Tive's Take

Creating content for the always-on lives brands now live is intrinsically different to creating advertising content. Yesterday I delivered a talk at Digital Shoreditch which pulls apart those differences in the processes in an effort to explain how to develop and deliver content that bridges the gap between campaigns.

The talk is a whistle stop tour of a process we’ve developed at AnalogFolk squeezed into 15 minutes. The media analogy to the economic concept of Stock & Flow was introduced by Robin Sloan and is one we’ve embraced at AnalogFolk. Thanks go out to Noah Brier for drawing attention to it in his excellent AdAge article. 

Thanks go out to Matt Dyke for his oversight and the always excellent Kate Sigrist for the sexy divider chart.

Feel free to add comments below or on the slideshare presentation itself.

*The narrative to the talk is shown on the ‘Notes’ tab under the presentation. You won’t be able to see them full screen or in this embedded version.*

The success of more personal, capped, social networks such as Path has shown that many of us value our everyday relationships over and above the unwieldy friend-grab of more traditional social networks such as Facebook. Recent coverage for new kid on the block, Pair, shows that we’re ready for a social network limited to just one friend - your partner. Pair is not the first network for lovers. Cupple, Duet and the recent Between are all predecessors but whilst innovation is “building a product for people before they know they want it”, success is building it just when people realise they want it. Timing is crucial and Pair’s recent investment  from valley luminaries puts it in a strong position to lead the battle of social for lovers. Pair lets you share photos, sketches, tasks,your location and live ‘thumb kisses’ with your partner and keep a continuous record of these interactions. It, and other new niche networks, are not only evolving the way to think of social as intimate, but also share several common elements that brands can learn from.

1: They are highly visual with photos dominating the ‘feed’. Facebook has been for sometime the largest photo-sharing site online and Path launched originally as a photo/video only  sharing app. Visual updates are a mainstay of keeping up to date with friends and relatives, and more and more social networks are launching with visual only interfaces. Recent interest in Pinterest has heralded the evolution of what Richard MacManus calls ‘the visual web’. The evolution from text and crude graphics in the 90’s to ‘multimedia’  in the 1990’s is being echoed by a design change that bandwidth and processing power allow, enabling sites to be visuals dominated. What’s more we know that visual social content garners more interaction than links or text updates.

Learning: brands need to make more beautiful visual content designed to be easily posted/pinned/shared socially from owned media channels.

2: They are almost all designed exclusively for mobile. As Mary Meeker reports, the mobile web consumption will soon outweigh web consumption. Combine this with a visually dominated platform fed by in-built cameras along with the advent of widespread 4G and mobile becomes the only logical primary platform for new social networks.

Learning: brands need to shift their focus to place the mobile web on at least an even keel with desktop web consumption.

3: They are pushing synchronous communications. Pair has two features that let you share a moment in real-time with your significant other. “Thumb kiss” lets your hold you thumb on your phone screen whilst your partner also does. If you both do it at the same time, the screen slowly turns pink and you successfully ‘kiss’. Similarly you can create a sketch together, at the same time (a feature Zynga could add to Draw Something) . Marco Triverio’s Feel Me app specialises solely in this kind of communication. Effectively the mobile screen becomes a “window” to your partner, and with front-mounted cameras, this interaction will only evolve further.

Learning: A move away from asynchronous interactions of SMS and email should hold particular interest for brands. It is a further evolution of an “always on” strategy; from a low-latency culture to zero-latency. As new platforms deliver true real-time communications, so brand activities should evolve to support  zero-latency interactions.

Yesterday Twitter announced advertising for “small businesses”. Essentially, the approach is similar to Facebook’s recent advertising improvements but with one added, clever, feature. As on Facebook, your content (tweets) will be promoted rather than writing individual ‘ads’. But Twitter has introduced an improvement on this approach by automatically selecting the tweets that it promotes on your behalf based on the interaction levels of each tweet. Rather than backing content that isn’t travelling well, only your best content will get promoted. This works great for smaller businesses who may not have campaigns to push, though of course for larger businesses or brands, owners will need control over the exact content that is promoted. Awareness of a CSR campaign for Uniqlo for example will receive less engagement than a sale or discount but may represent a key business objective that only controlled promoted tweets can deliver. You do still have the control of paying per follower or engagement and targeting by location.

Who classifies as a small business?

In partnership with American Express, Twitter has selected 10,000 small businesses to launch with. It is unclear when anyone will be able to start creating their own campaigns with applying via the AMEX scheme. It is also unclear what a small business is and therefore whether this can be used for small brands who may feel they would be hamstrung by ownership by a larger business. Is there a threshold for followers or employees or turnover? The application process doesn’t ask for any of these. If follower count is the metric, then this could be a great way for brands to get onto the Twitter ladder without the estimated £25,000 investment in Twitter ads that bigger brands require for a business page. Learn more here or search for #smallbiz.

Facebook announced “Interest Lists” yesterday which gives users the ability to group Pages into a list.

“Interest lists can help you turn Facebook into your own personalized newspaper, with special sections—or feeds—for topics that matter to you. You can find traditional news sections like Business, Sports and Style or get much more personalized—like Tech News, NBA Players, and Art Critics.”

On the surface, this looks very similar to the Google+ Sparks feature although Facebookers will need to create and curate their own lists rather than relying on the platform to curate the content for them as Google+ does. However, Interest Lists also allows you to publish your lists for friends to subscribe to and in this respect, the feature smacks of Twitter Lists. This second feature supports Facebook’s move to champion individuals using features such Facebook Subscribe allowing individuals to publish their feeds to the public and Verified Accounts that allow pseudonyms.

Interest Lists enable individuals to go one place for a collection of sources on one topic. For example, if you are into music, you could subscribe to updates from NME, Kerrang, Q, Mojo, The Fly and so forth from one list? From a brand point of view, it remain unclear as to whether these lists can be employed. For example, could The Mercury Music Prize create an Interest List that features updates from a list of the nominated artists? I hope so.

Watching this video, it struck me, just how many social networks is Barack on? 

Many…

(Did I miss any?)

Official apology

Wired interview with Dave Morin

The bigger picture - Apple, data and social networks

As far as my *exhaustive* research has shown, there doesn’t seem to be a standard way of asking a question on Twitter. 

Users often write regular questions but wouldn’t it be helpful if there was a standard format (hashtag?) that allowed other to digest the tweet as an incoming question? If a hashtag was used, more helpful users could answer questions from users they don’t follow creating a more helpful community.

I’m thinking you could use #[Hashtag]Question format where the incumbent hashtag remains the same but you simply add Question to it. In this sense you are creating Quora-esque topics that people can choose to follow and answer to show their knowledge.

For example Jason’s tweet above would be:

“#BullyingQuestion: anyone know of any anti-bullying schools/charities?”

Or:

What do you think?

Nike’s FuelBand locks together three of the biggest gamechangers in product development today -  gamification, socialisation and personal data - but adds one killer refinement that will make it stand out from the market.

FuelBand heralds the advent of the Quantified Self into the mainstream. For years athletes and the keener ones amongst us have used personal data to improve their regimes. From pedometers to Polar chestbands and watches that allow you to monitor and maintain your optimal heart rate, accessing personal data has played a key role in fitness. But pedometers and heartrate monitors deliver only one dataset each. Recent fitness accessories have started to deliver a lot more wellbeing information that doesn’t just focus on exercise. Jawbone’s UP will measure your sleep activity and let you track what you eat. (Though product flaws from its inability to wirelessly communicate with the app, through to bricking have stifled sales.) Meanwhile Nicholas Felton’s annual reports, which started in 2005, signposted an interest in personal data stretching beyond exercise oriented data (subsequently inspiring Facebook to employ Felton leading to the development of Timeline). People love to discover their personal data.

Add gamification to personal data, and exercise becomes more compelling. FuelBand users can set targets to beat and earn awards for activities a la Foursquare. (Cyclists should take note of the Strava Cycling app to earn similar rewards.) But setting targets for yourself is not nearly as compelling as competing with friends. This third tier of socialisation is really where FuelBand will succeed. As Opower’s comparative utility bills have shown, and behavioural scientists/economists have argued for some time, social competition is a big incentive to changing habits. Nike has integrated this social element heavily into FuelBand.

But Nike’s real victory comes not in folding together data, social and gaming, but the addition of one killer refinement…

FuelBand will let you count steps and calories, but more importantly, it simplifies and refines your data into an overarching score. This means that, unlike the original Nike+ which limits users to running, converting movement into one score to rule them all means users can compete against friends despite taking part in different activities. It’s not about number of steps or calories burned; you don’t need to run quicker or further than your friends; you just need to beat their score via any activity that gets you moving. By refining data to a simple cross-sport score Nike’s message “Life is a sport” truly comes to life. This refinement is where Nike will win.  

—- Whereas this message was best delivered via an award-winning advert ten years ago, Nike has evolved to deliver the same message via hardware and software. Kudos.

The same message today.

Rovio recently announced Angry Birds Magic which uses NFC and Angry Bird Magic Places which uses location data. If you play Angry Birds in a specific ‘place’, you can unlock features such as the Mighty Eagle - an even angrier bird. Undeniably, this will lead to brand partnerships (- play in your local Starbucks and unlock a power up?) But what interests me is not that Rovio has managed to create another revenue stream beyond their current partnerships, but that location-based products continue to be invested in despite the overwhelming lack of mainstream support. I’m an advocate of location-based games, a self-confessed one time Super Mayor, however I admit that geo-location just hasn’t managed to attracted the early majority… yet. There seems to be a clear reluctance and skepticism of its advantages. The key seems to be relevance. Is my location relevant to my activity ? How does it benefit me, let alone my friends? Proximity can deliver this (as discussed previously). I only hope that the partnerships Rovio forges to reward gamers for visiting Magic Places add enough value to the experience to get the majority to reappraise location-based applications. But I’m struggling to imagine a scenario where playing the game will enrich my time at a rewarding location such as a theme park / bird sanctuary. Much more likely will be the scenario in which my visit to a mundane location such as a train station is enriched by giving me a new game feature. But can the game ever act as an incentive to visit a location? Can the reward of the Mighty Eagle incentivise me enough to go to one location over a competitor? I would love Rovio to create a location-based experience that makes geo-skeptics turn their heads. Building the category isn’t their goal, but when an application as popular as Angry Birds makes this sort of move, it becomes a category influencer and spokesperson. I hope these partnerships serve to clarify the benefits of geo-location to the majorities. I want location-based experiences to grow. I want the mainstream to embrace them. But I’m not sure Angry Birds Magic Places helps. I pray the partnerships it announces soon catalyse rather than confuse the category.

Watch Rovio product managers talk about Angry Birds Magic & Magic Places.

Geo-location has been a buzz word since Foursquare’s launch at SXSW in 2009. But despite healthy growth and even with the advent of Facebook Places last year, it’s never really become mainstream. Most people still don’t see a value in it. Proximity however is the evolution of geo-location. It’s the marriage of location data and relevance. We’re seeing new manifestations of geo-located data that tie users into a locale that means something to them. Two examples have caught my eye recently - Color & Home Elephant (video intro’s below). Both of these iPhone apps tap us into our location but also connect us with users nearby… in realtime. Color does it through photos (- imagine seeing what the view is like courtside) whilst Home Elephant does it via simple neighbourhood updates (though hopefully not always catch-the-thief style updates). Proximity apps don’t tell us that a friend has checked into an airport on the other side of the world, they only tell us what is relevant nearby. So whilst I’m not sure that Color will be the next Twitter, I’ll stick my neck out and say that Proximity will overtake geo-location as the next buzzword and could well bring location into the mainstream. Thanks to @BrainPicker for pointing out Home Elephant

On my current theme of tech nostalgia is this excellent video charting Windows OS upgrades from 1.0 to the present 7. I completely forgot that programs like Doom 2 and Monkey Island were originally launched from DOS. It’s like taking a trip back to my childhood. 

Source via @RemoteDeveloper