The Magnum Challenge

I clicked on a banner yesterday!

I was placed on trendsales I guess. Doing my early in the morning shopping with my laptop on top of my bed while my boyfriend was still sleeping. (and here I am again) This is my favorite time slot. The sun is up, the house is quiet and there is time to do online shopping on my favorite sites amazon, trendsales, youheshe, reading blogs, news and checking out the weather on the day to come.   

This is the perfect spot to expose me for this banner. Do you want to dream. Oh yes! Do you want luxury and being spoiled? Yes please. Click this banner! Ok I will. And I ended up on this page the magnumchallenge.dk. And I don’t now how much was fascination over the beautiful pictures, the interactive twist’s or just that I was in the right situation to start dreaming, but anyway I ended up spending 10 minutes or more on the campaign site. And I had fun. And I don’t even like Magnum icecream. But this definitely took my ten steps closer to try. 

So I don’t now if it was perfect media planing finding me in this situation, the endorsment from the desperate housewife universe, the pictures of luxury and the opening to dream, but this campaign worked for me - or for the advertiser in deed. 

Billmonk - cool web application

This is really kinda fun and shows how widely web applications go…

Billmonk is a place where your economy is made web 2.0-able…

Check it out here

Join the public conversation

This morning I posted about how the social networks are challenging IM or SMS. Just wanted to stress an interesting point about this. If you watch conversation posted on comments, logs, walls or so, a lot of the conversation is actually quite personal. It seems as the personal conversation is going fra private to public. Even in the networks offering both a private mail option and a comment wall a lot of the conversation is held in the public sphere. This is really interesting.

IMs are very private and difined by privacy and the lack of disruptive elements. Here we see a tendency toward wanting the conversation to be public as if the content of conversation is being a part of the users creating their identity. If this is really the reason for taking conversation fra IM to social networks then IM haven’t got the weapons to fight back because they service is born and bread in the private sphere.

What will this mean for interacting with the users? Will marketing in the conversation be an option? Or is the public conversation a no go for marketers?

Social networks challenging IM?

A while ago I was going crazy cause some of my friends really got into the myspace thing, which in it self isn’t a bad thing. I’m there too - but mostly to figure out what is happening there. But they started sending messages to me on my comment-board. Which is ok as long as it is just comments, pictures or fun. But the comments started taking form as appointments and so. - and for a while I missed all the fun because I still rely on my cell as the place to contact me if going out for drinks or coffee. So I was going mad, cause I had no intention of starting to check my myspace once a day (or more). I’m more the visitor of the month there.

So I started thinking a bit more about this tendency. Could the social network challenge the cell texting or the Instant Messenging? Many of the networks are different cause it isn’t real time interaction, but with the major networks applying services as “online status”, IM-functions and so in to their sphere will this be the new way to have direct interaction with your friends in the future? Myspace has its myspaceIM and facebook just launched an application to integrate twitter into their service.

Three days ago imediaconnection published an article about this phenomenon taking off. John Gray VP of interactive marketing at Enlighten started the discussion. No conclusions, cause it doesn’t seem to affect the IM numbers - not yet. But he raised this issue as a trend to watch. Read his view here.

And it is an importante discussion, cause in reaching the teens IM has become an important player. John says here:

According to Pew Internet & American Life Project, 75 percent of all online teens use IM to communicate, making it a popular choice for media planners and buyers eager to target this influential consumer group. Marketers know platforms like AOL’s AIM have some of the highest conversion rates in the business. Consequently, they have made IM placements an integral part of their youth-centric campaigns.

So I’ll try to watch this trend and post some conclusions as soon as they appear.

Posting from Facebook

This is really cool - if it works. Right now I’m posting to Channel8000 directly from my facebook account. It’s really interesting when the huge social networks collaborate with the web 2.0 applications. Looking forward seeing what this will lead to.

Mapping the new media world

Here’s a really fun new way to visualise all the new media companies – as shown on the Tokyo underground
map

Jason Steinberg writes:
“They took the top 200 tech (definitely tech) sites and placed them
along subway lines. The lines are used to group together similar
services. For example along the blue Community line there’s Facebook,
Xing, Vox and LinkedIn. Each one also has a weather forecast and an
incremental web number. The more suns and less clouds represent a
positive prediction about a site’s future.
For those of you familiar with the Tokyo subway system, there are some
really funny (and snarky) bits:
1. Google has moved from Shibuya, a humming place for young people,
to
Shinjuku, a suspicious, messy, Yakuza-controlled, but still a
pretty
cool place to hang out (Golden Gaya).
2. Youtube has conquered Shibuya.
3. Microsoft has moved to Ikebukuro, if you know what I mean.
4. Yahoo is in Ueno, a nice place but nothing going on there.
5. Wikipedia now is in Shimbashi, the place for the square and
hard-headed Salaryman, like the Wikipedia watchdogs.
6. The Chinese line runs parallel to the “share line” which starts
with
the main pirates…
7. Paper info designer Tufte is right below the Federated Media,
right
before joining with the interactive information design circle in a
90
degree angle.
8. “You” are in the Emperor’s palace, in the center of the network.
And, its media friendly - your clients can sponsor it starting at
US$2,000 for one of 10 spaces which will be included on all adaptations
of the map.”

Thanks to Dan for this post!

Do we really want our audience to participate?

Long time ago I started reading Henry Jenkins Convergence Culture, but must admit I skipped a few chapters. But in this rainy summer I promised myself to start reading the last of a series (I turned out to be many) of book in which I have skipped, browsed and jumped inside the last year.

Last night I read the Tarantino’s Star Wars Chapter in Convergence Culture. It is really a brilliant book written by the founder (and Director) of MIT’s Comparative Media Studies Program.

There are so many wonderful insights in this chapter so I’ll share a few. I love his differentiation between interactivity and participation, with interactivity being the master plan of the sender, based by their intentions, control and responsiveness of consumer feedback and participation being the respons by the reciever shaped by cultural and social protocols.

Another brillant diversity he adresses is how he categories the players in the media industry on behalf on their response to the changing media landscape as prohibitionists or collaborationists. This is perfect because you can take all players in the industry and locate them in eiter direction. Sadly their is a tendency to the classic media players (being music, recordings and film) joining the prohibitionists, and leaving the collaborative respons to gaming, mobile and internet driven companies.

A way where we see this in action is the ongoing debate on whether the movie industry embrace fan sites using content from their backyard? Disney fought for years to prohibit this, but were happy to make children market their movies anywhere else? This just doesn’t make sense. We fight to create Word of Mouth, but as soon as is spreads to Word-of-Mouse - we panic.

The sociologist Grant McCranken says: Corporations must decide whether they are, literally, in or out. Will they make themself an island or will they enter the mix?”

Especially the gaming industry has left the island and they are conquering the world by letting the gamers not just join the game, but co-creating the universes in where they play. It is estimated that 60 % of the gameplay in the Sims is created by users, and we see how MMPOG’s are defined today - not by the given gameplay, but by the social interaction happening between the users, as mentiond before with machinima Tales of the Past 3.

As you can see I love this chapter and it ends by this interesting quote, where the part about renegotiating relationships are very well spoken ” many of the smartest folks in the media industry know this; some are trembling, and others are scrambling to renegotiate their relationships with consumers. In the end, the media producers need fans just as much as fans need them.”

How to create a YouTube succes

This video reached the magical number one on Youtube on the 22th of june. The secret is once again timing, and shows how important it is in the web 2.0 world to be able to react and do it fast. This is how to create outstanding social media campaigns. I’m not impressed by this production and a lot of creative things could be discussed, but they managed to tap in to the public agenda on just the right time and with the right speed. The video is on the 250.00th view in this moment.

Why is social media on web 2.0 different?

As Daria Rasmussen (my lovely co-worker) and me stressed several times under a conference on social media we hosted in march this year, social media is in its basic nature not so much different than 20 years ago. We now use last/Pandora or ilike to express our identity through public playlists, we make profiles on social networks as we  spend ours fillig out friendship-books and passing them  through our social networks 20 years ago (Personally I always had a problem filling out the “My future”- box, because my outer self wanted to be a hip journalist writing about politics and media, but deep inside I still had a little girl really wanting to be an indian princess - but I ever wrote that, in case some of the boys from the 6th grade would see the book)

The things going on in the media users heads and in their social interaction is not so much different. But the huge gap is in the speed in which these things go on. The adaptation rate is sky rocketting and I get dizzy just by thinking about the reach of our messages.

So there’s nothing new on social media - the news is in the broadband acces…

This is a good recent example copied with pride from Dan Calladine (love your newsletter, Dan!)

iLike popularity jumps due to Facebook widget?
“In true Internet fashion, iLike has gone through a year’s worth of
growth in a little over a week. As I wrote here last week, the company
went from having just 1,200 users to having more than 400,000 in a
little over a day — which taxed its resources to the point where it
doubled the number of servers it was running five times and still didn’t
have enough capacity. Eventually, the company had to plead with its
Silicon Valley friends and neighbours to provide extra servers for it to
use. And where is it now? It has quintupled in size again, and has more
than 2.2 million users.”

Read the whole article on Ingram 2.0 here

Most viewed danish music video

Posting Utada’s video I came to think about this danish music video which has reached the magical 1 mio views on Youtube. We did the counting on danish videos doing a digital media workshop for a big music/video client of ours a month ago. Everybody guessed that the most viewed would be some new, young, hip music guy featuring girls in bikinies…. Yeah they were right about the bikinies, but young and hip - You see for yourself… Amazing how this social media phenomenon seems to be able to surprice once again…