Urban Lifestyle Report - New Media (Aug 08)

BRANDS MEDIA PEOPLE

THE INTERNET CLIMATE IN

BRAZIL

DIGITAL BRANDING IN FOCUS: TV-SERIES

Extending Your Brand Reach through Widgets

PROFILE: MARTIN CEDERGREN

Internet Buzz; what are people watching, sharing & discussing?

Editor in Chief Tomas Nihlén [email protected] +46 8 501 64 377 Editor & Creative Director Linda Pierre [email protected] +46 8 501 64 376 Research & writing Tomas Nihlén, Linda Pierre, Lisa Sculati, Lia Dutra & Carl Johan Malmsten Subscription 5 issues/year, contact us for prizes. To buy one single report, head over to Filehill.com Images & illustrations Images and illustrations are all if not taken by any of our writers, been approved by the copy holder, free of use for commercial purpose or are licenced under Flickr Creative Commons. Webpage & blog www.urbanlifestylereport.com www.urbanlifestylereport.com/newmedia

We at Urban Lifestyle like change. And given the fact that you are holding an issue of ”Urban Lifestyle Report – New Media” in your hand (or reading it on the screen) you probably do too. Because if you didn’t like (or at least accepted) change, then you would’nt want to read about how the Internet is changing the marketing arena. Now that we have established that, here comes the news – there are some changes to this report.

First you will probably notice both the new design and the structure of the contents. We hope you like it and that it will improve your experience reading this report. The second change is that we have decided that (also when it comes to this report) quality is more important than quantity. So we are changing the production schedule to 5 reports per year. This will not affect your subscription in any other way than the frequency of the issue. Next issue will be out in October.

That’s it, I hope you will enjoy it as much as we do!

Tomas Nihlén, Editor in Chief and writer. Co-founder of Urban Lifestyle. Holds a very strong interest in new media and how Internet is changing the fundaments of the whole marketing arena. He parttcularly keeps an eye on the evolving Internet video scene. Also loves podcasting both as viewer and creator.

TIMES THEY AREA-CHANGIN´

CONTRIBUTORS

Linda Pierre, Editor and responsible for layout & design. Co-founder and co-owner of Urban Lifestyle. She is also marketing director for an e-commerce site in the travel accessories category. Linda enjoys actually using social media in her daily work instead of just talking about it.

Lisa Sculati, Writer. San Francisco based freelance writer and radio journalist. Enjoys exploring the latest trends in new media, blogging about Sweden, learning Swedish and spending time outside. Has worked with so called ”old media” or ”traditional media” for more than a decade.

Lia Dutra, Strategic Planner at Africa Propaganda in Brazil, likes talking about planning and advertising, and almost everything under the sun. She graduated with a degree in Marketing and Advertising, and before Africa, she contributed to several projects at JWT and on brands such as Unilever.

Carl Johan Malmsten, reports from Perth, Australia where he is a student at Edith Cowan University, majoring in Advertising and Marketing. When he has spare time from studies and writing about new media entering the Australian environment, he yaps about music to his tired fellow students.

IN THIS ISSUE 2008.08

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4. BRANDS

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COVER PHOTOGRAPH BY:JairoBD

12. MEDIA

28. PEOPLEIn this issue we are taking a closer look at the TV industry to see what some of the brands in that category are doing right now in new media. We will also cover some mobile marketing news and take a look at some social media mistakes by big brands.

Music in your phone, widgets as marketing strategy, micro-blogs as a business tool and much much more. And don’t miss Lia Rodriguez Dutra’s captivating article on the Internet scene in Brazil.

Are people really putting up with pre-rolls on video clips? The news is getting more social and the people are buzzing about ”Barack Rolls”, manga faces and Paris Hilton running for president.

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36. miscellaneousMartin Cedergren from 180 Amsterdam gets profiled, we give you our best tips on tools and inspirational sites at the moment. And finally Tomas Nihlén takes off the gloves and goes on a rant against old school thinking from the likes of H&M.

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ocation-based mobile services is perhaps the hottest thing around in the mobile sphere since SMS started gaining traction back in the day. Often these services are competing on a level

of technical complexity, but sometimes the most complex service isn’t the best one. It’s a matter of using the platform in a way that suits the audience. Just in the same way as all parts of social media aren’t right for every company; just adding a YouTube-channel and blog isn’t guaranteed success for a company. In the mobile scene, Luis Vuitton seems to have hit the jackpot with their campaign “Louis Vuitton Soundwalk”. Using what mobile experts would even call simple technology.

The Louis Vuitton Soundwalk lets users pick a city in which they want to take one of the three different “soundwalks” in, Beijing, Hong Kong or Shanghai. Each walk follows in the footsteps of a local female cinema icon, Gong Li (Beijing), Shu Qi (Hong Kong) and Joan Chen (Shanghai). If you decide to follow a soundwalk it will take you on a tour for an hour and the narrator will guide you along the street in the selected city in real time accompanied by the typical sounds of that city.

The experience is said to mimic that of a cinema, which is not surprising since the original soundtrack and the script is written by cinema professionals.

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Luis Vuitton extends brand through mobile

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BRANDSIn each issue we explore what brands are doing to prosper in the digital age and how the area of branding is evolving thanks to new media. In the section ”Digital Branding in Focus” we take a closer look at a specific brand category.

Text: Tomas Nihlén

Luis Vuitton extends brand through mobile Successful mobile marketing campaigns Digital branding in focus: TV-series Social media mistakes...

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recent newsletter from Mobile Marketing Association presented 14 successful and inspiring mobile campaigns. Below you’ll find three such examples that utilize mobile phones as channels in different ways.

In McDonald’s campaign, “SMS Lounge,” a mobile voucher campaign, customers send an SMS to register with their favourite McDonald’s restaurant. Every two weeks, they receive a voucher in QR format which is scanned at the restaurant. QR means “quick response” and basically is a two dimensional barcode that can contain far more information than a regular barcode. QR codes are extremely popular in Japan. The goal for McDonald’s campaign: to build loyalty and drive more people to the restaurants. Vouchers were chosen because everyone loves a freebie. The vouchers do not offer freebies but they do offer deep discounts.

The second interesting campaign is a proximity marketing campaign situated in the Spanish shopping mall L illa Diagonal in Barcelona. L illa has worked with proximity marketing for several years. The backbone in its system is a permanent bluetooth circuit inside the shopping mall. In a recent campaign to drive people to the mall, the company gave away free digital comics called

MACANUDO by the Argentinean cartoonist Liniers. Every week, visitors would receive a new cartoon to their cell phone via Bluetooth and/or WiFi. The campaign had two goals: to increase loyalty among existing customers and generate new customers for L illa. For Liniers, the campaign was all about generating buzz ahead of a new launch.

The third interesting example presented by MMA was a mobile campaign for BMW’s 1 series. This campaign used mobile phones as a tool to segment and target the right group of consumers. The purpose of the campaign was a classical challenge for car brands: to create leads and sign-ups for information and for test-driving the new cars. MMA says it was a great success.

SUCESSFUL MOBILE MARKETING CAMPAIGNS

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Text: Tomas NihlénPhoto: <Kirill

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TV-series

Digital branding in focus:

In this issue, we will take a closer look at the TV industry to find out how it’s using new

digital opportunities to build brands and reach out to consumers.

Text: Tomas Nihlén

BRANDS MEDIA PEOPLE

Digital BloodLately we’ve seen lots of buzz surrounding the new TV series on HBO,“True Blood,” in the blogosphere. The series is created by the same man who brought you Six Feet Under. This time, vampires are roaming the streets like regular folks and blood comes bottled with the fake label TruBlood. As you might have noticed, the “e” is missing from the brand name, and that is no coincidence. It’s well thought out since the blood is actually synthetic and comes in all the different blood types (A, B and so on).

Some of the taglines for TruBlood read:

“All flavor. No bite.”

“Suck on this”

“Real blood is for suckers”

“Friends don’t let friends drink friends”

Check it out for yourself at the product site here. When you enter this page, you are not asked for your year of birth, but rather your century of birth...

HBO teamed up with Campfire on the campaign for this series, which includes a number of different channels. The first step was to send out 1,000 letters back in May to vampire bloggers and sci-fi enthusiasts. In this letter, there was a mysterious code for them to break. Online discussions about this code started to build up and after a while,

some of these truth seekers with a language degree managed to solve the puzzle. The code then brought them to a fake website about vampires where they could video chat with an actress playing the role of a gatekeeping vampire. Visitors to this site would try their best to convince the gatekeeper that they were actually vampires and that they deserved a spot on the site. A blog called Bloodcopy was set up to report on the stories from both the vampire site and the series itself with over 80 video clips produced by Campfire to explain the back story. You will find links on the blog where the story continues on sites like Facebook, Last.fm. MySpace, YouTube and Twitter.

Throughout the campaign, users have been invited to submit all kinds of content to help the story move forward. All content has been reviewed from several perspectives, like what they contribute to the story and also the legal perspective before being published, according to an AdAge video that you find here (video).

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The TV series Mad Men is set in the 1960s in New York. A time of naivety in many ways, but also a time when consumers started to understand that products like cigarettes just might be harmful to their health. The advertising industry was just starting to enter a more complex era where they couldn’t sell any product just by creating creative and expensive advertising. The creators of this show decided to bring the characters into the 21th century by using Twitter to let the viewers follow their characters between shows. Don Draper, for instance, can be found here (via Adrants). Some of the rest of the characters have popped up here, here, here and here. Great way to use social media for a product that is interesting enough to get people engaged in it.

Back in 2005, News Corp (the owner of Fox) bought MySpace for 580 million U.S. dollars. In the first couple of years after the sale, the digital social networking scene was dominated by MySpace. But something happened along the way and Facebook stole the crown as king of the (European and North American) social networking services. Now this trend is affecting Fox’s marketing strategy. When it comes to choice of media channels, Fox executives are favoring Facebook over MySpace, writes The New York Times. This is what Joel Cheatwood, Senior Vice President for Development at Fox News said about this choice in the article:

“Facebook is currently the leading social network,” and he goes on to say, “They also have a user that’s a little older and a little more sophisticated, (with) discussion boards, a wall for users’ comments, reviews, polls and photo submissions.”

They have also designed a videoplayer, allowing users to watch their videos and share clips on social networking sites. I guess it’s good that they chose their platform based on user profiles rather than what they own themselves.

Even 1960s advertising professionals use Twitter now

Fox abandons their own MySpace for Facebook?

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The wildly popular TV series Seinfeld ran between 1989 and 1998 and thereby missed some of the new kids on the block. An audience that some refer to as the millennium generation, brought up in front of a computer. Sony Pictures thinks this series is still relevant today, ten years later (and I would have to agree on that point). So to reach this new audience, they packed a huge biodiesel-fueled bus and hit the road, travelling through 26 cities in the U.S. (where else?) On this road trip, they let college students try some of the characteristic Seinfeld food like black and white cookies and Snapple. To bring this trip into the 21th century, they also brought 3 laptops, inviting visitors to explore Seinfeld on their MySpace, Facebook and of course their page on Sony, according to MediaPost. The Sony page contains extra material, including some short video clips, wallpapers and a Google Map of the series. Interestingly enough, the MySpace page seems to have been removed for some reason, and at the moment, is not accessible.

Seinfeld trying to reach college students

The biggest media spectacle during the recent weeks is of course the Olympic Games in Beijing. We have deliberately chosen not to write about this since it has been over exposed in other media outlets. But there is one angle that is still interesting for us to cover, and that is what happened to the sponsoring brands in the social media sphere? A social media analytics company called Collective Intelligence tracked eight of these sponsors to see what kind of footprints they left in social media according to an article on AdRants. They tracked blogs, social networking services, forums and other places where online discussions take place. Three of the brands saw a significant increase in exposure. Visa for instance increased by 141 per cent, McDonalds by 51 per cent and Coca-Cola by 17 per cent.

Much of the attention was generated due to their Bluetooth campaign which happens to be the first of its kind in marketing history of the Olympic Games. That certainly helped increasing the interest surrounding these brands. According to the study there was also some negative attention related to these brands concerning civil right issues and the fact that they are playing by Chinese rules. But they didn’t see any indications of a single brand being specifically targeted with this critique.

Olympics

Social media

AdAge filmed a speech by marketing blogger Joseph Jaffe from the blog Jaffe Juice. In the 8 minute long clip Jaffe talks about different types of mistakes brands can make in the social media scene and also gives actual examples of companies that have failed.

Social media mistakes...For instance Sprint Mobile ran a campaign with the message that things were changing and that they had a new CEO and even ended the spot by giving the viewers the email address for the CEO. They encouraged consumers to get engaged, but those who chose to send an email to the new CEO only received an automated reply by another employee at Sprint, thanking them for feedback on the new campaign. He also mentioned Sony’s fake blog “All I want for Xmas is a PSP” which we have written about before.

But a mistake is of course a relative and subjective term. One thing might be considered as a success to one person and a missed opportunity to another. It depends if you focus on what you have achieved with a campaign or what you didn’t achieve and what opportunities you missed. For instance a recent campaign by Ben & Jerry’s called “Imagine Whirled Peace” to which the brand of course also introduces a new flavour with the same name. The campaign site lets visitors register and upload a “message of peace” for an event called Peace Day on September 21st. See for yourself here. Some might say it’s a step in the right direction or even a success. But according to this blogger they could have done more. Her critique is mainly about the lack of actual social aspects. B&J could have taken this opportunity to create an actual community around the brand and the site by letting people interact with each other more. So is this a success or a symbol of lost opportunities? Well that lies in the eyes of the beholder.

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Text: Tomas Nihlén

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US presidential candidate Barack Obama has tried and succeeded to create buzz around his pick of a vice president candidate. People who wanted to be first to know about the pick could sign up for a SMS alert and thereby get a kick from the feeling of being first. The Twitter crowd were waiting impatiently for the notification so they could tweet about this until their fingers would start to hurt, or so it would seem anyway. Lots of people using Twitter are very pro Obama, so it was no surprise to see the news dominating Twitter for while after the announcement. Unfortunately the news leaked to mainstream media before the SMS announcement was send out ,which sort of created an anticlimax for many people anticipating the news via SMS.

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In an earlier issue this year, we wrote about a new YouTube function called “annotation.” This function lets video creators allow for some interactivity in the videos by inserting decision points where the viewers can choose between parallel story lines. Depending on their choice, they are led to different clips and the user experience shifts depending on these selections.

Right now there is an interesting example of a big brand using this functionality in a campaign. The brand is Samsung and the product in focus is a mobile phone called “INSTINCT” (a typical iPhone competitor). The story begins (video) in a messy (probably bachelor) apartment and the main character has overslept after a night with a (presumable) one-night stand. He is late for work and must hurry to a meeting at the office. All the videos are shot from a first person perspective and the viewer constantly gets to choose between one selection or the option to “Follow Your INSTINCT.” Depending on the choices, this will lead the story in somewhat different directions. No matter what choices you make, the INSTINCT is always with you, and by INSTINCT I mean the mobile phone.

The general feeling in this campaign is that it is somewhat funny and perhaps somewhat sexist and reminds you of games like Leisure Suit Larry from the 1980s. Nevertheless interesting to see a big brand like Samsung try something innovating in the new media arena.

Samsung Tests Your Instinct In Interactive Video Campaign

Barack Obama embraces SMS to try to go viral with VP announcement

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mediaIn this section we explore how the new media landscape is evol-ving and what it means to marketers. Focus lies on the new tools and channels that can be used to understand and reach the consumers.

There is no way you can write about mobile marketing right now without mentioning the iPhone, even though many of you might be getting a bit tired of iPhone news. The biggest iPhone news of late is certainly the arrival of the iPhone 3G and the global launch of the device. Country after country is now getting its hands on legitimate iPhone versions and the gadget happiness should be complete. But there seem to be some problems in paradise. A woman in Arizona filed a lawsuit against Apple for overstating the speed of the new iPhone 3G, according MacWorld. Not great timing for Apple, struggling with iPhone 3G connectivity problems, despite updated software for the phone. Will this damage the Apple brand or not? That remains to be seen.

FIRSTTHE iPHONE....

Extending your brand reach through widgets Australia goes online - Part 1 Making the most of your micro-blogging experience Brazil. A country with a lot of potential

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Text: Tomas Nihlén

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Both Vodaphone and O2 have recently launched mobile music stores according to mocoNews.net. Vodaphone Music is an application based service that only works on Windows mobiles and lets users buy individual songs without a subscription. O2’s competing service is called “My Play” and was recently added to the “O2 Active” portal. This service is “artist led,” meaning all artists have a micro-site to build loyalty with fans and to lead them to make purchases in the store. The only music label onboard this service though is Sony BMG.

Another mobile music service called MusicStation seems to have struck gold with 500 000 downloads during their first 10 days after launching. This service is a subscription based service with an “all-you-can-eat” model. There is a big difference between MusicStation and the two operator-driven music stores, the difference is called “off portal” or “on portal”. An “on portal” mobile site or store is connected to a certain mobile operator and an “off portal” dito is available to all mobile users no matter what operator the users are tied to.

An “off portal” music store like MusicStation can build a competitive store and a strong brand as a well implemented mobile store. They can focus on being the best mobile music store on the market, and only that. While the operators are running a complex business, the music store is only one small area and not considered to be their core business. What kind of service will be the mobile version of iTunes Store? We just might have to wait and see...

mobile

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Text: Tomas NihlénIllustration: Blog.spoon graphics music

news

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Sometimes they’re funny. Sometimes they’re cute. Sometimes they’re evocative. They can spark interest or curiosity. We’re talking about web widgets, portable chunks of interactive code inside a module, sometimes referred to as gadgets.

EXTENDING YOUR BRAND REACHTHROUGH WIDGETS

ike. National Geographic. YouTube. Epicurious. iTunes. Twitter. Last FM. MySpace. Facebook. All of these big names are expanding their online audience and their brand

reach through the use of widgets. They are “widgetizing” their messages on their websites or blogs or through social networks.

Global market research firm comScore reports that close to 148 million Internet users in the U.S. view widgets in a month’s time, according to the latest statistics. That would indicate 81 percent of the American Internet audience is reachable through widgets. MySpace widgets recorded the widest audience in the latest stats,

building a relationship with an audience of more than 57 million Internet users.

Critics say widgets can zap a marketing budget and hurt more than help if the cost does not translate into a larger customer/client base, or if consumers don’t connect with or retain the message from a widget. But widgetizing your message, just like any other method to drive more traffic to a website and generate more interest in a product or service, requires the right marketing effort. On that end, Peter Yared, Founder and CEO of i-Widgets, says his company makes it very easy for existing websites to

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Text: Lisa SculatiIllustration: Lisa Sculati

extend their user activity and content into social networks, with a strong focus on driving traffic back to the site. “Our job is to make it seamless so that a website owner does not have to go learn all of the ins-and-outs of each destination and hire a programming team for each one.” Yared is confident that widgets are the future of online ads, offering an audience a plethora of opportunities to engage with online marketing content.

Attending an event called “Widgets Up the Wazoo” in San Francisco in August, hosted by SF New Tech, I got the chance to pick the brains of some of Silicon Valley’s top widget distributors and marketers, including Yared. A packed house of more than 200 widget enthusiasts, and skeptics, turned out to see what’s going on in the world of widgets and widget marketing.

Lawrence Coburn of Sexy Widget, providing reviews and analysis of widgets, toolbars, and distributed businesses, says YouTube is probably the best example of a website that blew up (with traffic) due to the proliferation of its widgets. “By enabling MySpace users to distribute their flash video player via their MySpace profiles, YouTube was quickly able to achieve a spectacular exit - a sale to Google for $1.6 B.”

How are widgets helping smaller or not so well known companies, interactive marketers, PR professionals and entrepreneurs? “One of the biggest trends I’m seeing in widgets right now is the advent of very sophisticated widget publishing tools,” says Coburn. “These tools allow agencies and marketers to easily widgetize their own content, priming it for viral distribution. Widget publishing tools include

the offerings of companies such as iWidgets and KickApps.” He goes on to say that Clearspring, Gigya, and Widgetbox are the three largest players providing widget infrastructure and analytics tools. “Right now very few companies have extended their presence into social networks, which is something that I think is going to change very

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Photo: mksilvey

In these times of “back-to-school” campaigns Adidas is betting its money on a widget campaign called “The New School of Thought”. The widget lets people play and download music by Ultraviolet Sound for free and was created by trueAnthem, a social music label that gives free music to consumers and let brands tap into the popularity and possible viral effecst of the music. Adidas is hoping fans of Ultraviolet Sound will put the widget on their blogs or social network pages to spread both the music and the Adidas brand amongst their friends. Using the widget also gives you a 30% discount on any Adidas Original item and by it kills two birds with one stone.

ADIDAS GIVES AWAY MUSIC VIA WIDGET

users of the website and new users consuming the site’s content in the widget.”

#3 New Users:“Widgets expose websites to new groups of users all over the web. These can be bloggers looking for new content, social network users finding widgets on friends profiles, or users searching the galleries like Widgetbox.”

At Widgets Up the Wazoo, Goodwin helped me create my own “Blidget,” a Widgetbox term for a widget for blogs. It took about 2 minutes and spread the content from my personal blog virally. Bloggers use blidgets to drive more web traffic to their site from targeted and unexpected sources.

“Widgets are valuable marketing tools not only because they have the potential to go viral and reach a wide audience,” says Goodwin, “but also because they can be targeted to very specific demographics. Widgets can take advantage of specific distribution levers within the web to bring a specific message and interactive content to the right audience. “

quickly,” says Yared. Social networks are showing increasing traffic and user stickiness, and most websites have flat user growth. Eyeballs will soon start to follow the content (from their widgets).”

Widgetbox Co-founder and CTO Giles Goodwin says he sees three solid examples of widgets helping to bump up website traffic:

#1 SEO (Search Engine Optimization): “Widgets can help drive traffic through SEO by linking to websites. The widgets also do well at SEO alone. For example this Olympics widget received strong traffic from organic search within 15 minutes.”

#2 Campaigns: “We at Widgetbox offer widget promotion campaigns for companies that want to kick start their widget traffic. We have seen massive uptake of subscribers and unique viewers directly due to these campaigns, meaning new

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ne of the most debated campaigns of Australia during the last few weeks has been the new JWT and MindShare created campaign for Vegemite (concentrated

yeast extract, much like Marmite, which you usually spread on toast). Being one of the most beloved brands of Australia, it has an effect on everyone living on the great island. Understanding this, JWT and MindShare launched the “How do you like your Vegemite?” campaign, aiming to engage consumers with a brand they have loved since childhood with TV, outdoor, print, POS (point of sale) and digital ads.

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The idea is to drive consumers to the campaign-site and let them have their say to how they prefer their Vegemite, whether it is Nudist, Redback, Tiger Toaster, Scrambler or PhillyMite. Online consumers can follow how the different states of Australia have voted.

Even if the campaign is good as an idea, the bigger story regarding the campaign is the fact that JWT and MindShare are going online in addition to TV. Australia is lagging behind in Internet standards and this effects the use

of online marketing, however, there’s certainly use of digital media

in Australia, but not to the extent that we are used to

in Europe and the U.S. According to Carlo Bertozzi, founder of one-year-old digital agency Longtail and

already regarded as Perth’s best, Australia

has reached a plateau, due to the slow implementation of

broadband in the market.

With the growth of the Internet “down under,” there’s also a growth in digital advertising, which is expected to increase 35% during 2008 (Price Waterhouse Coopers). With this come the growth of campaigns going online and hopefully the growth of agencies/clients having the courage to increase engagement with consumers online.

Text: Carl Johan MalmstenPhoto: robsmith-qld

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One and a half years in one of the world’s most isolated cities, with one more year to go, may not sound appealing. Especially when I started through Berghs School of Communication in Stockholm, which provides Bachelor of Communications exchange programs. But the fact is that Perth, on the west coast of Australia, feels more like a breeding ground than a place were you get hampered.

Perth is a great place to ease into the field of advertising with the university working closely with the industry in Perth and having lecturers with lots of experience. These lecturers include Diane Slade, who recently was appointed Vice-President for International Advertising Association, and Martin Trevaskis, editor of Campaign Brief WA.

A fellow student, also from Berghs School of Communication, Markus Kähr, has spent the last couple of months working on the graphic design layout for the inaugural IAA Dentsu Global Student Poster Challenge, supported by the United Nations.

Carl J Malmsten

ISOLATION CITYText: Carl Johan MalmstenPhoto: dnigh

New micro-blogging services appear to spring up every day, offering you a multitude of avenues to promote your business, make new professional contacts and more ways to

connect with those in your field.

Making the Most of Your micro-blogging Experiences(and enjoying it in the process!)

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Text: Lisa SculatiIllustration: Geek&Poke

I discover a new way to simplify my online life every day through my contacts on Twitter and Jaiku. You can do so much with 140 characters. Make your friends and business contacts aware of a new advertising campaign, a new blog post, a new service, a new social network tool, an event not to be missed. Business relationships have the potential to grow deeper through connections made though micro-blogging. Much has already been written about Twitter, Jaiku, Pownce, Friendfeed, Tumblr, Brightkite, Plurk, Identi.ca, Kwippy, Socialmedian and Blippr. Some marketers and entrepreneurs sign up for all of these services and use Ping.fm, HelloTxt and numerous other aggregator channels to submit their message to all of their micro-blogging sites at once. But I still read messages on Twitter saying “I just don’t get micro-blogging. What’s the point?” Let’s take a look at how four professionals in the Nordic region are simplifying and improving their business lives through micro-blogging.

Annika Lidne of Stockholm’s Disruptive Media AB says she uses micro-blogging for several different purposes. “As a research tool, I use it to ask questions about what my customers would like to see in the future, for instance which speakers they would like to listen to at an upcoming event. I use it as an information tool. In addition to direct posts, my blog feeds are published to my micro-blogging services so my followers are up to date with the information I want them to have. This way I also build a reputation as an expert in my field. I also use micro-blogging as a direct sales tool. If I have a concrete offer, like an upcoming event, I tip my contacts off - if they are in my target group (important - don’t spam people!) It’s very important to be friendly, humble and not come across like a marketer. The message should just be a short tip to a friend with a link for more information.”

Lidne says micro-blogging works great as an interactive event tool. “Before, during and after each of my conferences we use a Jaiku channel for information, updates and chats. During the conference we have one person with the specific duty to blog the event live. This makes it possible for the online audience to ask questions and comment on the speakers. The presenters also quickly put up links to their uploaded slideshows etc. We run the Jaiku channel on a separate big screen projector at the side of the stage so everyone can see the conversation. This often results in some of the online audience wanting to attend in person the next time around.” I asked Annika if the numerous channels to feed ever feels overwhelming. “No, I don’t feel overwhelmed. If you do, turn it off for a

while. It should be fun and useful, not a burden. I save time by using

micro-blogging services, not the other way around. If I’m

really busy I simply turn them (the micro-blogging services) off. My email load has decreased dramatically by using a combination of micro-

blogging services. Keeping up is mostly a matter of

using the available technology in a smart way and filtering out the

noise. Since I’ve started micro-blogging, I’ve

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”Before, during and after each of my

conferences we use a Jaiku channel for informtion, up-

dates and chats...”- Annika Lidne

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gotten a completely new set of friends, both personal and business wise, with whom I’m in constant contact with.

We often meet for face to face business meetings, to exchange information or just for fun. I’ve acquired a personal following of about 150 people that I have access to for any questions I have. It’s a consumer panel, research group and sounding board rolled into one.” Stockholm entrepreneur Thomas Lidforss says he began micro-blogging half a year ago. “In the beginning, I micro-blogged just to play with it. Then I put more thought into how to use the services. The biggest benefit: it’s like putting more firewood into the fireplace.

It keeps burning, creating more contacts, more people who will then read about your services on blogs and websites. More people to blogs and websites leads to more people contacting you about new business opportunities. Lidforss says it’s also great for advice. “I once asked about SIM card service providers and got an excellent answer within 15 minutes.” “I don’t find it (all the services) overwhelming. You only micro-blog as much and when you feel like it. I think the big advantage of micro-blogging is that it is personal (at least it started as such). I think that is a highly untapped service most companies have not understood yet.” Founder of Arctic Startup.com and Co-

founder of Finland’s Gylenne Skor, Antti Vilpponen says he really got into blogging at the end of 2006, when Jaiku started picking up speed in Finland. “The biggest benefits from services like these are relatively close to similar advantages from Facebook - they enable virality and spread messages fast. I use it to market myself and thus “brand” myself as well for public relations. It’s a great test of what flies and what I need to work on.” Vilpponen says he mainly uses Jaiku for micro-blogging, due to the community that is built there, but also because he got acquainted with it before testing out Twitter and other services. “I use Twitter passively. I have applications pushing the content to Twitter from other

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places, such as Jaiku and my ArcticStartup. Then I also use Facebook (which in a sense is the largest micro-blogging platform in the world) with my friends and a larger social circle due to its widespread popularity.” Johan Bryggare, Web Manager at SEB in Stockholm, says that he uses micro-blogging as a conversational tool in which he interacts with his network and expands it by finding new, interesting people to connect with. “The micro-blogging services are also very useful to keep on top of what’s happening in my field. Most of my Jaiku contacts are Swedish and the conversation also takes place in Swedish. For Twitter I use English and I have other contacts there. Right now I’m having a look at Identi.ca and Plurk. I sign up for many new services and try them out.” Bryggare says he uses different aggregating services, searches and mashups to handle the information streams and tools that facilitate posting to several of the services. “I began to micro-blog around the end of 2007. Mainly because I was curious and wanted to see what it was all about and also to keep updated on new technologies. I’ve gained a lot

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from them. It’s great to be able to connect and interact with some of the thought leaders of my industry and it’s great to find the latest trends in the field. And the sharing of knowledge and generosity in the networks is just amazing.”

I agree with Bryggare. I have to admit that none of my close friends have started micro-blogging yet. But my blogging and business experiences grow richer every day thanks to a supportive, knowledgeable and entertaining network of contacts on Twitter and Jaiku.

BRANDS MEDIA PEOPLE

BRAZIL. A COUNTRY WITH A LOT OF POTENTIAL STILL TO BE WORKED ON

razil has definitely fallen into the web. National Internet access increases everyday. Nowadays,

47% of the people in the country (over the age of 16) navigate through the web. That represents over 59 million users. Six months ago, only 38% of the population had frequent access to the web. And by 2009, the prediction is that half of the entire population – 90 million people – will be online. That’s rapid growth.

In Brazil, users spend more time online per month when compared with the rest of the world. Their

Internet usage accounts for more than 22 monthly hours, against 20

hours in France and 17.5 hours in Germany. Brazilians

are completely attached to

the social

B

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Text: Lia DutraPhoto: JairoBD

network Orkut and the virtual world Second Life. Over 27 million users have personal profiles on Orkut, a Google site, the most popular relationship website here.

In 2007, Brazil reached the mark of 50 million domestic and corporate computers according to FGV. The total sales prediction for 2008: more than 13 million PC’s. The proportion of the population that own PC’s is 26 machines for every 100 people; the global average is 21 PCs for every 100 people.

All of this together means we have a great environment and potential to work on the digital sphere. When TV first came to Brazil, it took 27 years to reach half of the population. With all the predictions, the internet will do the same in only 14 years considering its start in Brazil in 1995. Also talking about this comparison, it’s important to note that in 2007, more PC’s than TV’s were sold, the so-called consumption dream for the low income social level. When it comes to the audience, the web is the second placed medium in Brazil, with double the percentage of pay-TV users, the medium that comes in third.

You probably think this is all good news, right? It could be, actually it should be. Our major inhibition issue to access the web is the connection cost. In Brazil, the connection is 395 times more expensive than in Japan. And all over the world, the lack of access to the web also seems to be related to income. According to recent research, that this is not entirely true anymore. In Brazil, the inexistence of any kind of relation between a person’s income and their access to the web is pretty clear. While there have been some comparisons made with other countries such as the U.S. and France, Brazil is living out it’s own unqiue phenomenon in terms of the popularization of the digital mediums. It is expensive to have Internet access at home, but cheap and free public access makes it possible for people to use it more.

According to research made by the Datafolha Institute, 29% of access to the web in Brazil is made in LAN houses, 21% at home, 21% at friends or relatives’ houses and 10% in schools and universities. 9% of all that is done from free access local spots.

A great “experiment” we have going are “digital cities,” where the mayors contribute to open the wi-fi network for everyone. And this has brought some amazing and unexpected results. In São Paulo State, a little town called Sud Mennucci had its analphabetism reduced by half. Carnápolis, in Paraná and Quissamã, in Rio, are also implementing some other experiments with the free open bandwidth. It has become such a relevant fact in our reality that last July free wireless Internet was installed in one of the most famous avenues in Rio and its surrounding areas. The idea is to reach over 100 thousand users. Besides the “digital cities,” another notable initiative in Brazil is the Digital Porto in Recife, a ten year old technology project that has put us among the greatest software and digital programmers for the web in the world.

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Aside from the phenomenal numbers, we should also look at this from the qualitative and behavioral point of view. Much like the U.S. And Europe, we see a mobilization via the web. The tendency is to use the web as a leisure option in all social levels – just as the TV was long ago.

The biggest share of our users navigate the web everyday and another large amount do it from four to six times a week. That makes up almost 50% of our users, heavy users of the internet. This medium allows us to connect to people [consumers, as well] in their work hours and its prime time lasts almost 12 hours. A few weeks ago, Petrobras showed recognition of the importance of the web with the launch of a contest with 7 websites focused on electronic and digital art. Some people talk about the end of broadcast and the birth of socialcast – in the web, everyone’s got a voice, everyone can be ‘journalist’. Traditional newspapers are losing their share day by day. We talk a lot about its end.

Obviously, as a natural reflex of what happens all over the world, we live a strong audiovisual consumption through Internet and there is a large number of music, film and video downloads everyday. But that has become small compared to the growth of the collaborative content. Over half of the users post some kind of material of their own online. Social networks, relationship communities and mediums where people are able to upload their work [such as Slideshare and others], besides the blogs and photologs, have become a must with the 2.0 web.

For our [advertising and communication] industry, this all shows us amazing opportunities for the usage of digital mediums and online media to develop marketing strategies. It just needs to be encouraged.

After the internet began – especially as a medium for publicity - Brazil became famous for its banners and websites. Web da gente (The People’s Web, in English) – a “Brazilian version” of

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Google and Orkut heads for Brazil

Google has chosen to place their Latin American headquarters in Brazil since it is their fastest growing market in this region according to TechCrunch. Google’s growth in Brazil is impressive and there is an estimated revenue here of 500 million US dollars. Not bad from a staff of 200 people and when you realize that this office has only existed for three years.

This news comes not long after social networking service Orkut did the same thing. In Orkut’s case all development and management was just moved here. Not so surprising maybe that they took the same route since Google owns Orkut and the social network is huge in Brazil.

The FWA – shows some great branded and also personal work. But Brazil is still too small in digital marketing.

The major issue Brazil still faces is the lack of investment. The web here is still viewed as a secondary non-important medium. The good and hopeful perspective we have about the new media expansion is that the investments will follow the growth of the web. But imuch still has to be worked on.

Brands in Brazil still try to play it “safe”, they follow this kind of thought by only directing shots to the mass mediums. The lowest social levels are always left out. Despite young low income people being connected to the web, their parents aren’t, so brands do not invest because they want to do huge massive strong shots that will reach everybody. So marketers do not show us the true importance of the projects , which do not move on.

Brazil still needs to break some paradigms and myths concerning this digital world.

We’ve been present in Cannes and won some awards with astonishing websites in the Cyber category. But there are some other things for us to try to improve, such as mobile, social networks and so on. Internet is the most effective medium to develop relationship platforms with people through the open answer channels and the consumer content areas – especially since we are living in the dialogue phase between brands and consumers, which can’t be left behind.

We are getting there. At least we have been timidly trying to. One good example of a project that has worked out here is Unilever DIVA. It was a first born as a reference from Unilever in Europe to entirely modify its relationship program with the consumers. It used to be called “Home Basics”, but has changed the name to “Making Life Better.” This is totally aligned to the concept and idea of a social community website directed towards women The sites provide

relevant information about tons of issues related to life in general and where they are able to connect with each other and talk about all kinds of things. It’s an example of a basic branded social network with some additional benefits. Too bad it is so rare.

Some other good efforts recently include the Renault Sandero website, which tried to make it a little bit more interactive than other common websites in Brazil. They created a search tool for anything you needed. Another example is the L`Oreal “What’s going on with Grazi?” website for its new hair colorant product. The viral consists on you putting your number in the website and then the Brazilian celebrity (Grazi) calls you to talk about the news of the product – pretty similar to the Opel Astra TT viral in France with the ‘Prepare your hair” theme. I should also mention the Fiat mobile campaign for iPhone made by Hands, where you type m.hands.com.br in your phone browser and then you have to find the car in the middle of the forest – following the ATL adventure concept of the car.

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Propitious and promising environment with great potential we already have. We also have great interactive agencies, such as Click (from Isobar Group), Hello Interactive – which grew twice its size in less than a year – and others. Then, you ask, what is missing? And I’d have to tell you what our market needs is to value this discipline (if I should call it that) a little bit more. Brazil should stop facing the Internet as a limited resource and work its true latent possibilities. We should invest more in this “tool of the future” – because that’s where marketing is heading.

Sources: Carta Capital Magazine, Datafolha Institute and FGV.

- Lia Dutra

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Buzz is being generated in the blogosphere about an upcoming Silicon Valley event called Under The Radar: Mobility. At this November event in Mountain View, California, mobile startups will get to showcase their products and services to an impressive collection of established companies in the industry, such as Verizon, T-Mobile, Comcast, Sprint, iFund, Nokia, Microsoft and Motorola. 32 startups that have shown some potential and that have managed to stay alive for about a year will get to pitch their business. Under the Radar has a great track record of many startups being bought up or having landed substantial amounts of VC. Some of the success stories include Blinkx, Flickr, Jumpcut, Writely and Zimbra. Getting to present at this event is a big deal.

Facebook keeps working hard on becoming a more attractive marketing tool for brands. Recently they launched a new design for the site to make it more user friendly. One of the reasons for the redesign was of course to make it easier to monatize the service. Their latest new feature to do this is video ads on the right hand of the Facebook page. Users can comment on

these ads and the comments will appear in their friends’ news feeds. One example where these video ads were used was for the movie Tropic Thunder according to Social Media Today. This blog author raises an interesting question though, how will you deal with nasty comments, the type of comments that seem to dominate site like YouTube?

VIDEO ADS IN FACEBOOK

Buzz about Mobile Startup Event

PEOPLEThe Internet is no longer only a vast computer network, it’s beco-ming increasingly important as a tool for communication, research and recreation for people all around the world. This makes it an important mirror for cultures in the physical world and a structure and enabler for creating new ones.

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a recent study from the video advertising network Tremor Media consumers willingness to watch “pre-rolls” on videos is

being investigated. Interestingly it turns out that 80 per cent of the respondents watch the pre-rolls without shutting down the player. It doesn´t even seem to matter if these pre-rolls are 15 or 30 seconds long. But as Lost Remote points out; there is a parameter missing and that is the frequency with which the respondents are exposed to these pre-rolls. Is it just on some of the clips or even several times in the same clip, are some of the questions that would have been good to consider in within the study.

Another company active in the space of pre-rolls is BrightRoll which also is a video advertising network. BrightRoll has just completed the largets pre-roll run ever according to Mashable. During two months they have sold 1 million US dollars worth of pre-rolls spanning the work of 30 media producers according to TVWeek. Big brands are mentioned as buyers of these pre-rolls like The History Channel, Chili’s Grill & Bar, National Geographic, Blackberry, Supercuts and Land Rover.

But one question remains; are people really watching the pre-rolls or just letting them play while doing something else? I shot out a question on Twitter and received this answer from acriley:

”@tomasnihlen Re: Pre-rolls: I just let them play and do other stuff. Interstitials I click the ’make this go away button’ as fast as I can.”

Pre-rolls starting to roll in the big dollars?

In

Text: Tomas Nihlén

Pre-rolls starting to roll in the bigg dollars? News getting more social Awarness of mobil marketing on the rise Internet Buzz

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BRANDS MEDIA PEOPLE

Ever since the blogosphere started to evolve into a huge filter for information from around the world, there has been a strong trend towards the perso-nalization of news. By personalization, I mean that in the constant overflow of information, we use different kinds of filters, including friends and people we trust. This means that your personal network of both friends and people that you only know digitally are filtering much of your news intake.

Services like Digg, reddit and Newsvine were early to build news services filtered by their users. This trend became even stronger when we saw micro-blogging services like Twitter, Jaiku, Plurk, Identi.ca and so on surface and gain popularity.

Recently social aggretagors like FriendFeed and Socialthing have started to gain traction and our social information flows are aggretated on one or several places on the internet. Now we are seing a hybrid of a social aggregator and social news site in a service called socialmedian. This is how they describe themselves: “socialmedian is a social news network that connects people with personalized news and information.”

The service lets you join different news networks and get email notifications that tell you what is going on in your networks and “clip” news, which basically is like “digging” an article on Digg.

News Getting

More Personal

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Text: Tomas NihlénIllustration: Brian Solis

recent study in the U.S. shows that an increasing number of people recall having seen advertising through their mobile phone. The number has

increased from 31 percent to 37 percent in the past year. There are some interesting international differences though. In the U.K., 51 percent of the respondents said that they have received advertising messages through their phone, while in India, the corresponding number is as high as 85 percent.

The U.K. consumer seems to be the most responsive to mobile advertisng with 16 percent stating that they recall 16 percent of mobile advertising compared to 8 percent in the U.S. and 4 percent in India. According to these figures, it would appear that the Indian mobile marketing model resembles “spam,” since so many are exposed to it but so few find the advertising relevant enough to remember it. It could also be a question of bad targeting.

According to the same study, it’s still mostly the young males who are taking the time to look at the mobile advertising. But mobile marketing is still a relatively new field and this will most likely change over time.

Awareness Of Mobile Marketing On The Rise

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Text: Tomas NihlénGraphs: Marketing Charts

BRANDS MEDIA PEOPLE

A

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The Internet isn’t all about technology, it’s actually more about people. People share information, communicate, build one or several identities, get themselves educated and entertained all at the same time/same places. To capture some of what’s going on in Internet culture right now, we will now present some of the things that people are currently buzzing about around a few of the web’s water coolers, divided into 3 areas: video, the blogosphere and micro-blogs.

Internet Buzz...

Text: Tomas NihlénPhoto: Todd Huffman

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Digg: [Digg, about Digg: “a place for people to discover and share content from anywhere on the web. From the biggest online destinations to the most obscure blog, Digg surfaces the best stuff as voted on by our users. You won’t find editors at Digg — we’re here to provide a place where people can collectively determine the value of content and we’re changing the way people consume information online.”]

So what is hot on Digg right now? Here are three selected videos from the top 10 list from the latest 30 days as of August 22nd, 2008. (click on the image to watch the video)

Video

Number 1 on the list, with over 8000 diggs (votes), is a video by Paris Hilton, a political video actually, or is it just a comedy video? Confused? Let’s try to sort this out from the beginning. U.S. presidential candidate John McCain attacked his competitor Barack Obama for being “the biggest celebrity in the world,” and he did so in a video accompanied by images of Britney Spears and Paris Hilton. As a response to this, Paris Hilton and the video site Funny Or Die released this video, claiming Hilton was now actually a candidate for the election and she even gave her views on the most sustainable energy strategy. The result was a viral success: over 7 million of views on Funny Or Die.

The web is filled with Obama related stories, videos, images and more. The second story from Digg is a video called “Barack Roll” and features Obama dancing in different situations while he is “singing” along with the lyrics. The creator of this video must have spent many hours in the editing room to get the clip together. This video has received more than 7000 diggs, which translated to a third place on the Digg list, and has been shown over 1.7 million times on YouTube.

Paris Hilton for President

“Barack Roll”

The fourth position on the current Digg list is a so called “unboxing video,” which is a video where a product is unpacked for the first time and filmed to share with the rest of the world. But this video takes a strange turn a few moments into the clip. You’ll have to see it with your own eyes. The product in the clip is a mobile phone called Omnia i900 by Samsung. It attracted over 6000 diggs and has been viewed almost 400,000 times on YouTube. Check out this video for more information about the campaign.

Samsung unboxes magic

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YouTube: [Founded in February 2005, YouTube is the leader in online video, and the premier destination to watch and share original videos worldwide through a Web experience. YouTube allows people to easily upload and share video clips on www.YouTube.com and across the internet through websites, mobile devices, blogs and email.]

So what is popular on YouTube at the moment? Here are three selected videos from the top 10 list from the last 30 days as of August 22nd, 2008. (click on the image to watch the video)

30 years later...

This video that landed in third place on the YouTube list is a actually a 30 year old clip. In the 1970s, a lion was adopted by two British citizens who soon realised it would become more than they could handle. So they released the animal back into the wild in Africa. A year later they went back there to seek him out and to see if he was doing ok. This reunion with Christian the lion would turn out to be somewhat historical and you really must see the clip to understand why. This shows that some themes just never become outdated. Watch the video here. You will probably understand why it has collected over 3 million views.

Batman and the Dark Night will go down in history as a total box office success as well as a blog buzz dream for the film’s PR team. Spoofs have been flooding the internet, helping contribute to the film’s building buzz. This particular spoof (video) takes place in the beginning of the movie and has attracted over 2.6 million views on YouTube, which translates to a fourth place finish on the YouTube list. It’s a must see.

Two guys calling themselves “Smosh” have been an Internet phenomena since they first started lip syncing to the music from Pokemon and Power Rangers. Their latest viral success is called “Food Battle 2008” (video) and has so far garnered more than 2.4 millon views on YouTube, which lands it in ninth place on the YouTube list. This has become a yearly video event and both the videos in 2006 (video) and 2007 (video) became wildly popular on YouTube. Seems like everything they touch turns into digital gold.

The dark spoof

Smosh does it again and again

Besides these videos seen by millions of people we also recommend you to see: 2 videos from Microsoft: “Inspiration, Anyone?”& “Mojave experiment” and the animated “Emily”.

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Icerocket: [Wikipedia: “IceRocket is an Internet search engine specialized in searching blogs.”]

ReadBurner [analyzes what people are sharing with their personal social networks on a variety of services to determine the best content across the Web. With an increasing amount of news consumption taking place in RSS readers and personalized start pages versus traditional web sites, ReadBurner aggregates the most frequently shared content from these next generation services to determine what’s popular.”]

So which blogposts and news are popular at the moment? Here are a few selected posts that have been discussed by a lot of people, linked to by other blogs and shared with others.

Blogposts & News

Google admanager (“hosted ad serving and management solution for publishers with smaller direct sales teams”) is now available without an invite. Read the post here and some of the discussions from blogs like TechCrunch and Problogger.

Venture Beat blogs about the Twitter characters from the TV-show Mad Men we write about earlier in this report. Apparently some of them were taken down earlier this week. At first it seemed to be due to Twitter’s new spam definitions (that they aren’t “real” people behind the accounts) but later it was revealed that it was DMCA (Digtial Millennium Copywright Act) that had order Twitter to take them down. During the time some of the characters were suspended it quickly came up a new account with the same name only with an under score to it. Apparantly the accounts weren’t controlled by the TV cable company that runs the series (AMC) but by fans out there playing the characters on Twitter. Apparently Deep Focus (AMC’s web marketing group) convinced AMC that this is kind of free marketing and that is a good thing. So now they are back on Twitter again.So now they are back on Twitter again. What a drama! Here are some of the reactions in the blogosphere.

The American Presidential election is approaching, meaning there’s more and more attention around the canditades both in traditional media and in the blogosphere. Some of the news and discussions lately (except from video’s) have been regarding Obama’s Berlin Speech back in July (video). Apparantly a lot of people got upset when Obama in his speech said “I speak to you not as a candidate for President, but as a citizen - a proud citizen of the United States, and a fellow citizen of the world.” Speaking of political buzz, there is a recent study about the two candidates’ online presence, an interesting read.

Preview the new FriendFeed design.

Microsoft finally launches its new service called Photosynth. What it does it that it lets you put your photographs together and creates a 3D enviroment. The blog Read Write Web tell us their opinion.

Mozilla Labs (the people behind Firefox) also launches a new service. This one though is called Ubiquity and its goal is to “make it possible for everyone to do common Web tasks more quickly and easy”. They want to connect all the information that the net holds so that you don’t have to go to different places to get different type of information (a map, review etc). Watch the video here. But did they have to pick such a tricky name?

On next page you can read about things that have been buzzed about on the microblogging service Twitter and its users. One of the stories was that the popular mixed tape service called Muxtape had been shut down. Apparently, TechCrunch writes, a simular service has been reborned but this time as OpenTape. That is what happens on the Internet when you try to shut down something the people want, another pops up. Follow OpenTape on Twitter to know what’s going on first.

Toplist at Icerocket Shared on ReadBurner

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Twitter: [Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?]

So what are people linking to and buzzing about on Twitter? Here are a few selected links and stories from the top 10 list from the latest 30 days as of August 26th, 2008.

Micro-blogs

Links

Discussions

We’ve selected 5 of the top 30 links people using Twitter have been linking to in their “tweets”.

FaceYourManga - do your own manga image to use as an avatar (image of yourself) on different social media sites created a lot of buzz amongst the Twitter crowd. - 784 tweets

Blog post on Twitter’s own blog - some countries can no longer recieve their Twitter updates via their mobile phone. -107 tweets

Wine Libery TV - a video podcast about wine that is very popular. Gary Vaynerchuck how’s the man leading the show also uses the live video service Ustream to interact with his audience. - 67 tweets

Olympic failure - a lot of people how were at the Olympic opening in Bejing pulled out their mobile phones to take photograph’s of the “blue screen” of death... - 73 tweets

Blog action day - on October 15th it’s time for bloggers around the world to unit and try to make a difference for world poverty. - 72 tweets

We’ve selected 3 of the top discussions people have been having on Twitter lately.

Crank this! - Kevin Rose, one of the founder of Digg.com and host of Diggnation, urges people to head over to his Muxtape (free mixed tape service) to listen to Ratatat (a electronic duo from NYC). A few days later the service is closed down because of problems with the American music industry. - 49 direct replies

Haiku’s wanted - The new webserial (available for purchase on iTunes) Dr Horrible’s Sing a long asked for “DrHorrible haikus” and got quit a few. - 43 direct replies

Detroit - the “art, culture and technology” blog Laughingsquid ask the Twitter crowd what they think about when they here “Detroit”. - 34 direct replies

miscellaneousIn this section you find different topics we want to highlight, people to keep an eye on and more we think you as a marketer will find interesting.

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In this issue we will take a look at two Internet shows with a lot in common. They are both US specific and both were much

hyped in the blogosphere right now.

Internet Shows

Internet Shows Tips: Tools Tips: Inspiration Profile: Martin Cedergren Opinion: The End of the Surface Economy

36 38 39 40 41

Gemini DivisionNBC Universal recently (on the 18th of August) launched a new Internet show called Gemini Division with Rosario Dawson in the leading role. This show is restricted to only be accessible within the USA and usually you will not read about that kind of closed Internet show here. But we are making an exception for two reasons; first there are ways to fool most systems that you are in fact within the US borders, and secondly there has been far too much buzz to ignore this show...

The episodes are about 4-5 minutes long and NBC will release 50 episodes according to AdAge. New episodes are released Monday through Thursday and on Fridays they publish an aggregated show with the whole week’s content in one long episode.

The show has no doubt landed some big marketing fish like Microsoft, UPS and Intel. NBC has also stated that it might release some social media spinoffs if the viewers will ask for it, according to MarketingVox.

Child doctor turns horribleAnd while I’m writing about hyped Internet shows only available in the US I might as well tell you about another one; Dr Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog. This is another example of an Internet show that has managed to bridge the gap and attracted some “real” actors. The main character for instance is played by Neil Patrick Harris from the ancient TV series “Doogie Howser, M.D” where he plays a teenage doctor.

These series’ might contribute to inspiring many more new shows with the Internet as the main platform. It’s also interesting to follow how brands will jump into this new channel. We will continue to cover this topic in future reports so just tag along for the ride and don’t forget to read about what the consumers think about pre-rolls in one of our earlier articles in this issue.

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miscellaneous38

TIPS: TOOLS

GADGET - BackupPalIf your role at work involves public relations, account management or other phone-heavy tasks, you are probably very dependant on your cell phone and even more on the contacts in it. So what happens when you buy a new cell phone or if you happen to lose it? That would probably result in a big headache and at least an hour of re-entering contacts, maybe even emailing friends and contacts, asking for their numbers again. There are a few services today that would make this situation easier to deal with, by using a web based address book. But this approach still involves several steps like syncing the cell phone and computer via bluetooth and then syncing to the web and so on. Another approach is to use a product called BackupPal.

This gadget basically only has one button on it; an orange button that starts a backup of your phone when you push it. It holds a memory sufficient to back up several phones, and according to the manufacturer, makes restoring your contacts a snap.

SITE - A few minutes of freedomHave you ever felt like you would actually need a break from the Internet? Shut of the constant flow of information and just roll up your sleeves, only to log on again later and get back in the game? Now there is a solution, if you are working on a Mac anyway. There is a little application called Freedom, that simply lets you specify a number of minutes and then shuts down your Internet access for exactly that many minutes.

SERVICE - Color me goodColor Jack is a great colour picking service with some nice features besides the actual colour picking. For instance they have a blog where they write about colours, some OS X widgets and much more. Take a look for yourself and poke around to see what you think of it.

TIPS: INSPIRATION

Packaging memories & Typography

Do you want to take a look at how packaging looked in the 70s for some retro inspiration, head over to this Flickr set. Flickr is great in so many ways, David Airey gives his readers a tip about 30 inspiring Flickr groups on typography. You can find everything from Historical type and lettering, typography of the 50s to pictrograms. What did we do before the Internet? Looked through a lot of books...

Face photocopies finally useful...

We found this video from the Irish band Sickboy on the blog PSFK and found it interesting. The creator, yet another Irishman Lorcan Finnegan, wanted to illustrate how the two brothers (twins) are like carbon copies of each other. And of course at the same time make a different music video. They had to make quit a lot of different expressions in the photocopy machine to make the singers actually move their mouth and facial expressions along with the song. (click on the image to watch the video)

miscellaneous39

miscellaneous40

Name: Martin Cedergren

Currently works for: 180 Amsterdam

Location: Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Titel/role: Creative Director

Companies worked for before: AKQA, Forsman&Bodenfors

Educational background: Berghs School of Communication

Profile

Q. What clients do you work with? - At the moment adidas, Glenfiddich and Omega.

Q. What is your advice to become a successful in your line of work? - Be nice or leave.

Q. What are the 3 campaigns you are most proud of? 1. Skandia recruitment ad released November 1999. Agency: Starlet Deluxe/eBoy. - It’s still a classic gif animation telling that Skandia IT seeks similar people.

2. AMF Pension MMS campaign released October 2007. Agency: Forsman&Bodenfors/Perfect Fools.

- All advertising from AMF Pension focuses on the idea that the future is bright and there are reasons to look forward to it. We want to make the question of a pension important for younger people by getting them to think about the future.

This campaign employed phone messaging and a web-based service where visitors could have their sent-in photos “aged” so that the sender looked 70 years old.

The campaign included film spots (with Peter Siepen and Charlotte Perelli, two Swedish celebrities), outdoor boards, Internet banners and a web site.

During October 322,946 photos were submitted by visitors that wanted to see how they might look as 70-year-old retirees. The goal was 50,000 visitors. The campaign also won a Grand Prix Media Lion in Cannes this summer.

3. SVT Play Rapport launch campaign released May 2008. Agency: 180 Amsterdam/SVT Kommunikation/Doberman.

Rapport has been the most popular news program on Swedish Television for 30 years. This spring, Rapport became an online news channel called Play Rapport offering live online news at www.playrapport.se, whenever, wherever.

180 Amsterdam’s mission was to create a campaign to reach almost the entire Swedish population - with zero media spend. The results show an incredible amount of online traction as a direct result from the campaign, including Google hits on “play rapport” going from 30,000 to 796,000 as a result of the launch initiative.

!For many years, perfect packaging and total (perceived) branding control by companies has ruled the land of marketing. This has become a “truth” that everybody takes for granted. Much more effort, measured in both time and money, is spent on polishing the surface of products, services and brands instead of product development, consumer engagement and transparency.

A recent example here in Sweden is our own clothing giant H&M. A big part of H&M’s marketing strategy is inviting well-known designers to create or influence parts of H&M’s clothing line for limited periods of time. Recently some picture of a clothing line by an upcoming guest designer were leaked and plastered all over the Swedish fashion blogosphere.

H&M’s reaction? To hunt down these bloggers and demand that they remove these pictures immediately. Why? Because it was messing with their marketing plan. And the pictures were also not polished enough or displayed

The End Of The Surface Economy

low resolution. A spokesperson also claimed that this was bad for consumers since they would have to wait too long before the clothes were actually available in the stores. Do bloggers and blog readers really care about the resolution of the pictures? And are they really so impatient that they react in a negative way to H&M’s brand because they would have to wait for the clothes?

I think this is a perfect example of old school thinking, which still dominates big brands. I say just focus on designing good looking clothes at the right prices. And don’t forget to do all you can to make it as easy as possible for people to talk, blog and share information about your products.

That’s the new way of marketing and the best way to succeed in the digital era. So forget the old way, there is no sensible direction but forward.

- Tomas Nihlén [email protected]

OPINion

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