von Roland Hachmann | Mai 8, 2007 | Ad News, Blog, Digital Culture, Digital News, Marketing, Marketing Trends, Mobile Marketing, Social Media Marketing
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.
von Roland Hachmann | Mrz 15, 2007 | Blog, Digital Culture, Social Media Marketing
It’s all over the blogs. Twitter is everywhere. And I still don’t understand, why micro-messaging or -blogging is any good. Guess I will have to try it sometime.
Now even the NY Times experiments with it showing the main headlines of the paper on twitter.com…
Also, Google News has a twitter feed. Even though that is courtesy of bleep. software.
In addition, here are some cell phone cheat sheets by Jarrod.
(found via micropersuasion)
von Roland Hachmann | Jan 13, 2007 | Blog, Digital Culture, Digital News, Marketing Trends, Social Media Marketing
Now you thought YouTube is already a bad site for yoyeuristic nerds. But then I stumbled upon Stickam. This is absolutely crazy. It’s almost like YouTube, but there is one major difference: it’s LIVE!
Live video can feel very strange, I just noticed. The only times I have experienced live video streaming were during skype calls with my brothers in Hamburg or my Cousin in Arizona.
But this is different. You click on one of the links and all of a sudden you end up in the living room of a stranger. So while checking out the live feeds, I actually sneaked into one person from Denmark who started – quite openly – to smoke a selfmade hashpipe or something that looked like it. Made out of a plastic soda bottle. There was the option to chat, but quite frankly, I didn’t want to disturb the guy.
The next live stream I visited was the DJ performance of a breakbeat DJ. In the videostream it seemed that there are two people DJ-ing. But neither of them bothered to answer my question if there is any OK, one just answered. A little later, and he admitted that he is quite drunk. (And I just got reminded of the fact that chat syntax is revolutionary: “lol kwl im goin now sum1 else will tlk soon ok c u l8r m8“).
The most surprising live-surprise: the DJ actually greeted me via the stream! (â€wanno make a loif shouuwt ouuwt to roouwlaanâ€)
Very kwl, m8.
(found here)
von Roland Hachmann | Dez 22, 2006 | Blog, Digital Culture, Marketing Trends
An editor of wired, Robert Lemos, has stopped watching regular TV and replaced everything with internet content.
Suddenly, our family was not sitting together in the living room watching television — except for the occasional DVD movie — but instead scattered around the house. My wife and I watched our shows on our office computers, and our kids watched theirs on a laptop in the kitchen. Within a few days, the diaspora driven by digital content already made the house seem, well, less homey.
Apparently, TV has never been the center of this family, but nevertheless, the fact that everyone all of a sudden watched „TV“ at their preferred PC-location changed everything.
Plus: watching live sports online is apparently impossible. This will be one of the only things left for programmed television: Sports, elections, ceremonies such as the Oscars or Royal Weddings. Things you have to watch live. Everything else can be customised, downloaded, and watched whenever you want.
The role of TV will have to change to keep up. And there will be some social implications when this media usage is shifting. No more common TV room. No more watercooler discussions about show xyz from the evening before (unless it’s one of the exceptions named above). TV will be in the same corner as any website or even a book. People will watch it a all different times and under different circumstances, TV programmers (and advertisers) will not know any more, in which personal context people will watch certain shows.
Robert Lemos concludes:
As for my family, we’ve decided to remain cut off from cable television, and live with the net as our entertainment lifeline. Before the Wired assignment came along, we were already headed toward paring our television consumption down to a few shows a week and the experiment showed that the internet could do that much.
In the end, getting videos from the internet is not the same as live television programming. However, in a few years, I believe it will be better.
von Roland Hachmann | Dez 18, 2006 | Blog, Digital Culture, Social Media Marketing
Time Magazin has once again named their person of the year. But this time, it’s following the hype of web 2.0 and all that buzz around it, so the person of the year is us. The people of the internet, the bloggers, chatters, homepage designers, forum contributors, the Myspacers and Youtubers, etc. etc. Because we „control the information age“:
The new Web is a very different thing. It’s a tool for bringing together the small contributions of millions of people and making them matter. Silicon Valley consultants call it Web 2.0, as if it were a new version of some old software. But it’s really a revolution. . . .
And for seizing the reins of the global media, for founding and framing the new digital democracy, for working for nothing and beating the pros at their own game, TIME’s Person of the Year for 2006 is you. . . .
But at the same time, as people sit down and spend their spare time creating things they probably expected main stream media to do, there is equally a lot of crap going on, that nobody ever wanted to see:
Sure, it’s a mistake to romanticize all this any more than is strictly necessary. Web 2.0 harnesses the stupidity of crowds as well as its wisdom. Some of the comments on YouTube make you weep for the future of humanity just for the spelling alone, never mind the obscenity and the naked hatred.
I like that choice. 2006 really was the year of the social web. Not only in the US. Even in Germany („Old Europe“) web 2.0 has started to become a household buzzword. At least most of the major German newspapers had feature stories on it…
So what’s next, who can be the person of the year in 2007, if everyone has been it already in 2006? An alien?
(via)
Wo ich sonst so bin...