All Blacks lose to France and drop out of the Rugby World Cup 2007 in the quarter-final. Ouch, isn’t that the worst result yet?

So how do New Zealand deal with losing what most consider to be “our cup”. They blame someone else. This is what New Zealand does best.

Don’t get me wrong, the referee did a terrible job in the first half, and that second French try was from a forward pass, but the All Blacks just didn’t step up. The French were dogged in defense but are an unremarkable team. These guys got whipped by Argentina remember!

Today it will be the referee, but in the coming weeks, the coaches will start to be brought into the blame game. The controversial rotation policy will be touted as a major strategic mistake, and some serious questions will be asked about the decision to leave Doug Howlett out of the game.

Blog Posts

• Referee win against the All Blacks
• All Blacks lose RWC to crap ref

Technorati Tags: all blacks, allblacks, rugbyworldcup, rugbyworldcup2007, rwc2007

It is ridiculous how often reading Seth Godin’s blog just immediately clarifies an issue I have had trouble clarifying in my own mind and then explaining to others. This one resonates with me in a profound way this week.

I don’t know French. I can’t play the piano. I have no clue how to catch a bony spinefish. This is the first kind of don’t know. Stuff you don’t know because you haven’t been taught it yet. Books are awfully good at solving this problem, so are good teachers.

The second kind of ‘don’t know’ is often confused with the first type, but it’s really quite different. This is the person who says they don’t know how to cook, or that they can’t balance a checkbook. This isn’t about technique or a lack of knowledge. It’s usually either fear or lack of interest. People with this type of deficit won’t find the answer in a book or (usually) in a seminar either. You don’t learn how to cook from a cookbook.

The answer lies in trial and error and motivation and in overcoming the fear that makes us avoid the topic in the first place.

And why should a marketer care?

You need to care because if you try to solve the second kind of ignorance with a manual or a PDF or a blog post or even a long infomercial, you’re going to fail. If you discover that users are afraid or resistant to what you’re trying to get them to do, more information is almost always the incorrect response. The effective technique involves peer pressure and support and in changing the design and inputs of what you’re doing so that this group is more receptive to what’s on offer. For example, internet penetration isn’t up by a factor of 20 because people read a lot of copies of Internet for Dummies. It happened because of what peers said to each other over time, and because the act of getting online is a lot easier than it used to be. And you can help that happen.

Change is hard, but it is also exciting, challenging, and ultimately rewarding.

Web 2.0 for financial services - yes it does apply to this industry. Thank you to everyone who attended our event this evening "Web 2.0 & Social Media – An overview for service &amp professional services marketers"

If you would like a copy of the presentation, please let me know.

Read more on Web 2.0

Just returned from 2 days at Morgo up in the beautiful Bay of Islands of New Zealand. It is invitation only, and the deal is that everything that is said there is considered confidential. This means that you get some unbelievable frank and honest presentations and insights into other people’s businesses. It is very refreshing when so many events are just full presentations that are really thinly veiled sales pitches.

The other reason I love Morgo is that you get a chance to spend some time with some really great people. I first met Sam Morgan in 2001, and hasn’t really changed at all since becoming a gazzillionaire. I met Rowan Simpson who was at TradeMe and is now at Xero with Rod Drury. I think these guys and others in the industry in Wellington have done a great job of developing a community of people who can work together on launching different online businesses, and I anticipate many, many more will follow. Mike Cannon-Brookes has co-founded and built, Atlassian, Australia’s largest software exporter in just 5 years…oh and he’s only 27. The Ryan brothers who have eurekster and SLI Systems. Then there are the enterprise software and technology guys selling into the US market like Ian McCrae from Orion Health, and Selwyn Pellett from Endace, the first New Zealand company to list on the AIM share market in the UK.

So it was quite daunting to have to run a workshop on Internet Marketing with an audience of extremely experienced entrepreneurs. Luckily I had some help from Andy Lark. Thanks to Andy and everyone who came along, and I hope you got some value from it. If you would like a copy of either of the presentations, please let me know.

Thanks to Jenny and all the other organisers for inviting me again and for putting on such a great event. It was a great honour to have a chance to present at such an amazing event.

More posts about Morgo:

Morgo 2007 - Thoughts on the way home
Mike from Atlassian
Morgo - going global from NZ

Technorati Tags: morgo

There is an interesting discussion going on at ProBlogger.com on the subject “Should Links Open in a New Window?“. Five years ago, I would said yes. Now, I agree with Darren, if you use a tabbed browser (and who wouldn’t?) then having them open in a new window is very annoying. This is one feature of Gmail that really annoys me, all external links open in a new window.

I have been thinking for some time that actually what we need is a new target attribute for the hyperlink target. Obviously this would only be supported by tabbed browsers but it would be great if you could specify a link to open in a new tab.

<a href=”http://www.problogger.com” target=”_tab”>ProBlogger</a>

What do you think?

Technorati Tags: problogger, tabbed browsers

Social scientist Danah Boyd has posted a draft of a paper entitled “Viewing American class divisions through Facebook and MySpace“. Essentially she is suggesting that MySpace represents the working class kids, whereas Facebook is the social network for the university grads and undergrads.

Danah observes that definitions of “class” in the US are incredibly complex. It is not like the old British system, it is much more tied to education and values rather than necessarily income and where you grew up.

Even in the military the officers are on Facebook, whereas the grunt soldiers are generally on MySpace. The military have now blocked access on their network to MySpace, but they can still access Facebook.

All I can say is that in the last 9-12 months nearly all my friends who are university educated have abandoned MySpace in favour of Facebook. I have also noticed a number of posts out there on the subject.

I originally found this via the eclectically brilliant Boing Boing.

Technorati Tags: facebook, myspace, myspace vs facebook

I’m at Gotham Hall in New York City attending the Future of Online Advertising conference. I’m going to post summaries of presentations and thoughts throughout the two days. Posts are going up on the Marker Blog.

Technorati Tags: fooa07nyc

Well, it isn’t really the question for me as my business is largely about selling our clients on the benefits of business blogs or at least actively engaging the blogging community.

I still encounter resistance on almost a daily basis though. Here are the frequently asked questions and concerns that get posed to me when recommending a blog strategy:

What if a staff member posts something on the blog that is commercially sensitive?

A valid concern, however, what happens if a staff member sent something commercially sensitive by email? Are you going to monitor and read every single message they send out? Many, many people are unaware of the intensely insecure nature of email. Standard email messages are completely unencrypted and exceptionally easy to intercept. A single email message will generally get copied into log files on numerous mail servers around the world. The little button in Outlook that lets you recall a message, is essentially a ruse. You can’t actually recall or delete an email after it is sent.

My point? You have to trust your staff to be sensible the same way you trust them with a host of other mediums that can be used to communicate with the world. You can always have an internal blog or wiki if it is to be used for highly sensitive information, that’s what we do.

What if nobody posts anything?

You need to sell blogging to the people whom you want to be involved in the company and have some champions who will lead the way. One thing I noticed is that the guys in my team would send interesting links and information they had found to the all staff email list. I always just reply and tell them to blog it instead. I think all companies will be pleasantly surprised at the depth and breadth of knowledge available within their people. To be able to easily harness and share this knowledge is so incredibly powerful.

What is someone posts a critical comment?

This requires a complete shift in corporate thinking. Traditionally companies would shy away from publicly embarrassing issues and retain expensive PR spin doctors to deal with issues like this. I’ve previously posted about how Dell, in the face of growing customer dissatisfaction and criticism from the media, has embraced blogs and other Web 2.0 initiatives to try and create a far greater level of transparency with their market. There’s is an excellent case study of how conversations and dialogue are better than dealing with criticism in media that you have no control over. If you read my post on CEO blogs, I conclude that the most important thing is to deal with the comments and keep your blog active rather than shy away from it if things are going the way you want. Charles Dunstone at The Carphone Warehouse learnt that the hard way.

Another example, is low cost operator Southwest Airlines in the US, who currently have an unassigned seating policy on their flights. They posted on their blog that they were thinking of moving to assigned seating. They were overwhelmed with comments in response from their customers. The verdict was undeniably that this would be a “New Coke” scale tragedy if they were to proceed. All this within a matter of hours.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, blogging in the business environment, especially if you are the technology or communications business, should be a part of your marcomms strategy. If you are targeting the US market, then you should take this even more seriously. If you look at the number of Fortune 500 tech companies with blog strategies, the list is long and distinguished.

Technorati Tags: blogs, cgm, consumer generated media

Andy Lark has just posted that Rupert Murdoch told the Digital Hollywood conference in New York last week about MySpace:

“It’s extraordinary, the advertising has gone from basically nothing to, on a net basis, $25 million a month and growing every month - almost 30 per cent every quarter,”

He added:

“Next year we’ll be kicking in with search revenue from Google so together with IGN, we’ll be getting close to a billion dollars of revenue.”

MySpace is huge, you have to be looking at this as a marketing option, especially if you are targeting the 15-25 demographic.

Technorati Tags: myspace

Here is my summary of Shawn Gold’s presentation at ad:tech Sydney today. Shawn is the Chief Marketing Officer for MySpace.com, the world’s biggest social network. How big you ask? Well;

• 0 - 150+ million registered users in less than 3 years.
• Number One in the US in terms of page impressions, downloads and average time spent (an indicator of how “sticky” the content is). Other sites have more unique visitors (those with much wider appeal such as CNN.com etc) but no one can match them in terms of actual content delivered.
• Number 5 in Australia of all websites, Number 1 based on the same metrics as in the US.
• 400 billion page views per month, over 100 billion ads served.
• Currently in 7 countries, with internationalised sites, and will be in 20 countries by year end 2007, including China.

What advertising options do they offer now to advertisers beyond just standard online ads?

• The movie industry were really the first to adopt MySpace seriously as an advertising option by setting up dedicated MySpace pages with video trailers and allow other users to comment on and become friends of the movie. A movie studio can spend between US$1 - 3 million in a period of a couple of weeks to promote a new release through targeted advertising on the network. They can get instant market feedback and research on a movie as soon as it is released via comments on their MySpace page.
• Bands and comedians have used MySpace to build and maintain a loyal fan base. It is becoming common for them to offer exclusive access to events to just their MySpace friends. The Beastie Boys recently did a show recently where only their MySpace friends could gain entry.
• MySpace creates originally branded video content that can then be promoted through the network.
• MySpace can promote original video content. Dove Skincare in Canada created a 1 minute video, did a very small TVC campaign and then pushed it entirely online, using MySpace and other tools. They got 20-30 million unique views for a fraction of the dollars it would have cost to get via traditional air time.
• They can offer highly targeted campaigns e.g. if you wanted to advertise to all hip hop DJ’s in the US market or just California, they can do this.
• If you have a MySpace page and have built up a significant number of friends, then MySpace can run demographic profiles on your friends, given you deep metrics on who is interested in your product/brand.

What’s next? Well like everyone, they are trying to figure out how to monetise consumer generated video content. I was interested to discover that MySpace delivers more video content than YouTube or Google Video. Videos with “hotspots” with hyperlinks, branded/”wrapped” video players and pre and post rolls are all being experimented with.

What are the key areas of focus for MySpace?

1. Self Expression Platform - Growing their toolkit of widgets and tools to allow more consumer generated content to be put up on MySpace. They really believe that this idea of self-expressionion, 21st century cyber-hippies if you will, are the key to their success. Other previous social networks, such as Friendster, which was the basis for their business model, failed because they were very restrictive on the content you could publish and in what format. For example they wouldn’t allow you to customise the look of your Friendster page.
2. Communications Platform - Various tools such as instant message, text, Voice over IP, video calling, to enable their users to communicate easily with one another.
3. Content Aggregation - They already have massive communities for movies, music and comedians, they intend to pool more content in specific communities such as fashion.
4. Marketer Platform - Tools for marketers and agencies to more easily advertise and run/analyse campaigns on their site. Importantly, all advertising and the type of advertising will always be elective to the user to avoid the impact being diluted over time.
5. Safety & Education - MySpace gets a bad rap from people about the dangers of meeting people online. Confidence in the site is critical to the site and they have a big team working on this area. Every photo (about 5 million per day!) and video(about 40,000 per day) posted to the site is looked at by a human being to screen out pornographic or hateful material.
6. Internationalization - Continuing to roll out MySpace to different countries in different languages with regional specialisations.

Here are some final soundbites:

Andy Worhol said “Everyone is famous for 15 minutes” well today “Everyone is famous for 15 people”

The arty kid in a small time who used to feel isolated because he coudn’t relate to the friends in his local school can now connect with thousands of like-minded people around the world. It’s a great time to be lonely on the Internet.

Technorati Tags: myspace