Exclamation blog: Stories, Ideas and loud noises
Virgin Nostalgic
Richard Branson sure keeps it interesting. In the past year, Virign launched three gamechanging services, and marketed them in ways that were just as innovative as the services they aimed to promote. First, there was the Virgin America launch, where influential bloggers were loaded into the company’s inaugural flights and then raved on their blogs about the experience. Nice one Richard, Adam would definitely approve.
Then, Virgin launched Virgin Money, a peer-to-peer lending service. What did Sir Branson do? He gave out red dollar bills with a picture of him and his mother to commemorate the $1,000 she lent him to start Virgin. $1,000 bucks, wow, I assume she got a pretty decent return on that investment.
His most recent launch was Virgin Galactic, and nostalgia took center stage. What’s intriguing and very successful about this campaign is that for something so futuristic as “space travel for the masses”, Virgin went BACK in time to hit home with likely patrons. Take their DNA of Flight logo, for example, which is a fixture on most marketing materials. It’s a brief history of aviation from strapping wings on your back, to the Spirit of St. Louis, to the lunar lander, to Branson’s own SpaceShipTwo:
Also drumming up emotions from the past is Galactic Girl. This character who’s picture will appear on all of the Virgin Galactic spaceships is modeled after Sir Richard’s mother, Eve, who was a stewardess in the early days of air travel. This depiction is a modernized version of her back in the day:
It all takes on a Space-Mountain-Star-Tours-Tomorrowland type feel and really seems to hit home with the affluent demographic who can afford such a trip — mostly people old enough to have lived through quite a bit of the progression of spaceflight and early dreams of space travel. It’s an interesting strategy of looking to the past to build up excitement and interest in the future. Who knows, maybe next we’ll see George Jetson and Spacely Sprockets doing Virgin Galactic super-bowl spots.
Serph - What’s Its’ Buzz Tracking Werph?
There have been loads of products purported to do real-time buzz tracking in the last couple of years. Some cost a lot of money (Buzzlogic, Coremetrics), and some of them are free (Google Trends, Alexa Stats, Pagerank).
(Had it not been for Google Trends, I wouldn’t have known that a New Kids on The Block Reunion may be in the offing…)
When a relatively new entrant comes onto the market, especially a free one, I’m always wondering how solid the data will be.
I ran into Serph’s creator, Hiten Shah, at a Songbird event a few weeks ago, and he encouraged me to check it out. Signup for Serph was easy enough, and it actually allowed me to bypass the usual email registration. I was also fairly impressed that this free service allowed domain blacklisting. For example, if you’re searching for information about your company (i.e. “LaunchSquad”), you’re not going to want information from your own website reporting into the data you’re trying to obtain. It ain’t buzz if you said it about yourself, right?
The backstory on Serph is a little unusual; instead of being created as a product by a software company, it was compiled by ACSSEO, a social media marketing and SEO agency, who have some cool clients (HP, Dogster, TechCrunch).
While Serph’s queries are not lightning-fast (20-40 seconds, typically), the total aggregation of data looks pretty neat, and a lot cleaner than, say, what one would get in a Google Alerts email. The ideal way to track the Serph information, as far as I can tell, is in one’s RSS feeds, especially since the way it reports into feeds looks really nice and neat.
My initial queries for LaunchSquad’s name and the MetzMash social media blog (my other blog) seem to have yielded all of the right hits. While Serph may not be the most robust tool out there, but for brands on a budget, Serph is definitely a clean-looking jumping-off point for buzz tracking.
Movie Streaming: Last Nail in the Coffin for the Local Rental Shop?
I will begin by saying that my family’s weekly trips to Blockbuster are one of perhaps my most bizarre yet nonetheless cherished childhood memories.
I could be holed away in my bedroom slowly chugging my way through a homework assignment or distractedly practicing the piano on a Saturday afternoon when the cry would go up: “Who wants to go to Blockbuster?” My brother, sister and I would of course all come running, pile into our Aerostar mini-van and the trip would commence.
Needless to say, despite Blockbuster’s attempts to keep up with the competition and addition of an online movie rental service, the company’s local stores no longer hold quite the same appeal.
In fact, like many people, I can’t help but wonder if the increasing popularity of Netflix (and other similar services) and Apple’s announcement of iTunes instant movie rentals last week at Macworld, may truly spell the end for the actual physical movie stores so dear to me in my youth.
Since the launch of Netflix in 1997, for the regular movie renter it has become increasingly economical and convenient to join a Web-based movie rental service rather than trek to the local store. Now, with Steve Jobs’ latest announcement, the act of renting a movie has become instant and iTunes (and Netflix) users are able to stream films through the Web.
Neither service is perfect– both Netflix and iTunes have slightly annoying “window systems” that require users to watch purchased movies within a certain timeframe. Netflix does not have Mac support and much of both services’ libraries consist of somewhat archaic films that only the most particular movie buff has heard of.
Nonetheless, the appeal is clear, buzz rampant and demand is rising. There is enough competition between services that offerings will undoubtedly continue to improve and at this point I can be fairly sure that the Blockbuster trips of my youth will not continue into my adulthood.
While I do feel some loyalty towards my local movie store, I know I’ll be whipping out my iPod touch the next time the desire for an impromptu movie marathon strikes.
So long Aerostar.
If ‘08 Is The Year Of The Crowd, What Does That Mean For Marketing?
Some people are predicting that 2008 will be The Year of The Crowd. In a story last month, Karlene Lukowitz from MediaPost predicted that “Crowd” would be the word of the year. Lukowitz says, “Business people love buzzwords, and none will be buzzing more than terms paired with Crowd. She says “get ready for Crowdsourcing, Crowdstorming, Crowdbursting and who knows what else.”
The Year of The Crowd hails from the term Crowdsourcing. Jeff Howe first coined the term in a June 2006 Wired Magazine article.
Mountain Dew’s latest campaign is a great example of Crowdsourcing. In November of 2007, the interactive game Dewmocracy was launched, in which users vote to determine the can graphics, color and flavor of a new Mountain Dew product to launch in 2008.
Dewmocracy (officially written by PepsiCo as DEWmocracy) is a combination of the words Dew (a nickname for Mountain Dew) and democracy. It is an interactive game on its own domain that encourages users to vote for the next flavor of Mountain Dew that will make its debut on shelves in 2008. The game features a live-action short film and 3-dimensional characters. As the player goes through the game, users will help pick every feature of a new Mountain Dew, including can graphics, color, and flavor, from five choices for each aspect.
Mountain Dew and Pepsi aren’t only using this Crowdsourcing project to engage their loyal customers in designing their next product. They are also using this as an opportunity to market the new product between now and when it is released. They are betting on the fact that the consumers that come to Dewmocracy are loyal Mountain Dew customers, or brand evangelists. They are hoping ultimately that these brand evangelists will help spread the word about the new “Dew”. Word of Mouth Marketing has proven to be one of the most effective ways to market a new product, and to build buzz.
Paul Gillin, a social media consultant and author summed up brand evangelists best in a recent article in BtoB Magazine by saying,” Customers are a low-cost and high-powered extension of your marketing team. Their words carry more credibility than any ad or promotion you produce. Thanks to the new wave of online publishing tools, they have unprecedented potential to spread the word about your brand and seed the market with their spontaneous enthusiasm.”
But Mountain Dew isn’t the only company that is using the concept of the crowd for its marketing needs. Some large companies are using “Mob Wisdom”, or the “Wisdom of the Collective” to gain unique insights from customers.
Companies are realizing that if they could listen to all of the conversations customers were having around their products, their services, and their brand online, that they could then take that marketing insight and change their business for the better.
So, 2008 isn’t only the year of the crowd. It may also be the year of the online customer community. In its predictions for 2008, Forrester projects that at least one-quarter of Fortune 100 companies will launch online customer communities this year in order to create higher levels of engagement with their customers and prospects.
Companies are listening to customer conversations by tapping into the interactions between customers in online communities, and social networks. However some companies are only having basic customer communities built on their sites, or developing simple networks or groups for social networking sites. This creates added customer engagement between customers. But an online community on a company website can also be used to increase levels of engagement between customers and the company itself.
This happens by taking those online conversations, and using analytics to really see, monitor, and track what customers concerns, wants and needs are. Then, you are effectively using the crowd to help shape your company.
This type of Crowd Marketing has been described as many things so far. In a Chicago Tribune article from November entitled” You Talk, They hear on the Web,” Deborah Schultz called this emerging social practice Conversational Marketing.. Schultz consults on Social Media Strategies for Proctor & Gamble.
One of LaunchSquad’s clients is now using this Wisdom of the Collective to help provide companies with unique marketing information about their customers. Networked Insights allows companies to listen to conversations around a brand and tap into these interactions. This provides companies with actionable data they can then use strategically.
Networked Insights is currently working with The Guild and (The ArtfulHome.com), a marketplace for artists and collectors.
The Guild has been using Networked Insights for a little over three months and has completely shifted how they are strategizing in 2008 due to insights gained directly from their customers. The Guild realized that their customers were primarily buying products with interior design in mind. They were not aware of the scope and importance of interior design, and have now shifted their business priorities in the upcoming year.
Paul Gillin summed up this new type of marketing quite well by saying in a recent piece, “Your best product and marketing consultants may be out there right now, for free, waiting to help you. All you need to do is let them.”
Networked Insights and the Guild are a perfect example of this savvy interaction. What a way to start off the Year of the Crowd.
How to See Graffiti Art While you Type
As seriously as I now lust over landing a good story with a great writer, my younger incarnation hankered after rambunctious, spray-can toting skateboarders. Among them, street artists loomed large, becoming minor celebrities and giving all us all something exciting to look out for on our daily commutes through New York City.
While I was perusing the Wired blog this month, I came across The Decapitator, a street artist whose signature tag is removing heads from street signs and replacing them with boney, bloody stumps. If you haven’t seen these awesome images, you should definitely check them out.
The post got me researching graffiti artists last weekend and I found that there is an amazing selection of sites showcasing works from celebrity taggers like Neckface, as well as sites that highlight local heroes like the Ukranian Fat 315 crew.
While I do not advocate the destruction of public property, I do like how these online street art depositories connect a shared scene over international boundaries in real time — and I am intrigued how the sites have propelled those who were once seen as rambunctious skater kids into international icons. Perhaps the best example of this is the London street artist Banksy, who become an sensation when in February of last year took home £102,000 for a piece he sold at Sotheby’s.
Would I have any idea who the Fat 315 crew if it wasn’t for the web? The answer is no. But at Wooster Collective or Streetsy, I could sort by name and location. If you are interested, you can pull up a list of celebrity street artists on Wikipedia and start street art hunting online.
Wired Into Politics
Though 2004 was really the first election in which the Internet played a huge role, digital politics is very much starting to mature in 2008. Tech media site have interviews with candidates, viral videos are swaying voters for the first time, and, for God’s sake, John McCain has a MySpace page. There has, of course, been a lot of chatter about who has a voice, who deserves to have a voice and what they should be saying.
The traditional media complain that bloggers aren’t qualified to seriously cover something as important as presidential politics, bloggers complain that establishment reporters are too locked into their Beltway circles and have lost touch with mainstream America, and just about everyone agrees that political discourse is too shrill.
You know what? That’s great. That’s actually the essence of democracy.
I have never enjoyed politics as much as I have the past two years. For somebody like me, who is a politics junkie (it’s a medically-defined mental illness, I’m sure), this is the golden age of political discourse – there literally is too much information out there. For somebody who cannot get enough information, that’s heaven. I can instantly look at poll information, have access to political news from the best sources – both from traditional media and partisan outlets – and see or hear just about any speech made by any candidate.
It’s a fantastic, wonderful time to be a political observant – I spent last Thursday parked in front of my TV with my laptop popped open and I literally had every bit of information available sitting right there. Who cares if that information comes from a veteran journalist who’s probably jaded and too cynical, or a blogger who does this in their spare time. Too cautious or too loud, it’s still information, and too much is never enough.
Throwing A Party in 2008? A Wealth of Invite Options
Being devoted Seattle Seahawks fans, my roommate and I resolved to gather all our Seattle friends to sit down to watch our hometown team in the playoffs. When the game’s date and time was released Monday, we immediately started creating an invitation list and then, like savvy hosts, we clicked on our computers and set to choosing an event site to spread the news.
Hosting a party has never been so fun. Sure, sending out unique invitations in colorful envelopes used to be somewhat exciting, but with the advent of multiple event websites, greater numbers of party hosts are turning to the web when it comes time to handling all the coordination and logistics.
To be sure, the possibilities seem endless. While the invite industry is still relatively young, it is definitely beginning to get crowded. Evite is the oldest and perhaps most popular event site of the bunch, while nearly every social network, including Facebook, now allows users to create and advertise events to their contacts. For those that want to support the underlings, you can also choose between upstart rivals such as renkoo, skobee, MyPunchBowl and Socializr. [Check out our client TimeBridge, which is tackling the even more challenging problem of scheduling business meetings.]
Ultimately, my roommate and I decided on Facebook. For us, it seemed the easiest option as nearly all our friends are members of the site and the event application made it easy for us to sort through and find fellow Seattle natives. Unlike Evite, however, Facebook does not allow hosts to determine whether a guest has viewed the invitation or not — making it impossible to differentiate between the commitment-phobic and those who simply haven’t been checking their Facebook accounts.
So, while our Facebook experiment has been ruled a success, I might be tempted to look elsewhere in the future when I get the itch to host a party.
Maybe back to old faithful Evite when the Seahawks head to the Super Bowl…
Facebook woes? Not so fast…
Robert Scoble is angry because his Facebook account was shut down due to a debatable terms of use violation. Charlene Li felt a little violated when Facebook’s Beacon put information about her purchases in her mini-feed without asking her. People are predicting the end of Facebook and using some pretty harsh words when talking about it.
So I decided to step out of the Silicon Valley (and Alley!) world and ask a small sample of Facebook users that do not work in tech or read tech blogs on a regular basis if they were aware of or have heard any of the news about Beacon or the controversy surrounding their favorite and indispensable social network. First, I asked my little cousin at Berkeley who had no idea what I was talking about and said his roommates didn’t either. Next were two other Bay Area college students who also had no idea, yet seemed intrigued that Beacon could be a cool new feature they weren’t aware of. It’s a small sample size, but three college students in Silicon Valley had no clue and really didn’t care either.
Next, I moved to my demographic — young professionals, as we are called. First, a lawyer, hadn’t heard anything. Next, a law student: “I don’t know about that stuff.” Finally, a finance guy — still no.
A couple of the college students conveyed to me how indispensable Facebook is to their social lives — it’s how they invite people to parties, show pictures to their friends, see when their crush has broken up with a significant other, and then “spit game” once that’s happened. It’s not a nice-to-have, it’s a necessity. Much like Gmail and iTunes, which people know track their every move, Facebook has reached a point where people are so dependent on their useful services that it will take a whole lot more than a PR crisis or blogstorm for people to even consider going elsewhere.
When controversies like those mentioned above come about, the question becomes: will people care? In Facebook’s case, it’s not about whether people will care, instead it’s whether they even know. These may seem like big bumps in the road for people in the tech industry, but they are tiny blips on the radar for everyone else. In case anyone was worried about Facebook’s well-being, they’ll be just fine, and you’ll be able to go about your everyday Superpoking for a long time.
One-To-Many Text Messaging: How Soon Is Now?
I’m an iPhone geek. I was the third LaunchSquad team member to get an iPhone, and I evangelized it until three more colleagues and my wife bought their own. Obviously, I was delighted when I read (on my phone, natch) in the Gearlive blog this morning that the new update of the phone’s operating system will contain one-to-many text messaging. A lot of brands have tried to create one-to-many and swarm-like many-to-many text messaging solutions, but few have seen mainstream success.
Many a business model has been built on the premise of solving the one-to-many text message problem. 3Jam and NetworkText have tried to solve this problem head-on, and rock brands and corporate brands have also done innovative stuff with text-messaging on the Mozes platform.
If you’re wondering about the usefulness of one-to-many text messaging, consider the following scenarios:
1. Four friends are going to meet at an Italian restaurant. One arrives early, and realizes the restaurant is closed, and wants to notify the others quickly, so they can coordinate an alternative plan.
2. The location for a business meeting is changed at the last minute, and all participants need to be notified, quickly
3. You want to send a message out to a large group of friends (”I just got engaged!”) without putting it in a public space like Twitter, Facebook or Jaiku.
Twitter, Jaiku and Facebook’s newsfeed updates do fulfill a similar function, but I think it’s a pretty big exaggeration to say that adoption of those technologies is widespread. With bloggers predicting that there will be 5 million iPhones sold by the end this month, I think it’s a pretty safe bet to say that one-to-many text messaging will be a pretty widely deployed technology by the end of the year.
A colleague showed me how he could do this on his Blackberry, but the process involves selecting the recipients individually, and they can’t tell that the message sent to them was sent to multiple recipients. It’s quite possible that RIM may have been the first brand to bring one-to-many texting to a widely deployed device, but I don’t know if they will be the brand to capitalize on this innovation. Maybe consumers will only adopt this technology if it’s really easy (and fun) to use. That’s something that Cupertino figured out about 24 years ago.
