Social Media
The Samsung Smart TV stare battle with Keenan Cahill
Samsung is challenging people in the Netherlands to a staring contest with YouTube lip-synching sensation Keenan Cahill on their YouTube channel to promote their new series of Smart TV’s. You game uses eye-tracking to watch your eyelid movements through your webcam and your score is based on how long you can go without blinking. They then use the time you are staring at the screen for Cahill to use and promote the TV’s features like Skype and YouTube. It is a fun use of technology and an internet personality to use an old media channel is a new way.
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ESPN X Games Human Twitter
If you watched the extreme sports of ESPN’s X-Games that took place in L.A. over the weekend (or the thing between the mind numbingly repetitive Lady Gaga Shark Week commercial) you may have seen something unusual during the Moto X events. When the camera panned over the crowd there was an analog version of Twitter where fans could tweet their messages to the hashtag #humantwitter and a group of human updaters in the audience would write out and hold up the the Tweet. Photographers also took shots of all the messages and then be retweeted to their original senders. As every news station out there jumps into having their own Twitter feed and ask views to Tweet their reactions this was an interesting twist on the concept.
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My thoughts on Google+
So if you have been semi-concious for the past few weeks you have heard of, if you’re not already using Google+. It is Google’s latest move into the social networking space following Google Buzz, Google Wave, Orkut, Google Profile, Jaiku, Google Friend Connect and Dodgeball – all have had variable degrees of success. Google is obviously looking at this as a priority and they are doing it because they are losing their grip on the real-time social Internet and need to become a big player in the social space so they can better target us with ads and search results. The site since it is still in limited Beta and they are still working on it but for those of you who haven’t been able to get an invite in – here are some thoughts on what you are missing. (And I have some invites left if anyone wants them – hit me up on Twitter and I be happy to send them along).
When you start using Google+ you see more than a passing similarity to the Facebook’s layout and functionality though there are a few key differences. The core part of the experience revolves around a Facebook style news feed called the Stream. To get content into your stream you have to add friends which can be organized into Circles which are the biggest point of differentiation and the best idea in Google+ even though it comes with a downside. Circles allows you to group friends into categories like Friends, Family, Acquaintances, Work, etc. and you can then decide when you post something which Circles you want to share it with. This level of curation and content control is something that has always been a huge problem with Facebook and forced user to curate their overall friends list instead of individual content entries. This means that you probably don’t want to be friends with your boss or parents on Facebook because once they are in you can’t control which posts they can and can’t see.
So while the first part of the process looks and acts like Facebook, following your friends and getting your own followers is much more like Twitter because you can follow anyone and they can follow you without the need for their approval. This clash of two different social media conventions from two different sites creates an interesting and even confusing scenario. Since the site so clearly looks like Facebook I found myself treating the content like Facebook and I was posting vacation photos and other content I would normally put on my Facebook wall. The problem was that I wasn’t paying attention to which Circles I was sharing that content with so things I would normally never put on Twitter because they was personal I was sharing with the whole world and strangers were commenting on my vacation photos. It only had to happen once before I started paying a lot more attention to how I shared content and which Circles were selected when I posted anything. I think this is something that this is going to be a common problem and it is something that Google is going to need to find a way to address so that people understand this new dynamic.
But after spending a lot of time using and looking at how other people are using Google+ I just don’t see what the killer feature that is going to make people want to spend less time on Facebook and Twitter because those sites are such entrenched social routines by now. I just look at the group of friends of I have on Google+ which I think represent a hardcore early adopter community thus the most likely to take up a new site like this but after the buzz of the invite only access and initial exploration time wore off I get one new content post per day from that group. I also checked to see if that was a result of overall social media complacency but found that while they were silent on Google+ they all remained very active on Facebook and Twitter. So if I get nothing but the sound of crickets from a that group then I think that it’s a bellwether that the average person isn’t going to care about Google+ when they see it doesn’t bring anything new to the table. Only time will tell if Google still have an ace up their sleeve and will roll out some feature that will change everything but for now I think once the invite only access to the site expires this site might very well go the way of all of Google’s other social media experiments.
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What’s your social media Klout?
I came across an interesting new site that is still in beta development this week called Klout.com that measures your overall online influence. You log-in using Facebook or Twitter and after authorizing it to look at all your social media services that use 35 different variables to give you an influence score ranging from 1 to 100 with higher scores representing a wider and stronger sphere of influence.
You can look at how they arrived at the score through a metrics driven visual dashboard broken into true reach, amplification probability and network influence. True reach calculates the influence for each individual relationship taking into account factors such as whether an individual has shared or acted upon your content and the likelihood that they saw it. Amplification probability looks at your ability to create content that compels others to respond and high-velocity content that spreads into networks beyond your own is a key component of influence. Network influence measures actions like retweets, @messages, follows, lists, comments, and likes to measure the authority and the quality of your content.
Your score and social media behavior then put you into one of sixteen categories. They range from the low level Dabbler who is just starting out in social media to the Thought Leader is who a visionary in their industry. I am categorized as an Explorer which is “Someone who is actively engage in the social web, constantly trying out new ways to interact and network. You’re exploring the ecosystem and making it work for you. Your level of activity and engagement shows that you “get it”, we predict you’ll be moving up.”
The quality of the score analysis is very detailed, very interesting and vert good. The site also cuts the data into interesting displays and graphs like Klout Style which create a 4 dimension visual map showing your score and category against key people you follow.
But nothing everything is so wonderful as you clearly see other areas are clearly still in Beta. The most noticeable beta data results for me was the topics sections that lists the top 5 topics you most influence. For me it was creativity (I’d really hope that was number one) followed by soda, KFC, diabetes and marketing. How they came up with two through four is beyond me since I never eat at KFC, have given up drinking soda and have written anything about diabetes. I may have written about KFC and soda advertising campaigns two or three times in nine years.
If Twitter and Facebook aren’t funding these guys they are idiots because the introduction of game mechanics into the social media landscape makes it even more addicting as you want to post more content, get more followers so you can see your score and classification rise.
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Why doesn’t American Apparel own F-Commerce?
I have always found American Apparel to be a fascinating brand that has been willing to push the boundaries of advertising to create their brand image. They have been rattling around in my mind again lately because I read an article the other morning about their recent financial performance since fighting back from the edge of bankruptcy they just reported their in-store sales were flat in the second quarter of 2011 versus a decline of 16% for the same quarter last year. What I found even more interesting was that their online sales increased 19% when compared to the same quarter last year. I went onto store.americanapparel.net to see how they were selling their clothes online. The site was every bit as boring as I feared it would be and showed none of the risks the brand was willing to take in their advertising and brand positioning. So it got me thinking about the fashion in luxury spaces in general and how American Apparel could make their online sales strategy as differentiated as their advertising.
If you look at the historical adoption of technology in the luxury and fashion industries you will it has been pitiful. Time after time the technology adoption curve is lead by early adopter brands, then big brands, then small brands, then mom and pop brands and then luxury and fashion brands pulling up the rear. This trend continues with the adoption of social media in the space where they are just starting to dip their toe in the water after only recently figuring out how to sell products online once they were forced into it by competition like Gilt.com. I have never understood this trend because you have these high end brands that set the standard for design, fashion and even culture across the world yet they aren’t able to bring any of that innovation or design leadership into the digital space.
So American Apparel if you are paying attention here is the two step plan to make your online brand as strong as your advertising brand.
1 – Lose the web site
99% of it is just a boring e-commerce site with some forgettable brand content sprinkled in. Plus americanapparel.net – really?
2 – Sell everything through Facebook (f-commerce)
Stop screwing around with ‘Like’ buttons and be the first fashion brand to really embrace f-commerce so you online presence, like your ads, become a category buster.
You just have to read my article What Britney Spears can teach you about modern experiential branding to see how the social media has changed inter-personal dynamics and overlay that with the technology adoption insight you see that they could have an IMMENSE opportunity to something really unique. Their competitive set that isn’t doing anything more than ‘Like Us for a Discount” and your core customer is probably the purest expression of someone who truly lives in the social media space. Take advantage of the fact that every teenager in the world would love to be able to buy your product through Facebook and then tell all their friends about it. Finally being able to figure out how to turn your product into branded social media content is the holy grail of every company out there.
Hopefully someone out there is listening – if you are all I want is a credit in the case study and a small royalty from f-commerce sales wouldn’t hurt…
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Twitter & Facebook don’t understand global brands
Twitter and Facebook have become engrained in the social fabric of society unlike any other technology since the invention of television. That being said, they are two sites who have a huge flaw in that they have been developed almost completely from a consumers point of view and they need to take the time to understand a global brands point of view to give us the tools to be able to take their sites to a new level.
Unified multilingual social media
Both Twitter and Facebook Twitter take the point of view of the average user will be self selecting when it comes to language and this obviously happens because I would only be Facebook friends or follow people on Twitter who speak the same language that I do. The problem comes when you turn that construct around and look at the interaction dynamic from the point of view of global brand that needs to speak multiple languages from one source. For example, if I wanted to have one of the global brands I lead have a global Twitter presence that talked to our consumers in ten different languages then I would have to set up ten different feeds with ten different names to speak those ten different languages. When I go through this process on one of our global web sites we serve a single user experience that can then be customized with a language drop down for those ten different languages and we even automate the process using something like an IP sniffer. I know there are hacks to get around this where you can use hash tags to mark the language you are using and then split the content when it is aggregated somewhere else but that is so clumsy and creates so much excess content for the consumer that it would make a traditional Twitter experience too overwhelming.
Brands are multi-dimensional
In a similar vein, both Facebook and Twitter need to realize that brands are multi-dimensional experiences that consumers bond with through different expressions of those brands both digital and physical. For example, a guest may bond with the global values and direction of W Hotels and/or they may bond with a physical expression of that brand like the W South Beach or W Global Glam at New York Flash Week. Right now I have to set-up different Facebook pages or different Twitter streams for every incarnation of the brand which requires a huge infrastructure to manage and keep as a viable community and communication channel. Brands need the ability to group all of these different global and local incarnations together to make it easier for guests to be able to move between this information and these experiences. I know there have been rumbling of something like this from within Facebook for years I see not tangible signs that this is a priority for them or that the brands concept will be rolling out anytime in the near future.
These sites and all social media channels need to give brands the ability to be able to manage global brand through a single Twitter handle or single Facebook experience with the tools and understanding that brands are global entities with multidimensional touch points that speak multiple languages and want to do it all through a single user experience. The value to the sites to invest in this direction is that if brands had these tools then we would be able to create infinity more engaging, more global and deeper experiences that would let consumers relationships with these site go to an even deeper level than they are now.
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TweetingSeat: The social media park bench
TweetingSeat is an interactive park bench that was designed by Chris McNicholl to explore the environments in which the bench is placed and the people whom it encounters. Each time someone sits down, TweetingSeat uploads an image from two cameras to the Twitterfeed. One camera is located on the bench looking at the surrounding space, and another is located nearby looking at the people who use it. The hope is that by brining the real and digital worlds together that people and communities will form their own relationship with the object through the way in which they choose to use it. No word yet on where and when the TweetSeat will be installed but you can keep up with the project on their blog.
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The Inverse Facebook Experiment: A year later
The one article last year that caused the most discussion and got the most media coverage of any article I hve written since I started this blog was The Inverse Facebook Experiment which documented my experiment on the sociological impact Facebook has had on society and our inter-personal relationships. This experiment started as a personal project to look at the bonds between friends and how Facebook has become an acceptable social surrogate to real relationships and conversations. From there is evolved into something bigger and started to look at how that translated into my professional work leading global brands in the digital, branding and social media spaces. So since that original article caused so much discussion, comments and emails I wanted to revisit it a year later to see how things have changed, how they have stayed the same and to discuss a few things I wish I said in the original piece.
In the year since I did the experiment I continue to find Facebook to be a fascinating phenomenon that continues to change the very nature of the social interactions in our society unlike any other media or medium has before. As I started to write this look back at that experiment I think the best place to start is to discuss something I left out of the original piece that I wish I had talked about and was something I got a lot of comments on. When I decided to do this experiment and de-friend people on Facebook I was very aware that I was responsible for half of each of those friendships and that in 95% of the instances I was just as apathetic as about the relationships as they were. I was just as happy being an information voyeur who let bits of information and grainy cell phone photos create pseudo connections to those people I once interacted with in person. So I will start by saying that I was very aware as I went into the experiment that I was choosing to do the experiment over taking the time to fix those relationships.
It wasn’t an easy decision and it was something I have thought a lot about in the past year to try to figure out why I made that decision to abandon those relationships. In the end as nerdy as it sounds, I think was born out something that sounds like a plot line from the Matrix. Once I was aware of the pseudo relationships that were happening I couldn’t go back into it and see things the same way again. It was then that I really recognized that there are times when there is a lot of friction between my personal and professional lives. I normally thought that there were clearer lines between those two worlds where the normal flow was that I used the reactions and insights from my personal life as a base line of my professional thinking. This reversed the flow and made me realize that if you really love what you do then the world’s do blur together and there are times when one world may intrude farther than it should into the other world.
From there as I look back at my first conclusion coming out of the experiment which was: “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.” For me that insight manifested itself into the reality where we saw every brand out there trying to collect as many Facebook followers as they could with no plan as to how to engage and activate the community they were building. Once they collected all those followers they had to try to justify spending all that money with not much to show for it so they tried to assign a monetary value to those followers which I have seen range from $.15 to $125 with wildly varying logic to justify those values. The bottom line is that no one had a plan for how to activate those communities and turn those followers into spending consumers that added to the company bottom line. As a result you now see the industry shifting away from this empty collection mentality as more attention has turned to the social media space and more pressure has been brought to bear to have those communities to produce tangible results. AdvertisingAge even closed out 2010 by running a story called ‘It’s Time to Stop Collecting Facebook Fans‘ which detailed techniques on how marketers should engage those communities they had built up and even sighted the work the team and I at Starwood have done in the social media space saying we “only 20,000 fans – but boy are they engaged”.
It’s always nice to get a mention like that in the trade press even though their number about our communities were way too low but it felt like it validated the reason why I did the experiment from a professional perspective. The insights I got from the experiment let me see how thin bonds can be in virtual communities. I hope that this trend continues where we all stop becoming so enamored with the technology and get back to doing what branding and advertising should do which is to create connections between consumers and brands to produce sales. The personal side of the experiment is something that I continue to struggle with because real people and real relationships were involved. I think that my ultimate conclusion and biggest fear from all of this is that we are willingly trading away real conversations and interpersonal relationships in favor of a digital, easy digest, snapshot style of humanity.
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Twerrible Towel for #SteelersNation
I was born and raised in Pittsburgh so I pretty much had no choice but to become a die hard Pittsburgh Steelers fan. As a result when it comes to the Steelers my better judgement goes out the window and I do things like wear my Steelers jacket into the NYC Subway the week before they played the Jets so I could get flipped off and cursed at by homeless Jets fans among others. It gets worse with other facts like my dog was named the Steelers fan of the week a few years ago (seriously). I am fully aware of how out of character and ridiculous all of this is but here I am writing about it and making it worse so you get a sense of just how bad it is.
So with that in mind, what do you get when you combine a microcontroller, a repurposed fan motor, Twiiter, a hash tag and a Terrible Towel? The Twerrible Towel which is microsite housing a live stream of a repurposed mechanical contraption that will twirl a Terrible Towel every time someone tweets #SteelersNation. It was the brainchild of the agency McKinney who did the recent Sherwin Williams Color Chip campaign that I think was one of the most visually beautiful campaigns done last year. So far it is up to 16,000 twirls and counting so who knows where it will be come game day.
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Schweppes branding goes flat with new Facebook app
Shortly after the release of the new Facebook profile design a number of creative types figured out that you could play around with the layout to make the avatar photo and 5 adjacent thumbnails next to it into one image. The only problem was that you needed to have some Photoshop skills to be able to create it but it didn’t take long for a major brand to jump in and create a Facebook app that would do all the heavy lifting for you. The app is really easy to use as it lets you upload an image, adjust it in real time and then saves out all of the images for you.
BUT just as when I used the Tweet Wrap site to cerate Twitter wrapping paper I am left wondering what the hell does this app have to do with Schweppes? There is no brand tie in. No up sell. No link to their Web site!!! There has been a lot of buzz around creating these photos so you know it will be popular but with the way this app is done you could swap out the Schweppes logo for any other brand and it wouldn’t make the slightest difference. Schweppes should have found a way to have the app tie back to their core brand attributes so that the user experience supports what their brand stands for. A great example of this is when FedEx created their ‘launch a package‘ application. You can’t send files through Facebook so just like with the new profile photos there was a need by Facebook users for this functionality. But unlike Schweppes, the FedEx app tied back to their brand reenforcing the concepts of fast reliable delivery, anywhere, anytime. Even if Schweppes wasn’t going to create something that tied into their brand then why get some brand association by at least putting a small version of their logo in one of the photos so they could get some wide spread, free brand impressions out this?
If I’ve said it once I have said it a thousand times and it seems like I need to say it once more. Technology is not an idea. Production techniques are not an idea. We continue to fall into the trap where we are more caught up in the latest tools and technologies we use instead of the stories we are trying to tell. Successful and breakthrough work comes from connecting a brands core truths to their consumers. If that does not happen then this project like so many others will only remember it as a slightly interesting use of technology that is quickly forgotten while our perception of the brand goes unrecognized and unchanged.
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