sylleptic - mark hopwood’s blog

Facebook is doing something very interesting in allowing advertisers to buy specific networks. This ad was (I presume) created for members of the Agency.com network. It’s extremely targetted: it mentions Agency.com by name, and it’s advertising a service people at our company could very well be interested in.

This kind of thing is valuable, makes minimal use of personal data and would seem like an example where they’ve been very smart.

Shame about the creative though…

We’ve been keen to do something with QR codes for some time, and have run up against practical obstacles to their effectiveness each time, so it’s good to see an example that does make sense. Thanks to Blognation for the details.

QR codes are 2 dimensional bar codes. They look a bit like this normally.

This one directs you to my blog, since it contains the URL “blog.markhopwood.com”.

The idea is that you download a piece of software to your phone, then when you see one of these funny squares, you take a photo of it with your phone, and you’re directed to a website with related content. In the newspaper example, people reading an article about Radiohead might see one that links to a mobile site with one of their videos on it.

Why is this idea better than others I’ve seen (like this one that Iain Tait pointed out). The basic problem is that the software isn’t pre-installed on all our mobile phones yet, like it is in Japan. So the experience when you see one of these posters is pretty shallow. No software, no link. Maybe you think it looks cool, but that’s about it.

But if your favourite newspaper or magazine starts using them, you’ll have lots of reasons to download the software in each edition. And because it’s something printed, in your hand, rather than something on a poster or the side of a bus, you’ll still have all those QR codes when you’ve downloaded the software. And they can print instructions (like the ones below) on what to do when you see one of the codes. In short, there’s a bigger incentive to get the software, instructions and help with getting it, and it’s clear that it’s an ongoing thing. So it’s more likely to get used.

The best thing is that once you’ve loaded the software for your newspaper, you’ll have it the next time you see a poster in the street, so it’s driving technology adoption across the board.

Charles Tyrwhitt have just launched their new online store, which Agency.com helped to develop the user experience for. It was a collaboration with Javelin Group, and a host of e-commerce technologies are used, including:

• Mercado, for the structured product search and merchandising
• Scene 7 for the product image presentation
• Feefo for the user reviews of products

As an occasional wearer of suits and such like myself, I’m glad this site’s gone live, as it’s a great improvement on its predecessor and is applying a lot of current e-commerce best practice.

After a great deal of effort from a cast of hundreds (well, almost) we’ve launched British Airways’ preview site for Heathrow Terminal 5, which opens next year. It’s a feast of interactive content, showing all aspects of what’s going to be an amazing place to travel through. Some of the team have had visits already, and it sounds incredibly futuristic. They say on the site that bags will often be waiting on the carousel for arriving passengers, and it’ll be the way they’ve designed and used technology to improve service that will determine how successful it turns out to be.

Well done to the team that built the site: I know it’s been hard work, though maybe not as hard as erecting the largest free-standing building in the UK…

My article for Revolution Magazine has been published. It feels like I wrote it months ago, which I guess is one of the big differences between blogging and writing for a print magazine. Anyway, this is the text of what I wrote:

A couple of recent conversations got me thinking about the potential for business blogging. I was talking to a middle manager in a FTSE 100 company, who was unfamiliar with the term “blog” despite being a fairly heavy Internet user. The term had just passed him by. Then I sat down with a group of digital natives who’d gathered to talk about their Internet usage and interests, who hardly read any blogs at all. Is blogging a minority pursuit, or is it something that companies could make more of?

It would seem like there are plenty of companies that could benefit from a decent blog. Agency.com has certainly had its share of trials over its own corporate blogging efforts. How many organisations today would cite a lack of customer trust as one of their business issues? How many would benefit from a dialogue with their customers about how they’re doing, new product ideas, or their service issues? Blogging is an ideal way to meet these needs, but great examples are few and far between. My friend, who works for Avis, recently wrote a piece from his water-logged Oxfordshire home, sharing his advice on driving in wet conditions. His company’s blog is straightforward, honest, and winning awards. The stories of Wildlife Direct’s workers in the Congo are more dramatic and emotive than any soap opera. But these are rare examples.

When I looked around this week, most companies’ blogs were too boring and corporate for words (I guess that might be expected from Boeing), or disconnected from what the company does - and therefore any reason for having a blog in the first place. Who’s really interested in what the guys at an Spreadshirt watched on TV last night? Is it really a good idea to talk about the staff party on a site that anyone can see, like I saw one top London agency had done? Microsoft putting its employees’ blog URLs on their business cards is trying a bit harder, but are any of them worth reading?

I can see several causes for this disappointment. Some companies get worried about what investors, regulators and competitors are told, and start to control who can speak in public. If they’ve put 3 layers of sign-off in their web editorial process, a tool that allows staff to just start writing and getting published must sound like anarchy. In other companies, the people with interesting things to say are just too busy. The blog is left to the enthusiasts, and most of them are just a little bit on the geeky side. Lack of innovation is another challenge: getting a company blog going is so much more than just installing the software and creating some user accounts. Adding a link to your blog to your website’s page footer does not constitute a strategy.

Perhaps whatever companies do with blogging, most people wouldn’t be that interested in what they have to say, but it feels to me like a lot of companies are missing a trick.

Yesterday I presented at the AdMonsters EU Leadership Forum in London. AdMonsters is an international group of people working in online advertising operations and the group included people from a wide range of online publishers and agencies, including Channel 4, the Guardian, News International, AOL, Harvest Digital and Digitas.

My presentation is on Slideshare and here:

I had a great time, especially enjoying the presentation by Fru Hazlitt, MD of GCap London. Presenting was fun too. I recorded the audio, so I’ll replace the Slideshare with a movie of the slides plus audio soon.

My presentation explored the origins and possible solutions (including the one mooted by IASH) to the problem of how to safely place ads next to user generated content. Essentially, I think a combination of behavioural targeting, automated content analysis and manual publisher classification is probably needed, and that a code of practise based solution like IASH’s won’t solve the problems to the satisfaction of advertisers who need innovation and results.

We’ve made some great tongue-in-cheek video content to help BA with their recruitment of new cabin crew, using the Pam-Ann character. It’s pretty funny, and it’s nice to see so many clients and colleagues in the video itself.

Most importantly from my point of view, BA tend to be quite a serious brand, and it’s good to see them having some fun in this work. The site is here.

Do the green thing! The project that I’ve been helping a little bit, to launch a creative, fun environmental website called http://www.dothegreenthing.com, went live on Thursday. The content and idea are really lovely, and it’s bound to generate lots of interest and action.

Well done Andy and Naresh, and everyone else who’s been working so hard on it. Now it’s up to the rest of us to use the site and take the suggested actions.

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.

I’ve been having a conversation with a colleague at Agency.com about whether Facebook has established such a dominant position as the community site to use, that it won’t be knocked off that position. The idea we’re discussing is that so many people now use Facebook, that the hassle of moving would be too great for anyone, and the open application platform they’ve rolled out means that much future innovation will happen inside Facebook in future, rather than on new platforms.

I have a long-standing scepticism about dominant trends. Altavista used to be the top search engine, and IBM used to make all the PCs. I don’t think there are many unassailable positions in business, especially in a space as innovative as the Internet.

Yesterday I was reminded of the reason for my scepticism. I went to an event organised by the British Computer Society, about the next 50 years of technology. All sorts of exciting things are coming (including personal jet-packs, of course) and some of these will make serious impacts on our lives. Some of them, like the super-exponential increase in computing power and Internet bandwidth, will drive incredible innovations that we are only starting to see today. Video, interactivity, mobile, device convergence will all be important drivers for change

This is great if you work in digital business, but what has it got to do with Facebook? The answer is that all this innovation is going to lead to new social ideas, structures, devices that we can’t imagine today. Some of them will come this year or next year. And Facebook has as little chance, or as much, as anyone else of creating those innovations. In fact, because they have an operational business to manage and grow, their chances of innovating might even be lower than those of a couple of kids in a garage somewhere.

So if you’re thinking you’d never be able to survive without Facebook, it’s only a matter of time.