nGenera delivers Collaborative Enterprise Management (CEM) solutions to the world’s leading companies, applying the power of collaboration to management processes – from the board room, to customers and employees around the world. Learn more.
Every day we wake up and live our day with one foot firmly in the “real”, physical world and the other in the online, virtual world. These two worlds of information, experience, and entertainment play a major role in the lives of people all across the globe. I remember a time before Google when people thought of the Internet as a place only for geeks and freaks, but for a number of years it’s been mainstream for the masses. And yet, people tend to think of these two separate domains as distinct, separate, and often … strange. While the Internet is clearly a tool with which we supplement our lives, and the real world is the place where we actually live our life, the virtual world mirrors the real world in many significant ways and many people actively (and even to excesss) live their lives out online. This is my attempt to reframe a small group of actions in both spaces, as being… entirely what you’d expect - not strange or illogical - simply a byproduct of human actions, with shared characteristics. Most of these may make you go “duh”, but this is my way of having a little fun, while clearing up any misconceptions about these two topics.
Exploration
The real-world is … brimming full of people and places that you will never have a chance to meet or see, but this shouldn’t bother you because a lot of these people you would never want to visit or meet anyways due to opposite interests. Similarly, the Internet is a free for all of good site meets bad site, good person meets bad person, and personally relevant meets irrelevant – it’s the world wide web – you’re not expected to see everything, meet everyone, and do everything … it’s simply too big and you’d never have the time, money or attention for everything that’s out there. On the Internet you discover something new every day. Whatever it is that you discover tends to come your way via. targeted search, advertisements or serendipitous exploration. This is true of the real-world also, and so too is the reality that the most powerful drivers of online referrals are personal in nature, from people who you know and trust. In the end, what you end up finding is normally not even what you set out to search for in the first place.
TED talks are some of the richest discussions showcased on the Internet, led by world experts in Technology, Entertainment, and Design. The breadth and wealth of their video library makes it possible to simply browse to the site, poke your head around, and spend the next several hours enthralled in some thought provoking discussion … if you can understand it. The talks take place in English, meaning that, in the past, if you didn’t speak English, you may not have been able to share in the learning. All of that has changed over the last year, as TED worked to develop the TED Open Translation Project, which aims to make its full video library accessible to the non-English speaking world, by providing access to subtitles and interactive transcripts on every single video.
There’s a couple really neat elements to this. First, the majority of all translations in this project are staffed by volunteers…
In the last few years, a number of social media platforms have grown explosively, with Facebook and Twitter leading the way most recently. The question everyone has been asking is, how are these companies going to make money from their services? Social networking websites don’t appear to work particularly well for pay-per-click ads, and personally I think the reason for this is fairly intuitive, which is that people would rather spend time interacting with, and paying attention to, friends, rather than advertisements. Further, because the ads always seem irrelevant to me, despite the wealth of minable information that social networking sites have about their users and their interests, people become conditioned to mentally block out the ads - it becomes natural to ignore them and let them blend into miles and miles of online highway landscape.
Personally I think that Facebook and Twitter have a lot of potential as fee-based services for online entertainment, enterprise productivity, intelligence mining, information distribution, and others applications that would be build upon and expand from the free service offering, while leveraging an incredibly large audience. But for now, ads are the most direct route to a source of revenue…if people pay attention to them. A big IF. One company that is serving ads on these platforms, albeit in a different way, is Magpie, shown below. This pay-per-tweet service utilitizes a Twitter users’ account to broadcast a message to the users’ followers through tweets, and although the same click-through issues still apply, its interesting that this company is using a different approach to generate attention. And yet some questions remain…let’s dive in.
The online advertising wars just got a bit more interesting with the unveiling of “Twig”, VideoEgg’s new floating website adbar.
“Twig. Alwaaaays there when you need it” chants the catchy song in the promo video below. They’re not too far wrong and although I wouldn’t go so far as to say I NEED Ads, Twig IS always there, a floating frame at the top or bottom of your page. Contained in the thin frame is an interactive advertisement or video that becomes activated several seconds after you mouse over it. What I think is so interesting about this ad delivery mechanism is that it combines a number of simple elements, which when taken together, provide an advertisement that I believe will be more effective at getting “eye time” from website consumers, as well as produce better click through rates than ads embedded into specific locations on a page. Often advertisers try to achieve these results through using advertisements that are so big that you can’t help but see, be annoyed by, and raise mental walls to block out. There’s nothing that causes me to shut down and ignore an advertisement faster than when they get blown up and dominate my view of the content I actually went to the website to the consume. I think Twig is more subtle than that and as a result, will be more effective. Below is the promo video, and after the jump, a few reasons why I like Twig as both an advertiser and a media consumer.
The explosive growth in social networking websites over the last few years has resulted in employers taking notice and using the wealth of personal information that exists about a candidate to make decisions about their employability. This practice has become more widespread in its use, however this has been offset to a certain extent, by a growing understanding among social networking users and the general public, that what goes online is no longer truly private, and that users must take appropriate steps to secure their privacy.
In an unusual twist to these traditional stories, Yahoo Sports posted one last week about how NFL teams apply similar practices to scout out new prospects. Their trick? Befriend the players using fake profiles with pictures of attractive women who are … like, total fans!!! The catch is that these women are a baited lure, and once they accept, the unsuspecting NFL prospect has opened the gates, trojan horse style, to a detailed review of an individual’s comments, profile pages, and pictures.
April Fools has come and gone with some good virtual laughs to be had. Over the years April 01 has become increasingly popular as a day to show that companies too have a sense of humour, and each year it seems there are more companies joining the fun by using the Internet as a medium for employees and netizens both to share some laughs over a good old joke. Despite the lightheartedness of the jokes, these activities are highly effective from an adverting standpoint as well, garnering significant amounts of attention for what is effectively a (relatively) cheaply produced backslapper. If you consider how much it would cost to attract the same amount of attention using traditional means, April Fools “Jokevertisements” make a whole lot of sense, particularly when they are strategic about how they employ your attention.
People like to have fun on the Internet, and there’s no reason why companies can’t share in, and benefit, from acting a little less serious every once and a while - it makes them personable and less robot-like in the eyes of the public. They key factor may be that on April Fools, people in general expect others to joke around, and so are primed towards a positive response when encountering a prank, rather than criticism. In the same way it’s accepted that you can dress up in a silly costume on Halloween and not be ostricized for it, April Fools is a stamp of endorsement for companies to have some fun…and benefit from it. Netizens enjoy a website that has personality, because they often identify to a certain extent with their favourite websites - and when a website has personality, then the internalization is that YOU have personality. Marketing impressions goes up, and I suspect loyalty goes up too because the “entertainment” at your hangout was pretty good - they came through.
So without further adieu, my top 3 favourite April Fools 2009 “Jokevertisements.”
The Web is alive with activity - a tangled weave of people consuming and exchanging information that is personally relevant. Absorbing all this information and interpreting what activity is taking place in the far reaches of the Internet is no easy feat, in the same way trying to listen to, and respond to, everyone in a group of talking people (at the same time) is overwhelming.
And yet, increasingly people use the Internet as an avenue to express themselves and what’s important to them, and when someone, or many someones, tells you what’s important to them, as a person or a business, you normally want to listen. Enter Radian6 - self described as “a complete platform to listen, share, learn, and engage – both inside your company, and with your customers across the entire social web.” From what i’ve seen through their free product demo, this is no empty boast - Radian6 is the most comprehensive package of tools i’ve seen, for detecting, measuring, and responding to the voices of the many Netizens who are talking about your brand and the things that are important to it.
The geek in me gets very excited when I see videos like the one below: Microsoft’s vision for the future. Unveiled on February 27th at the Wharton Business Technology Conference, it’s a mock-up of how technology might interact with the world in 2019.
In the world of technology, 10 years is a significant span of time, and generally the ‘end-game’ ideas conceived now will interact with people and other pieces of technology in unknown future processes. This is because technology in its application must be seen as an evolving landscape of interconnected technologies, many of which don’t yet exist. It’s a spider web yet to be woven…
In the fall I introduced SocialSpark, a pay-per-blog marketplace that connects bloggers with financial incentives to blog about specific brands and products. An interesting business model, although clearly waist-deep in ethical issues. Although not directly related, I recently stumbled on the “Blog It, Earn It” story, which does something similar, except on a much smaller, event-specific, and transparent scope. Any and all bloggers are encouraged to blog about the upcoming SOBCon09 conference in exchange for a (significant, $200) discount on the admission price of the conference, themed “ROI of Relationships.” Entries can be made by blogging about the ways in which relationships are important to you, and in what ways they are shaping personal and business worlds. These blog posts must be submitted to the site, as well as a twitter feed, which is an interesting way of maximizing exposure to the promotion and participants’ messages, by relaying the information back out through the author’s personal blog and twitter networks. A limited number of participants will be rewarded after submissions close.
What’s the best way to understand your customer? Talk to them. What happens if they don’t want to talk to you? Find them and ask them on their home turf - Facebook.
The Telegraph is reporting that Facebook has announced a strategy to monetize the site that has thus far defied monetizing. Generally the standard web start-up business model is, build something unique that people like, and then once it’s got a large enough fan base and web traffic, sell advertisements or subscriptions. After all, somebody’s got to pay for it. The problem Facebook encountered is… it turns out people don’t really like to click on tacky ads when they can rather use the site for its intended purpose and talk to their friends.
