Monday, March 26, 2007

MTV 2.0 - Embedding Brands

MTV has had it's heyday.

Founded in 1981 by Bob Pittman, MTV now days is an old tired Viacom asset. It's target audience, is consuming digital media rather than siting in front of a programmed TV channel - which was noted on Guy Kawasaki's young person panels "Young Generation Innovation 2006" video.

In Wired's article; "A Second Life for MTV", Matt Bostwick, Senior Vice President of MTV's Leapfrog initiative - an experimental skunk works for MTV - is trying to reinvent the MTV brand for it's young consumers - by leapfrogging the current NetGen online behaviour, therefore re-positioning the MTV brand as leader in the near future.

Traditionally, MTV has earned it's keep by owning a hard-to-reach young demographic audience by supplying cool video clips hosted by cool and sexy VJ's coupled with original youth orientated programming - then selling premium Ad airtime to it's advertisers.

Now day's MTV's programming is full of cheap reality shows as NetGens are browsing online on MySpace for music and undiscovered bands/dj's/artists in a self discovery way.

The Leapfrog initiative has imagined a future beyond the MySpace's or other Social Networking sites that youths pimp-up with customised profiles.

The future that Leapfrog sees is a 3D virtual world; similar to Second Life - where NetGen's have a funky Avatar and interact with other NetGens in a 3D world, forging friendships with peers that can be across the globe and share music, trends and fashion ideas all online in a virtual world.

In this 3D world, Net Gen's would hang out at a Coca-Cola theatre where the latest bands/DJ's would perform in exclusive screenings or they would chill out at the Gillette Virtual extreme sports challenge among many other sponsored events.

Some of the scenes may well then be aired on MTV; engaging users with it's brands and sponsors as they are real participants in the freshly created shows - embedding brands into the target community.

The first initiative has been aired on MTV and has been based on the Laguna Beach (the real OC) MTV show - and it is available for NetGen's to sign up now at Viritual Laguna Beach - taking Web 2.0 Marketing way beyond the 30 second spot or a Flash driven sub site.

Sunday, March 25, 2007

The Greatest Community Marketer

I was reading the current Fortune Magazine, while at Gloria Jeans in Bondi Junction, and there was a small article in the First section on Richard Branson's new initiative on his part in keeping the world green (sorry the article is not online: Question Authority: "Preaching Green with the Zeal of a Convert").

Regardless, of his good points and bad points, as per his unauthorised biography - "Branson" by Tom Bower; Branson by nature is a highly effective Community Marketer.

His most recent move:- he has pleadged all Virgin Atlantic's and Virgin Trains profits to research on renewable energies.

Brilliant! Next time your choosing your between a Virgin product and other, and you have a conscience of the environment, you will more than likely choose a Virgin product or service - not necessarily Virgin Atlantic or Trains - the Halo Effect in full steam.

The brilliant thinking here, is that if you read the fine print, he is committing, not donating the profits to alternative energies.

That is to say, he will more than likely be a major shareholder of the new Virgin Energy business/investments and get a return on investment from the new venture(s).

My hat off to him for thinking out of the box.

Tuesday, March 20, 2007

Web 1.0 Thinking Vs Web 2.0 Thinking

As per my last post, I recently read an excellent article on Wired's February 2007 article titled How Yahoo! Blew It where it documents how Yahoo!'s Terry Semel missed the greatest opportunity in Net History to date - Not purchasing Google.

In summary - I strongly recommend that you read the article - Yahoo! made several mistakes as the Search War's were waged.

Mistake 1 - Low balling.
In 2002 Yahoo! attempted to buy Google for US$3 Billion dollars, even though Terry Semel's Lieutenants recommended a US$5 Billion offer. Terry Semel thought that this offer was excessive considering that initially Yahoo! had invested in Google.

Mistake 2 - Ego.
Due to the high price; Google had revenues of US$240 million a year while Yahoo!'s was about $837 million, the purchase would have been more of a merger than a purchase; the company would have in effect become Yahoogle. Terry Semel decided against it.

Mistake 3 - Poor execution.
Terry Semel's back-up plan was poorly executed. The plan consisted of buying Inktomi, considered to have an excellent search engine algorithm. As well as Bill Gross' Overture, known at that stage as GoTo.com.

Albeit a brilliant plan, Yahoo! vacillated in integrating the two into Yahoo! as well as investing in beefing up the key work relevance as well as automating the technology to allow advertisers to self administer their campaigns.

Mistake 4 - No Sense of Urgency
Due to the fact that Yahoo! derived revenue from multiple streams, such as banners and co-promotions, it was not as focused on Pay per Click as was Google - for Google it was the sole revenue stream.

Mistake 5 - Web 1.0 Thinking
When the talks with Google commenced, Yahoo! had just hired its new CEO, Terry Semel in April 2001 and Tim Koogle had resigned the month before due to the Tech Wreck of March 2000-October 2000. Therefore the shares where trading at US$7 and the overall Internet company CEO and investors thinking was to be cautious and not to spend money unwisely.

In conclusion, multiple mistakes where made, however the common denominator was that Yahoo! had Web 1.0 thinking and Google had Web 2.0 thinking.

Which begs you to think - is your current CEO Web 1.0 or CEO Web 2.0?

One way to gauge is; was if your firm started in before 2002?

If so, more then likely the executive team has Web 1.0 baggage - if you are part of the executive team, you need to start thinking fresh as every current Web firm will have a Web 2.0 threat delivering a much richer web experience to your customer base.

Monday, March 19, 2007

Time off line

I spent the past few days in the hospital - had an acute asthma episode.

Over the time I was recovering in hospital I had plenty of time to think as well as to catch-up on some reading.

One good read was the Feb 2007 edition of Wired. One great article of interest was "How Yahoo! Blew It" and it documents how Yahoo! lost the search race against Google.

I will be posting a fair bit the next few days covering Yahoo! and new trends and ideas.

Stay tune.

Billy

Friday, March 16, 2007

Sony's Community Marketing

Yesterday after ordering my mid morning Latte I picked up The Australian's Media & Marketing section and read with great interest on Sony's new Community Marketing for the Sony PlayStation 3.

The article titled "Foxtel channels PlayStation ads" covers how Sony will be launching a temporary Pay-TV channel on the recently launched (Feb 8th 2007) On Demand suite of programs on Foxtel's IQ digital set-top box.

The PlayStation 3 channel will be available for a period of 6 weeks and will feature six short films promoting the console.

Foxtel IQ subscribers will be able to watch the six shorts on demand at no charge during that period.

What a fantastic idea! - You can also be doing this for your brands using YouTube or an iPod.
-
PlaaayyyStationnnnn............

Wednesday, March 14, 2007

Volunteer Recruiting Tactic – Web 2.0 style

Through my day job at Elcom I recently commenced work with a major brand, which is relaunching their online presence.

This iconic brand (at this stage I can’t disclose the brand) has been around for 15 years and has done an excellent job in building a hugely successful brand – yet their online presence was a mish-mash of pages with no clear direction.

Since they are a charity and in order to achieve their major fund raising objectives they engage an army of volunteers to participate in their appeal.

Out of all my recommendations – and believe me, I don’t shy from recommending, they happily embraced the idea of creating a MySpace presence in order to attract more volunteers.

I will keep you posted on the how this strategy progresses.

Till later,

Billy

The Latin American Market 2.0

I was reading a blog on the Mexican Internet market posted by Joseph Jaffe on Crayonville's blog.

He wrote:-

"20% of the population is online and a staggering 70% of this group are broadband enabled.

Furthermore, Latin American leads broadband subscriber growth in 2005 vs 2004 with a whopping 70.7%. Next highest is Western Europe with 42.2%
(source: eMarketer)"

It reminded me of a report I put together late last year on the Latin American Market (not to be confused by the US Hispanic Market) and my findings support the blog:-

"Latin American market is the fastest growing market of Internet users comprising a total population of 553,908,632 and an Internet Penetration of 76,437,188 users, which has been largely neglected by many English speaking Internet firms.

While only 14.40% of the Central and Latin American population has access to the Internet in comparison to Oceania/Australia which has 52.06% penetration, this figure represents 8.50% of the global Internet Population versus the 0.50% for Oceania/Australia." (Source: Web 2.0, The Central and Latin America Market Opportunity, Chile – The Latin Tiger)

email me for a free copy of the report: billy at metrixdigital.com

Every day is a new Web 2.0 day

One of the many things that i love about the web 2.0 days is that every day as I'm browsing, I come across some new start-up or application - does wonders to my conditioned multi-tasking short attention span! - but I love it.

So many new ideas are popping up enhancing the online experience.

An application that I came across tonight is Snap. Snap bills itself as an evolution of search and linking.

It is founded by Bill Gross and backed by Gross' idealab, the incubator that founded Overture among other successes and some dogs - but thats another story...

Regardless of the outcome of Snap, it's exciting to see so many fresh ideas bubbling.

Monday, March 12, 2007

Why Community Marketing Works

In the Web 2.0 world many established industries are being radically changed.

One in particular is the music industry. Before the Internet, music labels chose the artist and selected a target consumer group and engaged in some clever marketing to sell their music.

Up until recently, one of the key marketing activities was Payola - a practice now made illegal, yet still being abused via a third party loophole.

But Net Gen (Generation Y) consumers are very skeptical of marketing and faith in advertising and the business of marketing has evaporated. Radio and MTV do not have the power they did pre Web 2.0.

In fact the only way to effectively market to Net Gens is via Peer to Peer Marketing - Why? Because Peers trust Peers.

Check out this cool Web 2.0 company; Slideshare for some key ideas on Peer to Peer marketing.

Thursday, March 8, 2007

Community Marketing

How does Web 2.0 Marketing differ from other forms of digital marketing?

Traditional marketing relies on Push-Pull Strategies that when planned and executed effectively allows an enterprise to achieve its strategic objective. However, in my experience; Australian company's generally always embrace a half-cooked Push or Pull strategy - but very rarely both.

With high Internet penetration of 1,958,914 in Australia, more of your target customers are spending more time online.

Web 2.0 allows users to tap into social, cool and funky applications & tools to enrich their lives. As a Marketer you need to start thinking on how you can build communities around your brands - and perhaps how can you tap into established communities and create content that will Halo Effect across to your brands.

This approach goes way beyond creating Flash Banners - and extends into creating tools and content that will connect;

-Customers with prospects
-Prospects with prospects
-Your brands with your customers and prospects
-Customers with Customers

Companies that are effectively employing Community Marketing are generally digital firms - creating an amazing opportunity for atom based firms to differentiate themselves by embracing Community Marketing before everyone else does.

Till later,

Billy

Wednesday, March 7, 2007

Web 2.0 Marketing


I have been talking to a lot of companies on Web 2.0; what it is and what is the business impact.

One thing that comes out of the discussions, is that Web 2.0 is here to stay and your business better embrace it.

If you are a digital firm, it will mean that you are (if you are not you better be), incorporating Ajax into your services. If you are a traditional business, you will need to review what services can be delivered via a Web 2.0 application/tool to enrich your customer's experience.

However, the biggest opportunity is to start thinking Web 2.0 Marketing. What is Marketing Web 2.0?

In a paragraph it means; extending your digital marketing beyond the website, beyond Search Engine Marketing, beyond Banner Ad, beyond Viral; it means knowing where your target customers are spending online and why. As well as knowing what portable media they are consuming; such as Vodcasting and YouTube and if they are participating in User Generated Content. Then developing and delivering an offering that communicates your message and reinforces your value proposition.

For more information check out what Microsoft has to say about Web 2.0 Marketing.

Till later,

Billy

Sunday, March 4, 2007

BarCampSydney 2007


Wow - what an event!

I wasn't sure what to expect when I committed my services to film the BarCampSydney event.

Russ Weakly (Sydney's CSS Guru & manages to rank Russ top 2 in google) met up with me prior to event to advise me on the format, known as Open Space, where delegates nominate the speakers and topics.

At any given moment there where 4 discussions/presentations/workshops on a variety of topics. I manged to film some great sessions, however at the next one I will take four camera crews to capture the whole event.

Lana Jane Beck managed to take some great photos. More photos here from other photographers.

Over the coming weeks I will be editing, encoding and uploading the sessions on YouTube and in MPEG4 format for downloading.

Make sure you don't miss out on the next BarCampSydney by registering now scheduled for June 2007.

Till later,

Billy