Friends of the Earth - Video Competition
Friends of the Earth are holding a video competition in conjunction with Youtube. The voting is now open, and some of the entries are brilliant. Here’s my favourite.
Friends of the Earth are holding a video competition in conjunction with Youtube. The voting is now open, and some of the entries are brilliant. Here’s my favourite.
I’m going to join in Blog Action Day, a day when thousands of bloggers will be writing about the environment. The idea is to create as much noise and attention at once as possible. If you have a blog, join in!
My overall feeling about ad:tech 2007, having been to the last 3 London ad:techs, was that 90% of what was on show was the same as at last year’s. The 10% related to video advertising, and products which claim to help advertisers to make the most of social networking, and the wonders of web 2.0.
The highlight for me was a discussion session about strategies for making the most of consumer generated content. The speakers came from 3 technology and service providers (1000 Heads, Milward Brown Precis, and Market Sentinel) and one advertiser: Avis, represented by my good friend Xavier Vallee, who is their UK Head of Marketing.
Distilling the best practice from the discussion, Fergus from Milward Brown put it well when he said advertisers needed to work out what was being said about them online, whether it mattered, what to do about it, and whether the action had worked. Some brands aren’t discussed much online (Flora isn’t, Marmite is) so they may not need to worry so much. Others need to be proactive and engage in the discussion appropriately.
The Avis case study is based on the idea of net promoter ratings, which essentially measure people saying positive things minus people saying negative things, for particular subjects, like “Avis car hire”. Avis has used this model for some time offline, and decided to start using them to weigh online conversation about them and their competitors.
Avis decided to set up the We Try Harder blog to engage in the online conversation, and made some sensible decisions about how they would execute on that idea, working with their partners Web Liquid. They wanted the blog to be authentic and honest, so it’s written by regular staff, and nobody copywrites for them. It sets out to acknowledge problems and discuss them, rather than pretending that a problem doesn’t exist. Comment and input from consumers is being used to refine Avis’s product and service offering in a way that wasn’t possible previously.
The results have been very good. Members of the public are visiting the blog and engaging regularly, and Avis’s measure of net approval has risen considerably, both in its own right and relative to its competitors. Even better, last week they won a prize for innovative use of digital channels in customer service from SOCAP. When you consider some of the statistics about the impact of online review and comment on travel booking decisions, this work must be falling through to Avis’s bottom line.
1000 Heads example of the Nokia N95 product launch showed another innovative approach to making the most of online discussion. They identified some of the key bloggers for mobile telephony in the UK and then approached them to invite them on an expenses-paid trip to New York for the worldwide launch. They were asked to write honestly about what they thought of the product, and lots of coverage and attention was generated as a result. There is an ethical question here. If Xavier was buying me dinner for writing this blog entry, you might be questioning whether I was being impartial in my praise of his efforts. The key thing, I suppose, is that they were asked to write honestly and they did cover their dislikes as well as likes about the product.
To sum up the best practice, the panellists as a group seemed to be saying:
All this has to be done quite fast, compared to its offline analogues, so it’s critical to have the right technology and people on the job.
My last question to the Market Sentinel guys was about Facebook, and the fact that it’s a largely closed community. Given the amount of discussion and interaction going on inside Facebook, the lack of tools to crawl and analyse that discussion must be a barrier to a reliable analysis.
My Agency.com colleagues who’ve been working on Ikea’s latest microsite are doing great work. It’s an interactive pop-up book, and it’s beautiful.
The same site includes a blog written by the manager of the soon-to-open Coventry store, who’s writing about all the preparations, as the opening date nears. The meatballs are being delivered next week, along with the Daim bars.
On the day that rumours spread about Microsoft taking a $500m stake in Facebook, Nielsen released their latest stats on social networking sites, and it seems I might be right about nothing lasting forever. According to this article at Media Guardian, although Facebook is the most popular social networking site today, it’s growth is slowing, and other sites, including Perfspot, are growing faster.
If I had equity at Facebook, I think I’d be selling it to Microsoft before they read the Nielsen report.
This morning I received yet another of the daily emails ad:tech have been sending me in the build-up to their exhibition and conference, which starts tomorrow. The subject line this time was “Newsletter 6 - see you tomorrow”. Newsletter 6!
I hope that whoever is looking after email at ad:tech is going to find the time to visit the session at 11:45 on Wednesday, titled “email best practice workshop”. Daily emails about an up-coming conference just seem like they might not be best practice to me. I hope the show lives up to all their pre-marketing.
I’ve found 2 great pieces of productivity software in the last 24 hours. Sandy is an email-based personal assistant I read about yesterday on Tim O’Reilly’s blog. You cc emails to Sandy with appointments, reminders, things you want to keep track of. The application reads the emails and does the most appropriate thing with them. I’m sending notes like “sandy, remind me to call mike in the morning” and the next thing I know, I get an email reminding me. It’s lacking a few features, like mobile integration for the UK, and integration with Google Calendar, but so far I like it a lot.
The second application is SyncMyCal. This application bridges my work calendar (Outlook) to my home calendar (Google) and I’ve been looking for something that does that for so long! It works, and the limited edition is free.
If I don’t get really organised now, it’s my own fault…
Based on this article, which says that 31% (of 100 people) lie when they register on websites, I thought I’d do some research of my own. Do you tell the truth when you register?
According to this article at WiredNews, the emoticon is 25 years old tomorrow. They were first used by a Professor Fahlman at Carnegie Mellon University, apparently.
I found this article from Microsoft really helpful, if a little serious, on the subject of how and when to use them. It explains that “emoticons are sideways faces that express emotion”
No sooner did I discover that Google allow one to target ads on race & ethnicity (as do MySpace, it seems) than I read that they’re introducing contextual advertising for mobile. Aside from the obvious discussion about whether display advertising works on mobile yet (I don’t think so) it was interesting to see the list of countries they’re piloting with:
US, England, France, Italy, Germany, Spain, Ireland, Russia, Netherlands, Australia, India, China, and Japan (shortly).
Yes, England! So the Scots, Welsh and Irish (northern or otherwise) and I presume the Channel Islanders as well, won’t be getting mobile ads from Google, but the English will.
Or perhaps they meant the United Kingdom…