Archive for the ‘Dot Comms’ Category

Ok, so now you have got to the small print! Last night, Yahoo! announced that they were closing down their Delicious social bookmarking service. We really like the service and have relied upon it extensively as a kind of online memory. It just works.

We also realised that many of you like it as much as we do so we thought we would offer help to inhouse people looking to back up their bookmarks and help move them to an alternative system. If you would like to talk about your wider social media needs and how we can help you then so much the better.

Feel free to drop us a line.

I think it was Bill Gates who pointed out that people often over-estimate the impact of technologies in the short-term and under-estimate them in the longer term. 25 years ago if you’d have told a typical yuppie holding a Dom Jolly-esque mobile phone that one day even primary school children and the homeless would have mobile phones you would have been laughed at, but it has come to pass.

Becky asked me to pull some predictions together last year which can be found here and get a rough idea of my record of success (or the lack of it) in my virtual crystal gazing. So I thought I would have another go at it this year.

As Bill recognised there is a real difficulty in squeezing things into a 12 month time frame. Key factors that I think may influence things include:

• Whether the western world as a whole will go into the second dip of a double-dip recession. I think that will be increasingly likely for a number of reasons: growing inflation in China, a Republican majority in Congress which will be fighting President Obama on issues like tax cuts and welfare reform, UK government spending cutbacks together with likely interest rises and government-sanctioned inflation will crush UK growth, as for the Eurozone it’s anyone’s guess at the moment
• A second reason is the amount of law suits currently under way between many of the major players currently shaping the future of mobile devices. Whilst they could win in the marketplace, they could be just as easily shutdown in the law courts. I don’t see compromise happening in a lot of cases simply because so many of them have too much to lose. Microsoft is out there fighting for relevance in the fast-approaching mobile future, Apple could see its major growth areas in tablet computing and smartphones wiped out by the courts and Nokia is struggling to stay alive

Net neutrality and intellectual property legislation could throw a spanner in the works:

• Ed Vaizey recently declared the end of net neutrality in the UK at the FT World Telecommunications conference and although there will be a lot of political shellacking it will get steam-rolled through. This boils down to walking away from a free market for online services. Unlike the Digital Economy Act, this is a potential money spinner for both large media companies and large ISPs so will feature little corporate lobbying against it save from Google, possibly joined by Facebook, Microsoft and Yahoo!. Its also an issue that most politicians don’t understand the significance of so will likely do as their told by the whips. I expect that parliamentary digital evangelist and MP Tom Watson won’t make any headway on this and Ofcom or its equivalent will smile and nod indulgently at the Open Rights group but pay no real attention. The UK is likely to be used as an ‘example’ by lobbyists looking to secure similar measures elsewhere
• Implementation of ACTA could put a break on internet and technology innovation as it puts old media rights ahead of new realities of a digital world and consumer protection concepts like fair use which were established during the late 20th and early 21st century.  It could have as big an impact as the Multi-Fibre Arrangement had on the textile industry in the late 20th century. In many ways the analogy is similar, an old uncompetitive industry had protective barriers to help it change or adapt in an orderly manner rather than getting washed away by new cheaper threats. Except ACTA is more about moderating the market flow between the media industry versus new online services rather than the flow of trade around the world in the geographic sense. Whole areas of innovation will now be out of bounds

Enough excuses, 2011 predictions

I suspect that this will be Facebook’s best year ever, however its future beyond 2011 will be significantly influenced by Facebook Messaging. Facebook has a challenge. In order for it it to make money it needs to be able to target advertisements effectively and it has to have active members. There are a number challenges to the activeness of Facebook members:

• Privacy concerns are starting to bite, as danah boyd talked about earlier this year. Add into this consumers increasing awareness of the economic impact that overly frank imagery can have
• Facebook is being seen by its audience as a utility. Many Facebook users log-on to do specific tasks such as find out and respond to event invitations or play Farmville. It’s arguable whether these are truly active engaged Facebook users

Inactive members are a dead-weight that take up storage space on their systems. Individually that cost is not significant but with a large amount of inactive users it starts to cost on a number of fronts: less compelling content to vend advertisements against, less eyeballs to vend advertisements to all adversely affect advertising revenue and then the direct associated storage cost of the inactive profile.

I think that its no accident that the likes of Zynga have been expanding their wings beyond Facebook. Facebook can’t use the stick of kicking out inactive profiles mainly because this would cause dissonance from active members who would see their precious friend numbers decline. Facebook, connect, like and share is about data gathering primarily, though like also makes your Facebook profile look more active than it really is – in this respect it is a shell game that advertisers will eventually wise up to.

Facebook messaging is interesting because IF consumers adopt it, they will be checking in on a regular basis and their communications can be mined for advertisement targeting purposes. So 2011 will be make or break time for Facebook Messaging and the future of the social network as a successful business.

2011 will be make-or-break for Twitter. 2011 should start to see the fruits of Dick Costolo’s efforts to provide a clear long-term vision for Twitter and execute on it. Costolo should be able to formulate a vision by the end of this year and start executing in 2011, whilst Twitter is popular there is still considerable room for future audience growth.

Coupons – the economic condition means that coupons aren’t likely to go away though there will be a thinning out of competition in this field. On the face of it Groupon should be a big winner at least in the US because of its fast-growing audience. I expect that some marketers will get vocal about educating consumers to expect discounts as this diminishes the power of brands, but then many GroupOn clients will be small or medium-sized enterprises more bothered about survival through having an adequate cash-flow.

Gadget sales will have peaked in 2010. A combination of inflation in China, rising interest rates in many countries and the second arm of a double-dip recession I suspect that gadget sales will only be on a par with 2010 or slightly lower rather than showing further growth.

Generation-y will have to suck it up. Up until now generation-y have been pandered to by parents marketers and pundits; however large unemployment numbers and employers having a whip-hand will force them to suck it up in a similar way to what generation-x went through before them. In the same way that the public sector was the miracle market demographic during 2008-to-mid-2010 boomers will be that demographic for 2011. Not having to pay mortgage payments (which are likely to rise) or rent (which is already rising), they are likely to have a better disposable income than most, although many of them may end up being The Bank of Gen-Y so they may not be the saviour that many brands would be looking for.

This is an edited version of a post that first appeared on my personal blog.

I am a big fan of Delicious and noticed that they had been tweaking the ’save window’ interface. The result provided an elegant experience, though I was thrown by the tags box being moved above the (now much smaller) notes box. The way in which tags are suggested seems to be faster and more elegant.

I grabbed a screen shot of what I could, the box looks out of proportion with a lot of white space as Delicious hasn’t resized the amount of screen real-estate that the Delicious toolbar claims when you press the ‘tag’ button. The team at Delicious have published a great blog post outlining their thinking on the redesign: the key takeaway for me being that I am obviously much more verbose than most users in the notes field. This is cross-posted from my personal blog.

Drew Benvie and Mark Pinsent have been writing their thoughts about new social network Path. I wanted to give it a bit of thought before piling in otherwise I would be just going over the same ground that they have already done.

Path is a new social network that has a number of points of interest to the digerati:

• It’s an iPhone app - that’s good because the iPhone is pretty hot at the moment
• It’s got a good user experience
• It’s a social network
• It’s about visual sharing
• It limits the number of contacts that you can have to 50

So what does this all mean?

Facebook isn’t perfect, they’re not as smart as Google and recent history has demonstrated that even Google is fallible. Facebook has a number of weak points:

• Poor user experience - Take your social media maven hat off for a minute and ask yourself how an average consumer is supposed to do many of the tasks which Facebook is capable of? I do it by always gone through help and I get paid to do this kind of thing. What are the visual cues that separate a page, or a community page from a group? Which is probably why 20-and-30-something males interviewed as part of recent research by IPC Media described Facebook as looking old
• Privacy - partly by design by Facebook so they can sell advertising inventory on lots of compelling social data. Partly because of social engineering, Facebook more than anyone else has done more than anyone else devalue the concept of ‘friend’
• Context - Facebook thinks that it is a general purpose social network; a digital Ford Model T. But today the Ford Motor Company sells thousands of variants of each car model and has shares in different brands (currently Mazda and Aston Martin) to appeal to a similarly wide range of customers. Reid Hoffman, founder of LinkedIn realised that no one social network can do it all

Path deals with privacy by narrowing down your social graph to 50 people and presumably keeping this content in the deep web rather than easily crawlable for Google. Context is about your closest friends and family. As for user experience, Facebook has set the bar low.

In some ways its not completely new as a concept. It’s a visual social network like Flickr and Flickr also gives you control over who you share your images with. But that facility isn’t used and its not particularly easy to use. Facebook allows you to create lists of contacts, but again its not that easy to use. Email provides complete tailoring of a list, but we get too much already and as the Claire Swire incident showed; very easy to share.

50-connection limit

The 50-connection limit is something that has got a lot of people talking as it changes the perceived dynamics of social networks.

In a typical symmetrical network like LinkedIn, Friendster or Facebook friends are like stamps to be collected. There are a number of reasons for this:

• Ego: particularly in teens who may interpret their friend number as a loose measure of self-validation and popularity
• The power of loose networks - most experts in network theory claim that having a large loose network tends to be better than having a small close set of connections

In an asymmetric network like Delicious, Twitter or Flickr tend to be networks formed around common interests rather than strictly around relationships. For instance, that could be a relationship with a brand, an expert or a celebrity. I know some of the people who follow me on Twitter, but by no means all 1,648 or so of my followers.

The 50-person limit also has a downside at least from Path’s point of view. Growth is likely to be much slower than normal due to to network effects. Think about this for a moment:

• I can only have 50 people, so I am unlikely to invite all 50 close contacts (if I had them) because I would need to leave a bit of leeway for new people (admittedly, this assumes that I am at a relatively young life stage)
• I can’t ‘drop’ someone because that is so much more of a major put-down than de-friending them on Facebook. They were in my inner sanctum, they would have had to do something pretty heinous in order to cast them out into the night
• When does a girlfriend (or boyfriend) become a sufficient keeper that you invite them to connect on your Path network?

What does this mean for clients | brands?

The first thing I am curious about is how Path will make a profit? What is the clickthrough rate likely to be on adverts vended against the content?

Secondly brand auditing | landscaping | monitoring may be a divisive issue as Path is more akin to private physician networks like Sermo than Facebook in terms of its privacy promise. Snooping would also be difficult because of the visual nature of the content doesn’t lend itself to be processed automatically as easily as text (key word analysis etc).

It may create an artificial bubble of trust: whilst Path content isn’t readily re-shareable, it can be screen shot quite easily and that forwarded on. What this would mean is that if you had content go viral it would take days rather than minutes like it would on Twitter or Facebook.

What it does mean however is that brand experiences shared by people with their networks over Path are likely to carry more impact because of the close nature of the network. So for instance, the word-of-mouth that cycling enthusiast Mark may share about cycling brand Rapha will carry more weight to his nearest and dearest than his wider network.

This means that a brand could have a creeping reputation problem that stays under their monitoring radar until it emerges fully-formed crossing over on to Twitter, Facebook or blog posts. This is cross-posted from my personal blog.

In the UK, the internet industry has become a media sector lobbyists football. From the Digital Economy Bill and the music-mogul entertained holiday in Corfu that Lord Mandelson denied to Labour prospective parliamentary candidate Richard Mollet’s leaked memo it is obvious that there is a political and commercial will to cripple the internet and turn Digital Britain into an analogue third-world country.

Where this likely to focus next is on social media and the uses of social media in marketing. A key problem with social media compared to other marketing platforms such as cinema and television advertising is the lack of effective, respected age barriers. With television advertising you have the 9pm watershed, adverts on rental films can rely on the age classification, as can cinema advertisers and even print adverts can rely on TGI data to demonstrate sufficient care that they weren’t targeting minors.

Contrast this with many social media platforms, notably Facebook, which has a 13 year-old age limit for participation, yet 37 per cent of 5-to-7 year-olds had visited Facebook and 25 per cent of children surveyed had some sort of social network profile according to an Ofcom survey referenced by Fast Company. If you look at applications in Facebook, their purile content could be considered to be aimed at the under-13s.

Ok, but why is this an issue?

OPPORTUNITY COST.

Societies have generally had negative impressions of the latest forms of media and their effect on young people: rock n’ roll and rave music, video games, films, television and the internet have all had this in common. There is no better example of this fear than the Daily Mail’s recent scare story about sexual predators on Facebook.

Conversely, the heat is also going out of other businesses as the time, attention and money moves to social networks:

• Televsion: ITV has seen a progressive decline in advertising revenues and audience figures for a number of years to online properties
• Cinemas can be argued to have had a similar problem stemming back to the 1980s when excessive advertising inventory was considered to impact the cinema-going experience
• Radio stations have seen a reduction in investment and retrenchment from stations due to a lack of revenue
• Newspapers failure to deal with the digital world is legendary

All of these businesses can see revenue going elsewhere that they could consider to be legitimately theirs. The recent BBC retrenchment in online is partly due to the corporate revisiting non-core online franchises and as a way of heading off lobbying by media companies. This has also has to be seen in the catastrophic records that media companies have had on their disastrous online ventures notably Friends Reunited, Bebo and MySpace.

I believe that social networking and social media is especially vulnerable to over-regulation in the UK. There is ample ammunition in the Ofcom report to encourage regulation and the forthcoming governing of social media by the ASA doesn’t fill me with confidence that the regulators understand the very real differences between social media and advertising content.

So what is it likely to mean?

• The biggest impact is probably going to be on application developers who are likely to be further challenged on building viral applications whilst not overtly marketing to children. An application installation may require a ‘date of birth’ registration screen to demonstrate that due care and attention has been paid to reach over 13s
• Facebook advertisers are much more at the mercy of Facebook in terms of the accuracy of age groups, but may have to introduce an age request page as an interstitial after clickthrough
• Moderation on Facebook on groups and comments on fan pages is likely to require heavier intervention to ensure that claims by commenters do not breach ASA guidelines, which is likely to be a buzzkill on community building as consumers will feel excessive constrained and ‘messaged’

But real question will this legislative kraken drive eyeballs and revenues back to the analogue media titans? I don’t think so, there are very few media vehicles that have staged as dramatic a media turnaround, even with a favourable regulatory environment.

For many international brands it maybe looking at pumping more into campaigns driven out of the US at US consumers and hoping for a positive audience bleed from the UK. This has an additional advantage that ASA regulations on competitive adverts can be flouted and campaigns can go negative. This would be a good bet for them. When I was at Yahoo! about half the UK users went to the US site and I would estimate that this was similar with other US online properties. Short of going to a North Korean-style web experience there isn’t much that could be done about this.

A secondary impact of this would be a reduced demand for UK-based agencies and practitioners as technically these campaigns would be US work. Many US-based international corporations would be more than happy to retrench more marketing spend in their own country where their head office managers have more control over the projects to ensure consistency.

Given that, an estimated 48,000 people employed in PR at the moment and social media is the future you are talking about regulation would actively encourage the off-shoring thousands of well-paid white collar jobs, as well as a further dent in the UK as a creative hub for the marketing services sector. This doesn’t include the countless digital creatives in Soho and beyond or the advertising groups like WPP who have decided that the future is digital. Once this talent is gone, there will be no turning back. This was first published at my personal blog.

When the Sex Pistols played their last concert at the famous Winterland Ballroom in San Francisco John Lydon’s final remark to the audience was “Ah-ha-ha. Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated? Good night“.

I was reminded of that phrase when I looked at data by the SASI Research Group (University of Sheffield) which shows how much debt western Europe actually has in comparison to the rest of the world. It is one of the most frightening images I have ever seen.  This was originally published on my personal blog.

Labour, the Lib-Dems and now the SNP all have at least one thing in common, they all seem to have the Tories directly in their crosshairs as the Tories seem to be under the most scrutiny and attack so far in the election campaign.

Of course none of this is a shock, it is only natural for the parties to have a go at each other, but what is striking about the attacks on the Tories is that it would normally be reserved for an incumbent Government, rather than the Opposition. The Tories are obviously the bookies favourite to win the most seats, at the very least the largest number in a Hung Parliament, so they are seen as the biggest threat by all of the parties.

Labour is obviously going after the Tories on everything as their prime competition. The Lib-Dems are trying to impress themselves onto voters as the eligible kingmakers whilst protecting their own seats which is evidenced most recently by Nick Clegg launching a “VAT Bombshell” poster campaign focusing on the Tory tax scheme. Alex Salmond is also trying to scare voters away from voting Tory in Scotland by running with a line that the Tories will go on a “smash-and-grab” spree by reviewing £1billion worth of funding to Scotland.

The latest Lib-Dem attack on the Conservative tax strategy

Of all of the parties, this probably benefits Labour the most as a lot of the “attack-dog” work they would normally have to do is being done by the smaller parties on a far more targeted level than the Labour election war chest would normally allow. The Tories therefore have to spend more time defending their policies and ideas on a national scale as well as batting away attacks on a more geographically targeted scale. Labour, while still needing to point out their perceived flaws in Conservative policy has more of an opportunity to sell in their policies.

Whether this will make a huge difference on Election Day, we will only know on May 7 but what is sure is the Tories would like more scrutiny on Labour, rather than being almost constantly defending their own policies and agenda. Labour would therefore be enjoying the underdog status and it is well known this is a position where Brown feels very comfortable.

Cross posted with my personal blog.

Such excitement in this morning’s scanning meeting as the team pored over the papers trying to spot the April Fools stories. This year seemed to yield more stories than ever before with several clever advertisers getting in on the act as well.

Granted, in some papers it wasn’t so easy to spot which were the April Fools stories and which just fell under the normal brand of ridiculous reporting, with some of our colleagues even convinced that certain papers did not have any irregular features in them…slightly embarrassing not to spot that the Circle Line is probably not going to be home to another Hadron Collider. What?! It was early!

Anyway we thought we would do a roundup of everything we found - have we missed anything!?

Labour’s election strategy: bring on no-nonsense hard man Gordon Brown - The Guardian

Experts find way to stop us ageing - Daily Express

Labour’s election strategy: bring on no-nonsense hard man Gordon Brown - Guardian

If we are to believe The Daily Mirror and the Daily Express, our Majesty has fallen on tough times, and has taken to Flying with EasyJet…be honest - you did have to look twice!

Meanwhile, The Sun wondered how many people might be tempted by a lick of paper, the Daily Mail wowed us with stories of the AA’s new breakdown service.

In France it’s much simpler. Just pin a picture of a fish on someone’s back…. Poisson d’Avril!

For a full list of today’s Fleet St Foolery, click here.

Google has finally left the Chinese market for search, so I thought I would try the alternative Baidu. My trial is gloriously unscientific in nature and not particularly rigorous. I did what most consumers would have done and searched for myself.

I was quite open-minded about this, on the one hand Google has been killing the search market in Europe, nothing can touch it in the EU and they have made moderately successful forays into other sectors as well. I also know that Google is not all conquering, in fact the wheels start to come off the wagon when you venture into areas with non-Roman languages such as Russian, Korean, Japanese and Chinese.

On the other hand, Robin Li over at Baidu is no slouch. Baidu is famous for its huge index and its continued appetite to crawl content whenever and wherever it can find it.

Baidu like its Korean counterpart Naver has also managed to develop a successful social search product running a question-and-answer service like a better version of Yahoo! Answers - largely free of spam and a more middle-class range of participants provide highly relevant quality content.

It is also blatantly obvious that Baidu doesn’t care whether it attracts a potential English-speaking audience as the entire site apart from investor relations is in Chinese.

Methodology

• I searched for “Ged Carroll” on Google’s Hong Kong service and Baidu.com.
• Then I ran the same search on Google Japan and Baidu’s Japanese service.

Outcomes

I was expecting some divergence between Google and Baidu search engine results pages for a number of reasons. Google crawls an estimated 15 per cent of the total web, and Baidu is likely to crawl a slightly larger amount. That means that their search indexes are likely to be slightly different. Secondly the results are usually ‘flavoured’ according to local market preferences such as language and local content.

I was a bit surprised at the level of divergence between Google and Baidu, which was great than I had seen between Google and Yahoo! in the past.

First of all flavouring. A comparison between the Japanese and Chinese versions of Baidu show a high degree of variance between the two versions of the Baidu search engine.

Part of the reason for the difference may be due to Chinese regulations around permitted services, for instance an educational video of me by Econsultancy on YouTube is the top result on the Japanese site and a couple of twitter related hits come in at six and seven. The Japanese site skews much more toward video services than the Chinese site which picked up profile services Plaxo and Naymz.

Interestingly, the Chinese site picked up the re-direct URI for my blog (renaissancechambara.com), whereas neither the Japanese or the Chinese versions picked up my proper domain (renaissancechambara.jp) at all. Even when I clicked a few pages down.

Plotting Baidu China against Google Hong Kong produced an interesting diversity of the results.

Their one point of correlation, my profile on Naymz. Again part of this may be because of my presence on services that don’t do business in China for instance YouTube and Twitter. Google rightly puts more weight and a consequently higher ranking on my Crunchbase and LinkedIn profiles than Plaxo which appears a couple of pages down on Google.

Baidu obviously puts much more emphasis on a historic redirect URI I have for my blog than the ‘real’ one and doesn’t seem to crawl the site in any great depth. I am guessing that this is because of its largely English language content.

In Japan, the Baidu | Google comparison told a similar story. The Google flavouring between Hong Kong and Japanese versions wasn’t that great only showing differences at position five and lower on the page. Baidu Japan managed to pick up my last.fm profile and twitter profile, but didn’t pick up my blog or any professional information on the first page.

In conclusion, Baidu provides a great search experience for consumers, but am uncertain how valuable it would be for people in a professional context, for instance researching foreigners with whom they may be doing business or finding foreign presentations. I can understand why Chinese scientific audiences would be concerned by the departure of Google.

I also suspect that optimising content to make it searchable on Baidu is different to the process that I would go through for Google or Yahoo!, but that would merit far more investigation before I could blog with any confidence about it. This is cross-posted from my personal blog.

It was proclaimed yesterday in the Daily Mail that ‘Junk food is as addictive as heroin’.  The word EXAGGERATION springs to mind.  Not that I doubt the scientific credentials of the research, but comparing our love for chocolate cake to smack, do you not think that’s a bit of a stretch?  Have you ever heard of someone who’d been mugged by an addict to feed his Milky Way habit or a corner shop raided for its Curly Wurlys?  Perhaps it’s time we stopped using the term addict so liberally, because I’m pretty sure I could be accused of being addicted to Bacon Frazzles and Ribena.