Licence to Roam

I woke up today to find that Twitter has decided to break itself and started to censor what it shows me. Before today, when I decided to follow someone, I saw all of their public tweets, all of their replies, no matter to whom they were replying. This was a setting in the system, allowing me to see everything. However, by default, it was turned off. Given that few people never change the default, most people did not use this setting, which could be part of the reason why they never quite get it, why there is such a drop off rate. This means of finding out who is interesting, who is involved in conversations with people you follow, is one of the key features that allows you to enjoy the serendipity of finding new people.

BUt now it’s gone. Removed as an option. The Twitter blog says:

Based on usage patterns and feedback, we’ve learned most people want to see when someone they follow replies to another person they follow—it’s a good way to stay in the loop. However, receiving one-sided fragments via replies sent to folks you don’t follow in your timeline is undesirable. Today’s update removes this undesirable and confusing option.

So now they’re controlling what I can see, they’ve removed the choice. They’re censoring what I can hear. It’s the equivalent of being in a pub with a few friends and a bunch of new people and not hearing any of the conversation between everyone else. I’m not the only one who sees it this way, just search for the hashtag #fixreplies

Twitter Fix Replies (screenshot from site)

Twitter, this needs to go back. I make a choice to follow people and I make a choice to follow everything they see. Don’t strip out content, just let me see it all.

Update: this becomes even more confusing.

• First of all, Amazon’s response was that it was policy
• Then they blamed a ‘glitch’.
• Then a troll came out of the woodwork and announced to the world that he had done it, through clickjacking and other means
• Now an ex-employee Amazon blames the French, or at least a French employee, who conflated the scope of the word ‘adult’ to include the erotic
• Now Amazon call it “an embarrassing and ham-fisted cataloging error” affecting over 57000 books

A cataloguing error, a lack of response from Amazon followed by confusing messages and a lot of jumping to conclusions (including me) led to a social media storm that can only damage the reputation of the brand. As BL says, you need to think about how you monitor your brand all the time, not just 9-5 Mon-Fri; although Amazon did appear to be responsive over the weekend even if the answers were not fully clear.

According to Amazon, they’ve been having a ‘glitch’ over the weekend that has stripped the sales ranking form a number of books, thereby reducing the likelihood of the books appearing in searches, so impacting sales.

The only problem with this is that the glitch appears to affect gay/lesbian/sex titles only and even then the impact is inconsistent, which is unexpected if there was a logic behind it. Playboy and Girls Gone Wild is not adult under the glitch, but literature with a gay themes is, even when there’s no sex written about. Apparently, before they called it a glitch, they had called it a policy according to the email received by Mark Probst

In consideration of our entire customer base, we exclude “adult” material from appearing in some searches and best seller lists. Since these lists are generated using sales ranks, adult materials must also be excluded from that feature.

If you’re on Twitter, or have been reading feeds over the weekend, you’ll have seen this. It appears that the power of public opinion, published all over the web has forced Amazon to update a policy to a glitch and then to fix it. But is it enough to rescue their reputation or the new meaning of Amazon Rank

Last night, the Guardian Word of Mouth blog ran a chocolate tasting and they really did deliver. There was a room full of pieces of chocolate Easter Eggs for us to enjoy, ranging from supermarket basic types all the way up to gourmet organic chocolate. As well as bowls and bowls of choc, there was the opportunity to try some port or Courvoisier. or some Gonzalez Byass exclusive sherry or even to get a demonstration of chocolate making. It was a brilliant evening, ably organised by Suse and everyone looked liked they were enjoying themselves as they ate their way to a chocolate haze.

Writing this up, there’s definitely on improvement they could make – a list of brands to take away so I could remember what I liked! BUt I have some recollection. My favourite from the eggs was the Daylesford Organic dark chocolate. The chocolate truffles from Paul A Young, both the Guinness and the basil were brilliant for my favourite taste overall was the ‘raw’ chocolate from Mayan Magic, who gave a demonstration of making your own (coming to Selfridges next week)

Chocsaway on Twitter

Update: here’s some more posts about the event

Eternally Neurotic

On the one hand, the Olympics are the most wonderful celebration of humanity, of striving to be the best, faster, higher, stronger as the motto says. On the other hand, I find them – the organisation behind the games – to be one of the most cynical and grasping of organisations, historically prone to corruption, pushing their weight around to control the image, the trademarks, the media rights, anything that generates money.

This evening, I went along to the IET for a Pinkerton Lecture, on using social media to inspire change. Delivered by Alex Balfour, who is the Head of New Media for the London Organising Committee of the Olympic Games, it was a brilliant run through of the social media landscape (targeted at the majority of the audience who wouldn’t necessarily play in the space) and an introduction to what LOCOG is doing when it comes to social media.

As Alex ran through some of the innovations that his team has been repsonsible for, such as putting education packs online instead of using mailouts, of putting information for training camp venues up on the web, I wanted to challenge him. Where was the social media, where was the innovation? What he was talking about wasn’t ‘new’, but only new in the old definition of media. An understanding of the mindset of the overall organisation was given when, in answer to one of my questions at the end of the session, let it be known that the media broadcast rights for the 2016 Games, which included digital broadcast, will be signed up in 2009, 7 years before the games, even before the host city is confirmed. Whilst I could understand agreeing traditional TV rights, how can you even understand what could be done online that far ahead? The reasoning given was financial, that TV rights in effect add a huge amount to the running of the games. But why assign them before you know how much it’s going to cost, before you know which city is running it and how much they need. Given the current negotiations with the London budget and how they are going to afford the games, surely it would be better to sign things up closer to the time, when you know costs AND now what you can sell given a changing rights landscape.

Alex also mentioned that the 2010 Winter games are having to work out how they will cope with the media applications from non-traditional outlets, meaning bloggers and online newsites. I asked about this for 2012, but the answer was not clear about the access that would be granted for online reporters.

Alex covered some of the initiatives they have been running with, for example one around the handover parties that took place in August, where they asked people to contribute videos and images of celebration to add to a video they would show at the parties. Another example would be a call for images and content that could be used as part of the venues, either a collection of the content built up over the lead into the games, or ‘live’ stuff created during the games. They are working in a difficult environment, hampered by what sound like unbelievably stupid rules, such as a ban on linking to any site that is not a sponsor, but I’d like to see how they are going to approach some of the challenges

• One of the basic tenets of social media is sharing. How are they going to let people share the Games, through images, video, remixes, mashups of broadcast content (after the live broadcast)etc if all the ‘rights’ are tied up.
• With the assumption that every single person at the games will have a mobile phone capable of photography, video capture and live broadcast to the web, how are you going to support that?
• The sharing of content is often dependent on the use of tags but most of the expected tags wouls be copyrighted or trademarked. Are you going to police that?

One definite conclusion I came away with is that the games will allow social media as long as they control it, as long as it’s on their terms. A couple of videos were shown, one from the Handover celebrations and one from the announcement of the London win. I was in Trafalgar Square that day and recall vividly the rush of adrenaline and the euphoria of that moment, but it’s indelibly linked in memory to the happenings of the day after, so much so that I can’t watch celebration pictures without getting emotional. As I was listening to the how they plan to manage and initiate social media conversations, I was watching news and images come in on my phone about the Mumbai terrorists attacks. There is much irony for me in the contrast of social media used to connect people about what is happening in the world in real time compared to what the Olympic Committee may be forced to do, which is use the tools to leverage a commercial connection.

It’s the Great British Beer Festival this week at Earl’s Court, a huge cavern of a place that is full of beer and beer drinkers. As part of their ongoing campaign to widen the appeal of beer CAMRA are running some free tours, a Girl’s Guide to the Great British Beer Festival. They’re curated by Melissa Cole, who’s an independent beer journalist and member of the British Guild of Beer Writers. Tonight was their first run of the tour, a group of about 12 of us were the guinea pigs for this attempt to spread the word about beer to a different audience.

My first impressions of the place were not exactly brilliant. In one corner, there was a huge group of what I assume were Cornishmen singing their national songs. Elsewhere, there were a lot of stereotypes, beer bellies and silly ‘real ale’ t-shirts that on the surface did not make this a friendly place. But first looks were deceiving and as we wandered round, we got nothing but good humour and support.

Melissa had put together a list of 40 beers to take a look at, however the tour only covered 5 of them, in 1/3 pints, to ensure we were all drinking responsibly. Here’s what we tried.

• Wells and Young; Youngs Waggledance.. a honeyed sweet ale that was a great start. For me, it only had a very slight honey smell.
• Copper Dragon; Golden Pippen Ale. Lovely and fruity, with lemony overtones.
• Dark Star Expresso. Wow. a stout porter with a strong hit of coffee. As one of the party said, you could drink this for breakfast. It would go great with something like Chille Mole. But I could only drink the one at any sitting I think
• Fuller’s Discovery.. This was a reallyy refreshing, designed to act as a bridge between lager and ales.
• Iceni Raspberry Wheat. the first taste of this is very, very tart, but overall, it slips down a treat. I’d love this with cheese.

I liked all of them, only a small tasting, bt it’s given me new things to try. Thanks for CAMRA for organising this.

Deborah Schultz, Chris Heuer, Jeremiah Owyang, Tara Hunt, Hugh MacLeod, David Parmet

•  DP: Brian Oberkirch put this together – he asked 2 questions. How to market into community without being too marketer like. And how do you build a community around what you are doing?  What does ‘no marketing’ look like? How can we use social media?
• DS: None of this is about tools or technology, but is about the customers.  Here to talk about some of the subtleties, not about the tactics. It’s about marketing, customer service, product development. the marketing silo needs to be changed, why are they afraid of the opps. This is not telling or selling, this is being in the trenches.
• CH: what is really bugging me right now is the number of people who are saying to me ‘build me a community’ but this does make a community, it is the interpersonal connections that make it. Social media is not new media, it changes how we relate to each other. You have to shift the way you think about participation. have to change mindset from stop trying to sell me to help make me buy.
• JO: I do a lot of research on this, such as online community best practices.  it was clear that the ones that let go and let their customers take charge have the thriving communities.
• TH: "marketing is the price you pay for creating mediocre products". this was a big part of the reason for this panel. [history of her and move and Citizen agency] Looking at social capital – relationships and reputation.   It’s all about whuffie in these communities, what you can give away.
• CH: you need a patronage model, where there is money, in corps, it needs room to do it in there. there has to be a genuine spirit of giving in there .
• TH: we talk about doing things that are good for the world alongside the product that will sell.
• HM: [wine, blogging stormhoek story.] Social objects help drive conversation. when we talk about community, when a corporation talks about it, it’s liek a lever they think they can pull, which is not there. you have a bunch of people who use and talk about the product. they are not the company community.
• DP: the concept of giving it away for free is a powerful one, that scares the companies away.  Have used Stormhoek as an example, suggesting that companies do this.
• DS: there are lots of companies for 100s of years…this is a new skillset that is an art rather than a science.  if you are at a small company, where you have a certain amount of control, then you have to get out of the ivory tower. get out to conferences, find the edges.  Larger companies have the problem that they only listen to the complainers, how about listening to the people who love you.   Why do small companies put up an FAQ? why not bring in people who can answer the questions? this is marketing and customer support. get out and flatten it.
• JO: you can give away things for free, I give a lot of my knowledge for free, make people nervous.
• HM: James Governer, gives away 90% of ideas, sells 10%. he can only execute on 10% and it works/
• TH: you can tell people you have knowledge and they will see what they are talking about.  It’s a smart calling code.
• CH: it’s the because effect. Will It blend gives away entertainment.
• HM: there has been a paradigm shift from message to social gesture and that cannot be faked.
• TH: a lot of traditional marketing aims to do a generic spread of message. you throw the net out wide and hope to catch as many. with stormhoek HM saw a great opportunity, of people who were doing a lot of events – its niche, opportunities,
• CH: it’s not the message, it’s not the brand logo, it’s what it represents. We have to think about the human connections, about being of service to fellow human.

Audience Questions

• Q: JO – when selecting brand evangelists, how?  And HM – what about Cooler?  A: JO: tools to find them, who is talking online, goign into communities, finding out who is talking the most, customer support forums. go to brand monitoring companies, who do good job of mining the whole place. the main point is that you can find the people, great people to start with.   HM: Kula is South Sea shells that had a story. Talking about the iphone with Tara, what matters is that tara is a friend, we talk about shared stuff. stories are key. tech is still about socialising around objects.  DS: this is about a cultural shift – getting out. Traditional marketing..is not a relationship. in a relationship you can’t ignore until you have something to say. giving away things for free, the whuffie payback comes back way later. this impacts all lines of your business.
• Q: I understand giving away the small things. what about the big stuff?
  • A: CH: audi are doing a great things. doing a lot of things around the experience, the educational classes, spa treatments.
  •  TH: some people give amazing support and service. 
  • DS: you have to break it down to smaller segments, go local. 
  •  HM: great brands have lots of little small brands, like starbucks. it’s not just about the big thing, it’s all the small things. 
• Q: how do you actually get some money in the short term? (ref a movie, document)
  • A: HM: put half out there, and if people want to learn more they will buy it. 
  • TH: start telling the story, getting people to start telling his story.  
• Q: giving away for free reduces perceived value?  what’s the rebuttal. 
  • A: DP..when selling things, I had a client for selling to teenage girls. they wanted to ‘go viral’. I had to remind them they can’t the product can only go viral.  I suggested we find people to talk about it.  My response is not to go to an intermediary. go to the customers.  put it to the people who would actually use it. 
  • TH: it’s not giving products away for free only. It can be the things around it, the experience.
  • DP: audi, free wifi, breakfast, things to do
  • DS: now everyone has a different perspective on audi. it’s nuanced. 
• Q: can you distill this into a takeaway?
  • HM – social objects ate
  • TH: turn it around, be part of the community, listen, embrace the chaos, find your higher purpose
  • CH: passion for people and product
  • DS: technology changes, human behaviour doesn’t. nothing replaces listening, get out of tower.
• Q: I work for PETA and what we give away for free is our message? is that annoying?
  • CH: saying the only thing you have is a message is wrong. you are connecting to a higher purpose, to a felling.
  • TH: I don’t remember the emails, shows that you have not connecting.
  • DS: are you giving them something they be interested in or just what you want to sell. Think about you are only talking to these people when you need them – cultivate the connections you have.
• Q: I work for Kaboom. A lot of the things you have suggested we have done and it has not taken off as we hoped. now I have all these goals I need to reach. What can I take back to explain that this takes time.  The vision is to make a great place to play for every child in america.
  •    HM: they don’t get it…
  • CH : it’s not campaigns, it’s programmes, you have to change the mentality. get qualitative results, people who have heard online and show the stories.
• Q: Why are you doing this – because you believe or is it a fad?
  • JO: marketing does not exist to hide shitty products, there is a reason.
  • CH: marketing has become associated with sales as opposed to matching product with user.
  • DP: it’s about stories and relationships, helping them work out what they are doing. it’s been a fun ride.
  • DS: it’s a personal mission, not a fad. I’m not a marketer, but a customer advocate. I love that everyone has a voice,
  • CH: it’s about what is your intention.

HM – a story without love is not worth telling

Tags: hughmacleod, darvidparmet, chrisheuer, tarahunt, jermiahowyang, deborahschulz

Last year I really enjoyed Futures of Entertainment, a 2 day conference up at MIT, all about transmedia entertainment. they are runningit again this year and details can be found on their site. I’ve gone and booked a ticket (assuming i can sort out the logistics). Last year I live blogged it, which considering each session was about 3 hours, took some concentration!. I’ve listed the posts below. Sam Ford has some links as well. Well worth the time I think, so go and book now over here.

Virtual Worlds: They are becoming platforms for thought experiments — some of which involve fantasies we would not like to enact in the real world, others involve possibilities that we may want to test market before putting into practice.

Fan Cultures: Courted, encouraged, engaged and acknowledged, fans are more and more frequently being recognized as trendsetters, viral marketers, and grassroots intermediaries

Transmedia Properties Part 1 – an introduction

Transmedia part 2

User Generated Content Part 1: Caterina Fake, Ji Lee, Rob Tercek, Kevin Barrett.

User Generated Content - part 2

The Future of Television: Andy Hunter, Mark Warshaw, Josh Bernoff, Betsy Morga

Interested in going to Blogher07. Scrapblog have joined forces with the conference to offer an all-expenses paid trip to the conference for two. But only in North America – I wish these competitions for web based companies which are global in their vary nature would make these restrictions clear on the main page and not buried in terms and conditions.

Entry is simple – create a scrapblog, tag it and get people to visit it. This is a traffic and member generation strategy, as the more people you get to see your scrapblog, the more entries you get. Go ahead- what are you waiting for.

Tonight at the Problogger meetup, I met up with Keith, from vibrator.com (do you need a warning that that link is NSFW?) As an e-commerce site, it is very web2.0; there’s a pretty good blog, all the right prompts to delicious, digg, technorati etc and the UGC competition – submit your own erotic story.

Furthermore Keith is quite happy for bloggers to get samples to test and blog about – and I’m pretty sure he won’t need them back Considering the other blog is called Behind the Buzz, that could be something to think about!

Walmart launch a new video download service today. Apparently their development team is browser challenged as they only appear to have IE available to them. Under that app, their site looks, well, not beautiful but at least OK.

However, on Firefox it looks like this:

I know that sites sometimes launch without full testing…and that Walmart Video is probably targeted fully at those who have never heard of anyother browser but a token effort to fail gracefully would have been nice. (Tip: Valleywag)

This is now back…some changes but nothing substantial.

One of the projects I’ve been working on, at least from a metrics and tracking perspective, is a US campaign for Domino’s Pizza: Anything Goes, any large pizza, any topping any crust for $9.99. Supported by a heavy TV promotion, in-store, email, SMS, online advertising, all the usual stuff, it also had an unusual contest and teaser video component.

The concept behind the online promotion is that anything goes for $9.99. So for 5 weeks, starting 1 Jan, Dominos have been auctioning items on eBay for $9.99. From ipods to video cameras to home entertainment systems everything was the one price. It was set up as an Buy it Now auction; to find the items, a clue was posted everyday on the microsite that when solved gave the keywords associated with the auction page and you were told within what time period the items would be posted. There was a lot of commetary about it within the eBay community as well, as this was a new thing for the service to participate in.

There were also 4 big prizes. With each of these, there is an associated set of videos that tell a story that leads up to why the item is being sold. The first one went up 15 Jan, 2 weeks before the campaign was launched, in 3 video channels (YT, metacafe, AOL Uncut). So, meet Mackenzie.

Mackenzie is a sweet (!) 16 year whose father bought her the wrong colour car for her birthday. Looking at her videos, you eventually find out that she gets the car that she wants and she puts her Saab convertible up on ebay to sell it. And it went pretty quickly – see the winner here. A second series set up the sale of a big screen TV and there are 2 more that went up this week, one for a Harley Davidson and one for one last big surprise. (the big surprise was a Lotus car)

So that’s the campaign, let’s take a look a little closer at Mackenzie. Her behaviour drove a lot of comments, most people condemning her at various levels of politeness (it definitely brought out the worst online attitude in some people). And the views that the series for, especially the first one, were OK but not spectacular. That was until it was ‘borrowed’ – downloaded from one of the services and reposted. If any of the initial re-posters credited their source, I could not find it, which again indicates an interesting attitude. We found it first on YouTube, then Break, then 4 other sites and saw the views really stack up. Break has by far got the most views that we can count. It may be in many other places that we’ve not found yet.

The pinnacle has been appearing on the front page of AOL, on their video blog,(where it is the most commented at the moment) making their top viral video and being picked as video of the day. If only we could get the viewing numbers!

Interestingly, AOL got the video from iFilm. Now, none of these reposts are branded, although the connection is normally made in the comments. But the company is still getting the benefit, being able to talk about the success in press and on TV.

Some lessons from this:

• Don’t be surprised how long it takes for something to take off. Most views on the videos have taken place after the auctions are complete, items can have a slow burn
• Be prepared for the comments. Once it’s out on the web, people can say anything. However, comments were closed on the video with the winner in it – there’s a difference between a character and a prize winner.
• Don’t expect success with everything, even if the creative team is the same. Mackenzie did well, Rich man not so much. It’ll be a few weeks before we now the results of the last 2 sets.
• Don’t be surprised when things are taken and not credited to you. Work out how to make that a success as well

After that, I’m back to recording video views.

Flash is commonly used with websites to bring life and movement, to bring entertainment and improve the experience. When used well, it really helps with telling the story and getting a message across. When used badly, it sucks. Kellogg’s Special K use of flash definitely falls into the latter category. It uses heavy flash to display product information (killing the browser at the same time). Whilst product info is in the flash object, a badly formatted image pops up to display nutritional info which looks like it was scanned in from the packets. Flash is not the best software to use for an information driven site, however much your agency tries to sell you this!

Hugh is offering to help solve the conundrum of meshing big, corporate business advertising as performed by the big corporate advertising agencies with the world that is Web2.0. He has a solution he’s willing to offer you for $100k. And if I had the cash, I might have taken him up on the offer, given the success he’s having with Stormhoek, English Cut and others.

Meanwhile, I’ll keep plugging away here, hopefully breaking down a few barriers and making small steps into moving the big clients closer to a different way of using the web. I mentioned fear in my comment and sometimes this has a real foundation beyond the fear of lack of control. Previous skirmishes fought, previous damage to reputations mean the drawbridges are just harder to get down, especially in a litigious environment. But opening peoples eyes to what is out there about their brand, surprising them with all the positive stuff (remember the bloggers and the boards are not just negative) helps them on their way. You have to find the chink in the armour, the first steps that they are comfortable with before you can jump all the way head first into pool.

Update: an interesting survey from Sapient underlines the mistrust that CMO’s have with the big agencies doing digital as well, with only 10% believing the traditional agencies can move into interactive. The six key (aggregated) attributes are:

• 1. Quality of Creative Content
• 2. Innovation and Strategic Value
• 3. Price/Cost
• 4. Sophisticated Analytics and Measurement Systems
• 5. Proficiency in Emerging, Interactive or Digital Media
• 6. Traditional Print, Offline and Media Buying Services

Interactive is now ranking higher than the traditional stuff.

Dave Taylor has a good take on the Vista laptop promotion being run by Microsoft and Edelman. In his opinion they’re sending out laptops instead of the OS DVD as the upgrade process, combined with the machine specs would mean that many of the target bloggers would not have a good time installing this. There are copies of Vista around (I’ve got one somewhere) so that tactic is being tried, but getting a DVD through the post is not as near as much fun as unwrapping a laptop. The PR team are trying to leverage that thrill factor and would probably have done it even if the upgrade was the simplest process in the world (by which I mean put disc in drive and click once).

Eric, over at CommonSense PR, has listed 5 key points about choosing a blogging consultant.  Some excellent points there, especially about checking the blogging history of the consultant and ther references.  I would add a further one, in that also check the variety and breadth of previous work.  One thing I have found with digital teams for marketing websites is that sometimes the company can have a very long track record of completed projects but every single one is the ‘same’, they just changed the colours and the words with little or no creative thought.   SO, when choosing a consultant check that they understand the media well enough to know that you cannot apply the same solution each time, each solution has to be created anew.

Starbucks’ itsredagain is their Holiday website.  It’s definitely multilingual, having you pass through 2 pages to choose your language and even gives a subtitle choice for those lacking speakers .   There’s nothing groundbreaking here, with a choice of send your own greeting card or submit your Christmas tradition to be added to the interactive map.  But what is there is done well, very well.  Good creative, flowing usability, it;s about knowing what you want to do and executing superbly.   The page also links out to cheerpass.com, a blog for people to submit stories of random acts of kindness, creating a cheerpass to pass the story along and share the joy.   I was tickled by the Terms of Use agreement, where I agree to submit my data to the US “a jurisdiction that may not have the same level of data protection laws as my home country.” a clear statement that once my data is on a US server, I no longer own it.

4 seconds is all it takes.   New research looking at first impressions of e-commerce sites found that users make their mind up about the site within 4 seconds, which is half the time it took in a few years ago.   As connection speed increases, so does people expectations.  No longer are you prepared to wait for a page to load.    And a slow load time does not just colour your perceptions of the website, it changes your perception of the company as a whole.

One complication that I have found is that the visions of an ‘advertising creative’ are far easier to create on a website – Flash can do so much to make it look like a commercial.  But the stark technical issues – that it looks good but is huge, takes a long time to load and then does very little – is something that is a far harder reality to get over.   ‘Static’ pages are still good!   I like this research, more evidence to move the creatives away from doing full flash only sites for everything.

Nike Golf have decided that the best way to market their new golf balls is to blast them at objects and film the resulting destruction in slo-mo. Great videos, aimed at convincing people that if only they buy these balls, they will be able to hit them hard enough to do such damage. You can vote on what you want the testers to destroy next – I voted for the Bunny. Bad design in that once I’ve voted, I have to refresh the page entirely to get back and add my name to their mailing list to find out when the next video is released; there’s also no privacy policy on the page, which surprises me considering how they normally are. the videos have not hit Youtube yet, so i can’t show you one, but here’s a shot of an exploding lavalamp.

Thanks to yesbutnobutyes

There’s obviously something in the air, maybe the high property prices, but, following Nissan, another car manufacturer has decided that their vehicles are perfect to live in.  This time it is Chevy, who are running the ‘Aveo Livin’ Large Campus Challenge‘.  I’m late on this as it finished last week,

They put the teams through a series of challenges, videoed them, got them blogging throughout the week and then got people to vote for the teams via text (not sure if via the site as well).   It’s hitting a lot of the right buttons for a digital interactive campaign here and from appearances, it got some traction.

Looking at the product site, I’m guessing the college student is one of their key targets.  A entry level car (I guess, cars not being my thing really), they hit 7 large potential markets and generate a lot of buzz about the car, (technorati search).   We’ll probably get a few more of these types of campaigns in the next few months, each slightly more outrageous than the last.

Bad, bad title. Setting up everyone to believe you can take control of the masses out there. As was acknowledged eventually in the panel conversation, taking control is out of the question but it seems that none of the panel had questioned the title in preparation. Again, this is taken from rapidly scribbled notes.
The panel were:

• Mary Bermel, Director Interactive, HP
• Dean Harris, Chief Marketing Officer, Kayak.com
• John Trimble, SVP Branded Sales, FOX Interactive Media
• Moderator: Stacey Lynn Koerner, President, Consumer Experience Practice, Interpublic Media

Stacey: What is an operational defintition of UGC?

John: It means different things to different people. It’s a community environment; it’s not new – message boards, newsgroups are all UGC.

Dean: It’s content, of multiple medias, designed by non-paid professionals or amateurs. ie they are not paid by a company/agency to produce the stuff.

Mary: HP looks at UGC the way dean defines it.

Stacey: Is UGC and consumer control putting pressure on the marketeer?

Mary: Yes. we are not used to giving up control. have to let go and accept that users have a voice. Teams have to change tack from push to pull. It is a different mindset for 90% of the work.

Stacey: Are publishers changing their mindset?

John: Yes. It is a major paradigm shift.You have to deliver something unique, create a reason for the user to engage. It’s collaborative; as a publisher have to tak to clients. It’s more of a challenge, more creative.

Stacey: Could collaborative processes become best practices in the ‘traditional’ properties with Fox, as traditional becomes more digital?

John: At the end of the day digital is the sizzle. TV is still mass. Views it as co-dependents, need to work together to do a collaborative campaign. Fox can provide multiple touchpoints. Publishers have to deliver the platform across the panels.

Dean: Online brings new transparency; marketing is supposed to be about the consumer, online supports this. the good brands will survive the transparency.

Mary: Agrees that we need many channels. Last year HP committed to double online spend year on year. They were at 10%, so far the trend is ontrack. There is definitely a metrics challenge with talking to traditional side and sees problems in trying to bring the two systems together (to make a common standard). Let them be content with their reach and freuqency if that’s what makes them happy. Would love to see traditional become more accountable. But online we say the key metric is engagement and we still can’t explain that in a satisfactory manner to traditional advertisers.

From here on in, there was little clarity between the differences between advertising on UGC sites such as MySpace and UGC as in content that supports (or not) the brand from entities other than paid agencies. Some times a question was answered from both perspectives. There was no pointing out the differences between the two approaches, both of which have advantages and disadvantages, which confused some people, if those sitting next to me were to go by.

Dean: Consumers are in control and that is good as consumers will make the decisions that are good for them and good for the brand.

A straw poll was conducted at this point and only one person admitted to being scared to death over the consumers being in control. I think more should be, it’s going to change a lot of people’s jobs.

John: UGC gives immediate feedback as to where users are connecting with positioning and proposition and allows you to examine the brand. It’s an immediate focus group.

Stacey: What are your top 3 concerns about UGC?

John: Cost! it delivers value (said half tongue in cheek). Trust. Security. Delivery.

Mary: Sees data that says that social networks (ie myspace) don;t trust content/products that advertise in the network environments, There are good examples, but product messages are not the answer; building microsites can take the user out of the network which is also not good. Worried about the learning cost of understanding UGC.

Dean: we have to be interesting. great messages. we have to break through with stuff people want to receive.

Next was an audience Q&A session – a lot of questions.

Q: How do you trust the UGC?

John: you can start by putting your toe in the water, [advertise] in safe places on the network, ie myspace homepage. Start to build up your credibility and trust. Some advertisers only want to be in protected areas. The risk takers are the automotives, fast foods, entertainment/studios.

Q: How far can you go with pulled content (ie can it be more edgier than traditional bought media)

Mary: a brand needs to create content that people want to pull. Create complete messages. As you get to the longtail how can you control? HP is slowly dipping toes in this area. Wants to be more associated with content that is sort of peer reviewed and is not prepared to go to the tail.

John: if innapproapriate content is placed around ads, they can (and have) pulled the ads. It puts pressure on media planners to be careful.

Dean: Kayak launched a TV campaign that was controversial, extended it online by creating an ad tool and asking users to create their own ads. they did moderate and remove things hateful, too sexual but it did go further than normally allowed (on network). It was seen as a way to extend the media buy.

Here, Mary may be doing a service to all us smaller bloggers out here..it’s often about influence, not total reach and just ‘cos we’re out on the tail does not mean we are edgier. But I though only Dean answered the question about can you go more edgy online, or when consumers are choosing to create media or whn advertising next to uncensored stuff. I’ve seen the types of lines that can get cut from ads ‘cos the TV networks don’t like them and was shocked by some of the decisions, what was not allowed in. On line is slightly less restrained and you can stretch the brand, although you always have to remember that users can stretch it far further.

Q: is it really a paradign shift as marketing has always been about engagement and is it just an opportunity shift?

Mary: marketers have to think differently now across the channels.

Stacey: we have had a dialogue before but limited reach. Now we have a dialogue with a channel as consumers are a channel too. Consumers spread the word so this challenges how we engage.

John: it is having a huge impact on the ad infrastructure. The audience is fragmented, you have to customise more. You have to increase badnwidth to address this fragmentation.

Dean: it lets us do it faster, better, cheaper. Has unlocked a creative renaissance (all the tools). it is truly exciting.

Q: If Fox is selling the protected spaces, what % of reach is actually seeing this space?

John: the protected areas reference was about giving advertisers a safe space if they were uncomfirtable. many are moving into the unprotected areas. The home page gets about 15m uniques, about 200m impressions. This is about 25% of the user base.

Q: what happens when UGC heckles the brand?

Dean: that’s life! Not everyone likes the brand. we can’t get crazed about it.

Mary: It’s no longer the email that goes round the company, now everyone can see the problem. But if you are in the right the user community will stand up for you and defend you. If you are credible and stay true, the community will stand up.

Stacey: problems start with this when a brand ‘plays’ at this and does not really let up control.

Q: how much control is too much before you lose credibility?

Dean: You can’t take control and should not. things like Payperpost will backfire and cause problems.

Stacey: If you are just looking at spreading the brand then you are missing the boat. We should do more to learn about how users see the brand. We can’t just count eyeballs.

And there time was up. For me, this was a far better panel than the first one. Some realism that things have to change. But like the morning session, still a lot of confusion about what this means.