Social Media
Vodafone puts 28,800 Facebook members in 1 car
Vodafone has rolled out an interesting use of Facebook in the Netherlands called Facebook vs Hamilton where they are challenging F1 champion Lewis Hamilton to a race on September 13th against 28.800 Facebook users who are competing against him in a virtual car. It is a timed race to see which is faster – downloading the profile photos 28,800 facebook members or Hamilton driving around a 2.7km track in his Mercedes F1 race car.
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Giving FourSquare some Assisted Serendipity
It is always interesting to watch as new social media platforms are taken and used as the underpinning for new ideas. The latest one i found is Assisted Serendipity that uses Foursquare’s check-in data to give you updates on the male/female ratio at your favorite local hangouts. You define the places to watch and the gender ratio you are looking for and when the numbers turn in your favor the site will let you know. While it certainly seems like a more male centric service it is still in it’s infancy so there is no hard data to knowhow well it is really working and if we will see Assisted Serendipidy commercials competing with eHarmony any time soon.
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Will checking-in to a Pepsi bottle be the next big thing in social media?
Success in online advertising for large brands is usually determined in equal parts by having an idea that creates revenue or brand buzz and the ability to execute it in a way or on a platform that no one has ever done before. Those two things are linked because when you pioneer a new media or platform it translates into millions of dollars in free press which translates into brand buzz which translates into revenue. It’s a trend in advertising that is unique to the digital world because TV, radio and print ads live within the strict parameters of their mediums and don’t have the ability to create new advertising platforms that can connect with consumers in a totally new way. So as a result huge amounts of ad agency and client time are spent in the constant race to find the new shiny platform that will help set their brand apart from all the others in the increasingly crowded digital landscape.
Because modern branding is about having a conversation with the consumer and social media doesn’t require each brand to build their own unique platform to have that conversation much of this effort recently has been focused on that medium. The challenge for marketers is that you can see a trend over the evolution of social media where we need to participate less and less in the social media platforms to generate content. For the majority of society social media started with Facebook and it’s a long form check-ins and the ability to let you determine the list of friends that could see your updates. Twitter then shortened that check-in to just 140 characters and removed approval process so anyone could see your updates. Four Square then removed the need to type anything to create a check in by making it all location based and split the approval process so you can have some friends who see all your check-ins but at the same time anyone can see a check-in for a specific location.
So where do we go from here? What is the next evolution in social media? I am going to bet that we are going to continue to see the trend I outlined before continue and we are going to move from location based check-in to a more product focused approach with object based check-in. Enter StickyBits which launched at South by Southwest Interactive in March. It’s an iPhone and Android based application that lets you associate videos, photos, text or audio to real-world objects through barcodes.
Stickybits made the very smart decision to base their platform on something that that every product in every store already has. North American consumers aren’t as accepting of new technology like what you see in Asia. When you used a QR code you first had the challenge of having to create awareness among your consumer base to what the code is and then how to use it. From there the technology was hindered by never having an internal unified platform and each experience varied wildly after you scanned the code. You would usually receive some form of simple mobile experience that was very light on content instead of the rich content you get with Stickybits.
You download the free StickyBits app and scan a barcode which is either a unique codes obtained from StickyBits or from barcode already on a product. The application processes the code and then you can upload a geo-tagged piece of content that is tied to your social media profile or view what others have already uploaded. The problem with this when it first launched was that there was no ability to differentiate between brand and user created content and content was simply listed in the order in which it was posted. That problem was fixed the week with the release of their updated application that can distinguish between the two types on content and now lists ‘branded bits’ accordingly. PepsiCo has signed up to be the first sponsor to take advantage of this new feature so when you scan can of Pepsi you now get a video about the Pepsi’s Refresh project before seeing all the bits associated with that object. Other Pepsi products like Lay’s potato chips will soon be joining in as well.
So while no one can predict the future, I think the combination of using barcodes as a universally available entry point, rich media content and having packaged goods clients means this technology has the potential to explode far faster than what we have seen with other recent social media darlings like FourSquare.
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C’Mon LeBron, Love NYC
If you follow NBA Basketball you know the the Cleveland Cavaliers were recently eliminated form the NBA Playoffs and it once again started huge speculation on if the Cavaliers superstar LeBron James will stay with the team when his contract expires at the end of June. The speculation about which team he will go to if he leaves continues to center on the biggest stage in the world – New York City and the Knicks who have been making salary room for just such a superstar. In typical aggressive New Yorker style the city of New York has launched an new grass roots campaign “to show the world’s greatest athlete why he belongs in the world’s greatest city”. The campaign is completely social media centric with a Facebook page, Twitter feed and C’mon LeBron toolkit containing logos, Facebook and Twitter avatars. It has just started so the movement only has 400 right now but we will see if a little love and whole lot of $$$$$ can make the difference and bring him to NYC.
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Should We Like the Facebook ‘Like’ Button?
The latest social media add on that has everyone buzzing is the new Facebook ‘Like’ button that has now landed not only on Facebook.com but is also finding it’s way out to regular web sites as well. On Facebook.com the Like button has replaced the long time ‘Become a Fan’ button and when it is used on other sites the Like button lets users make connections to your pages and share content back to their friends on Facebook by click on a small. light blue ‘Like’ button. It also become a kind of popularity meter like the ‘Retweet’ and ‘Digg’ buttons where can see how many people have clicked the button.
I get their strategy to try and move the Facebook experience out beyond the site itself which they have not been able to really do before now but should we like the ‘Like’ button? Having tried it out on a few sites and even putting in on this blog for the past week .
The first thing I found out after I implemented it on my blog and asked some people about it was no one cared about it or used it. They felt like it was just one more thing that was late to the party in the already crowded sea of social media.
But when it comes right down to it the biggest problem I have with the Facebook Like button is that I ‘m not going to invest time, resources and money into something that they can change without my input at any time and they have a horrible track record for sticking with a direction like this for the long haul. It used to be all about the Boxes on your personal page that we all developed mini applications for and then those were buried and slowly phased out. Then it was all about grouping users into networks as the core of the site until those got disbanded. It was all about having your community as a group page until they changed that to pages instead. I would start in on the changes to their rules and permission but we would be here all day. And on, and on, and on… These things in themselves have been frustrating enough but they have been contained to just their site. Now that they are pushing that out to other sites it has to have more stability than what they have shown in the past. For right now I don’t believe this going to be any different other than the newest flavor of the moment that is going to leave a bad aftertaste when they go a new direction a year from now.
So for now my advice is to continue to drive traffic to your Facebook community group or page on Facebook.com where the problems and changes can be contained and don’t effect your site.
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The Evolution of Privacy on Facebook
Matt McKeon is a developer with the Visual Communication Lab at IBM Research’s Center for Social Software has created a really interesting data visualization showing the changes to Facebook’s default profile settings in regards to your personal data in 10 different categories since 2005. I’m betting after you see this you are going to be spending some serious time with your privacy settings.
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What makes an online community successful?
Last week I spoke at the Social Media & Community 2.0 Conference about Non-Traditional Insight-Driven Community Building and I’ve had a few emails asking for me to elaborate on one of my slides so I thought I would post the answer here.
When you use social media to create an online community the biggest challenge is going to be how does your brand stand out from your competitors who are all trying to get the same consumers into their online communities? One of the keys to success is to build your community so consumers see some kind of value in their participation in your community. That value is critical because while both traditional and online communities form around shared interests, the bond to the digital community is really thin. This happens because a community that is formed in the real world is based around physical proximity and participation so people have to go to that community to be a part of it. The effort required to physically go somewhere to participate in something is much, much higher than the 5 seconds it takes to click a ‘Follow’ or ‘Like’ button. So because of that difference you have to work much harder to keep the digital community working, keep that consumer seeing the value and keep them from losing interest and breaking that thin bond and dropping out. I have found that when consumers see value it falls into three different kinds of modivators.
Emotional
They join or participate in the community because they have an emotional connection to the communities subject matter. It could be a cause they are passionate about or a brand they connect with on a personal level. Of the three different triggers this is the strongest because the bond is on a personal and emotional level which will be harder to break than the other two. The best examples are communities for brands like Apple, Microsoft Xbox or Toms Shoes.
Intellectual
They join or participate in the community because they want to either give or gain knowledge round the communities subject matter. The members who want to give knowledge feel a sense of empowerment for being a teacher who can speak with authority on the subject matter. The members who want to gain knowledge join the community because it allows them to learn from a community that would not be geographically possible outside of the virtual world and it removes the intimidation that could be found if the situation was taken into the real world. These could be founded around large and generic subjects like cooking or brands like Adobe, Ford or Twitter.
Financial
They join or participate in the community because that participation brings them financial gains or savings like discounts or special offers. It could give be as straight forward as coupons that translate into dollar savings or access to special merchandise that isn’t offered to the general public making them feel like an insider who has special access to the brand. The best examples are communities for brands like Coupons.com or Gilt.com.
How do you use these triggers?
I have found a lot of success building communities to cater to and take advantage of all three of these different motivators by cycle through these three different motivators in the marketing messaging. This means that one week give out some tips about the brands area of expertise (intellectual), the next week talk about something that is core to their business (emotional) and then the next week send out a discount or offer to drive sales or customers into the store (financial). By cycling through the messaging you keep the communication fresh so it isn’t the same thing over and over again, you cater to the individual motivators as well as consumers who fall into multiple categories and you are able to build the brand and drive sales.
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Architecture + digital technology = N Building Tokyo
In tokyo near the Tachikawa station amidst a shopping district you will find the N Building. It is unique because if you have ever been to Asia you know that most ever building in these commercial districts has signs and billboards covering almost ever inch of the facade but not in this case. The facade of the N Building is one giant QR code that triggers up to date shop information, Tweets from building residents and even AR decorations for different seasons and events. Check out the video above for all the details but I think this is a fascinating direction for new retail experiences that can go far beyond the traditional store windows and branding.
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The Inverse Facebook Experiment
About three and a half months ago I very quietly began my own social media experiment to see if Facebook, which was supposed to bring people together, was actually keeping some of my friends away from me. All of this came about because one of my really close friends (Friend A) ran into one of my other friends who I don’t see that often (Friend B). Somehow I came up in the course of the conversation and Friend A realized that Friend B talked about me like we hung out all the time but all he was really doing was repeating things he had read in my Facebook status updates. It got me thinking – how many other friends were doing the same things? Was staying friends with them on Facebook just enabling this behavior so we never saw each other face to face? Was my friendship just being collected like a trading card so people could have a higher friend number and feel better about themselves? And had Facebook become such an engrained part of society that if I de-friending them in the virtual world would it have an actual effect on our friendship in the real world?
I really debated those questions for about a week and decided that I needed to know the answers. I wasn’t doing this to be mean spirited but I wanted to try to have more meaningful friendships in my life and fewer purely virtual ones. I knew it was going to be a hard process and I might have to explain my actions to some of these people so I needed to have a consistent set of rules that would help me make my decisions. As I was working out the rules I decided the best thing would to keep it simple. So the two rules I used were:
1 – I had to have been friends with you on Facebook for more than a year.
2 – I had to have had some kind of meaningful exchange with you in the past year and I broke that down to subgroups. If you live near me then we had to have gone out to at least one lunch, dinner or talked something meaningful for more than 15 minutes in the past year. If you live far away then we had to have had at least 2 meaningful email exchanges in the past year. If you work with me than we had to have done something outside of work like lunch, dinner or drinks at least once in the past year.
I thought it was a fair way to make the decisions and honestly kept the bar pretty low to stay on my friends list. When I applied those rules to my nearly 225 Facebook friends it meant I was going to de-friend just under 100 of them. I was shocked by the fact that so many of my friends couldn’t meet those basic criteria and it only strengthened my resolve that this needed to happen. I bit the bullet, gave the axe to everyone on the list and waited for the reaction.
In the three and a half months since I started this experiment I have honestly been shocked at the response – or actually the lack there of.
95% of the people on that list had no response at all. They never noticed, emailed, IM’d or called to ask me why we weren’t friends anymore. I can only conclude that for that group we had become acquaintances who had a connection at some point in our lives but Facebook had created a false sense of meaningful connection and friendship.
3% caught on to me pretty much immediately and got in touch to ask what had happened. I was honest with them for why I did it and I didn’t take the ‘I don’t know why we aren’t friends anymore. It must have been a Facebook error” road. I am very happy to say that for that group we have been seeing a lot more of each other and it was a wake up call that really brought us back together.
2% caught on at some point later in that 3 1/2 month period and asked me what happened. Again I was honest with them but they mainly just wanted to be friends again on Facebook and not really make any real change.
I am curious to see if those numbers will stay the same now that I have made this experiment public. A large percentage of that group who got the axe read my blog on a regular basis and are probably racing to Facebook to see if they were on the list.
I have put a lot of thought into what I learned from all of this and what insights we can take from it. I started with once again embracing the fact that my creative process uses personal experiences to create professional insights and work. This was an experiment that clearly took place in my personal life but the insight I walked away with reinforces something I already knew from my professional like. Any digital community only has real value if the connections created to that community are real and have real value to the people participating in it. If those connections are so thin that they are at best passive participation that go unnoticed when they are broken then no matter how many people are part of that community it is meaningless. It will never have an effect, it will never communicate anything and it will only exist to serve the community creator and not the community itself.
If you are feeling brave try this experiment for yourself to see what results you get and if the same conclusion holds true. No matter what the outcome hopefully it will help you reconnect with old friends in the real world and have a conversation that does start with a form field that reads “What’s on your mind?”.
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MySpace U.K. Makes Music with Facebook
Johnathan Hills and the guys over at Domani Studio have not been resting on their shiny new FWA of the year win and have been busy with the recently launched site for MySpace U.K.. The site turns to either Facebook Connect, you read that right, or the new MySpace version of Connect called MySpaceID to allow users to create personalized videos with major music stars like 50 cent, Alicia Keys and Lostprophets. It’s honestly one of the best external uses of Facebook content I have ever seen as your profile photo is seamlessly integrated into the videos that were all shot specifically for the site to be able to create the effect. It os funny to login, choose some of the video clips and then call a friend over to see their reaction. Now is MySpace could just figure out a way to make their actual site as cool as this experience…
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