Spreading on the internet

Not a post about Paris Hilton, but rather this interesting article by Mike Arauz. He made a funny graphic about Tiger Woods –

Via Mike Arauz

He makes some very interesting comments about how it spreads, but for me the key is that it spread because he hooked into existing and active audiences on the internet and then saw his message spread through groups.

“As Duncan Watts has shown in his tipping-point-busting research, the distance that an idea will spread doesn’t depend on the originating source, but rather on the structure of the network and how receptive the network is to the idea. In my case, the idea of making jokes out of charts was an already well established and appreciated internet behavior (especially with hip-hop related content). There was a ready hunger for this kind of content.”

I like this, because it relies on knowledge of the internet and its culture, not on a Mintel (or other) report into what Digital Moms do online  – “Gaming! **** me!”

Iendure a lot of meetings where the word viral is bandied around, and a lot of meetings where the online behaviour of target audiences is dissected in painful, deep and not particularly useful detail.  A focus on the action and not the person may yield more satisfying results.

Filed under: consumers, Mike Arauz, Tiger Woods, viral

Testing YouTube….

Having a bit of trouble with embedding. So here’s Johnny Devlin. It’s from a video called Into the Void by the Shadow Conspiracy.

Filed under: Videos, Johnny Devlin

Ethics busting advertising!

Subject line – “Recession busting betting”

Filed under: General

Facebook page of the week – Five Live Breakfast

There seems to be a pattern developing here – I’m picking these because they interest me as opposed to any demonstrable success. Today’s Facebook page of the week has only 2,500 members (easily outpaced by the “poo girl” at Leeds Festival) but I think it represents an interesting trend.

In Revolution this week is an opinion piece entitled “Is there mileage left in social media or has the bubble finally burst?” The answer (guess what?) was “no”, and the reason given was Facebook. It’s size, inclusivity, ambition and data.

For me, the difference is that Facebook has become so pervasive that you cease to notice it, it is part of mainstream culture. And I don’t think MySpace was ever part of mainstream culture.

Every morning, I listen to Nicky Campbell on Radio Five. It’s the only thing that compels me across the room to hit the snooze button. But I noticed the other morning that for the past couple of weeks, as well as the usual “Text us, call in etc. etc.” Nicky said “..and you can add a comment on our Facebook page…” He’d been saying it for a while but it never really registered with me (I’m not a morning person)

Now, Radio has always been a uniquely intimate, interactive medium – a member of the Test Match Special team pointed out that the programme always was interactive, even when it just got letters. But there is something about a Facebook page –  the visibility of conversation and opinion, the immediacy of response – that makes this a bit different.  Plus, the fact that wall posts will be read out on national radio is a big enhancement to Facebook.

So, This week’s Facebook Page of the Week, BBC Radio Five Live Breakfast. A possible glimpse into the medium term future of broadcast interaction. I bet Nicky never thought he’d get here from Wheel of Fortune.

Filed under: Facebook Page of the Week, bbc, breakfast show, facebook, nicky campbell, Radio Five

Monopoly, a great use of online tools

Just caught this via @herdmeister – a great project from Monopoly. To be fair, Monopoly have got form in this arena, with the fantastic and award-winning taxi game Tribal DDB developed for them but this takes it one step further. What I admire about projects like this is the instinctive understanding of the tools and how they can be used. The buildings are created in Google Sketchup, applied to Google Maps. There’s a nice (unskinned) Blogger blog updating people about the challenge.

Mashable indicates that Google had some direct involvement, and I suppose it would be a brave client that would do something like this without reassurance and support.

Plus, no prizes, just kudos and enjoyment. Brilliant.

(Oh, Masahble got the car, so I’m the boot)

Filed under: Social thinking

Facebook Page of the Week – MTV Finland

As mentioned above, I went to Berlin over the weekend. One of the things I like most when travelling is watching MTV in foreign countries. It seems to give a much more effective snapshot of the culture than any guidebook ever does, and at least you know what you’re listening to when you go out. Also, MTV does use some very creative stuff in its shorts and promos.

That said, I can can’t stand the f**king thing in the UK.

Two good things about German MTV –

50 Cent’s “The Money and The Power” is broadcast with subtitles. This means you get the full, unexpurged swearing experience in English. Actually makes for a more compelling reality show – at least they are being called motherfuckers to their faces, even if it isn’t me doing it.

A weird but highly entertaining interlude featuring Tokio Hotel and two old Germans. Couldn’t make head nor tail of it, but it made me laugh. Seems MTV.de won’t show it in the UK though…

They also have a live magazine type show called MTV Home. It’s presented by Joko, Klaas and a girl who, to be honest, is such a gesture that even a “retrosexual” (look it up) like myself felt faintly uncomfortable. Joko and Klaas are the standard slightly annoying MTV pretty boys (even though I couldn’t understand what they were saying, a false laugh at an in-joke is a surprisingly universal language).

It’s a very multimedia experience. They have a IM during the show so people can converse with them live, which they do with a fairly engaging wandering-around-with-a-laptop way. It all felt very interactive, so I mentally filed it away as a possible blog post.

So when I got back I checked their Facebook Group – 1,245 fans. 1,245. For a prime-time, youth oriented, highly interactive show. Mind you, MTV Germany only has 37,000 fans.

Why the ennui? Well, the page is a classic gesture page. “We should be on Facebook” you can hear someone saying in a brainstorm. It is not updated, doesn’t integrate with the blog or the Twitter feed etc. etc. Plus, penetration of Facebook in Germany is surprisingly low (about 700,000 I believe). This is reflected in the fairly low number of Facebook fans for MTV Germany, which does update it’s page very regularly with interesting content. (All that said, Club Visionaire, a very nice waterside club has got 5,144 fans)

But all this looking around led me to find that MTV Finland has 1,172,372 fans!

So this week’s Facebook Page of the week is MTV Finland, which seems to have gathered up 22% of the total population of Finland as fans. Christ knows how they did that. If anyone Finnish could enlighten me I’d be grateful.

Filed under: Facebook Page of the Week, club visionaire, mtv, mtv finland, mtv home

Burger King – Geschmack ist King

It means “Flavour is king”, according to Google translate. I was in Berlin over the weekend (Great place, thoroughly recommend Panorama Bar, Visonionaire, Watergate, Cookies Cream, and Fischers Fritz if you’ve won the lottery).

One poster that caught my eye over there was for Burger King, with a picture of a girl in the dark and the address Blackbk.de

It ‘s actually a fairly nice (in not massively original) idea – they covered the Burger King in Tiergarten so the inside was pitch black, invited people in and filmed the result. You can see the video here. It’s worth it for the most German looking man in the world (2 mins) and almost straight after him, is that…is that…is that TechnoViking? Could it be?

Filed under: experiential

Jetblue – this week’s Twitter case study

In tandem with Facebook page of the week, I’ll be drawing your attention to something nice on Twitter each week as well.

This week, we’ll start with JetBlue. Those of you who know what I’m going to say can leave now – I’m starting with the obvious ones to get the ball rolling.

JetBlue are a US airline flying principally domestic routes. They offer value and service and, as far as I can gather, their terminal at JFK is very pretty.

JetBlue was a fairly early adopter to the Twitter world, but their success has been phenomenal. As an example, while researching this post I came across post by Joel at Socialized about how he was followed by JetBlue. He quotes Morgan Johnson of JetBlue saying that he is pleased to have as many as 700+ followers. That post was written on 17 March 2008.  I just checked JetBlue’s twitter page and they now have 1,114,759 followers. That’s an increase of 1,114,059 in about 18 months. However you like to measure the success of your social media interactions, that’s an impressive number.

So, what do JetBlue do and how can we learn?

In a sense, JetBlue show the classic transition that I’d like to see all clients do.

First, they Listened. That was the orginal point of JetBlue getting on Twitter. They wanted to see what people were saying about them and the customer experience.

Then, they Helped. JetBlue started to respond to specific questions and queries from people. This is an entirely normal transition. If people see you in a social space, they will come up and talk to you and ask you stuff. If you’re in a position to respond, you start to become useful.

Finally, they Talked. This is the big step – from having specific, directed conversations with customers around a particular question or issue to empowering employees to have fun, banter and chat to the audience.

It is difficult to quantify the ROI the JetBlue get from Twitter – hopefully they may touch on it when they release their annual report. But 1.1 million followers has to be a good thing (c’mon, you’d baost if you’d built a 1.1m strong email database in 18 months, and you know 92% of that would be people who registered to a competition via moneysavingexpert.com).

They recently lauched JetBlue Cheeps (see what they did?) which tweets short-term deals on unfilled flights, and there is some evidence that this is filling planes.

And their most recent promotion was sold out 36 hours before deadline, with a lot of the credit going to Twitter.

So, Listen, Help, Talk. S’easy.

Filed under: Twitter case study

Facebook Page of The Week

I’m going to try and talk about a Facebook page that I like on a weekly basis. First up, my favourite at the moment, Selfridges.

Selfridges, along with every other bloody brand in the world, is celebrating some kind of Birthday this year. 100 years.

(Pic by Mark Allanson)

To celebrate this, they are doing a lot of quite cool stuff. I know this because I’m a fan of theirs and they update me with something about once every two days.

Things I like about this page

– They did have a stupid, overdesigned and confusing flash website-in-a-website thing on their site. It doesn’t exist any more, but there are prominent links to their social activity. I like to believe that their social media strategy worked so well that they ditched the flash presentation.

– they have a lovely tone of voice – it feels like it is written by people who are genuinely enthusiastic about Selfridges and excited to work there.

– they continually produce good content. Now, granted, they are celebrating 100 years with a huge amount of instore activity. All the same, some pictures of Scarlett Johansen dropped into my news feed today, so they get points.

– they’re really running a community

– they’re quietly building a fan base (13,000+ so far)

– they crosslink to other properties very well

– they have started to favorite other pages, creating a little MySpace style community (and a kind of social proof. A friend of mine once explained to me the intricacies of managing your MySpace friends so the cool ones were at the top. That was a good way to get more friends)

What I’d like to see

– a bit more help and advice, customer service style stuff

– a bit more conversing directly with fans. It’s perhaps still a bit stand offish.

But I like it. Visit the page, become a fan, and let me know what you think.

Filed under: Facebook Page of the Week

Convergence – digital is life

Some of the smarter commenters I’ve read recently are starting to focus on the way digital is becoming a part of life rather than a seperate channel. While this is an attractive thought, it can be difficult to see how brands should respond to this. But here’s an example….

I’m off to Berlin this weekend. As we don’t have a huge amount of time, we’d like to pack as much into the weekend as possible. We’ve been before, so don’t need to see the sights, but we’d like to make sure we get a to see enough or Berlin’s legendary nightlife.

However, there’s little in the world I enjoy less than pulling out a guidebook and trying to work out what street I’m on and how to get to the next destination.

So, I started a Google map, added all the restaurants, bars and clubs we might want to go to. I then downloaded MyMaps Editor for my Android phone and accessed that map through my handset. Now all I have to do is activate Vodafone Passport and double check that they aren’t going to slaughter me with data charges, and all I’ll have to do is access the map wherever I am in Berlin and I’ll have a personalised view of local bars I might want to try.

In contrast, on the Hedonist’s Guide website (that’s where I got the info from), there is a bespoke map of Berlin that I have to log in to access, which is not downloadable or sharable (or useful).

Here’s a suggestion for the Hedonsist’s Guide – put all your recommendations on Google Maps and allow people to download the map. (You can still keep your log in etc. or even relese the map as a standalone product for iPhone or Android, say 99p a download. I’d have done it)

Filed under: convergence, utility, android, berlin, google maps, hedonist's guide