Wrong! Take a look at this campaign by Intuit the company that creates Quicken and Tax Turbo software. It doesn’t get more dull than accounting and tax software, but they have come up with a very interesting campaign.

Do you recognise this guy?

That’s right, they’ve brought Vanilla Ice out of retirement. Ice, Ice baby.

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

Joost is the new baby from the clever guys that brought us Kazaa and then Skype. It has been known as The Venice Project until now and is basically TV on demand on your computer but will no doubt leverage their established credentials in building huge online communities. This is how they explain it:

Joost™ is a new way of watching TV on the internet, which uses new and established technologies to provide the best of both the internet and TV worlds. We’re in the process of making it as TV-like as we can, with programmes, channels and adverts. You can also see some things that we think will enhance the TV experience: searching for programmes and channels, for example, as well as social features like chat. There are many more new features to come!

This is a significant step towards what I referred to as TV 2.0 in a previous post.

I’ve got a beta account so will post my experience once I have had a chance to play with it.

Technorati Tags: joost

This is number 2 on ViralVideoChart.com today.

Technorati Tags: family guy

Technorati Tags: chicken, porsche

Corporate blogging in general has not been that strong in the UK market. I believe that that there is still a feeling that blogs are for Americans. It is not exactly quintessentially English to tell the world about what you are thinking.

Charles Dunstone is the CEO of The Carphone Warehouse and started a blog after they acquired a broadband operator and launched the TalkTalk free broadband service. He was considered a pioneer in the marketplace at the time.

TalkTalk ran into problems with provisioning and customer service a few months ago, and Dunstone stopped blogging for over 2 months. He has received a lot of negative feedback about this and posted again on the 13th November apologising for the long absence.

Critics of blogs will be arguing that this is what happens if you are too transparent, and that blogs open you up to scrutiny that you might otherwise avoid. I believe that the error was in not continuing to blog through the crisis. If he had been able to continue the dialogue and explain to customers what they were doing to resolve the issues in a personal, human way, it may have helped with their public relations nightmare.

Dell used their blog extensively through the battery recall and by encouraging comments, they were able to follow up directly with the customer and try to find a way to resolve their concerns. Even sharing this information with the world shows that Dell was trying their best to deal with a difficult situation. Here is an example comment and response:

Michael Mace said:
I know you didn’t create the battery problem, but your handling of it worries me. Here’s my experience so far:

–I went to the battery recall site several weeks ago, entered my battery’s information very carefully, and the system told me I did not need a replacement.

–Tonight after receiving your additional notice, I entered the information again and now it says I do need a recall. I know you say you haven’t changed the batteries recalled, but I think you have.

If you change the criteria for the recall, you should say so very clearly. Others who had checked with the site previously may not bother to re-check.

I tried to reply about this to your e-mail, but the reply bounced. Apparently you sent the message from an address that doesn’t accept replies — even though you didn’t say so in the e-mail message, and you did say in the message that people should contact you if they have any questions.

This is a level of sloppiness I don’t expect from Dell.

So I hunted down this weblog — it’s the only electronic forum I could find for giving you feedback (I don’t want to invest the time in calling you).

That’s my two cents.
October 18, 2006 10:56 PM

Lionel Menchaca, Digital Media Manager said:
Michael: Thanks for the comments. My apologies for not following up. I can tell you that we did not change the criteria for the recall. We simply received updated information from Sony in terms of the number of batteries shipped.

In terms of your specific battery, do you still need to get a replacement battery lined up?
October 18, 2006 10:56 PM

In this example, Lionel from Dell was able to clear up a misunderstanding immediately that they had changed the criteria for the recall, when in fact they had not. It has to be better to know what your customers are thinking rather than trying to avoid the issue. Nearly every business deals with major product recalls or similar public relations issues from time to time and I believe that it is how the company handles the situation, which will have the most impact on the future perceptions of the brand. A blog is an excellent tool for maintaining direct contact with affected customers and giving them comfort that they are doing everything possible.

40 of the Fortune 500 corporations in the US are now blogging. This is up from 24 just six months ago so is definitely on the rise. Whilst tech companies dominate, there are a guys like Boeing and General Motors doing it.

Amazon.com Inc.
Avaya Inc.
Cisco Systems, Inc.
Dell, Inc
Electronic Data Systems
Ford Motor Company
General Motors Corporation
Hewlett-Packard Company
International Business Machines
Microsoft Corporation
Motorola Inc
Oracle Corporation
Sprint
Sun Microsystems Inc.
Texas Instruments
The Boeing Company
Time Warner Inc.
Viacom International Inc

The updated list and links are available as a Wiki so if you find any more, just add them to the list.

So blogging is on the rise and should be part of the marketing and communications strategy, but what are the key issues to consider:

Ownership
However, which department should own it? Is it the team that deals with the website, public relations, or the marketing team? The reality is probably all three. When a CEO commits to a blog, this sends a clear message to their business that it is important and will help accelerate wider adoption of blogs.

Policy
A clear blog policy is also a must to ensure that employees understand what is appropriate and what is not. You can’t try to control content, but a business blog should be just that, you shouldn’t see their personal holiday photos up there. This policy can also detail how to deal with comments, a critical but potentially time consuming task.

Frequency
There is endless debate on what is an acceptable number of posts per month. I believe quality is better than quantity. Most readers will access the content via RSS, so it is not as if they are checking back every day. They’ll be aware when you post. A two month gap between posts clearly isn’t appropriate though.

Platform
I personally don’t believe the choice of blogging tools and software really matters, however, it is essential that they be connected to the various social networks and include support for:

RSS
Tags
Trackbacks
Ping search engines and RSS aggregators

Don’t let it be a major IT project, setting up a blog should take hours with the wide availability of excellent software and services.

I hope that more UK CEO’s and companies, take the plunge soon.

Technorati Tags: blogs, business blogs, ceo blogs

Dave Sifry, CEO and Founder of Technorati has released his quarterly State of the Blogosphere today.

Not suprisingly there has been another quarter of tremendous growth. The entire post is required reading for anyone interested in this space.

British ‘guerilla artist’ Banksy asks a very good question of Paris HIlton. He has cleverly doctored about 500 copies of her new CD and then slipped them into the stock at various HMV and Virgin Megastores in a bout of reverse shoplifting. Brilliant. Check out the full set of photos on Flickr.

Technorati Tags: paris hilton, banksy

You might have to be a gamer to understand it, but this is very clever.

Technorati Tags: battlefield 2, bf2, bravia, sony