FLIRTing with the Crowds

Russia’s prime minister Vladimir Putin shows off some Judo skills on youtube:

Somebody could call this ‘ruffling feathers’…

I will be speaking about the FLIRT model of crowdsourcing and Sonera’s new collaborative service AIVO (Finnish for BRAIN) on the 3rd of December in London at the Online Information 2008.

Be there. No alternatives.

The title says it all. Click here for the presentation on slideshare. Only in Finnish, I’m afraid.Remember to keep it in electric form in order to save the environment

 So Apple’s patent application aimed to battle sneaker hackers with a kind of ‘DRM for garments’ is spurring some controversy. Many, including Nicholas Carr, are worried that the activity of a few sneaker geeks is inflicting an overt response from big companies aiming at DRMing everything from your sneakers to your soul. Together with Apple’s other endeavors to curb personal freedom, Nick Carr says it’s no longer cool to be an Apple fanboy.

Garment technology is indeed the talk of the day otherwise as well. The Beijing Olympics saw an elevated discussion about garment and equipment technology giving certain athletes an unfair advantage over ones from other countries that didn’t have access to the technology in time for the Olympics. My take on this is simple: if it doesn’t jeopardise the athlete’s health, it’s perfectly viable to use as a booster for performance - indeed, some people’s genetics give them ‘unfair’ advantage over others too, and they’re still not banned from competing.

Yet another development creating a buzz within the industry is the use of latest technology in camouflage, a topic which The Economist well covers in their latest Technology Quarterly. While using Light Emitting Diodes and a miniature camera to change the surface coloring of the garment according to one’s surroundings might still sound a bit clumsy, some believe we’re starting to see active camo in field use within just a couple of years.

I used to work at H&M in the beginning of my studies. Maybe I should get back there, the fashion industry sounds interesting…

The professional creative world is stuck with Adobe. That’s one thing that is not going to change anytime soon. However, although the usability of Adobe products is usually on a pretty ok level, Adobe’s products are far from being perfect and stable, while at the same time demanding increasing amounts of firepower with each iteration.

The most demanding users are naturally the ones with greatest pains and now they have joined forces to create Dear Adobe, a site that gathers Adobe users’ gripes from all around the world and facilitates the wisdom of crowds to find the most popular issues of concern.

Now, a few years ago this would probably have been handled by Adobe’s lawyers through an ultimatum to shut the site down on the threat of a lawsuit. How times change: Adobe’s staff has actually started to work with the site’s maintainers to work out what their users’ most acute concerns are and how to deal with them. This shows a great understanding by Adobe of the tenets of true marketing spirit in the age of social media - joining and fostering a genuine conversation. You can’t always invite the people to your party. However, if they’re having a party without you but still talking about you, you should go in and join the talk with an open mind; close them down and tell them to shut up and they’ll just move to another address - and they won’t have any nicer things to say about you than they had before…

My friend Riku Vassinen already christened yearbookyourself.com to be the most effective viral of 2008. For this verdict, I would need to see how much clickstream/business the site is generating to the actual advertisers’ sites (multiple brands represented there and it seems the site is paid for by a group of malls), but it certainly seems a success by terms of its spreading efficiency and visits to the viral site itself. Approximately within two weeks around half of the facebook friends I connect with on regular terms had visited the sit, and many had changed their profile pic to the one they created on the site. If you don’t believe me, just check out the conversation thread we had there this week:

So yes, it’s amazing what can be achieved with a message and phenomenon that taps the right mood in the crowd (as Duncan Watts argues, it’s not about the right people, it’s the right atmosphere among the people), but still it needs to be kept in mind that for a viral to be truly effective, it needs to be generating impressions and traffic - and ultimately money - for the advertiser. Traffic to the funny viral site is not enough, although the rise has been rocket-like:

I have to say that linking today’s fashion trends with those of the past was a nice idea to tie the fashion business to the action on-screen (which involves skipping through different decades and checking out which style looked good/funny on you), but I at least didn’t pay too much attention to the advertising brands’ links, let alone clicking on them. The site however generated a purchasing behavior in me: I have never had the need for glasses but those ones I have in the picture just looked so good/funny that I simply had to google for 50’s glasses and quickly found a web shop selling them. A week later now, I just wore them for the first time and got pretty good response from my friends too. This could be called ‘accidental marketing’, a theme I’ve been thinking about lately as a result of also another occurrence within the past couple of weeks: after seeing this video, I instantly jumped to iTunes and bought the latest album of the band performing the song that the (obviously a genius) guy is drumming to. I doubt this was an intentional marketing ploy by Dragonforce, but an effective one nevertheless. Have you had any accidental marketing happening to you lately?

And yeah, the insane video I mentioned:

Initiated an interesting discussion (sorry, only in Finnish) yesterday on a topic that had been on my mind lately: whether or not Flash sites (especially microsites) are the new 30-second spot: a standard first (because of high production values) offering by agencies for marketing activities from basic product launch to an invitation for customer collaboration. Working on a client side, these solutions get thrown at me every now and then as a solution to just about everything. And why not; a Flash microsite is a well-defined project with a beginning and an end; you get to work with creative people who make all stuff colorful and put them moving around in exciting ways; in the end the site is launched and you get to have a party with the team.

There’s just one problem. Flash sites are usually not very social. With being social I don’t even mean that it should initiate  a genuine dialog between the customers and the brand, but simply finding the content in the first place. Sharing individual pieces of content from a flash site is not always possible: trying to copy-paste and email/IM/Tweet a link will just send your buddy to a front page or 1st level sub-page, even if the content you wanted to show was deeper in the hierarchy. Flash is not well indexed by or found with search engines (although this is improving) and mobile devices, which are increasingly used for surfing, don’t get it. Still, Flash sites are offered as a cure for just about everything.

One reason of course has to do with great sales people at ad agencies. Flash sites motivate designers, bring good money and score awards better than Google adwords campaigns. But the other reason clearly is internal: it is far easier for a busy marketing manager to write down a three-slide powerpoint on sales goals, main communications target and a schedule, than engage in long-term thinking about how the company should continuously engage with the people through digital channels. This latter is not a job for ad creatives (they can help with the tools of course), but instead rest on the shoulders of client-side people. It’s tedious, lengthy labour with no quick returns (as with numerous eyballs that you might lure onto your flashy Flash site with extensive banner campaigning), but instead trying, failing, trying, failing and trying again, and doing it in relatively small steps, as few companies will hire an army of bloggers outright, but instead the existing workers need to manage this on their coffee breaks. Customer satisfaction and rewards from these kinds of activities are built over time, and require constant and active effort from the people that are running them. Also, not all marketing managers are fortunate enough to launch e.g. an official company blog before lots of numerous, strenuous sessions with general management and communications directors and strangling rules and guidelines for communications. Still, these methods of marketing should be pursued as they create a customer experience completely different from the traditional tools of web marketing - a human one. Loyalty and customer bond from these activities last and can withstand hard times better than the experience from visiting a Flash site.

Don’t get me wrong. At best, a Flash site is a great brand building tool, even without funny videos. One of the most powerful branding experiences that integrated seamlessly with the product itself was (and to my surprise, still is) the Requiem for a Dream site, which unfolds the story in ways that enhance and expand the movie experience in a way a html site couldn’t (ok, ajax and some other tools could - to some extent). Flash is a tool like anything else and needs to be applied to a correct context; you wouldn’t cut your nails with a chainsaw either.

***

Thanks to everybody on Jaiku who commented on my initial question. While the feedback was largely what I expected, there were lots of true insights there as well.

While watching this video, I suddenly had a strange deja vu about seeing similar ads before. It took me couple of seconds to realize that I hadn’t seen them on TV or even the web - but in old sci-fi flicks, such as Total Recall, Robocop or Blade Runner. Every now and then it just stops you to think you’re now living in - or at least far closer to - the future envisioned just 10-20 years ago.

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Want to check out my current skills / interests / experience? Check out the Wordle cloud I just crafted using my Master’s Thesis as input. That’s a CV in a glimpse:

In the visually loaded, lightning-fast media landscape that requires split-second judgements on which visual stimuli are important and which are not, this kind of makes great sense. These kinds of appendices to your CV could be just the thing your recruiter needs in order to assess the big picture of what you have that makes you stand out.