New Trendbriefing: The tyranny of transparency (But I don’t feel sorry)

The new trendbriefing is all about the tyranny of transparency:

„Old economy fog is clearing: no longer can incompetence, below-par performance, ignored global standards, anti-social & anti-eco behavior, or opaque pricing be obscured. In its place has come a transparent, fully informed marketplace, where producers have no excuse left to underperform. TRANSPARENCY TYRANNY for some, TRANSPARENCY TRIUMPH for others.“

Opinion portals, blogs, review sites, forums, video sites, etc. etc. The modern consumer has every means to publish his or her opinion about everything – and every consumer can also find opinions on everything. And it’s only going to get worse over time, says that report. The amount might, as they write, outnumber the fake reviews written by the brands themselves leading to greater „honesty“ and „trust“.

But it also means that users will need ever better and more intelligent filters to find anything useful – especially something useful for THEM. Since the reviews might be written by users with a completely different taste for things. Other fields of danger are company internal things being spread, of course.
Yet, I don’t feel sorry for these companies. If they have things to hide, then it’s a threat for them.

At the same time, it is a huge chance for companies. Of course, people will also spread good news, so there will be a lot more word of mouth going around.

But the main factor is in the fields of market research: It has become so easy and inexpensive to find out, what consumers are really thinking about products and services! The more diverse the landscape of reviews, videos, soundbites or photos, the better results of an „online conversation research“ can get. I recommend to everyone to go „egosurfing“ – either for your own name, or for your company, your brand.

So don’t try to solve the problem of transparency, grab the opportunity of endless free consumer insights!

Will viral advertising work in the future, or are people getting tired of it?

This is something Frederick Samuel asks here, having presented a viral spot for Ray Ban (which looks, if you ask me, like it has been well post-produced to achieve this effect…)

My reply in the comments was:

good viral means good content and that will continue to be king, nevermind if it is an ad or not. think about it: people don’t forward it, because it is an ad for xyz, quite often, they won’t even be able to tell you the name of the brand or product a few days later.
the challenge with viral is really, to produce good content. to have a remarkable story worth spreading. with an increasing number of viral spots, it will be more difficult to stand out of the clutter enough to be liked&spread. but that is a challenge that classical advertising had all along, so there really isn’t anything new, don’t you think?

What do you think?

last.fm soon with videos

While other online radio stations close their gates due to new licensing rules, last.fm will now even include videos, writes read/writeweb. They’ll start with smaller independent labels, but will have, allegedly, also partnerships with bigger ones like EMI and Warner. And they are negotiating with Sony and Universal.

Once that is live, you should be able to compile your own video channel, too. In even better quality than anything you can currently (llegally) get on YouTube. read/writeweb calls it the MTV of web 2.0 and I think that defines it quite well.

Joost hooks up new deals for new contents

Having first looked at joost a few days ago, I wasn’t very impressed with the contents I could find. But certainly, they are (were?) still in beta. Now you can read everywhere that they are signing new deals with content providers / producers / TV stations.

In Tuesday’s deal with Time Warner Inc.’s Turner Broadcasting System, Joost said it would air episodes of the popular “Aqua Teen Hunger Force” and “Robot Chicken” from Turner’s Adult Swim network, along with “Larry King Live” and other CNN news and interview programs.

Still doesn’t sound too great to me, but then there are apparently other deals, such as:

  • Sony Corp. will run episodes of several old TV series including “Charlie’s Angels” and “Starsky & Hutch” on Joost.
  • Time Warner’s Sports Illustrated will run photo shoots and programs about its swimsuit issue.
  • The National Hockey League will broadcast vintage games and game highlights.
  • Hasbro Inc. will run old episodes of “Transformers” and “G.I. Joe.”

If they continue like this, then they will soon enough have a lot of good quality content. Considering that you can choose what you watch, and the fact that the quality of the streamed (peer-to-peer) videos is very good, this is a real competition to any regular cable TV…

Marketing with Twitter – four ideas.

While I am still unsure about the real value of Twitter in marketing, Rohit Bhargava mentions four ideas of how Twitter can be valueable. I still ain’t convinced completely, but getting there…

Capture the live pulse of an event
This is one of the most popular marketing uses that I have seen for Twitter, where it is used to offer a visual display of conversations happening around an event. More and more interactive events have this, and I suspect other non-Web related events will start to incorporate it as well to offer participants a visual way to track the pulse of an event and determine where to spend time.

Undoubtedly, this could work. The question is: who is the target audience? If it is all those people at the event, who subscribe to one twitter feed about the event, it could be brilliant to let everyone know what is happening elsewhere within the event. If it is for people outside the event, the whole twittersphere of the event will sound like 140-character long gibberish to those not present, I suppose.

Deepen a static experience through live commentary
I saw an interesting story last week about how Fox is going to be using Twitter to promote their new show Drive by having the director provide live updates and directors commentary via Twitter throughout the show. We will definitely be seeing more of this type of marketing in the near future.

This could be nice, but only if the show is live, too. Otherwise, we’ll be reading tweets about stuff that we know nothing about until we see it a few months later on TV.

Facilitate collaborative watching
When it comes to watching video content online or on television, Twitter can allow you to watch something „alongside“ anyone anywhere by sharing your impressions and reading impressions from others as a program unfolds. This is a powerful new method of sharing feedback and ideas

This won’t work, if we truly believe in the end of programmed television. If people are not watching things at the same time, because everyone can watch „on demand“, then how can you share your thoughts with other viewers via twitter? Unless there is a „twitter group“ for that particular movie or series – and I just underestimate the scale of randomness: the fact that for some shows, there will always be somebody, at any given time, watching the same show as myself…

Add a new dimension to promotions
Scavenger hunts, user generated content campaigns, and other reality based marketing promotions are growing popularity as ways to encourage interaction from customers. Twitter can offer a way of encouraging dialogue between promotion participants and adding an „instant message style“ dimension to a promotion without the privacy and contact acceptance barriers normally associated with using IM for marketing.

This, I think, could be a fantastic use for twitter. A connection of customers in Twitter groups during promotions, enabling „swarm intelligence“, as we call it here in Germany, would be a brilliant setup for all sorts of ideas for promos, alternate reality games, real life social games or gatherings, etc.

So, in general, I start to like the idea of using Twitter for marketing, having been sceptical a few weeks / months ago. But I do think, that we still need a lot of refinement to make sure it’s not just a gimmick, but does actually contribute value to campaigns.