type the company name or one of their major brands into the Twitter search engine at search.twittter.com. Other free tools such as socialmention.com will provide an indication

of the urgency behind developing a strategy to cope with these new channels.

Free tools are a good “social thermometer” to take a brand’s temperature online, but to get serious, companies need to invest in paid tools that allow a deep level of analysis and workflow management to be incorporated into existing processes. Companies such a Visible Technologies, Techrigy, Buzzmetrics and Radian6 provide enterprise grade solutions for listening, and identifying conversations and then engaging in a positive and meaningful way.

The steps to mind the social media gap can be summarised as

LISTEN >LEARN >ENGAGE >INTEGRATE

LiStenIdentify passionate and authentic brand influencers and activistsIs anyone online actually having conversations about my brand, product or service?

What are they discussing?

Is what they are saying good, bad or indifferent?

Who are these people having these conversations? Are they influential?

Where do they tend to congregate?

» andrew Grill | digital Strategist & evangelist | www.andrewgrill.com

“The impact of poor customer service can not only completely undermine the latest marketing campaign, but also wipe millions off the value of an entire company.”

Learn Assess conversation volume about your brand, find audiences who care about your offerings, uncover new business opportunities

What is driving conversation of my brand?

What are the perceived characteristics of my brand and my competitor’s brands?

What are the opportunities to improve brand perception?

enGaGe

Participate in conversations about your brand and engage influencers and advocates

Your product advocates are levers for your success

Arm them with information, reward them for their loyalty and respect them by considering their input and using it

Give advocates some recognition, and value and measure their impact

Detractors need and deserve respect as well – you may be able to convert them to an advocate by engaging directly with them

inteGrateEnhance your existing operational and marketing strategies to take advantage of this new and real-time communications channel between brands and consumers. Existing measurement metrics need to be expanded to include

Brand buzz: Who’s talking about your brand right now and what’s the tone?

Influence: Are complaints or praises coming from isolated individuals or people with a huge following and hence influence?

Reach: How far are your messages spreading?

Virality: What is the speed at which a conversation moves throughout the social media ecosystem?

Social media has provided consumers with the tools and a platform to have their opinions heard and acted upon like never before. Brands need to ensure they have adequate resources to join the conversation, while minding the gap between the promise offered by marketing, and the service delivered by the operations and customer support teams.


The biggest change that Web 2.0 has brought to brands is the opportunity to interact with their customers online. Out goes

advertising monologue, in comes interaction and dialogue. But how do brands create meaningful dialogue with their customers online? A growing number of brands are creating online communities as a way of engaging directly with customers, as part of a loyalty strategy. Those that are effective in creating loyal, engaged customers are those who create sustainable communities from the outset.

The key to getting it right is to be sure of what you want to achieve. Why are you starting a community? What are your goals? Who will join it, and why? What will keep them coming back? Most communities that fail do so because they were not properly thought through and had no compelling purpose. It’s not enough to provide a space and expect people to come to it.

Ensure that your community reflects your brand. This means getting the detail right, including tone, language, design and style. Think about how old your audience is, what they’re into, who they admire. Give your community some personality. Make sure it provides a positive experience to its users, so they come back. Is it easy to use and navigate?

Test your community idea before you invest time and money in it. Run a focus group, talk to your customers, and involve them in its development. Then you’re encouraging them to participate from the start, and they’ll recommend you to their peers. If they don’t like your idea, it’s better to know before you start.

Be brutally honest – do you have the time and money to develop and promote the community, monitor and manage it? You’ll need dedicated in-house resource, or you can outsource to a community management company (like eModeration). If you can’t commit the resource, don’t do it.

Listen to feedback from users – good and bad. Act on it. The power of Web 2.0 for brands is the ability to listen and learn from customers. Sometimes they’ll say things you don’t like, but often they’re the things you need to hear.

Monitor your community. While you should allow users freedom to express

opinions that you may not agree with, no-one should be subject to abuse. Moderate your community to make sure nothing illegal, abusive or obscene is posted, and ensure you do so without compromising its quality. Draft easily-understood terms of use, so users have clear boundaries. Enforce those boundaries through moderation. This will help protect your brand from association with illegal or abusive content, and improve your users’ experience.

Online communities aren’t for everyone. But if you have a clear goal, and a compelling proposition, then a successful online community can be a great way to engage with consumers, get feedback on new products or service, and spot issues before they escalate.

For more information on developing and managing communities, see our blog: http://blog.emoderation.com.

» tamara Littleton | ceo , emoderation | www.emoderation.com

“Online communities aren’t for everyone. But if you have a clear goal, and a compelling proposition, then a successful online community can be a great way to engage with consumers.”

by Tamara Littleton


creating

engaging

communitieS


» alexandra Samuel | ceo, Social Signal | www.socialsignal.com

To make good choices about where to spend your social media dollars, you need to be clear about what you want to get out

of social media, and how you’re going to do it in compelling way. These four questions can help to frame your planning and decision-making.

1. wHY do you want to use social media?

The clearer and more specific you are about your goals, the better your results. You might want to:

Increase brand recognition and awareness of your product or service offerings

Get more your sales leads

Convert more leads into sales

Increase your fees by establishing your brand as the leading source of expertise in your industry

Increase traffic to your web site or store

Increase the number of transactions your customers complete or the average value per transaction

Reduce your marketing costs while keeping your revenue constant

Reach a new audience or market

Select the goals you want to achieve, and prioritize them. Then focus on your top one or two, at least initially.

2. wHo are you trying to reach?

This affects which channels to use, and how to approach them:

Facebook is key for marketing-driven organizations, especially with consumer products or services.

LinkedIn is key for sales-driven organizations and B2B businesses or organizations. Use it to expand your network, identify prospects, and find your best route into an organization.

Twitter is useful for targeting bloggers and social media influencers, and has B2B potential too.

YouTube is great for marketing-driven businesses who want to reach young and not-so-young alike, whether it’s with high-end hope-it-goes-viral videos or economy-

class how-tos and tutorial videos about something your customers care about.

Flickr is another good B2C platform for any organization with a visual story to tell. For instance, if your products or services offer a solution to a problem with a visual symptom (e.g. a dented car, painfully high heels) ask people to submit pictures of the problem for a chance to win your solution.

3. wHat do you want your audience to do?

Generally, you have two overlapping audiences, and you want them to do two very distinct things:

Your want your customers - the people you want to sell to – to become leads by connecting with you, probably by joining your e-mail list, following you on Twitter, or becoming a fan or member of your Facebook page or group

Your want your influencers to talk about

you so that their readers and friends – your customers – find out about you.

4. wHat can your social media presence do For your audience?

How will your social media presence be concretely useful to your audiences? You might:

Offer customers specific how-to tips, discounts, or a contest that gives them a chance to win a useful product or service (ideally yours).

Offer influencers content to write about, samples of your content or services, prizes for linking about/tweeting to you, or prizes that they can offer to their own readers.

Answer these four questions honestly, and focus on serving your customers and audience, and you will have a strategic framework that helps you make good decisions about social media platforms and tools.

by Alexandra Samuel “Answer these four questions honestly,

and focus on serving your customers and audience, and you will have a strategic framework that helps you make good decisions about social media platforms and tools.”

Starting a social media project? Ask these 4 questions first.

Facebook continues to make a series of evolutionary moves in recent months, rather than react to the news, let’s take a holistic

look at where the company is headed. I’ve given my perspective to SFGate, now but want to dive into details here. I’ll give my perspective, but as we’ve seen time and time before, the real value is the collective contributions in the comments.

Evolving to a platform –not just a social network

Facebook isn’t a social network, it’s really a communications platform – in fact, when you look closely, it’s not unlike an operating system on the web. Early innovations such as the instant messaging tool,then the applications platform that allowed 3rd party developers (called F8, correction: Just Facebook Platform) aren’t unlike what Microsoft offers to consumers. What separates them from others

is the social news feed which aggregates what others in your network are doing.

Unique culture fosters innovation

It’s important to examine the culture and leadership of a company as it’s a strong indicator of how they’ll behave. Young, innovative, yet somewhat reserved leader Mark Zuckerberg continues to make choices that don’t always include what the community expects – or wants. In my visits to their previous HQ, it was much like a dorm room: spray painted walls, fancy cafeteria. However recently, they moved out of downtown Palo Alto (to the determent of local businesses) to a centralized location on California avenue in biotech row off Page Mill. The employee base, and culture reflect all of this: the age of the untainted product teams indicate this –In my ripe old age of mid 30s, I’m clearly one of the oldest during my visits.

www.pointzEromEdia.com12 point zEro • MAGAZINE


by Jeremiah Owyang

THE FUTURE

OF


recent moves indicate move towards real time.

Fast forward to summer 2009, and we’re starting to see some radical developments. First with the acquisition of Friendfeed which is mainly a talent acquisition and early snatching of potentially the next Twitter competitor, who they were unable to acquire. Now we’re seeing indicators that they’re gearing up for mobile, and other devices like gaming consoles with a Facebook lite version that is quickly delivers the basic for those that need to quickly find out what their community is doing and communicate back. Lately, we’ve seen indicators they want to find ways to improve real-time search, which means they can help consumers make real time decisions.

awkward adolescence has its challenges

The continued innovation is spurred by the elusive business model –this awkwardness is a natural outcome of a company in growth. I’ve heard a couple of times from various employees that they’re generating revenue (but there’s no official information available) yet I hear from brands that traditional advertising is ineffective. Secondly, this constant innovation becomes a real burden on brands who have a difficult time understanding which tools to use and why, as well as 3rd party developers who are constantly rejiggering the changing API and Terms of Service.

what to expect in Facebook’s Future: a web Based operating System

So what’s in store for Facebook in the future? Here’s what we should expect:

Aggregator of all. To win, Facebook wants it’s network to spread to other locations, then aggregate back to it’s website. This centralizes Facebook (which can be accessed anywhere from any digital medium) as the hub of communications. As a result, consumers will make decisions based on information from peers in this hubs, and brands will pay money to be part of it.

A new class of competitors –beyond social networks. In the end, Facebook is an aggregator of all information that’s important to an individual and their friends. Who currently does this? Media darling Twitter does this, Friendfeed (hence the acquisition) and existing web email systems like Hotmail, Gmail, AOL, and Yahoo have shown indicators they’re thinking about heading this way.

Content to be more public –yet members may resist. The option to allow profiles to be public and the vanity URL landgrab

are indicators that they want to make information more public –yet the challenge will be convincing members to opt-in.

Facebook.com as a destination isn’t as important. To be successful, Facebook will need to spread to many websites (like corporate ones) and experiences, this is why Facebook Connect (authentication for 3rd parties) matters. This Era of Social Colonization empowers the FB experience to spread to other websites.

Monetization engines to turn on. The constant innovation of dozens of products are akin to ‘throwing pasta at the wall’ to see what sticks. Facebook’s 250mm user base is nearing mainstream web portal (see traffic compared to Google and Yahoo) they’re quickly closing the gap.

No kingdom lasts forever. We see this time and time again, technology companies supernova, grow then fail to innovate from political tape and sheer size.

This is my take, yet it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s the only opinion. I hope to hear what you think holds in store for Facebook in the coming years, love to hear your comments.

» Jeremiah owyang | web Strategist | www.web-strategist.com

right: Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg continues to make choices that don’t always include what the community expects – or wants.

To be successful, Facebook will need to spread to many websites (like corporate ones) and experiences, this is why Facebook Connect (authentication for 3rd parties) matters. This Era of Social Colonization empowers the FB experience to spread to other websites.

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Barely a day goes by at the moment without some kind of scare story about social media and its effects on society. Whether it’s people

losing their jobs for discretionary lapses on Facebook, teenage bullying horror stories on MY Space or the spread of misinformation on Wikipedia, the press are more than willing to report that – like the printing press and the telephone before it – social media is about to destroy life as we know it.

Earlier this year the Oxford Professor, Baroness Susan Greenfield, told the House of Lords that social networking is diminishing our ability to interact socially in the real world. Around the same time, psychologist Dr Aric Sigman released a report claiming social networks cause loneliness. The implication from both these critics was that relationships nurtured in virtual environments are less valuable, and that social skills developed online have no currency once the computer is switched off.

Counter arguments in defence of the household-name social networks have been articulated at length elsewhere, but what about the millions of people whose experiences of online interaction extend beyond Twitter and You Tube? Our experience at Gurgle.com is that, by connecting with each other and sharing

information about niche issues specific to pregnancy and parenting, our users are not only better informed and more confident as parents, they are also making genuine, long-lasting and deep-rooted relationships that extend beyond the site. Rather than causing loneliness, Gurgle.com has given them the opportunity to find reassurance, advice and support.

All over the web, social networking tools have empowered small, niche communities of people to form around shared interests, experiences and knowledge. This has implications for business too. Rather than placing barriers between businesses and their customers, social media has opened up a whole new range of opportunities for brands to engage with consumers and strengthen their relationships with them. Examples of success stories in this area are as high-profile as the likes of Starbucks, Toyota, Dell and Nike.

Mothercare use Gurgle.com to test and review products pre launch as community opinion is proving more beneficial in driving sales. Yet the mention of social media still causes suspicion and mistrust amongst many of the people in organisations who could most benefit from utilising it. Only last week I had a conversation with an event organiser who nearly fainted when I suggested she should use Facebook and You Tube as promotional tools.

Unfortunate things will happen from time to time on social networks, just as they do in every other sphere of life. But the benefits of engaging in with your audience via social media far outweigh the risks. For Businesses, the biggest risk is negative feedback, which is why they must find the time and resource to learn how to use this feedback to improve their customers’ experiences. Only then will they reap the benefits social media has to offer.

» chris deary | community manager, Gurgle.com | www.gurgle.com

“All over the web, social networking tools have empowered small, niche communities of people to form around shared interests, experiences and knowledge.”

by Chris Deary

Businesses need to see past the social media scare stories and start to reap the benefits


Just when you thought Twitter was the killer app for companies that want to join, contribute and lead conversations about their brands,

along comes Google’s new communication and collaboration tool Google Wave. As with any major Google launch, it is set to revolutionise the way we communicate, share and work.

While no date for full launch has been confirmed, September 30th will see the Google Wave developer preview extended to 100,000 users, and whatever the final date, it looks set to shatter any remaining complacency in the commercial sector over the central role of social media in brand communications. Companies that are still agnostic about the PR efficacy of Twitter, blogs, YouTube and other cloud tools will surely be forced to change tack.

So how does it work?Google Wave is a web-based tool accessed

through your internet browser that takes brand (and personal) conversations to a new level, combining the elements we love about email, instant messaging, video, music and document sharing into an open space where everyone can comment, share and create in real-time.

Brands will be able to initiate and participate in rich and deep ongoing conversations by creating a wave and adding people to it, or by linking to and commenting on one already rolling. Imagine how rapidly

and widely a conversation can spread. Everyone on your wave can use richly formatted text, photos, gadgets, and even feeds from other sources on the web. They can reply anywhere in the message, edit the wave directly and add participants at any point in the process. It uses concurrent rich-text editing, where you see on your screen nearly instantly what your fellow collaborators are typing in your wave. That means Google Wave is just as well suited for quick messages as for persistent content — it allows for both collaboration and communication. You can also use “playback” to rewind the wave and see how the conversation evolved.

Google Wave is also a platform, with open APIs, that developers can use to embed waves in other web services and build new extensions that work inside waves.

While Google Wave is based on established email and instant messaging applications, the learning curve is likely to be a little steeper than it was for Twitter, for example. However,

if successful, brands should not underestimate its potential to push forward collective thinking and collaboration, with conversations evolving at a speed that has never been seen before on the web. In PR terms, this will leave no room for passive monitoring of social media – instead brands will be forced to dive in and edit or respond to ‘waves’ in real time.

The traditional brand reputation management ‘news push’ tools that have been used for centuries won’t disappear overnight – but they will become increasingly irrelevant as conversations dominate the way people engage with companies, and with each other, online.

about wendy mcauliffeWendy is founder and director of Liberate Media, an online PR and social media consultancy focusing on the technology and digital industries. She combines 10 years of journalism and PR experience.

» wendy mcauliffe | director, Liberate media | www.liberatemedia.com

“Brands will be able to initiate and participate in rich and deep ongoing conversations by creating a wave and adding people to it”

by Wendy McAuliffe


Google wave

reputation managementtionn mmaannage

what it means for brand


Twitter can be a great way for social entrepreneurs to reach a wide, yet targeted audience:

9.3 M Twitter (March up 131% over February and has passed up LinkedIn for reach.)

Nearly one-in-five (19%) online adults ages 18 to 24 have used Twitter/similar services, as have 20% of online adults ages 25 to 34.

Median age of a Twitter user is 31. Median age of a MySpace user is 27, Facebook user is 26 and LinkedIn user is 40. (Pew Research Center)

People are motivated by learning new things and getting information real-time as it’s developing. (Ann Handley, MarketingProfs, Mashable)

Twitter works best for organizations when your objectives are mission aligned. Is education part of your mission? Is activism or public policy change your goal? Twitter can help you achieve your mission, as well as serving as a useful tool for marketing and communications. In the case of Social Edge, we are focused on helping social entrepreneurs start and scale their venture by connecting them with ideas, resources, and people that can help make them more succesful. Deadlines for funding oportunities, relevant discussions, fascinating research, stories about other social entrepreneurs, and news from the field of

social entrepreneurship can help them. So those are the types of ideas we Twitter – it’s a continuation of our mission in a different venue. Does it drive traffic to our site? Yes, but only if they find the Twitter interesting and relevant enough to click on the link.

So with your mission in mind, here are 10 ways to use Twitter to grow your social venture (and examples of folks who do it well). The first three are focused on what your organization can learn and gain from listening, the latter seven are ways you can serve your community using Twitter.

10 ways Social entrepreneurs should use mission-aligned twittering:1. Networking: find key influencers

in your field to follow

2. Knowledge: listen to keep up with latest events in your field(s)

3. Research: ask questions to gain insights, ideas, prioritize

4. Educating: highlight research, trends, and advances

5. Increasing Awareness: share accomplishments, beneficiary stories

6. Filtering: select the best information to retweet and save people time

7. Events/conferences: increase reach and global participation

8. Fundraising: raise small gifts, create “Epic Change”

9. Announcements: post winners of contests, deadlines, milestones, etc.

10. Friendraising: build loyalty, make personal connections

twitter tips Authenticity, transparency, and purpose

are key to a good twitter presence

Ensure your twitterer(s) understand mission and brand personality

Make it personal and different from a blog, email, or RSS

Include links to full articles and use url shorteners with tracking

Use hashtags to be found and connect with others

Listen, respond, and retweet relevant information

Don’t repeat tweet

Add value

Twitter is the ultimate in permission marketing and viral marketing. People can stop following you at any time, and they will only retweet what they find interesting & valuable. So your job is to ensure that Twittering is part of your operational programs, as well as part of your fundraising, communications, and marketing department(s). The better the integration throughout your organization, the more useful your Twitters will be for your audience.

Remember, it is not about you – self-serving marketing will soon lose it’s followers, so keep your audience in mind and focus on the Twitters that are useful and entertaining.

» Jill Finlayson | marketing manager, socialedge | www.socialedge.org

“People can stop following you at any time, they will only retweet what they find interesting & valuable.”

by JillFinlayson

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It would be naïve to think that we could ever again have a woman exactly identical to Jackie O., an Audrey Hepburn or a Mother Teresa

for a role model—we live in a different world now and like my mom says, “It was a simpler time then.” We don’t typically gather the family around the transistor radio anymore or get asked to go steady by a Wally Cleaver, but just because we are surrounded by Blackberrys, mini-skirts and the Real World doesn’t mean that we can’t take some of those graceful, sophisticated, old-fashioned values and implement them into our everyday, modern life. Because let’s be honest, our current female landscape is embarrassing, flippant and shallow (guys, would you agree?). Is it even possible to be successful, stylish, and smart in today’s dumbed-down, instant-message, five-seconds-of-fame society? Yes.

The great thing about living with class, style and grace is that it has nothing to do with wealth. Being classy is an attitude and

outlook on life; the art of gracefulness is how we behave and act when no one is watching; being stylish is how we carry and present ourselves to others. It might involve our clothes, but it’s not defined by designer labels. It might include our job, but it doesn’t matter if we are white collar or blue collar. It might entail a different set of social systems and obligations, but it’s not dictated by where we were raised. Why? Because class is not defined by our circumstances—it’s our reaction to those circumstances that defines who we are. It doesn’t matter if you work at McDonald’s or the Trump Tower—are you punctual and courteous? It is not a matter of if you went to an exclusive private institution

or a free public school—did you make the most of every opportunity that was given to you? It doesn’t make a bit of difference if you’re designing clothes for Vera Wang or working in the fabric section of Wal-Mart—are you attentive and accommodating? No matter what our upbringing was, what our current friend situation looks like, or what our yearly income is, we can all do this. I don’t care if you’re living in a 550 square-foot apartment in Lincoln, Nebraska or in a penthouse on Park Avenue. It doesn’t matter if you’re scraping by on minimum wage or raking in a six-figure income. You can live with style, class, and grace no matter where you are, who you know, or what you do.

» Jordan christy | author, How to be a Hepburn in a Hilton world | www.jordanchristy.com

“The great thing about living with class, style and grace is that it has nothing to do with wealth”

by Jordan Christy



Most of the things I’ve found out about my favorite bands I’ve found out on the world wide web. I know

that Bono is 49 years old and that his real name is Paul because I found it online - or that Chris and Gwyneth’s kids’ names are Moses and Apple - or what kind of keyboard Brandon Flowers plays. I don’t understand why I enjoy knowing about stuff like this or what inspired different bands to write different songs but I do enjoy it.

So as someone who makes music, as much as I’d like to think it’s just about making great music, I want to keep in mind that there are people that listen to Remedy Drive who want more from us then an album or a few mp3s. I really enjoy making videos every week to let everyone in on what’s going on for us. It seems the less these videos are about the music the more our community online enjoys them. This most recent video was just a bit about what our plans were for vacation.

It seems like we’re looking for something more then a rock star. We’re looking for an association, something to relate to, connect with and be part of. We’re looking for guidance and inspiration – all of this in addition to being entertained. This is why I think online connection is important for anyone trying to build a movement with music. As a result, people wanting to know more about this relatively obscure rock band from Nebraska might be surprised by the accessibility they find online.

» david zach | Lead vocals, remedy drive | www.remedydrive.com

“I think online connection is important for anyone trying to build a movement with music.”

by DavidZach

when the music isn’t enough...

We all take our news in different ways. The newspaper industry is struggling but is still

the centrepiece of news consumption for many people. Radio and television are undergoing evolutions of their own, with digital developments opening new doors and making others obsolete. For established outlets the internet has presented challenge after challenge, from the need for a website to the current assault on their supremacy by social media.

For those web users who consume news online, much of that news has traditionally been discovered through a go-to site. Before getting to grips with RSS many of us checked our site of choice for news on a daily basis, confirming the position of the likes of BBC News, The Guardian and the Daily Telegraph as news gatekeepers. The social web is changing all that. There is an extra layer between the consumer and the news, namely a group of hand-picked curators who effectively filter content for us.

This is a fundamental shift in the consumption of news, at least for people using social media regularly. We are simultaneously starting to take our news second-hand and

adding a process of quality control. In order to make a splash in the world of social media stories - from all sources from blogs to national networks - rely on the approval (or disapproval) of respected and influential news-sharers.

Leaving aside the thorny issue of exactly who those influencers are, the experience for the average social media user is a simple one: we share recommendations with our friends and followers. Instead of visiting BBC News of a morning, many of us scroll through our chosen Twitter client and click on the links shared by people we assume, from reputation and experience, are likely to be sharing something of value. And where did ‘they’ get it from? The people they respect and trust. Retweeting, for example, is a one-click idea, but it symbolises an emerging method of

moving information. Of course, this has an effect on the types of news ultimately seen by social media users. We’re less stuck in our ways and click links based on recommended content instead of revisting a pre-chosen site. This broadens our news horizons, exposing us to a wider range of sites and opinions. In spite of this, there is potential for a narrowing of our political spectrum. The social news utopia does not exist: we choose to follow people with whom we share common interests and standpoints.

The question for the established news powers is how to harness social media to maintain their supremacy. As is so common when considering how traditional names can make an impact in social media, it comes down to quality content, Google juice and linkbait.

» Chris Nee | Porter Novelli | www.clickingandscreaming.com

How the web is changing news consumption

“The social web is changing. There is an extra layer between the consumer and the news, namely a group of hand-picked curators who effectively filter content for us.”

by Chris Nee

www.PoiNtzeromedia.Com 21PoiNt zero • MAGAZINE



Google announced their Google Chrome OS in July, one that was widely predicated by the tech community. It is expected to be

a more advanced version of Android that will be pre-installed on net books initially. The question that I pose is this, as Google rarely do anything unless it generates revenue, how will Google make money from the Chrome OS in their continued quest to organize the world’s information?

From the screenshots that have been posted around the web, it does indeed look very similar, in terms of style to Android, with a focus on Google’s core products, and why not? This OS isn’t going to allow us to produce complex image rendering in Adobe PhotoShop. This is net book territory, designed to run internet related applications which Google have in abundance as well as other projects such as Google Drive, still a closely guarded secret apparently, that I’m sure will come to light as the release of the operating system descends.

In short, people shouldn’t expect too much from this operating system, I expect it to be an expanded version of Android which is completely built around it’s own internet applications like Reader, Search, Mail, Docs, Picasa. I mean after all, the future of computers is in the cloud isn’t it?

Chrome OS could be the real start of cloud computing, where hardly anything is held on the hard drives of our computers. Google have created an impressive software suit of applications that cover the majority of users needs in today’s Internet oriented society.

What exactly will be required to be stored on the hard drive of a Google Chrome OS net book? Not much if all your photos, documents, contacts, emails, notes and files are held on Google’s servers

The only major complication to the success of this product, is, if all our data is stored on their servers, how much of it will be accessible to them. No doubt this could be why their producing this in the first place, if they have all our search behavior, as well as our personal documents and photos, this would surely enhance their advertising targeting on the Google Content Network and help advertisers and their Adword’s campaigns with market research. Chrome OS allows them to satisfy there mission statement as well as use the data to increase their advertising revenues.

With Internet speeds and accessibility becoming faster and more reliable respectively, full cloud computing is ready to be properly supported and will allow the potential for it to flourish.

This article has come full circle, from straight operating systems to cloud computing, but eventually, back round to the Google’s main and primary strategy in whatever they do, how do we make money?

» James Glick | media account manager, cheezedmG.com | www.JamesGlick.co.uk

by James Glick

In a marketing position, you are always looking for new ways to deliver ‘the message’. Any way that you can insert a description of your goods or services

into a stranger’s subconscious is a plus. Over the last few years, online commerce has (supposedly) taken off to the extent that everyone is doing it. I have yet to define ‘everyone’, because to me this number appears to be about 7 customers and 100,000 companies trying to sell, but perhaps I’m wrong.

My question is a simple one: Why are they doing it? Is it because they simply cannot be bothered to go outside, meet someone else, check for comparison prices, or talk to someone that works in retail? Is it because eventual control over the purchasing process, and the possibility of a good financial deal is the be all and end all of every buying decision? I think that we are being sold faulty goods, here: Let’s drill down a little. I shall be 50 years old this year, and I spend a lot of time online. There are many reasons for this, but in the mid-nineties when I was introduced to online worlds, I found it interesting in an anonymous kind of way. You could say and do anything online (or watch it.), and no one really knew you were doing it. It’s a childish emotion, I know, but it was fun for a while.

My attention span has never been truly measurable without a micrometer, but that’s just me. Being adolescent-minded, it was obvious to me at the time that the pioneers of the Internet were ones that would interest kids that would grow up with your website, so their thought processes were aimed a certain way, anyway. But what happens when Internet users don’t grow up? Because that’s where we are at. There has been a lot of fear over the death of newspapers, lately. Does anyone read anymore? Not the internet generation, that’s for sure. The answer isn’t a lack of knowledge about this generation, it’s a case of newspapers not talking down to their readers (Obvious exceptions accepted.). It’s the case that to read the entire newspaper, you have to have an interest in politics, international diplomacy, business, sports, pop culture, fashion and the workplace. That’s a little dry, when you have the choice of reading about Johnny Depp’s love life. If you don’t have an interest in what someone else is thinking,

you aren’t going to educate yourself. If you are more at home just doing what you want, and reading about what is interesting to you, you aren’t going to find much interesting enough to hold your attention.

For the last 70 years, we have been beholding the end of some medium or other: Newspapers were going to be killed by the movies; movies by radio, radio by TV, TV by cable; cable by the net, and we are all still enjoying all of it. Why? Because everyone learned to adapt, and offer something different. What we aren’t going to change is the infantilization of the current generations mid-thirties and below. While they are still stuck on celebrity website gossip, the remaining 10% in power are reading newspapers and are making decisions that affect all of us. They are manipulating exchange rates, organising the fall of governments, and the price of oil. The only thing anyone can do is to try to educate themselves about what is happening. How the real estate crisis in the States has resulted in a generation in their late

fifties having to work for five more years. How the continuing rise in oil prices are due to the peak of easily accessible supply that means that it will run out about 3 years after the US social safety net runs out of money.

At this time, the 4-500 miles either side of the equator will be uninhabitable thanks to global warming, and about a billion people will be shoehorning themselves into the rest of the World. When I was growing up, we paid a license fee in order to be able to watch TV. That fee ran the national broadcaster that allowed it to broadcast all that boring stuff that you should be watching. I DID gain an interest in business and cricket, I didn’t in Opera and Ballet, but it was there if someone wanted it. What is wrong with defining a piece of the 500-channel TV universe and multiple radio offerings? If we are to have any hope in our race, it is those in their twenties right now that will have to right these wrongs within the next 20 years. What a pity that the majority of these are tweeting about their underwear, rather than learning how to fix the place.


» Steve James | Boom’s end Blog | www.boomsend.wordpress.com

“If you are more at home just doing what you want, and reading about what is interesting to you, you aren’t going to find much interesting enough to hold your attention.”

by Steve James

The Mobile Entertainment Forum is the global trade association of the mobile media industry, working on behalf of its diverse membership to drive mobile entertainment adoption, shape regulation and deliver competitive advantage to its members:

• MEF initiatives change the industry • MEF insights provide competitive advantage• MEF policy protects your business

We invite all forward-thinking companies to take an active role in accelerating the industry’s global expansion.

Join the globalleaders in mobile entertainment…

leaders in mobile entertainment…


leaders in mobile entertainment…


The Global Voice of Mobile Entertainmentwww.m-e-f.org

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MEF08_AD_Midem09.pdf 1 12/01/2009 17:05

The Mobile Entertainment Forum is the global trade association of the mobile media industry, working on behalf of its diverse membership to drive mobile entertainment adoption, shape regulation and deliver competitive advantage to its members:

• MEF initiatives change the industry • MEF insights provide competitive advantage• MEF policy protects your business

We invite all forward-thinking companies to take an active role in accelerating the industry’s global expansion.


The Global Voice of Mobile Entertainmentwww.m-e-f.org

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MEF08_AD_Midem09.pdf 1 12/01/2009 17:05

WWW.POINTZEROMEDIA.COM 25POINT ZERO • MAGAZINE

POINT ZEROSocial Media

The internet has changed the dynamic between brands and shoppers; the old certainties of brand equity are becoming less

significant and marketers must realise they need to look beyond this security blanket. If you offer consumers the best deals and best quality of service you are well placed to succeed; those that do not embrace this new marketing paradigm will find their lead eroded by brands that do.

The key driver to providing more sophisticated forms of targeted advertising is user data and the success of the targeting depends on how such data can be gathered and how it can be put to use. Therefore to provide value on an individual level it’s necessary to build up a picture of a user’s preferences and that means developing a level of trust to the extent that the consumer is willing to share those details.

Online advertising must shift to a service model to remain relevant, however in order that consumers will be willing to share their personal data then marketers must be able to offer something of value in exchange. A great example of this would be Spotify – users receive free music in exchange for ads.

Before consumers will sign up to a service of this type they must first value the proposition, but they must also be confident

that they maintain the power in the relationship. Therefore any consumer-facing service must satisfy three key criteria to reassure the user that it is legitimate:

111111111111111USER EXPERIENCE – the website or application must be of a sufficiently professional standard to demonstrate to

the user that it is trustworthy.

222222222222222CONTROL – The user must know exactly what they are signing up to, once they have given their permission to be marketed to

they should be able to dictate exactly what they do and do not want to receive. Equally if they are unhappy with the service they must be able to opt-out easily, any application must be simple to uninstall.

333333333333333PRIVACY – the sign up process must be completely transparent in outlining the terms and conditions so the consumer

can be secure in the knowledge that their data will not be shared or sold on without their consent.

Services that enhance the user experience build a privileged communications channel between the brands advertising on them and online consumers. Users will appreciate a service, providing the advertising isn’t too intrusive and provides only offers that are relevant to them on an individual basis. When consumers recognise the twin benefits of free services and tailored offers then this translates into positive brand associations for advertiser partners.

This consent model predicates an entirely new way of looking at advertising; it is built around a requirement to establish a firm relationship between the brand and the consumer, thus removing traditional barriers. After all if the consumer perceives he/she is getting less out of the deal they will opt-out of the service and the advertiser will lose access to valuable data. Equally if the offers are badly targeted they offer no value and will be viewed as little better than spam. The only way to succeed is by developing a bond of trust between the consumer and the brand so that online shoppers recognise the value in granting the advertiser access to their data.

» Vincent Labey | Founder, Aedgency | www.aedgency.com

by Vincent Labey



The internet has changed the dynamic between brands and shoppers; the old certainties of brand equity are becoming less

significant and marketers must realise they need to look beyond this security blanket. If you offer consumers the best deals and best quality of service you are well placed to succeed; those that do not embrace this new marketing paradigm will find their lead eroded by brands that do.

The key driver to providing more sophisticated forms of targeted advertising is user data and the success of the targeting depends on how such data can be gathered and how it can be put to use. Therefore to provide value on an individual level it’s necessary to build up a picture of a user’s preferences and that means developing a level of trust to the extent that the consumer is willing to share those details.

Online advertising must shift to a service model to remain relevant, however in order that consumers will be willing to share their personal data then marketers must be able to offer something of value in exchange. A great example of this would be Spotify – users receive free music in exchange for ads.

Before consumers will sign up to a service of this type they must first value the proposition, but they must also be confident

that they maintain the power in the relationship. Therefore any consumer-facing service must satisfy three key criteria to reassure the user that it is legitimate:

111111111111111User experience – the website or application must be of a sufficiently professional standard to demonstrate to

the user that it is trustworthy.

222222222222222control – The user must know exactly what they are signing up to, once they have given their permission to be marketed to

they should be able to dictate exactly what they do and do not want to receive. Equally if they are unhappy with the service they must be able to opt-out easily, any application must be simple to uninstall.

333333333333333privacy – the sign up process must be completely transparent in outlining the terms and conditions so the consumer

can be secure in the knowledge that their data will not be shared or sold on without their consent.

Services that enhance the user experience build a privileged communications channel between the brands advertising on them and online consumers. Users will appreciate a service, providing the advertising isn’t too intrusive and provides only offers that are relevant to them on an individual basis. When consumers recognise the twin benefits of free services and tailored offers then this translates into positive brand associations for advertiser partners.

This consent model predicates an entirely new way of looking at advertising; it is built around a requirement to establish a firm relationship between the brand and the consumer, thus removing traditional barriers. After all if the consumer perceives he/she is getting less out of the deal they will opt-out of the service and the advertiser will lose access to valuable data. Equally if the offers are badly targeted they offer no value and will be viewed as little better than spam. The only way to succeed is by developing a bond of trust between the consumer and the brand so that online shoppers recognise the value in granting the advertiser access to their data.

» Vincent Labey | Founder, aedgency | www.aedgency.com

Breaking down Breaking down Breaking down the the the BBBarriers: arriers: arriers:

A new way of thinking about advertising

by Vincent Labey

WHY PARKSASSOCIATES?

We provide strategic consulting and full-fledged research solutions, helping

our clients achieve a greater understanding of emerging

business opportunities in digital living and consumer

technologies.

For companies seeking a deeper understanding of how and why consumers adopt technology, Parks

Associates is the solution.

INDUSTRIESNew Media & Advertising

Digital Entertainment & GamingConsumer Electronics

Home NetworksInternet & Television Services

Software & MiddlewareDigital Health

Mobile Applications & ServicesHome Control Systems & Security

Energy Management

All Eyes o n V I D E O

International study of current consumer experiences and attitudes regarding advanced video platforms and services

For more information, and to download our free white papers, visit www.parksassociates.com or e-mail [email protected].

UPCOMING PROJECT

Addressable, Interactive Television Advertising in the U.S.Television Services: Global Outlook (Second Edition) Broadband Services: Global Outlook (Second Edition) Trends in Electronic Program Guide DevelopmentOnline Video Advertising Strategies & ResultsOnline Video and Broadband Service Provider StrategiesConnected Home: Global OutlookOnline Gaming: Global Outlook

FUTURE REPORTS

Our future projects dig deeper into the expanding role of connected CE, online video, and interactive services as

consumer demand for connectivity continues to grow.

How many people watchonline video?

WESTERN EUROPE46

million

UNITED STATES32million

www.parksassociates.com

We all take our news in different ways. The newspaper industry is struggling but is still

the centrepiece of news consumption for many people. Radio and television are undergoing evolutions of their own, with digital developments opening new doors and making others obsolete. For established outlets the internet has presented challenge after challenge, from the need for a website to the current assault on their supremacy by social media.

More than 80% of broadband households in France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and the U.K. watch streaming video online at least once a month. The popularity of online video and advanced video applications in general has motivated service providers in the U.S. and throughout Europe to expand their service offerings – and to deploy advanced CE to handle these demands.

They have marketed and installed advanced set-top boxes and DVRs that allow users to leverage broadband connectivity

and download content from the Internet. CE manufacturers in turn have been adding Internet capability to all types of devices, with connected TVs leading this new wave of advanced products.

These added capabilities will inevitably impact the area of social networking, pushing social and community-based networking into the next phase of its development, one that is heavily video-oriented.

This transition will start with basic applications, such as the ability to share YouTube and personal videos to any device with a display. As this area further integrates with video services, it will evolve into Visual Networking – the combination of video with collaborative social networking solutions

and applications. To take advantage of these new capabilities, providers will expand their traditional communications and television services to incorporate features such as video conferencing, chat, and community-based recommendations in electronic program guides (EPG). Consumers will also be able to get more community-based applications, such as local news and event calendars, school lunch menus, videos of town council meetings, and integrated recommendation and transactional services like Craigslist and Angie’s List.

Are consumers ready for a more video-centric social networking experience and all that it entails? If the feature is a replication of Facebook or MySpace on a separate

27WWW.POINTZEROMEDIA.COM POINT ZERO • MAGAZINE

»

“More than 80% of broadband households in France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and the U.K. watch streaming video online at least once a month.”

by Jayant Dasari


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Social network

Europe: Monthly Digital Media Activity“How often do you do the following ...?”(Among all BB HHs surveyed)

television channel, then the answer is no. Such an offering is not compelling. A more successful service would be a subtle blend of social networking features – recommendations, sharing, and chat – woven into a video-centric experience. Responses from consumers in both quantitative and qualitative studies indicate growing interest in community-oriented services via TV-based programming. They are responsive to a service that connects with them on a local level and provides local, school, and neighborhood information as well as videos of local government meetings on specific channels.

A challenge in mixing these types of personal and social media with traditional video is in the presentation to the consumer eye (and remote control). Adding more content when viewers are already inundated with thousands of options risks burying a great idea at the end of a long line of home shopping channels. It will be important for the industry to develop EPGs that are navigable; can help people find preferred content based

on behavioural, contextual, and demographic information; and can incorporate recommendations from trusted contacts.

That latter ability will be key function in bringing people to TV 2.0 services. Regardless of all the content search and discovery

applications available to people, they still rely heavily on recommendations from friends and family to discover new music and video content, whether it be on TV or the Internet. A key feature from the online experience that needs to move into the TV area is the viral sharing of content (by e-mailing a program and/or a “Watch this!” link).

For now, overall interest in TV 2.0 features is relatively low, not surprising given the early stages of this market. As recommendation and community features become more integrated with the video experience and more intuitive (non-distracting) via the EPG, these offerings

will become important tools for discovery of video content – and important services for providers to entice their subscribers. Programmers can encourage new viewership, and advertisers will also race to create more interactive marketing campaigns that encourage the sharing of popular advertisements via a television interface.

» Jayant Dasari | Research Analyst, Parks Associates | www.parksassociates.com

“A key feature from the online experience that needs to move into the TV area is the viral sharing of content (by e-mailing a program and/or a “Watch this!” link).”


After a long period where it looked like the competition had given up the ghost, 2009 has been the year when Google’s

dominance in search has started to be really challenged. We’ve had the re-launch of Ask Jeeves, a re-vamp of Yahoo! Search, the launch of Microsoft’s Bing and most recently Microsoft’s effective takeover of Yahoo! The search wars are on and universal search is one of the key battle grounds. Consumers are demanding a much wider range of content including images, consumer reviews, blog posts and videos. Search engines are moving beyond the ’ten blue links’ with a range of new search features which reflect the more sophisticated demands for specific types of information by consumers.

Tamar recently asked YouGov to survey over 2,000 consumers as part of our annual UK Search Attitudes Report. The results are broadly reassuring for both Microsoft and Google’s strategy for the future of search. When consumers were asked which types of results they would find most useful when researching a purchase online product reviews were the most popular, selected by

53 per cent of consumers overall and almost 60 per cent of those aged 44-54. Consumer reviews were followed by images and photo results, regarded as useful by 45 per cent of people overall, rising to nearly 50 per cent for 25-34 year olds.

Local results were regarded as the third most useful type of universal search result, selected by 17 per cent of consumers. Interestingly, video results were only described as useful by a mere 6 per cent of men and just 3 per cent of women, perhaps reflecting that video results have only relatively recently been incorporated into standard search results by Google.

Digging deeper into how search engines are evolving, we also asked the UK public to assess recently introduced or soon to be introduced new features. Unsurprisingly, those that make it easier to separate and drill down into specific types of results scored highly. Google’s Search Options and Bing’s Image Search features topped the list with 58 per cent of people in each case claiming they would be useful or very useful in delivering a better search experience. Google’s Search Options allows users to drill down into search results by choosing to view specific categories of results such as product reviews or forum posts. Bing’s Image Search feature displays images as a tile which you can scroll through, rather than having to repeatedly click on to a new page to see more results.

Google’s Rich Snippets feature where search results will automatically show user reviews and customer satisfaction ratings also scored highly with 51 per cent seeing it as a useful feature. By way of contrast, when asked to assess Google’s move to introduce Wiki Search as a way for individuals to customize their search experience by re-ranking, deleting and commenting on

results, less than a third 30 per cent thought it would be useful.

While these figures show there is clearly a demand for these new search tools in principal, the challenge for the likes of Microsoft and Google will be integrating these features seamlessly into their search engines and making sure ordinary users are aware of them.

Brands thinking about their Search strategy going forward need to start thinking about how best to integrate Universal Search into their overall online marketing strategy. The opportunity is there for brands who can create and optimise content in a way which matches the search behaviour of consumers today.

» Neil Jackson | Search Director, Tamar | www.tamar.com

“Video results were only described as useful by a mere 6% of men and just 3% of women, perhaps reflecting that video results have only relatively recently been incorporated into standard search results by Google.”

by Neil Jackson


WWW.POINTZEROMEDIA.COM30 POINT ZERO • MAGAZINE

POINT ZEROMobile 2.0

Is there a future in ad-funding mobile applications? by

Simon Liss

M obile applications and mobile application stores are now becoming a feature on most new mobile

phones. Apple’s iPhone and Appstore led the charge, but the wagon has since been jumped on by Nokia, Android, Blackberry, Microsoft and the network operators. Chances are that even if you don’t own an application capable smart-phone, you will be aware they exist. Mobile apps are also moving from the frivolous to the practical and they will eventually, I believe, become essential.

I run a mobile agency, but please don’t think that I am fooled by the hype surrounding mobile applications. We get to see quite a bit of the value chain, because we work with anybody from product developers to advertisers and lots in between. As with any new technology stampede, we are just beginning to see the dust settle and the commercial reality of this new world come into focus.

Paid for, free, ad-funded or freemium?

For the most part, those making the first wave of applications were small bedroom outfits. They might manage to sell 15,000 of their apps at $1 a pop and they’d take home a relatively healthy wedge for a few weeks of late-night coding, but nothing to worry Bill Gates. Larger commercial companies and media companies who are now on the scene tend to need their products to make a return for them and their investors, but they also need to achieve scale and get as many people to use their apps as possible. They have a choice, offer their product as a paid-for download, or offer it for free. Some also try a combination of a free version and then a premium version with extra features and/or no advertising – often referred to as a ‘freemium’ model.

Either way, the free download option is attractive, especially for those with investor


targets to meet, because it seems the quickest way to acquire a decent volume of users. Getting the app on hand-sets is clearly a strategic advantage, but it can lead to a ‘build it and they will come’ approach to advertising. The trouble starts here, as when the main driver is pure customer acquisition, the real-world commercial model can take a back seat. We have seen quite a few companies wake up late in the game to the fact that ad-funding their apps is not as easy as it sounds.

What are the barriers to profitable in-app ads?

There are two main stumbling blocks. The first is the nature of mobile applications themselves. When you open an app, chances are you intend to use that app and then close it. Unlike browsing, which can be less directional, most app usage has a distinct purpose. Your propensity to click on a ‘classic’ interruptive ad banner, launch the browser and

then interact with the landing page content is much less apparent with a mobile app.

The second barrier is the nature of current mobile ad inventory. Most of the volume tends to be long-tail network advertising, which relies on scale rather than relevance to get results. Application developers are naturally attracted to ad-hosting solutions from ad networks like Google or Admob, because they offer a ‘plug and play’ approach and good fill-rates. All a developer needs to do is insert a few lines of code. No need to broker deals or go direct to advertisers. These networks offer targeting, but right now the relevance of ads served has some room for improvement. Google adsense for mobile, for instance, has just come out of a trial phase, and is still relying on campaigns that seem to have been designed for PCs. We’ve seen ads for Blackberry mobile phones being served to an iPhone, which point to a website designed for a PC. Not a good user experience and, one must imagine, not yet generating significant

CTRs, revenue or value for anyone concerned. The other ad option is to broker direct deals

with relevant advertisers. ESPN mobile did so with their iPhone app, getting Jaguar to advertise to their mostly male, high-net-worth customer base. Early signs are that these more content relevant deals are getting better results than less targeted campaigns. The main drawback is that each ad deal needs to be negotiated and implemented on a case by case basis.

Consider context to deliver value

The most promising form of in-app advertising is the affiliate marketing model, which is perhaps not strictly advertising at all. Here, relevant products or services are offered, ideally as a natural continuation of application usage. A good example is Shazam, the music recognition service. On their iPhone and Android apps they offer links to Amazon to download the track you’ve just identified and take a cut of any resulting sales. This has clear value for all concerned, and makes perfect sense in the context of the application.

So, my advice to developers is this; if your app concept is not primarily designed to sell something, then you should either develop something good enough to sell per download and be happy with limited returns, or ensure that you can form commercial alliances with those that do have something to sell that can add value to the user experience.

» Simon Liss | MD, We Love Mobile UK | www.welovemobile.co.uk

“Unlike browsing, which can be less directional, most app usage has a distinct purpose. Your propensity to click on a ‘classic’ interruptive ad banner, launch the browser and then interact with the landing page content is much less apparent with a mobile app.”

far left: Shazam iPhone app

showing a Google adsense advert

left: Shazam iPhone app showing

iTunes purchase links

below: ESPN in-app ad for Jaguar

Mobile advertising is one of the hottest areas of interest in the telecoms industry. The idea of switching on a virtual

tap and having a new revenue stream flood into the network operator business is not the only appeal. Those of us on the telecom side of the fence look at the glamorous advertising industry and imagine award-winning Cadbury and Guinness campaigns viewed on mobile handsets. The thought of being on set with an A-list celebrity shooting a 30-second mobile commercial is more than enough to lure the sensationalists among us.

In reality, mobile advertising is beset with difficulties. There has been a lot of over-claiming and under-delivering of mobile services to the consumer and advertising services have been affected by this. At the end of the day we all have a phone, we’re all consumers and if user experience is not up to scratch we’re going to have rather conservative expectations going forward. Large players such as Vodafone and Telefónica have been looking at mobile advertising for many years, but the journey for all pioneers in this space has been difficult as operator business culture has to adjust to accommodate and support this new revenue stream. The telecoms business has been built on the “consumer pays” model and that must change as there is a limit to the amount the individual is prepared to pay for content. On the one hand you have an industry that is looking to charge consumers for content, and on the other you

have an industry that would prefer a simple way of spending advertiser money. It was so much easier for advertising planners when there was only TV, radio and print to consider.

Ericsson decided in 2008 that the time was right to commit to mobile advertising. We felt something needed to be done to help telecom operators make mobile advertising a reality, and not be overrun by internet companies. Our kick-off point was to build an ad-serving platform, avoiding the pitfalls and including the value pieces learned from studying start-up businesses in this space.

There are strong arguments for continuing to invest in this area, despite the economic downturn. The realities of advertising remain, even during difficult economic times. For example, the impact of traditional media has been decreasing for many years and this will continue. Television and the press are struggling as consumers spend less time at home and are becoming more difficult to reach. Significantly, internet advertising is weathering the storm and digital media is continuing to do well as advertisers look for new ways of engaging with consumers. Naturally the mobile phone is a key focus of interest… if only we could all pull in the same direction.

The appeal of mobile advertising compared with other channels is the ability to put brand

messages in the palm of a consumer’s hand, anytime and anywhere. Advertisers value the impact that a brand message delivered to a mobile phone will have, and look for providers that can manage that process. A unique value-add for advertisers is the prospect of leveraging subscriber profile data to make targeting more effective. Essentially, it is important to adhere to strict codes of conduct and best practice; when that is done then the advertisers have the most powerful advertising channel ever.

Although mobile advertising is taking off slowly, everyone recognizes that it will be a significant revenue stream due to the proliferation of advanced phones and the decline of traditional media. However there have been some key obstacles along the way. Besides the obvious cultural differences between the advertising world and the telecoms industry, there are other issues to overcome.

Ad-serving technology is not rocket science. A more central issue at present is the openness of operators to allow third-party access to data management. Not surprisingly operators have been reluctant to allow small start-ups to integrate directly with their own systems. There has also been a significant amount of distrust and nervousness about allowing the major internet players access to subscriber profile information. Advertisers want to know what ad space they are buying and who views it, and they will pay a premium if the operator can provide them with generic information about the ad viewer, such as age, gender, or location.


POINT ZEROmobile 2.0

mobile advertising has been slow to establish itself as a genuine advertising channel.Mobile advertising has been slow to take off. But the industry is learning from its initial mistakes. Supported by industry approved standards and brokering functions, advertising spend on mobile looks set to take off.

by Nick Wiggin


research insightsNew findings taken from interviews with agency advertising buyers in New York, Hong Kong and the UK reveals that The media agencies will get onboard if the targeting potential of the mobile channel is released and the process of executing mobile advertising is made efficient. With this targeting information, a broker can help operators sell the right space at a premium. But the future of mobile advertising relies upon the ability of agencies to buy ad space across networks in a matter of minutes. This is a key stumbling block that is affecting the growth of mobile advertising as a business.

“We have to look at betterplanning and buying tools, I would love to see the day when it’s simple and clear.” CEO, Mobile Agency, New York: Source Ericsson Consumer Labs May 2009

This global research study produced by Ericsson Consumer Labs also found that consumer reactions to mobile advertising were favourable when certain ‘best practice’ requirements were met. By adhering to industry guidelines on best practice and working together it is clear from the study that agencies and operators can overcome

the barriers to mobile advertising and kick start real revenue generation.

industry standardsWe need to look to our industry associations to guide us objectively through this maze, and it is encouraging that after lots of blood, sweat and tears a handful of these associations have made real progress recently in helping this industry grow. We now have the support of three global industry associations, the GSM Association (GSMA), the Mobile Marketing Association (MMA) and the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB), which have defined standards in the areas of metrics, formats, best practice and cooperation.

the need for a brokerThe next step for operators to agree on collectively is who they can work with to aggregate all operator inventory for the benefit of the advertising community. There is an obvious need for a new role in this market — a broker. At Ericsson we have stepped in and focused our attention on connecting relevant media buying and ad-serving applications in a managed service model, acting as the broker between advertising demand and supply.

Clearly when advertisers can buy targeted advertising across networks in a matter of minutes, combined with a reliable optimization and reporting tool, the shift of ad spending to mobile will increase dramatically.

» nick wiggin | Head of advertising Strategy & partnerships, ericsson | www.ericsson.com

industry associationsThe GSM Association (GSMA) has announced a measurement standard that involves operators in each local market committing to providing a research house with data that is then presented in a uniform way to advertisers who want to see what browser content has been viewed and by whom. This is a step in the right direction and evidence of operators seeing the benefit of working together.www.gsmworld.com

The Mobile Marketing Association (MMA) has taken the lead on producing global advertising standards that mean operators can provide uniform ad space. This will facilitate the creative process and remove issues of size and specifications. The MMA also has a code of conduct that applies to mobile advertising and is a useful best-practice guide for marketers.www.mmaglobal.com

The Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) has a strong local market focus and is key to facilitating objective discussions amongst operators who see the value in working together to make mobile advertising happen. www.iabuk.net



In reality, mobile advertising is beset with difficulties. There has been a lot of over-claiming and under-delivering of mobile services to the consumer and advertising services have been affected by this. At the end of the day we all have a phone, we’re all consumers and if user experience is not up to scratch we’re going to have rather conservative expectations going forward. Large players such as Vodafone and Telefónica have been looking at mobile advertising for many years, but the journey for all pioneers

in this space has been difficult as operator business culture has to adjust to accommodate and support this new revenue stream. The telecoms business has been built on the “consumer pays” model and that must change as there is a limit to the amount the individual is prepared to pay for content. On the one hand you have an industry that is looking to charge consumers for content, and on the other you have an industry that would prefer a simple way of spending advertiser money. It was so much easier for advertising planners when there was only TV, radio and print to consider.

Ericsson decided in 2008 that the time was right to commit to mobile advertising. We felt something needed to be done to help telecom operators make mobile advertising a reality, and not be overrun by internet companies. Our kick-off point was to build an ad-serving platform, avoiding the pitfalls and including the value pieces learned from

studying start-up businesses in this space. There are strong arguments for continuing

to invest in this area, despite the economic downturn. The realities of advertising remain, even during difficult economic times. For example, the impact of traditional media has been decreasing for many years and this will continue. Television and the press are struggling as consumers spend less time at home and are becoming more difficult to reach. Significantly, internet advertising is weathering the storm and digital media is continuing to do well as advertisers look for new ways of engaging with consumers. Naturally the mobile phone is a key focus of interest… if only we could all pull in the same direction.

The appeal of mobile advertising compared with other channels is the ability to put brand messages in the palm of a consumer’s hand, anytime and anywhere. Advertisers value the impact that a brand message delivered to a mobile phone will have, and look for providers that can manage that process. A unique value-add for advertisers is the prospect of leveraging subscriber profile data to make targeting more effective. Essentially, it is important to adhere to strict codes of conduct and best practice; when that is done then the advertisers have the most powerful advertising channel ever.





by Nick Wiggin

Mobile advertising has been slow to take off. But the industry is learning from its initial mistakes. Supported by industry approved standards and brokering functions, advertising spend on mobile looks set to take off.

Making mobile advertising happen



In reality, mobile advertising is beset with difficulties. There has been a lot of over-claiming and under-delivering of mobile services to the consumer and advertising services have been affected by this. At the end of the day we all have a phone, we’re all consumers and if user experience is not up to scratch we’re going to have rather conservative expectations going forward. Large players such as Vodafone and Telefónica have been looking at mobile advertising for many years, but the journey for all pioneers

in this space has been difficult as operator business culture has to adjust to accommodate and support this new revenue stream. The telecoms business has been built on the “consumer pays” model and that must change as there is a limit to the amount the individual is prepared to pay for content. On the one hand you have an industry that is looking to charge consumers for content, and on the other you have an industry that would prefer a simple way of spending advertiser money. It was so much easier for advertising planners when there was only TV, radio and print to consider.

Ericsson decided in 2008 that the time was right to commit to mobile advertising. We felt something needed to be done to help telecom operators make mobile advertising a reality, and not be overrun by internet companies. Our kick-off point was to build an ad-serving platform, avoiding the pitfalls and including the value pieces learned from

studying start-up businesses in this space. There are strong arguments for continuing

to invest in this area, despite the economic downturn. The realities of advertising remain, even during difficult economic times. For example, the impact of traditional media has been decreasing for many years and this will continue. Television and the press are struggling as consumers spend less time at home and are becoming more difficult to reach. Significantly, internet advertising is weathering the storm and digital media is continuing to do well as advertisers look for new ways of engaging with consumers. Naturally the mobile phone is a key focus of interest… if only we could all pull in the same direction.

The appeal of mobile advertising compared with other channels is the ability to put brand messages in the palm of a consumer’s hand, anytime and anywhere. Advertisers value the impact that a brand message delivered to a mobile phone will have, and look for providers that can manage that process. A unique value-add for advertisers is the prospect of leveraging subscriber profile data to make targeting more effective. Essentially, it is important to adhere to strict codes of conduct and best practice; when that is done then the advertisers have the most powerful advertising channel ever.




POINT ZEROmobile 2.0

makingmobileadvertisinghappenMobile advertising has been slow to establish itself as a genuine advertising channel. But the industry is learning from its initial mistakes. Supported by industry approved standards and brokering functions, advertising spend on mobile looks set to take off.

by Nick Wiggin


Research insightsNew findings taken from interviews with agency advertising buyers in New York, Hong Kong and the UK reveals that The media agencies will get onboard if the targeting potential of the mobile channel is released and the process of executing mobile advertising is made efficient. With this targeting information, a broker can help operators sell the right space at a premium. But the future of mobile advertising relies upon the ability of agencies to buy ad space across networks in a matter of minutes. This is a key stumbling block that is affecting the growth of mobile advertising as a business.

“We have to look at betterplanning and buying tools, I would love to see the day when it’s simple and clear.” CEO, Mobile Agency, New York:

Source Ericsson Consumer Labs May 2009

This global research study produced by Ericsson Consumer Labs also found that consumer reactions to mobile advertising were favourable when certain ‘best practice’ requirements were met. By adhering to industry guidelines on best practice and working together it is clear from the study that agencies and operators can overcome

the barriers to mobile advertising and kick start real revenue generation.

Industry standardsWe need to look to our industry associations to guide us objectively through this maze, and it is encouraging that after lots of blood, sweat and tears a handful of these associations have made real progress recently in helping this industry grow. We now have the support of three global industry associations, the GSM Association (GSMA), the Mobile Marketing Association (MMA) and the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB), which have defined standards in the areas of metrics, formats, best practice and cooperation.

The need for a brokerThe next step for operators to agree on collectively is who they can work with to aggregate all operator inventory for the benefit of the advertising community. There is an obvious need for a new role in this market — a broker. At Ericsson we have stepped in and focused our attention on connecting relevant media buying and ad-serving applications in a managed service model, acting as the broker between advertising demand and supply.

Clearly when advertisers can buy targeted advertising across networks in a matter of minutes, combined with a reliable optimization and reporting tool, the shift of ad spending to mobile will increase dramatically.

» Nick Wiggin | Head of Advertising Strategy & Partnerships, Ericsson | www.ericsson.com

Industry AssociationsThe GSM Association (GSMA) has

announced a measurement standard

that involves operators in each local

market committing to providing a

research house with data that is

then presented in a uniform way to

advertisers who want to see what

browser content has been viewed and

by whom. This is a step in the right

direction and evidence of operators

seeing the benefit of working together.

www.gsmworld.com

The Mobile Marketing Association

(MMA) has taken the lead on producing

global advertising standards that

mean operators can provide uniform

ad space. This will facilitate the

creative process and remove issues

of size and specifications. The MMA

also has a code of conduct that applies

to mobile advertising and is a useful

best-practice guide for marketers.

www.mmaglobal.com

The Internet Advertising Bureau

(IAB) has a strong local market focus

and is key to facilitating objective

discussions amongst operators who

see the value in working together

to make mobile advertising happen.

www.iabuk.net


» Italo Gani | Chief Commercial Officer, m-stars | www.m-stars.net


Ican give you a long argument about how reachable mobile as a media is. But let’s leave that to the scholars. Indulge me instead with this one

simple question; Where is your mobile phone at this moment? Bet you 1 to 10 that it’s within reach, if not already on your hand as we speak (sort of speak). I’d say it’s a 24/7 -ON media. So, no argument from me.

And I’m sure that we’re not still arguing about the effectiveness of mobile phone as a media to deliver your brand’s message. We KNOW that. So why hasn’t it work? And why am I still playing in this lucrative media playground? Here’s why. In this instant world where gourmet food is just a phone call away and delivered to your doorstep at 3 am (well maybe not gourmet), people expect anything else to work as instantly. Unfortunately instant is NOT what’s going to happened here.

Market/Industry education is still in need in this process of maturing the mobile ecosystem. 3 years are barely enough to ripen a media. Hell, Internet is still ripening after 20 years and it still hasn’t reached maturity. And when I say market, I am not talking about mobile subscriber, the end knot of this long line, the product’s buyers, the brand believers. I am talking about Brand owners, media agencies, creative agencies,

research agencies and telco operators, the players that can and will be benefited from mobile as a successful interactive media.

Mobile subscriber is increasing rapidly every month in developing countries like China (600milliion mobile subscriber), India (380million subscriber) and Indonesia (130million subscriber). The rising (if not already proven) dragon and seemingly untouched market for most retail products. Mobile as a mass as well as targeted media is very interesting solution for the brand to interact with target audience. You only need one SMS bullet to reach one intended audience at merely efficient cost. You got to like that odd. Killer message hasn’t been this easy and playing hasn’t been this much fun.

To put the cherry on top, massive rate of Mobile market penetration particularly in asia has allowed anybody, and I mean ANY BODY with even D SES buying power, can afford to have and they do have at least 1 mobile phone. This will allow brands to reach and communicate interactively to their target market. With

uniqueness in market pattern that mobile user penetration is huge compare to fixed internet user, I strongly believe that mobile potentially will the main interactive media in this market.

Markets like China, India and Indonesia will the best playground for mobile marketing service. With the amount of mobile subscriber, most likely the real budget and successful mobile marketing cases will starting from these countries compare to Europe and US.

Country like Indonesia already starting advance permission-based mobile marketing service, there are already case studies that created in this market. The Asian biggest low fare airlines is already repeating their mobile ad campaign, Indonesia biggest local FMCG brand that never done internet campaign before is starting their mobile ad campaign as well, and many more mobile ad campaign happen in Indonesia opt-in mobile media environment. And most brand are quite amaze with the high response rate of the mobile campaign.

Every new marketing communication scheme will adapt with the local market environment, and can be an evolution or a revolution process. Whichever they are, the changes are happening already. Come along then, the playground’s open. You wouldn’t want to miss the ride, right?

by Italo Gani

35

An interesting new topic seems to have emerged among mobile marketing afficionados in the wake of Steve Jobs recent

iPhone apps success. The question is being asked whether applications for mobile phones will have longevity or if the real answer to mobile marketing bliss is the mobile internet?

This reminds me of the old and much quoted show down between Betamax and VHS. Remember those two video formats that brought the joys of movie home entertainment into our living rooms for the first time? Betamax was definitely better. In terms of quality it won hands down against VHS. But, as history tells us, it was VHS that won the battle of the formats.

How is that possible? How can an inferior product beat a sophisticated, well thought through quality one? Well, there are many reasons, and this scenario is by no means unusual. Just look at Microsoft versus Apple…

Einstein once said that “the only two infinite things in this world are the universe and man’s stupidity – and I’m not so sure about the former”. I agree, so human stupidity is definitely one reason.

But I believe that the main reason for inferior products beating their quality competition is simplicity. KISS. Keep It Simple Stupid (some say “Keep It Simple Safe” but I wanted to continue Einstein’s thought…)

Doesn’t this make a lot of sense? A new product, especially if it is somehow of a high quality, always excites at first, and if it is only because of the novelty factor. But in the end someone comes up with something much simpler that can do the trick as well. And that’s what the masses eventually go for.

This was true for Betamax versus VHS and it will be equally true for mobile apps versus the mobile internet. Apple’s marketers and spin doctors are currently milking the competitive advantage of their app store, and it is true that mobile apps are currently sexier than the mobile internet. But that won’t be like that for long. Once the mobile internet has overcome its teething problems, and it is doing so at lightening speed, it will beat mobile apps hands down simply because it is so simple!

Think of an app: it needs to be developed separately for each phone model, and new one’s are entering the market constantly. It needs to be downloaded and then sits on your phone, so there is a memory issue. A mobile internet site, or mobi site, on the other hand sits on an external server and can simply be accessed by every phone that is WAP enabled.

So just as VHS outclassed Betamax on sheer simplicity, few if any will bother much about utilizing apps to reach a mass market in mobile marketing soon.

» Alexander Gregori | Co-founder, Dawn Anna Investments (Pty) Ltd | www.mymobworld.com

Pssst… don’t

you want to buy

my Betamax?

by Alexander Gregori

WWW.POINTZEROMEDIA.COM POINT ZERO • MAGAZINE



Historically – at least since the establishment of operator portals – the operator has been the gatekeeper for the bulk of

mobile media, and more specifically content and applications within that. This meant that for many, unless you were an established brand with heritage in the space, the process for getting content and apps onto an operator’s portal was time consuming and expensive. In the end, some companies simply did not regard mobile as a viable channel.

Mobile phone subscribers suffered a limited experience as a result. Those looking to download a ringtone or access an internet site would be automatically routed to their respective operator’s portal, whilst any attempt to go off-piste and browse off-portal content and WAP sites was an off-putting and cumbersome process. This user experience improved, but out of bundle data charges meant that in most markets searching for and downloading content was prohibitively expensive.

And then came App StoreIn July 2008 Apple fundamentally changed the way mobile media is accessed and sold on the mobile handset with the launch of its App Store for iPhone. Since its launch, Apple has achieved over 1.8 billion downloads in

a little over a year, with more than 65,000 applications now available to its customers.

The success of Apple’s App Store has had huge ramifications across the mobile industry, with a sharp uptake of new services by consumers such as mobile social networking, Location Based Services (LBS) and gaming, as well as increased activity in areas such as mobile marketing. This in part is due to the emergence of a new generation of handsets that enable faster, easier access to feature rich services, but also thanks to the increased presence of flat rate data packages, driving access and usage to different forms of mobile media.

Consequently, operators no longer retain the same control they once did, with handset vendors, aggregators and in some cases publishers, all establishing a degree of direct access to the consumer. The last six months alone has seen a number of different vendors, OS providers and operators launch their own respective storefronts in order to secure a share of the app pie.

Drowned in AppsAs consumer appetite for content and applications continues to grow, and as more companies do indeed look to secure a share of this lucrative market, we can expect to see parties on all sides face a number of challenges.

For app store hosts, the objective will be to encourage developers and content owners to produce applications for their platform. For developers the greatest hurdle can often be content discovery, especially in the Apple App Store, and making sure that their app has the right marketing and communications strategy in place to directly reach out to and influence mobile consumers.

The value of PR and social media in particular cannot be overlooked. If used effectively, it can help to own and engage with online developer communities or seed individual apps out to consumers, and consequently boost the number of applications available to and being downloaded on a single app store.

Mobile media has become a compelling medium for brands inside and outside of the industry to engage with. The app store model has broken down the walls of operator control and now offers tremendous potential for direct engagement with mobile consumers, but the question remains as to which brands will fully immerse themselves and build upon these new opportunities.

» David Ross-Tomlin | Campaign Manager, Diffusion Mobile | www.diffusion-mobile.com

by David Ross-Tomlin

The advertiser’s nirvana is to be able to use a medium that has ubiquitous reach and therefore huge volumes yet can be

segmented to a fine-grained level to offer specific campaign targeting. The advertiser’s dream also includes the potential to precisely measure the effectiveness of delivery and hence a tangible return on the initial advertising investment.

Though it might sound too good to be true, the highly personalised medium of the mobile phone with its inherent communication capability offers just such an opportunity through advertising within SMS services – for example football results, horoscopes or directory enquiry responses. Even beyond peer-to-peer SMS messaging there are billions of service messages sent each day, each to an opted-in consumer who will be able to see and interact with the advertising message within it – every phone in the world can receive SMS. This provides the reach and volume of inventory to satisfy the needs of the advertiser.

The SMS service message also allows for highly contextualised advert delivery based on a wide range of parameters including the content of the service message itself, location, time of day and other user information. This approach reaches the desired target audience and ensures that only those impressions that need to be sent are paid for, offering a highly cost effective and efficient channel for communication and

interaction that is capable of maximising the relevancy of the advert to the consumer.

Most importantly technologies exist to allow the measurement not only of the number of advert impressions delivered (and to whom), but also of the individual user’s

interaction with the advert. By embedding a clickable link within the message that is unique to each user and each advert, the interaction history of each consumer can be measured. This provides not only an overall click through rate measurement but also the

ability to track the interaction of each user and guide further campaign message delivery to them. The click mechanic on a mobile phone provides an easy to use path to further brand or product messages, coupons or offers and direct customer acquisition through an instant voice call.

There is, therefore, a medium that meets the advertisers’ needs: a high volume, wide reach, push messaging format that does not require the user to happen to see a message yet which can be highly contextualised and fully measurable. For the first time, SMS offers a demonstrable ROI through premium inventory that maximizes value for advertisers, brands and publishers.


» Jeremy Copp | CEO, Rapid Mobile Media Ltd | www.rapid-mobile.com


“Beyond peer-to-peer SMS messaging there are billions of service messages sent each day, each to an opted-in consumer who will be able to see and interact with the advertising message within it – every phone in the world can receive SMS.”

by Jeremy Copp

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In the last 18 months, Social Media Marketing has generated a lot of attention and buzz in most enterprises. From the innovative uses

of social media during the US Presidential campaign of Barack Obama, to individuals creating a personal brand on blogs and microblogs, everyone seems interested in getting in on the social media hype. Mainstream media continues to point to unprecedented adoption rates of social networks like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn among others, leaving enterprises to move beyond the question of whether or not to adopt social media as part of the marketing mix, and into how they should adopt it.

Most enterprises have made attempts at dipping their toe in social media mostly by establishing a presence on what we will call the “free social web” – Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. While these social outposts are extremely important for branding and driving traffic to an enterprise’s web site or online community, they are difficult to measure and track and, most importantly, it’s difficult for the brand to own the conversations happening within the broader social web. These sites own the explicit data (profile information, demographics data, etc) and

implicit data (comments on other posts, details on connections, responses to polls, allegiance to fan pages, etc) making the information difficult or impossible to review, interpret and act on.

Leveraging and Launching Social Media

Enterprises that are at the point of expanding their social media initiatives by launching their own market facing community benefit by learning from the successes and failures of other brands. Three common mistakes Enterprises make are:

The “build-it-and-they-will-come” fallacy —This happens when a company focuses too single-mindedly on the tools and forgets to consider the marketing programs that are driving membership and participation in their community. Too many brands believe once the community is launched it will result with

hundreds of thousands of members out of the gate. The truth is the launch of a community should go hand-in-hand with a well though marketing program and activities to drive membership and participation.

The “let’s-keep-it-small-so-it-does-not-

move-the needle” phenomenon — Some enterprises seem to get into a permanent state of pilot when it comes to social media marketing programs. At some point you either need to move on and scale, or decide that social media marketing is not for you and shut it down.

The “not-invented-here” syndrome —This can happen when a very strong community already exists, and the company tries to create a new one and lure members to their own platform. In some cases it makes more sense for that company to engage where the community already hangs out and affiliate with them instead of trying to compete with them.

Measuring ROI – It’s both important, and possible

Earlier this year Chris Brogan (President of New Marketing Labs) and I conducted research on Corporate Trends in Social Media Marketing. We learned that most enterprises that


by Mike Lewis

»

POINT ZEROEnterprise 2.0

Adopting Social Media in the Enterprise

dipped their toes into social media were planning larger, more comprehensive strategies in the second half of 2009 that involved deploying their own customer or market facing online communities. The primary motivation of the enterprises

planning these initiatives were addressing standard marketing goals including promoting brand, increasing customer engagement and driving demand generation activities. On the flip side, the biggest concerns of the same enterprises were around ensuring their brand image is not tarnished within a community and that they can generate high levels of participation among community members.

An additional concern identified in the survey was the perceived inability to track an RIO with social programs.

Measuring ROI in social media is something everyone involved in the space is trying to capture. While there are many different

opinions on the subject no one has established an industry standard. One of the primary reasons behind the lack of a standard ROI definition for social media is because, as we learned in the survey, there are many different objectives for social media programs. For example, while page views may be a compelling metric for a UCG campaign, it may indicate poor performance in a peer support community.

Without standard metrics, organizations need to know whether or not social media programs are making an impact. As companies adopt and enhance social programs they need to be sure that the vendors they select to support the technology component of the social program understand the differences in business objectives companies have and have the appropriate metrics in place to track an ROI. With the right platform and tools in place, measuring ROI is easily possible.

About Mike LewisMike Lewis is Vice President of Marketing & Sales at Awareness, Inc – the leading provider of on-demand social media marketing software. He is an active blogger at Social Episodes and on Twitter.

http://www.awarenessnetworks.com http://blog.socialepisodes.com http://twitter.com/bostonmike

» Mike Lewis | Vice President of Marketing & Sales , Awareness | www.awarenessnetworks.com

“Measuring ROI in social media is something everyone involved is trying to capture. While there are many different opinions on the subject no one has established an industry standard.”

contact us for more info [email protected]. 07734 695725www.thegravy.co.uk


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The apocryphal Chinese curse “May you live in interesting times” neatly sums up the combination of excitement and foreboding

inherent in the rapid changes organisations seek to manage, not least in Corporate Social Networking. Excitement at the sheer potential for releasing the untapped strengths within what many companies acknowledge is their greatest asset – their people. And foreboding at how to manage and securely channel the empowering collaborative capabilities.

Many organisations are actively evolving their understanding and maturing their approach to using Corporate Social Networking. Some initial reactions were to ban or block such sites as Facebook in the workplace. However, with growing knowledge and more tools designed for corporate use, many organisations recognise that the same social networking principles applied in the work environment help build the cohesion and innovation that they seek. For instance, the general manager for Logica in Scotland, Martin Ewart makes a pitch that open, networked working environments are essential for promoting innovation and thought

leadership – recognising that “Nowadays we can no longer assume that only a select group of people qualify as innovators”. 1

Social and workplace tools are in rapid transition. Hindsight shows that personal computers emerged just over 25 years old and widespread use of the Internet is a more recent phenomenon that has grown exponentially. What about foresight? Look ahead to, say, 10 years from now: social networking is ubiquitous and the tools even more sophisticated and intuitive.

Organisations cannot afford to watch and do nothing. Learning from hands-on experience is invaluable and many are doing just that. Thankfully, several are willing to share their experiences whether through the web, at Social Networking conferences or communities of interest.

Take the example of Lockheed Martin, a multinational Aerospace and Defence company that has created its own internal

social networking solution called Unity2, based on a range of technologies including Microsoft SharePoint. Unity combines wikis, blogs, group forums and personal pages as well as being a front-end to a document repository. Not surprisingly, security measures are paramount. For example, documents that are under export control restrictions have access locked-down to approved staff. The company’s motivation for introducing Unity is said to include the need to accommodate the changing age profile of the workforce. There’s both need to address potential loss of know-how as senior people retire and need to empower employees who have expectations about using Web 2.0 tools and are familiar with using them in their everyday lives.

The Aerospace and Defence sector exemplifies some of the demanding requirements that business has for Corporate Social Networking solutions. There is a complex supply chain requiring communication and collaboration across companies and with customer(s), often across international boundaries; access control to documents needs to be under strict control and audit, for instance to protect intellectual property


by Carl Billson

»


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and to comply with export restrictions; identity management needs to meet prescribed conditions and may benefit from third party PKI (Public Key Infrastructure); it needs to meet internationally recognised open standards so that companies are not ‘locked-in’ and benefit

from global innovation. The UK Council for Electronic Business (www.ukceb.org) is a UK-based trade organisation that is active in this sector and seeks to promote standards and share experiences of good practice and policy guidance regarding corporate social networking.

What are some drivers in the market place? One example is Google’s announcement and demonstration to its developer community

of Google Wave in May 20093. Google suggest that there is a need for new standard for communication – one suitable for the 21st century. Lars Rasmussen, development team leader on Google Wave, suggested that Wave is what email would be like if it were invented

today. He said that Google wants Wave to be an open platform such that anyone can provide platforms for Wave using open tools that Google provides. This includes competitors to Google and organizations who build or adopt implementations of Wave for ‘internal’ use all of which follow the same standard protocol and enable interoperability.

Some of the strengths of Wave are in the

way it fluently blends a raft of collaboration tools and techniques, ones that are familiar from a range of tools currently available in various solutions. It adds some neat ‘widgets’ of its own and, through an ‘open’ approach invites the developer community to create others. Examples include concurrent group collaboration, language translation ‘on the fly’ and event ‘playback’ where, for example, email ‘conversations’ can be dynamically played-back from any point in a more intuitive manner than viewing current ‘static’ email threads. Wave is bold in its scope and stated intentions for open-ness and global adoption. The story is set to unfold with the first public release stated for later in 2009.

We undoubtedly live in interesting and exciting times for Corporate Social Networking!

1. Article in www.publicservice.co.uk, 3 July 2009, ‘From Facebook to the coalface’

2. Many articles are available on the web

3. http://wave.google.com/

» Carl Billson | MD Flurysh & Business Manager, UKCeB.org | www.ukceb.org

“Some of the strengths of Wave are in the way it fluently blends a raft of collaboration tools and techniques, ones that are familiar from a range of tools currently available in various solutions.”



Social media has become the norm in Europe, with social networking having a penetration of nearly 75% among European internet

users*. Statistics such as this have spurred corporations worldwide to adopt social media practices for their employees that increase productivity and grow ROI. Let’s look at four employee productivity challenges Enterprise 2.0 tackles head on.

The Intranet Time Drain – The Nine-Headed Hydra

How would you rate your corporate intranet? Many would compare theirs to the mythical Hydra: You have to chop off several heads (and keep chopping) in order to find needed information. Whether looking for the right person or the right document, employees can run up a sizeable bill when it comes to wasted time. Consider this: If an average employee spends 30 minutes a week looking for the right resource, then a mid-size company of 1,000 employees wastes 30,000 minutes (500 hours) per week in lost productivity.

The Training Strain – The Dreaded Ramp-Up Time

Companies face huge costs to replace employees. The average on-boarding time for a new employee can vary from weeks to months. Accelerating ramp-up time by even a small percentage can produce significant savings. The impact is particularly compelling with sales generating professionals – the quicker a quota-bearing representative is able to start generating revenue, the more profitable your company will be.

The Learning Change – Lack of Participation

Social media continues to change the Internet by making it a hub for participation, empowering every user to contribute their knowledge with content, ratings, votes and opinions. When a company ignores Web 2.0 principles such as user-generated content, employees are denied the opportunity to collaborate, share and participate.

The Silo Pain – Hording Knowledge

Most organizations have no systematic way to retain an employee’s knowledge before he/she leaves. Individuals and project teams are often driven by deadlines which don’t allow them to discover how other teams or geographies could benefit from their work. How much time do your employees spend today reinventing the wheel or duplicating past and current efforts?

The Answer: Enterprise 2.0

Now that we’ve identified problems that tax employee productivity, let’s see how Enterprise 2.0 can address them.

Bye-Bye Ramp-Up Time: Knowledge isn’t just stored in the form of traditional documents: it’s inside blogs, threaded discussions and wikis. Successful Enterprise 2.0 allows knowledge types to be centrally stored and organized based on relevant

categories, tags and user ratings. When employees transition out of their roles or leave the company, their knowledge is retained in a way that new employees can easily access, enhancing their own knowledge at an accelerated pace.

Go Beyond the Written Word: Successful Enterprise 2.0 hinges on respecting each employee’s unique way of learning, be it verbal, visual or aural. Savvy businesses are seeing the power of video and podcasts to promote social e-learning and provide an engaging way for employees to share expertise. Push your organization to excel beyond text-based Enterprise 2.0 initiatives.

Create Collaborative Workspaces

and Useful Tags: Harness the true power of Enterprise 2.0 by helping your employees find the right information through collaborative workspaces and tags. With user ratings and comments, your employees can easily score the usefulness of information and grow knowledge-based communities as information is centralized around a particular topic – all actions that significantly slash productivity risks.

*comScore World Metrix, February 2009

by Craig Hepburn

DRAINS, STRAINS

AND PAINS:

Four Productivity

Risks Enterprise 2.0

Defeats


» Craig Hepburn | Senior Marketing Manager, Open Text | www.opentext.com



Aquick search on Google throws up a wide range of differing definitions of cloud computing with everything from hosting

blogs on external sites to enterprise software as a service delivered within the firewall and everything in between. But is it actually about technology?

Since the days of the mainframe and dumb terminals, through desktop PCs to smart phones and WiFi enabled devices there has been a constant tussle between the centralising, controlling instincts of the IT department and the de-centralising, freedom of use sought by employees. These swings are as much about control as they are about technology or even capability. With the advent of increased bandwidth to the home and increased home use of personal computing this tension has become even greater.

Pervasive connectivity and sophisticated collaboration tools mean that working “in the flow” is increasingly the norm. Taking in lots of little bits of information from wide ranging sources, working with others to use and improve that information, and then laying a visible trail of your actions for others to follow, is much more productive and quick than the comparatively static world of Word

documents, e-mails, and meetings. So if your toolset at home includes collaborating on Google docs, scanning for input from Twitter, collaborating with experts on Linkedin, what are you going to do “at work”?

In the old days having an office used to be a symbol of status, emblematic of the ability to get things done. Now having an office often means that you have to work with slower bandwidth than you have at home, you have to work within the constraints of a firewall that seems determined to prevent you from doing anything remotely useful, and the range of applications and operating systems available to you seems to have nothing to do with what you’re actually trying to achieve. Working from home has become a much more common phenomenon and the development of tools

and services aimed at freelance and home workers has grown apace. The combination of these two factors, the controlled nature of the workplace and the productivity possible anywhere else, has led many to question the benefits of a conventional “inside the firewall” approach to IT.

But we are not just talking about a technological shift here. We are really talking about a shift in culture that is happening in society at large as more and more of us become part of the networked world. The internet generation who have grown up with the low cost means of production at their finger tips are changing forever the media landscape. With this comes a change in power, how it is is exercised, and what form it takes. This power shift is already beginning to affect the workplace.

“In the old days having an office used to be a symbol of status, emblematic of the ability to get things done. Now having an office often means that you have to work with slower bandwidth than you have at home.”

by Euan Semple

To quote the famous management guru Peter Drucker, “In a knowledge economy there are no such things as conscripts, there are only volunteers. The problem is that we have trained our managers to manage conscripts”. This has never been more true than it is today. More industries than ever depend on smart people and their willingness to share what they know with the companies they work for. The increased ability that those smart people have to take their skills and networks elsewhere places considerable pressure on managers now and in the future. Conventional assumptions about command and control, if indeed they ever worked, rarely do when what is expected is the willing and active participation of networks of smart individuals in the goals of your company.

At a practical level what does this mean? Where is the most productive place for an individual to have information about himself and his work stored? Is it buried in a corporate database left unmanaged, unattended, and out of date for years, or stored somewhere

on the cloud readily available to anyone the individual decides should have access to it? As people become more mobile and much more likely to move frequently from one job to another, having all of your data locked up in an organisation is going to become more and more unacceptable. But what does this mean for managers and their roles?

I’m often asked if the advent of social computing and the cloud means a loss of control for managers. My response is that they never had control in the past anyway. They simply had the appearance of control. For many years now the outside world has been a copy and paste away from members of staff. No matter how fancy your IT security systems, there is little to stop a disgruntled employee from copying text from an internal e-mail and pasting it onto an external bulletin board. Thankfully, what social computing gives managers is an increased opportunity for influence. By engaging in the workplace online conversations, explaining what risks are and how to avoid them, or for that matter what breaches

of contract and how to avoid those too, managers give staff a far greater opportunity to understand what is right and what is wrong and how to behave appropriately.

So the cloud is not just the latest buzzword being used to brand familiar technologies and platforms. It is much more than this. It is a reflection of the shift in the relationship between organisations and the staff they employ, and a shift in how the organisation defines its boundaries with the outside world. To pretend this shift isn’t happening and lock your staff, and your stuff, behind an ever more tightly controlled firewall would be inviting disaster. To rush headlong into deploying cloud based solutions without first considering their implications would be equally foolhardy. The cloud represents an exciting world of opportunities and a much more enabling approach to technology and the ability to get things done in business, than we have ever had before but be aware of the power of this transition and don’t forget to ask for some help on the journey.

» Euan Semple | Freelance consultant | www.euansemple.com

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Social media is facilitating the shift in marketing from its focus on creating awareness to nurturing customer relationships and loyalty

to maximize retention. Crucial to this is the anecdotal evidence or opinions that social media produces, which attracts interest and builds brands — what analysts are calling Engagement Metrics.

Most marketers agree that it’s hard to measure the impact that social media has on buyers. The technologies and tactics are all very new; organizations don’t know how to measure the value that viral video and social network marketing delivers. For example, it’s all but impossible to determine conclusive evidence of blog value. While readership for any blog might be limited to a few thousand people, the viral nature of the Web exponentially increases this activity.

While tools are effective and results are good, the “rub” with social marketing lies in the difficulty in measuring the impact that social media has on buyers.

So, how do you measure engagement metrics? The following tactics should give you insight into how to measure and optimize your social media marketing initiatives.

111111111111111Outline and fully understand your objectives; they will dictate the metrics that you measure. Measuring website traffic and

time spent on your site, for example, is very different to measuring social networking activities.

222222222222222Marry online and offline tactics to run fully integrated marketing campaigns; combine videos, podcasts, blogs, Twitter, Facebook

groups, events and print.

333333333333333Since metrics are still evolving, it’s best to measure effectiveness holistically using a combination of qualitative and quantitative

metrics. Improved analysis of community activity, for example, can be a powerful source on consumer responses, intentions and actions.

444444444444444Segmentation skills are still essential to connecting with a specific audience and making your message relevant. Study

specifically how business buyers in certain

markets use social networking sites. Connect with your consumers using surveys, focus groups and more. Remember to centralize this invaluable information and make it readily accessible.

555555555555555Process is very important. For example, organizations should be focusing more specifically on how social media can support

the sales cycle. At IGLOO, we create processes that profile our customers over time, nurturing prospects and using social activity in our online VIP Room, for example, to establish lead qualification scores.

666666666666666And last but certainly not least, join in the conversation. Respond to your customer’s comments on blogs. Find out what makes them

happy and what turns them off. Involve your engineers in your customer conversations. Comment on their blogs and participate in

their forums and you’ll become a trusted resource instead of a marketing spin doctor.

Although in early stages with regard to B2B customer adoption, social media presents new opportunities to connect customers and prospects, build trust and brand loyalty, and create more tailored messages/campaigns to increase your marketing return on engagement and stakeholder relevancy.

According to a major research analyst firm, the following performance gains were realized in just a year by organizations leveraging social media to improve customer engagement: 96% improved customer advocacy 82% improved their ability to generate customer insights for products/service development

53% reduced market research cost

Now that’s what I call good MROE.

» Elizabeth Hanson | Marketing Director | www.igloosoftware.com

Social Media and Your “Return on Engagement” (ROE)

“While readership for any blog might be limited to a few thousand people, the viral nature of the Web exponentially increases this activity.”

by Elizabeth Hanson

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Point ZeroMagazine Issue 2 October 09

Technology

Transcript of Point ZeroMagazine Issue 2 October 09