iPhone Price Check

An interesting iPhone application from Kigi software. Enter a product UPC code and the application will search for user reviews (filtered to show only those reviews deemed useful) and comparative prices/availability. The next (and logical) step is to have the iPhone camera work as a barcode scanner.


The implications for retail operators are obvious and significant. Imagine browsing books at Borders and entering them instantly onto your Amazon.com wishlist...

The Tipping Point is Toast

This year more than one billion dollars will be spent on word of mouth marketing campaigns to target "influentials". Projected to grow at 36% year over year, this is the fastest growing element of the marketing armory. A great article featuring truly innovative work by Duncan Watts, a network-theory scientist, says that it's all a waste of money. To substantiate his point, he has developed a new technique for propagating ads virally, harnessing the p2p power of everyday people, ignoring influentials altogether.

Really worth a read, the full article is here....

Fishing Where The Fish Are

Conde Nast's teen site Flip has decided to turn down the focus on its standalone site and instead turn itself into a widget that can live in different ecosystems. Facebook will be the initial beneficiary of this strategy and ongoing development and marketing efforts will be focused on this approach.

Sarah Chubb, president of CondéNet said, “Flip’s demographic is perfectly aligned with FacebookWe’ve made 300,000 girls incredibly happy, but there’s millions of them on Facebook. And we know they’re interested the same kinds of tools that are available there. It would be a whole lot harder to build from 300,000 to the serious numbers like 1 or 2 million, which is the sweet spot for us. So this seemed like the best way to go.”

In my opinion the growth of Facebook and the other social networks will give rise to similar questions from many other providers of niche social nets...

Permission Is The Asset Of The Future

The title of this post comes from a Seth Godin article about the music industry. A very interesting article that you can read here.

He's right of course. As marketing continues to evolve and get smarter about being relevant and - who knows, even anticipated, so are the consumers. Consumers have already created the Channel of Me in which customisation and control is enabled by technology. In my mind, the ultimate expression of this evolution in the customer mindset will be the consumer as a personal data broker. As an individual, I will be able to allow certain parties to see certain parts of my "Private Key" profile. Permission will become easy to grant and to rescind based on my preferences at that given moment... For example, if I am in the market for a car, I will give Ford permission to talk to me, when I have made my choice - the marketing window is closed, if I want to stay up to date with travel offers, I will share a piece of my profile with Expedia etc.

The key here is control. Customers will control their own data in a way not dissimilar to the way they control their media consumption today. Permission will be a sliding scale with limitless potential for nuancing and endless possibilities for monetization...

The Corporate Social Graph

My friend and learned author of Marketing in the In-Between: A Post-Modern Turn on Madison Avenue , Len Ellis recently pointed me to an interesting development from IBM Lotus. Called Atlas, this software will mine relationships within the business world to help answer questions such as who the experts are on a given topic, how they are connected to me, and who my contacts know that I don't.

Reach, the social dashboard element of Atlas, helps users navigate six degrees of separation that divide them from a colleague. The dashboard indicates the shortest path to reach an expert and ranks that expert based on the level of interaction across the network.

More here....

The Art of Conversation

Joseph Jaffe's new book "Join the Conversation: How to Engage Marketing-Weary Consumers with the Power of Community, Dialogue, and Partnership" continues a homage to Jim Stengel who has (along with his company - P&G) done more to push the concept of influence marketing than just about anyone else. Jaffe details the steps marketers must take to gain maximum advantage of participation in the conversations that are taking place.



I think that 2008 will see a shift from a passive observation of sentiment and buzz to a more active, open, honest and ultimately mutually useful facilitation and participation in the conversations themselves. Active listening....

The Altruistic Crowd

A recent survey by the Keller Fay Group and Bazaarvoice reveals the motivations of those who are driven to share their opinions. The study (of over 1,300 online reviewers) found that to a large extent - and when asked - reviewers are motivated by goodwill and positive sentiment:

• 90 percent write reviews in order to help others make better buying decisions


• 70 percent want to help companies improve the products they build and carry


• 79 percent write reviews in order to reward a company


• 87 percent of the reviews are generally positive in tone

More here...

Trending Up

Trendwatching.com has released it report on trends for 2008. Lots of good thought provoking ideas of how (already emerging/emerged) trends from premiumization to crowd-mining will develop over the next year...

The Channel Of Me & The Channel Of Us

Two consumer mega-trends have emerged, both powered by the maturation of technologies that allow consumers to filter, screen, delete, take, consume and share what and when they like. These trends are the channel of me and the channel of us. In the Channel of Me, the consumer has become an editor, a cameraman and a censor. It presents a new culture of both control and customization, it creates a new model where the user is at the center and brands revolve, and evolve, around her.
The Channel of Us leverages the forces of collaboration and influence that have emerged in the connected society. At its best, the brand becomes a part of the conversations that are occurring naturally in these groups in an open, honest, flexible relationship with both the community and the individual.

The era of influence marketing - where we need to develop constituencies and not simply customer databases has come to CRM...

When There Were Brands...

Following up on my post on building constituents as opposed to customer bases - please read the post below from Modern Marketing. Follow the links just to see the damage that we can do to our brands if we do not create relationships that our constituents value.

I have been in the market for a new kitchen for sometime and as a result, quite randomly, found myself in a Moben salesroom and booked up for a consultation. The Moben rep duly arrived and was very good, explaining everything we needed. In short we were sold and even cancelled other consultations. However, I then mentioned our intended purchase to friends and family and got some concerned looks. Unusually for me I hadn't checked the company online but then did so. I found a series of horror stories - including this particularly graphic one. Order cancelled. Moben's tight marketing programme including a shop in a nice part of town, lovely website, super salesman and beautiful literature had been made entirely redundant by my 10 second search. Call it death by Google Index.

Influence Marketing & The Sagrada Familia

I was lucky enough this week to be able at address 400 or so marketers from Europe at the Forrester Consumer Marketing forum in Barcelona (beautiful city). So apart from getting back to Europe for a bit which is always nice, my presentation and discussion afterwards focused on Influence Marketing. I discussed the consumer trends that are the "channel of me" and the "channel of us" and the need for marketers to give serious consideration to building constituents as opposed to focusing only on building customer databases. We discussed further how social media marketing and CRM are really expressions of the same desire - to better know and therefore better converse with your customers and future customers.

The Forrester blog is here...

Having the Haystack Help Find The Needle

How advertising and marketing services agencies have changed:

• From brand and product centric to customer centric
• From a focus on awareness to a richer one on advocacy
• From shouting (even targeted shouting) to listening
• From artisanal to tech-savvy
• From intuitive to analytical
• From standalone to holdings to a networked eco-system

This (yet to be fully realised) vision is about better listening to and therefore better understanding the consumer and broader groups of consumers. Ultimately it is about, having the haystack that is the community help you find the needle.

Twingly - A New Look at the Blogosphere

For a refreshing change on you desktop's idle moments, Twingly screensaver brings an up to the second update of global blog activity to your screen. Created by PrimeLabs in Sweden, the screensaver can be downloaded here...

Social Climbing

Success in Social Media is a very smart, pragmatic guide to just that - How to use social media effectively. Broken down into 12 steps, the guide covers all aspects of marketing in an era of connected communities. The guide (from MotiveLab and Buzzlogic) provides clear guiding principles around the following:

1. Establish Clear Business Objectives and Metrics
2. Reframe Your Notion of Marketing Communications
3. Clarify Your Positioning
4. Identify the Influencers
5. Listen Before You Launch
6. Integrate Social Media with SEO
7. Engage Your Audience
8. Engage Your Employees
9. Engage Your Customers
10. Be Honest and Authentic
11. Define Metrics According to Business Objectives
12. Fail Quickly. Fail Cheaply

Trends & Intersections

The Future Exploration Network provides a novel way of looking at the trends that will shape our near future. They have focused on 10 areas: society & culture, government & politics, work & business, media & communications, science & technology, food & drink, medicine & well-being, financial services, retail & leisure, and transport & automotive. Click on the underground map for the PDF version.

Remarkableness

Don't you just love it when something comes along and just blows your mind with the possibilities it offers to change the way something is currently done? Well, Microsoft Live Labs has just launched Photosynth, a new application that takes a large collection of photos of a place or an object, analyzes them for similarities, and displays them in a reconstructed three-dimensional space. Add tags associated with the images from Flickr for example and you have something new and special. There are a couple of things here that I cannot do justice to so I urge you to take a look at the excellent presentation from the last TED summit. Then you can download a demo of the application here. Well worth the bandwidth...

Learning From Yahoo Answers

Using an approach similar to that of the popular Yahoo Answers (I use it almost constantly and am amazed by the quality of responses I get), Bazaarvoice has launched its new Ask & Answer product. The moderated service uses the power of social search to keep visitors on a site rather that researching a question elsewhere - or to have them come back to check on the status of a question they posed. Customers who leave an email address will be informed that their question has been answered. The service sits alongside more conventional product information and allows visitors to ask specific questions such as, "Will this plant grow in Texas?" and to get answers from other customers with direct experience. Sounds like an interesting way to increase the pitiful commerce sites conversion rates of around 2.6%...

The Database Of Attentions

In the attention economy, Twitter enables the capture and memorisation of those things which retain (however briefly) the attention of our community members... A powerful and simple way of sharing information - a kind of instant blogging mechanism or a shared scribble pad has immense power in the context of a community based on affinity or usage (i.e. Land Rover owners or Labrador enthusiasts). The potential for community building and dialogs with and between customers is amazing. Much reward lies in mining this database of attentions.

Social Networking Gets Professional

In April 2004 the Economist wrote an article about LinkedIn which was at that time three years old and at that time had about 40,000 members. This week they have published another missive broadly relating the coming of age of social networking for business, LinkedIn now has 10 Million members and 350 corporate sponsors paying up to 250, 000 USD to advertise jobs to the network. From a personal point of view, I have had several recent professional meetings where my my LinkedIn profile and common contacts with my guests have been very useful in establishing a frame of reference... Definitely a space to watch for many reasons.

Don't Like The Ads? Roll Your Own.

There are an increasing number of players in the consumer generated advertising (CGA) field. A recent entrant is XLNTads (yes excellent). The basic idea is; you select from one of their participating brands, you make an ad using the building blocks provided (logos, jingles, brand guidelines etc) and, if it runs you get 20,000 USD...