Showing posts with label Digital Trends. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Digital Trends. Show all posts

11.8.09

Changing definition of friendship:::Social networks

One of the things that always fascinated me with virtual worlds and social networks was how many users regard their online contacts as 'friends' in every sense of the word...with the exception that they've often never actually met.


Family values return, thanks to the internet

India Knight

Here’s a strange thing: everyone is increasingly desperate for attention and yet we spend more and more of our leisure time in rooms with other live humans in them, ignoring live humans and doing things alone online. The people we know – husbands, wives, siblings, children – sit on the sofa while we engage with the people we don’t on the internet.

We’re all desperate to interact, to have our voices heard, but we find the nameless masses make a better audience than our near and dear. Is this a terrible disaster? Is it yet another nail in the coffin of “traditional” family life?

Wanting to be heard is a newish phenomenon in itself: not so long ago the thing to do was quietly potter through life, head down, drawing not an iota of vulgar attention to oneself. Today it isn’t just children that crave attention – grown-ups have found a voracious appetite for it, too. Adults, already prone to feeling like so many teeny-weeny little ants, scuttling about unappreciated and unnoticed, are eager to have their ant-voices – or their great big lion-roar, for that matter – brought to as large an audience as possible.

Technology has obligingly come to the rescue: if you feel like saying something about this article and are reading it online (for free! Um. Yes. Anyway. Moving on), you can avail yourself of the comment space or the e-mail address below.

If you have thoughts that you’d like to share about anything at all – from politics to child-rearing via artichokes or shed-building – you can start a blog; it takes about four minutes to set one up. If you’d like new friends, you can join a social networking site; if you want a date, you can trawl the singles sites; if you want a recipe for strawberry jam, you can ask strangers in a foodie chatroom. If the stuff that you watch on television or hear on the radio or read in the paper triggers a chain of thought, you’re free to share it with the people who made it at the click of a mouse.

All of this attention-seeking (and I don’t mean that pejoratively) takes place while we are in the physical company of friends and family with whom we are apparently failing to interact at all.

A report released last week by Ofcom, the communications regulator, painted a fascinating picture of family life – or rather of family life at play. Whereas 60 years ago people might have gathered around the wireless after supper, and 20 years ago around the television, today they are more likely to be in the same room, possibly on the same sofa, doing completely separate things: one watching television and checking Facebook at the same time, one tweeting away, one downloading music onto their iPod, one updating their blog. The Communications Market Report shows how reliant Britons have become on the internet for entertainment, and the net, though it links you to millions of other people, is a physically solitary pursuit.

Ofcom’s report presents a picture of a country multitasking in the most frantic way: 36% of those questioned, for instance, said they were online at the same time as they watched television – and this is after a long day at work. Ofcom’s director of market research said: “What we find is that there has been a trend for people to converge on the living room, to watch the 37in high-definition television, but when they get there they start to do something else like surf the internet as well.” The report suggests that although television viewing is holding up – three hours and 45 minutes a day is the average – it is only holding up because people are doing other things online at the same time.

Previously, teenagers were alone in indulging in what MTV calls “connected cocooning”, where someone is at home but spending all their energy communicating with the outside world. However, the older generations are now catching up.

We all know that multitasking is exhausting and that it has its limits, so the question is: will this level of engagement fry what remains of our brains? Will people’s already lamentably short attention spans fizzle away to nothing?

I don’t think so. I spend countless evenings in the sitting room with my two older children: the television is on; I’m at my desktop computer; one of them might be checking Spotify on his laptop; the other gaming online, with strangers from Arkansas or Fife, with an earpiece and a microphone so he can chat to them. If anyone – usually much older – suggests this is odd, the middle son shrugs and says that the people he’s chatting to are as real as you or me or “friends” on Facebook. They are just not physically present.

It would be easier to scoff if we didn’t know of the amazing success – I don’t mean just in terms of numbers but in terms of helpfulness and support – of giant websites such as Mumsnet, where strangers, normal people, not weirdo nerd-heads, also form friendships that are entirely real, even though they happen through the medium of fibreoptic cables.

The thing is, there’s necessary multitasking, of the kind you do at work, but there’s now a new and different kind of multitasking that we do for pleasure. Checking Twitter updates while cooking, for instance, may sound demented to the uninitiated, but it isn’t wildly different from listening to Radio 4 – both consist of people telling you interesting stuff. Admittedly, some of us have Radio 4 on while we cook and text, and while the sauce reduces we might even text about Radio 4. I do realise how peculiar this sounds unless you do it too, but it’s hugely enjoyable.

As for family life: I’m in favour of anything that has everyone in one place. We may be differently occupied, but we’re hanging out together, each doing our own thing. Nobody would be throwing up their hands in horror if we were all reading our own books or staring into space having our own thoughts – so why be appalled by the idea that we might all be involved in our individual bits of internet?

To me, the picture painted by Ofcom is rather reminiscent of a gentler age, where one family member played patience while the other read and a third caught up on some sewing. I can’t see anything wrong with this: then, as now, being together in the same room is sometimes enough.

+ The TUC has proposed a motion, due to be debated at next month’s conference, arguing that high heels in the workplace are demeaning to women and contribute to long-term health injuries and as such should be replaced by “sensible shoes” with a 1in heel limit. Is there a more unattractive combination of words than “sensible” and “shoes”? The TUC, which is mostly made up of men, might as well call for a return to “sensible slacks” and “drip-dry blouses”.

Besides, I have recently discovered that it is entirely possible to injure yourself through the wearing of completely flat shoes, or indeed of wearing no shoes at all as often as possible. Not only do you get hobbit feet – well, hobbit-shaped, not hobbit-furred – but you also get weird aches and pains, which are basically your feet sobbing for Louboutins.

Also, it’s 2009. I think we can probably safely assume that if women felt “demeaned” by wearing high heels they wouldn’t buy, or wear, any. Instead, many go into paroxysms of ecstasy at the mere word.

Bless the TUC, but really. What next? Perhaps a motion proposing that chocolate is bad for your teeth and causes unsightly stains when melty and should therefore be banned from all tea breaks

10.8.09

How to Use Facebook for Professional Networking


How do you use Facebook? Is it to connect with long forgotten friends or share fun tidbits of your personal life with extended family? If that’s you, well… you are not alone. A great majority of Facebook users maintain Facebook profiles exclusively for personal networking and do not feel Facebook is appropriate for professional networking. I disagree with this approach. Facebook social networking experience should be what you want to make of it and more and more professionals turn to Facebook to maintain professional and/or business presence in addition to a personal one.

What’s wrong with using LinkedIn for my professional networking?

Nothing really. LinkedIn is definitely the channel of choice for professional networking. However, Facebook continues to grow and mature making its security and sharing options more and more robust. All this to ensure that you have choices and your social networking experience is precisely what YOU want to make of it. While you won’t post pictures of your family vacation on LinkedIn, a balanced mix of professional information along with a limited and tasteful glimpse into your personal life could prove to make Facebook the new LinkedIn for those who what to use Facebook for both.

Charlene Kingston in her blog post advocates keeping two separate profiles on Facebook: your personal profile for friends and family and your professional one by creating a “fan page.” This works great for small businesses where the owner of the business has the authority to set up and control the fan page. What if you work in a big company and do not have that luxury? You can still use your Facebook profile as a professional networking tool as long as your follow some basic rules.

Polish your Facebook profile for professional networking

Let’s start with some basics which includes using your real and full name in your profile. This is not only important to ensure that you are easily found on Facebook and on Google when your profile is indexed but also to keep the profile professional. Don’t use nicknames, fictional names or maiden names unless that’s the name you are using in your professional life. Remember to secure your facebook vanity domain name to make it easy to direct others to your Facebook profile with a clean and easy to type in URL.

Also, don’t forget to include your photo in your profile. No avatars, no images of kids or wedding photos please. A simple, tasteful head shot of you will do the trick.

Include detailed information about your area of expertise, your company where you work including website and any other social media channels where corporate presence is maintained. Your contact information and all of your social media channels you maintain presence on should also be listed.

Adjust your security settings

What might be appropriate to share with your family and close friends might not be appropriate to display or share with your colleagues or professional contacts. Don’t just assume the default security settings will keep you out of trouble. Take the time to go through each link in the Privacy area and make adjustments. Nick O’Neal has a great blog posts that will guide you to choose wisely when adjusting your privacy settings.

Consider setting up friends’ groups to control what information is viewable by whom. The groups are also IMPORTANT because according to Facebook you soon will have precise control of what gets shared with whom on the level of individual wall post. You will be able to direct your weekend planning posts to just your family or friends and send posts about the latest whitepaper you’ve read to just your colleagues and professional contacts. Having your friends divided into logical groups will make appropriate sharing a snap. Here is more info. about Facebook’s new privacy settingsincluding the timeline for rolling this enhancement out (courtesy of the Marketing Pilgrim blog).

Add apps selectively

There are tons of applications available for download, but it does not mean that you should go for quantity rather than quality. Yes, you can send virtual gifts to people, play games or display love quotes, but aside from being great time wasters these types of activities will greatly diminish the quality of your profile. Opt for socializing with others through conversations, asking and answering questions, sharing resources and advice rather than playing games.

Join groups related to your business interests

Similarly to LinkedIn, finding and joining quality Facebook groups opens up great opportunities to network with professionals who are interested in what you are interested in and who will pay attention if you display your subject matter expertise there.

Not sure how to find groups? Search for them and see what groups your colleagues have joined. If you find that there is no group that matches your expertise create one, but before you do that please think about your own commitment to maintaining the group. There are a lot of dead groups on Facebook. Don’t let yours be one of them.

Interact with your Facebook friends and group members

There is nothing more powerful than personal interaction. Facebook excels at it and gives you lots of opportunities to engage. Remember though to separate your personal posts from your professional content.

For your professional network interactions consider the following activities

  • Asking/answering questions or starting a new discussion thread
  • Sharing a resource on your group’s wall particularly articles you have written or articles that quote you
  • Commenting on a status message of your colleague
  • Sharing a list of your favorite industry books or online resources
  • Inviting others or accepting invitation to professional networking events

But don’t attempt to send bulk commercial or self-serving messages to all your friends. Maintaining a professional presence is about finding and developing relationships and not spamming people.

Crowd-stopping window display in Korea

25.5.09

Nokia colorful emails

Nowadays to create an original, creative website to present a mobile phone is a hell of a challenge. We've seen (almost) everything. Like in the case of the automotive industry creativity seems to be the hardest word. Competition is fierce, differentiation is weak, money isn't always there. So what should an agency do to introduce a new Nokia mobile phone which wants to challenge the Blackberry?

nokia_e75_a.jpg

Try, for example, with a colorful and engaging interface. Then create a video which uses pictograms a smart way. Shake everything together and then add a tiny smart widget that give a touch of originality to your emails. Visit the new Nokia E75 website to experience all of this.


nokia_e75_b.jpg

Clean, simple and effective in delivering the message. Very nice work.

nokia_e75_c.jpg

The agency is Farfar.

5.5.09

Web Trend Map 4

The web’s most important domains, influential people, and their relationships illustrated on a map of the Tokyo subway.

The map makes it easy to see the strengths of web companies in relationship to each other. Comparing the map with the one from last year allows the viewer to discern shifts in trends, important newcomers, and growth of established players.

2.5.09

2009:The digital year in review


What digital trends will 2009 be remembered for? Below is my list of the five most influential.
1) Facebook and social networks
Firstly, 2008 was the year Facebook overtook MySpace as the world’s most popular social network, with 181 million global users compared to MySpace’s 121 million, according to October 2008 data from comScore.
Facebook’s total global users increased 85% between December 2007 and October 2008, with significant expansion outside the English-speaking markets that have been the traditional drivers of Facebook’s growth.
In her book about social media, Once You’re Lucky, Twice You’re Good, American journalist Sarah Lacy explains this explosion by arguing that Facebook remains a development-driven company, retaining a very strong focus on continually adding new features for users.
One of the less well-known aspects of Facebook’s expansion is its hold on mobile users. In November Facebook revealed on its blog, found
here, that 15 million users were regularly accessing its service using mobiles, up from 5 million at the start of the year.
But Facebook is of course not the only social media story, and social networks have brought a great deal of diversity to the internet. While Facebook is the most popular in the genre, almost every country has one or more strong local players, including Studivz in Germany, Hyves in the Netherlands, and Fotolog in Spain.
2) The rise of the mobile internet
In 2008 mobile internet usage finally took off, thanks in part to the continued success of both Apple’s iPhone, and social networking sites.
Regular
reports from Opera, makers of Opera Mini, the most popular mobile internet browser (think Firefox or Internet Explorer for your phone), tracked the rise of mobile internet. These reports only examined people using Opera’s browser, but the figures showed that by October 2008 the browser had 21 million monthly users, a 311% rise since October 2007.
In the Opera sample, data use (that is, how much data was downloaded, or a measure of the amount of content viewed on a mobile device) was up nearly 490% over the same period, showing that not only were more people going online on their phones, but mobile internet users were doing more when they were online.
The launch of the 3G version of the iPhone has been one of the drivers of this growth but I would argue that the other main catalyst has been - once again - social networking. Two years ago people might have said of mobile internet use ‘Why would I want that?’ However, many people now want to access their social networking profiles when they are away from their desks.
Data, again from Opera, shows that, of the markets studied, networking sites were the most popular category of mobile internet sets in more countries than was the case with search sites. When PCs are used to access the internet, search websites are still the most popular destinations.
3) The iPhone and mobile apps
The biggest technology story, and one of the accelerators of mobile internet use, was the launch of the 3G iPhone in July. In less than six months the device has reportedly become the biggest selling phone in the US, and the most purchased smartphone worldwide.
Crucial to the success of the iPhone has been the easy way it offers to install applications, namely small programmes that allow the handset to do useful and fun tasks. By opening up the software architecture for the iPhone, Apple allowed independent developers to produce and sell these apps, letting the free market and people’s imaginations drive the choice of products, and set prices.
Currently there are over 10,000 apps available from the iTunes store, ranging from Google Spoken Search (talk into the phone instead of keying a search query), to Snaptell (identifies books, DVDs and CDs from photos, displays prices at online stores) to iNap (wakes you up when you get near your public transport destination.
With competition provided by rival mobile operating systems from Google (called Android) and from Symbian, 2009 will see further change in the way mobile phones are used.
4) Twitter
Twitter is the less formal version of blogging. Established in 2006, Twitter allows users to write their opinions, what they are doing, or how they feel in 140 characters or fewer. This message then appears on their page, and to their Twitter “friends” (this is a similar status to that on Facebook).
Users build up lists of people they follow and whose updates they want to read, with some power users now having more than 20,000 followers. (Barack Obama is officially the most ‘followed’ Twitter user, with over 150,000 following his updates, although he stopped updating on November 5th). Because it is so quick and so informal, news can spread quickly across Twitter, as one person passes it on to his network of friends and so on, until many thousands can see news in a matter of minutes.
Twitter’s most striking moment to date was scooping the mainstream media with news of the Mumbai terror attacks. Twitter users on the ground were able to tell contacts about the outrage, who then told their contacts and so on. Twitter is not perfect, and 140 characters is a very limited space in which to transmit a complex message, but Twitter gained real traction in 2008 as a way of connecting people in informal and useful ways.
5) Social recommendations and local
Finally, 2008 saw a big rise in the area of social recommendations. Sites like CitySearch, Qype and Tipped rely on users to write reviews of local businesses, and make recommendations. These sites work on the ‘wisdom of the crowds’ principle, and the assumption that users will police themselves, with any obviously fake reviews exposed by other members.
This trend exemplifies a shift in how the internet is being used with people now appearing to put their trust in strangers as much as, if not more than, professional reviewers or friends. The fact that there are many small players in this market niche, rather than a few dominant ones, suggests that no one has yet come up with the ideal solution to social recommendation.
This trend is also connected to the first two. Social networks are working to integrate into these recommendation sites via initiatives such as Facebook Connect and MySpace ID so that users can see what their social circle recommended. In addition, mobile will make these services far more relevant.
We can expect further convergence between all of the above trends in 2009.

15.4.09

Smart::: Creating shorter links

BRAND OWNER:Mercedes Benz
CATEGORY:Automotive
REGION:Belgium
DATE:Apr 2009 - Dec 2008

The Smart car’s key selling point is the fact that it can be manoeuvred into tiny parking spaces – perfect for city living. Measuring just 2.69 metres long, it can even be parked sideways in most road-side spaces.
In order to highlight this fact online, Smart has created a URL shortening service. Akin to services such as http://www.tinyurl.com/ and is.gd, the service transforms a long URL such as those from Google Maps, into a very short one.
Visitors to http://url.so-smart.be/ are able to ‘navigate swiftly through the busy online traffic’ and ‘park large URLs into tiny spaces’. Visitors can enter a long URL, for example: http://advertiser-in-arabia.blogspot.com/ and it will be transformed into a shorter ‘smart’ URL such as http://so-smart.be/~ns21n4 .
This shorter URL takes up fewer characters on micro-blogging sites such as Twitter, which has a 140 character message limit. Any links shortened with this service automatically become micro ads because of the ‘so-smart.be’ prefix.
Visitors to http://www.so-smart.be/ will find a site called “Smart & the City”, charting the love affair that the car has with the city and featuring information about the vehicle including specifications, carbon emission levels, and the option to request a brochure or a showroom visit.

7 Skills for a Post-Pandemic Marketer

The impact of Covid-19 has had a significant impact across the board with the marketing and advertising industry in 2020, but there is hope...