Leo Burnett - Cultural Fuel

Please participate in our quick Social Ninja Barometer polls, regarding Google+ vs Facebook.

This poll assumes you have and are using both.

Poll 1:

Poll 2:

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Oh my, some brands just can’t help themselves, can they? I mean it’s not like you need a social media guru or digital ninja to tell you this: you shouldn’t pretend to wanna have a conversation with your brand’s fans if you can’t stomach criticism.

But yet, this is what keeps happening. This time with Versace. Versace closed down posting functionality of for their 500K fans after criticism about sandblasting their jeans was voiced because it is done manually by laborers in poor countries and the sand gets in their lungs.

What I find particularly spicy about this is that this kind of reaction is that it isn’t about just shutting down or moderating fans bickering or complaining about products or styles.

This is about shutting down a worthy cause and request people have with a brand they actually would love to be able continue to like. Please take these folks to a “How to avoid PR nightmares 101″ night class somewhere.

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Garrett Ryan found an interesting article by Gregory Ferenstein giving some stats on some of the Facebook App tactics in use. The effectiveness of different Facebook strategies was determined by randomly giving users of Facebook apps different experiences and observing how activity spreads throughout the network.

If you ever wondered which ones work better, or needed some numbers, here you go: researchers found the winning strategy to be up to two times more effective than email, and 10 times more effective than banner ads.

Read the whole thing here.

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A few folks have been sniggering about the fact that, yeah, there is a difference between google and facebook. Facebook’s ongoing privacy concerns aside, Google just has more of your stuff and has had track record that isn’t exactly spick and span in the consumer advocacy area.

It would seem that with this fact of much more potential consumer data, brands would love to get in bed with Google. As a result, it makes sense that our community is making first suggestions on how Google could do this. Of course, this is all assuming that privacy right outrages will all be mastered swimmingly well, and Google doesn’t yet again tank this x-th attempt at becoming more social, and Facebook doesn’t succeed in replicating some of the Google advantages.

Check out Sean Percival’s proposal for a Google brand page layout. He also explains some of the unique advantages Google+ could offer.

Seen on Gerald Hensel’s Google+ Stream

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Quick announcement and reminder to those who haven’t acted on this yet.

This Friday, Facebook will become owner of the publishing rights of ALL your private photos. You need to make a simple change: go to ‘account’, ‘account settings’, ‘facebook adverts’(along the top), ‘ads shown by third parties’, choose ‘NO ONE’ then SAVE. 2 minutes’ job. And please Share share share. (

Thanks Stephen Rothman

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Big brother or not, it looks like face recognition for the masses will be a reality soon. Viewdle is soon to release automatic face recognition for facebook.

Viewdle - Photo and Video Face Tagging from Viewdle on Vimeo.

Via Suresh Ramaswamy

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Collaboration is human. We like to take part in shared experiences and then talk about them. Debate/dissect them. Remix them. Come to shared agreement about them. These are core elements of how we share experiences.

And yet - many digital experiences seem to be more like echos - call and response, but mostly asynchronous, especially if you’re looking for a real person, instead of a script. And when you think about where you spend your ‘connected’ time is it mostly in isolation? It seems we spend most of our time online doing something alone, or reaching out for information, but not getting live feedback from a person, or groups of people.

Image by ChrisL_AK on Flickr

Why is this?  Is it purely that no groups of people are ever in the same place on the internet at the same time?  Is it the fact that most computers only ’seat’ one?  Why are their so few places for live digital interaction outside of instant messaging/chat and texting (which, while relevant for younger audiences, are not typically a mass behavior). Is it a new preference we’re only understanding now because of the new tolls we use to communicate?  Are people actually afraid to have a ‘live’ experience online?

As Web 2.0 took hold, the expectation grew that Brands should offer the chance for feedback from users, but very little of it is in real-time.  Or really even close to real-time.  And having groups able to give feedback and discuss or even manipulate something together is almost unheard of, outside of alternate reality worlds like SecondLife (which are, shall we say, not as relevant as one would like to a mass audience).

Think about the tools you use for work - like Word, Powerpoint and Excel.  Until the latest Office release with Sharepoint built in, there were few ways to work collaboratively on these documents without emailing them around.   Google and Xoho Docs gave us this power from the start, but are not as widely used. Some others are listed here.  But these are really all about productivity.  Where are real collaboration tools for consumers?

We have seen several recent campaigns where timeliness of response is a central part of their appeal, like the Old Spice Guy, or Wheat Thins’ Crunch Is Calling commercials with their van deliveries or Edge Shave Zone’s Anti-Irritation campaign.  The fact that the response comes quickly (ok - sort of quickly) is what makes them cool.  But still these examples are not about collaborating, as much as responding.  Think about what a difference in quality there is between those campaigns and the experience you have watching the SuperBowl and talking with your friends while you see the ads.

So what to do?  Well, the answer lies in another trend.  In some recent research about DVR viewing, it was uncovered that DVR viewership was down in some younger segments, and it was determined that it was because of that group needing to experience the event/show live, in order to participate live with their friends and avoid any spoilers.  So both the time-aspect and popularity of the content changed their behavior from what it might otherwise be - delayed viewing - to live viewing so they could use social networks and text messaging as an immediate channel for collaboration and connection.  This finding creates an insight that drives how we design content and experiences for great community collaboration: the centrality of having a well-known Time, Place, and Reward.

Time: clear deadlines/happy hours/times to tune in

Place: obvious platforms where all/most of the people who share the passion will be

Reward/Goal: a shared community value (social currency) attached to the participation

By creating engaging Acts that include a powerful mix of Time, Place and Reward drivers we can encourage engaging experiences in a variety of ways:

1. Facebook - Since almost everyone is already on there anyway - why not there?  The sheer number of things you can do on Facebook continues to grow (including chat), and it may well be the SecondLife of the moment.  Their recent roll out of their partnership with LiveStream allows for multiples of interactions at the same time, although true dialog has not yet really taken hold there.  Why not add a platform that enables real-time community discussion for a Brand?  Or crowd-creation of content that connects the people together while they are creating it?
2. Online worlds - We shouldn’t count them out just yet.  Don’t forget that Farmville still lets you go ‘live’ a friend’s farm, or down to the local i-pub.  The key here is to match the Brand’s purpose to the community’s task when they enter the alternate world, which can get pretty murky outside of gaming worlds, which we’ll get to in a minute.
3. Tablets/kiosks/media tables - One possible vision for Microsoft Surface could have been to allow for more than one ’seat’ at the computer.  IPads and other tablets are still mostly used as one-person devices, but their very portability does encourage some level of ’show and tell’.  As retail stores find new ways to allow for more engagement, they will be looking for ways to encourage shoppers to share and build experiences in-store that deliver value, and although a majority will be available on their mobile phones, there are still opportunities to allow for shared experiences that can impact sales.
4. Gaming platforms - Wii, Xbox and now Kinect are great examples of being able to place ourselves in a world with others, easily and with a maximum of impact.  Again, all that is needed is a clear purpose for participation that aligns with the Reward/Goal the gamers have.
5. Hosted ‘projects’ - Prezi, the zooming presentation software, is an interesting example of a digital experience that not only allows collaboration, but gives it a personality with little avatars zooming around the page for each collaborator.  Yeah - it’s kind of second-lifey, but the cool thing there is that it’s really _about_ the collaboration on something - a presentation in their case.  This idea about interaction should be examined further.
6. Interactive toys - When we think of how digitally wired many toys are these days, we should remember that Mom may be there with her kid at the same time, and finding something for them to do together could be an emotionally-charged moment.
7. The family car - same premise as #6, but this time with a few possible other players.  It’s great that the car of the future can read you your tweets, but why can’t it do something more for the whole family than just one person?
8. Your site - With Facebook reportedly preparing a commenting function to be rolled out across 3rd party websites, could this (or other products like Convore) bring more dialog and collaboration to your site?  If not, you can always examine where most of the conversation will be happening, and plan how to engage there.

How would your Brand participate in this kind of collaboration? And what could you do if everyone could be in the experience at the same time?

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So, here is the deal: Facebook is planning to build a huge data centre in Oregon and equip it with the latest energy efficient computers to keep providing its service to the more than 500 million users. That doesn’t sound that bad, right? Well, the way Facebook is planning to provide all this amount of energy is with coal. Yup, that evil thing is still around.

For that, Greenpeace had created a campaign which is already expanding around the globe to Unfriend coal on Facebook. The truth about this is that the more people join this cause, the more possible will be that the network changes to clean resources (like cheeky clouds for example), because as the video said: Facebook responds to mass pressure.

The campaign is getting stronger in countries like Mexico, France, Indonesia, New Zealand, UK and Turkey, and hopefully everybody will join this movement. Meanwhile, enjoy this funny animated video! … You can see Mark Zuckerberg naked on it !

Visit the official campaign site from Greenpeace

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Saw a video by Hubble Innovations, via Florian Geiger today.

The video outlines the well-know problem of traditional media’s slowly but surely failing business models and claims to be able to solve it.

The Future of media brands - Case Study from Hubble Innovations on Vimeo.

The solution isn’t exactly new: it’s a super-aggregator idea that totally personalized to me, my location, my social network and content/event preferences. Even though they claim rights to the idea, it’s preposterous. This idea already exists in partial solutions already in existing synching and SM integrator solutions. In fact, some could argue: “Isn’t this what Facebook is slowly becoming anyway?”

My take on this is: The concept is a fairly logical and tempting conclusion based on the insight that people would like to have everything in one place and like location awareness. Apart from the title of the video being a misnomer (it doesn’t address the future of media brands but rather paints a picture of a desired user behavior), it will still take quite a while to build its proof of concept.

1. First of all, as we have seen with previous aggregator solutions, it takes a while for people to completely disband their existing behaviors of going to single source. For example, even though RockMelt had a pretty good start through social buzz, actual usage after initial sign-up have dropped. People tend to go back to their fragmented user behaviors until the user experience has matured. For complete adoption of an aggregator idea, the individual moving parts AND their respective user behaviors have to be quite mature. I don’t think this is the case just yet for this concept.  But it probably will in the future, after some other ideas have trailblazed these behaviors, failed on the way, and generated learnings that will ultimately benefit some 20-something entrepreneur who will become a billionaire, again.
2. Apart from the fact that the idea remains quite abstract and hidden behind a fancy animation, it also fails to address how exactly this is supposed to save traditional media, or at least revolutionize or evolve the media and publishing space. Who in fact would be a qualified media partner to build and propel this concept?  The concept does mention how people will pay for this experience, but not who gets paid for it and how. Assuming that the concept can repeat an Apple-like success of starting to pay for content (which is lofty enough), I still think this is the key point in terms of business maturity that will make or break this concept. Which content producers (old media or new) will come together how, produce how, and get paid how. In fact, since so much of news, information and entertainment is based on actual people (users) sharing and producing content without getting paid for it, wouldn’t you have to find a way to have them get a share for their content production and dissemination activities (see flattr) as well? So much of their behavior is about sharing (old) media content that the benefit of doing it just in one place might not be enough (ironically, in a way they are actually responsible for keeping those traditional publishers in business through their activities). In fact, this important social sharing aspect would probably have to be addressed as part of the business model, otherwise it will just remain one more aggregator solution. A solution that until now has no user base (such as Facebook) or no real competence in traditional content creation (such as NYT) and no competence in new content creation (such as Gizmodo or Mashable), and which is my point: no real strategy on HOW to pull it together. It’s a user experience vision, not a business idea, is my point. And, unlike other aggregator and synching solutions such as Read It Later, Instapaper, Dropbox and others which very defined user goals they serve, this solution would have to solve for it all. And we know how many attempts it takes for even the big players (think of Google’s long list of abandoned Betas) to pull it off and how many product ideas need to fail before maturity sets in. So keep trucking, but prepare to wait a while.
3. Also, the concepts just assumes people will behave this way. But when you look at those early adopters who are responsible for initial successes of of new web offerings, you can quickly see that they are quite different from those who come in when a certain maturity has set in. In fact, early adopter behavior is (to some extent) one of not managing and aggregating their experiences, but rather seeking new ones, so that those become trends that then lead to being reaggregated in new experiences again. Therefore, the game facebook plays is a type of tug of war of those users that they need to innovate, while maturing an experience for the large mass to keep them happy while also making sure the innovator group doesn’t get bored.  Facebook has, by and large, played the game the best in comparison to for example local market solutions in Germany and other places. The point is, aggregation happens after innovation. And they are different things to different types of users at different maturity levels. The concept fails to address this (at least in the video). There seems to be no go-to-market strategy.

So, in conclusion: thanks for the video, but a) aggregation itself is not an idea, it’s about how you aggregate, with who and when, and b) the big players have been working on it for a quite a while anyhow and c) you can’t pull it off if you don’t have some background at being expert in at least one area that is key to business success: i.e., producing worthwhile content, or making people pay for content, or innovative payment technology, or maturing a user experience for disparate user behavior profiles.

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In case you’ve been living under a rock, Facebook rolled out some changes to user’s profiles earlier this month, including a snazzy new band of photos across the top of most people’s profile pages.

This naturally inspired some people to find novel ways to express themselves using the ‘canvas’ at the top of their newsfeed, including (famously) Alexandre Oudin. After a few more days, there were sites popping up everywhere to do this to your profile in a few easy steps (Photo Magic, Oudinizer, Profile Maker, etc.).

Impressively, Schweppes acted quickly to get a developer to create a Schweppes Profile App on Facebook, as explained with the following video:

I like that they managed to turn around the app so fast, and keep the entire experience relatively simple.  My questions are:

1. This seems to be an activity that most people might enjoy, and I wonder if Facebook considered making the functionality native.  To be honest, the process is still a little complicated, due to the tagging requirements, and Facebook could get around these elegantly.

2. I think the resulting photo could have carried at least a nominal amount of branding - maybe even flirt with a facet of the product?  What about making you in your photo engage with the product in some way?

Although here’s a good example of what you should probably not do:

3. When these mercurial changes occur on Facebook, I wonder if there is really any benefit to the ‘first out’ application.  The app seemed to have some loading troubles a few times when I was using it.  Stability should be pretty high on the list of requirements, one would think.

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