Category archive: Marketing

Tuesday, May 09, 2006

More pizza phones

If you thought I was kidding when I wrote about the narrow-minded inutility of what I have dubbed the Pizza Phone, I was. At least that’s what I thought until I read this, from Danah Boyd at Many 2 Many:

The next step in social technologies is mobile. Duh. Yet, a set of factors have made innovation in this space near impossible. First, carriers want to control everything. They control what goes on a handset, how much you pay for it and who else you can communicate with. Next, you have hella diverse handsets. Even if you can put an application on a phone, there’s no standard. Developers have to make a bazillion different versions of an app. To make matters worse, installing on a phone sucks and most users don’t want to do it. Plus, to make their lives easier, developers often go for Java apps and web apps which are atrociously slow and painful. All around, it’s a terrible experience for innovators, designers and users.

The only question appears to be, would you like a Hawaiian pizza phone or pepperoni? The rest of Boyd’s post gets into an interesting analysis of where Helio went wrong in its thinking about MySpace.

Thursday, May 04, 2006

Social media does not serve up communities on silver platters

Terry Heaton is a media specialist whose background is in television, but who is entirely up to speed with social media and its implications. He writes of the case of YouTube, the user-contributed videos website that very quickly grew to six million daily users, and which now serves more than 35,000 videos per day:

[T]hose numbers have caught the attention of the mainstream, and we’re about to see clone after clone being created. Why? It’s the numbers. It’s like mass media scouts are scanning the horizon and shouting back to the tribe, “There! There’s the audience we’ve been losing.”

Meanwhile, there are reports that youTube is raising as much as $25 million in venture money. Why? It’s the numbers. Is youTube the new Amazon, the new eBay, or the new mySpace? This is a VERY tricky question, because with money comes old school rules, and if there ever was an anti-establishment site, it’s youTube. Remember that this site was built for user-contributed videos. The deep pockets that are drooling over it could give a rat’s ass about such. They want those numbers to present their OWN videos, and that’s a problem. The same users who made youTube “successful” could just as easily turn their allegiance elsewhere.

Terry laments the fact that so many companies are desperate to purchase communities developed by other entities, yet want nothing to do with exploration and experimentation of their own. Our quotation here earlier of Jeff Jarvis’s contention that you can’t own the community; the community owns the community is one that such companies would do well to heed. In a time where individuals online have not only asserted control but wield it with a growing certainty that it is their right (and it is), it is easier than ever to be faced with millions of turned backs. And no receipt can get you your money back on that kind of loss.

Cross-posted from What MySpace Means: Lessons for Every Brand

Wednesday, May 03, 2006

The Engagement Alliance's first event

It’s happening on June 21st here in London, and you are all invited. We’ve got fantastic speakers from - amongst others - Skype, the Guardian, and Hitwise coming along on the day to help people make sense of the MySpace phenomenon and what it means for their businesses. For all the details, check out the official website for What MySpace Means: Lessons for Every Brand.

I’m going to leave this post on top for a couple of days. If you’re not reading this site through RSS, please scroll down for updates. Thanks!

Tuesday, May 02, 2006

Digital TV broadcasts to mobile arrive in Europe

Nine months after the first digital TV broadcasts to mobile phones started in Korea, now Three/Hutchison, the 3G mobile operator in Italy, has started the full broadcasts on the DVB-H technology. The story was reported by our friends at the3GPortal on Friday.

Initially Three/Hutchison do not offer the full channel selection, and have only 500 of the new handsets (which include the “set-top box” digital tuner built into the 3G mobile phone) to get the first customers viewing. But Hutchison promises to have all major Italian broadcast channels on by June, and aim to sign up a million 3G TV viewers by end of this year.

For those who are now remarkably confused (didn’t we have TV viewing on our 3G phones already?), this is a new technology and new type of viewing. Previously on mobile phones you could either watch video clips (download a clip, then watch it) or select a “streaming service” - which would at times cut out and be fuzzy etc. But now following the concept from Korea, the Italian mobile operator has launched handsets which have full 3G telecoms and data capacity - AND a separate digital tuner. The TV signals will be broadcast over the airwaves. This allows a much better - and more cost-effective TV viewing experience on the mobile phone (or other viewing device, such as the flat panel viewer on a backseat of an automobile etc). Of course it means that anyone offering this type of service also needs to own a TV broadcasting license, as Three/Hutchison does in Italy.

Again another variant on the “Y of Convergence” that Alan Moore and I talk about in our book, of how telecoms, the internet and media are merging.

Monday, May 01, 2006

Sample blogs for Southwest Airlines

I previously blogged about the Southwest Airlines blog, which many have found disappointing. Here’s an example of the network in action: Brian Oberkirch has created five sample blogs for Southwest, showing them how much better it could be done.

Disappointingly, especially from one who is trying to sell his services as a social media consultant, Brian hasn’t categorised these on his blog, which makes linking to them a pain. Ease of linking is hugely important if you want to spread information across the network. Here they are, anyway:

Sample 1
Sample 2
Sample 3
Sample 4
Sample 5

Link via Shel Israel