SeattleGirl

Zeitgeist Day 2

I'm happy to say I'm back in sunny Seattle after spending a really interesting week in Europe. Yesterday wrapped the second day of Zeitgeist. An overview of the whole conference can be seen here.

Day two's theme was People Power. Presentations were given by everyday people (as well as a Prince) describing how they use technology to bring awareness to their global issues. Chief Almir Narayamogs Surui, leader of the Surui Tribe of the Amazon explained how indigenous people are using technology to bring awareness to the plight of his people and their rainforest. 1.2M acres of the Amazon rainforest were destroyed last year by loggers. The rainforest has reached the limit of the allowable deforestation. The Surui tribe has discovered a way to monitor their forest by using Google maps and GPS to build a multilayered map of the rainforest. They can monitor activities in the rainforest with the satellite images on Google maps and defend their more than 300K acres of rainforest from continued destruction. This is a tribe that only first made contact with the outside world in 1969. What they have taught themselves about communication and using technology to enable their survival is nothing short of amazing.

Oscar Morales, founder of One Million Voices against FARC explained how using Facebook, Gmail, Google Apps and MSN Messenger they were able to mobilize 12M in 40 countries on February 4, 2008 to come together in rallies showing their opposition to FARC. This was one person who was passionate about a cause and using the world of technology today reached across borders, languages, time zones and cultures to bring people together for one day. He didn't have money or fame but he had passion and technology.

There were other discussions from global leaders of banks and media companies but I didn't find their situations near has inspiring as Chief Surui and Oscar Morales. Media companies are struggling in the current economic environment but the economy only exacerbated what technology was already doing to their business models. Sonal Shah, Deputy Assistant to President Obama explained how their hang a large part of their success to two things; message distribution and data collection. Everyday thousands of pieces of data would be uploaded from Obama supporters identifying who they'd talked to, who was committed, uncommitted, supporters and possible supporters. This vast amount of data allowed the teams to be as effective with their time and resources during their outreach as possible. With 1000's of offices around the country and millions of people participating there was no way they could have managed the data or message distribution without their extensive use of web technologies.

The real message from the day was that every person has power whether you are a citizen journalist or political activist the web technologies of today and tomorrow allow us all the ability to make our voices heard and bring about change. It doesn't take money or fame, but rather passion and ingenuity. No business is immune from the new landscape of technologies. Whether you run a multi billion dollar bank as Deutsche Bank spoke about or an international media company like Vivendi or the BBC technology has changed everything. Businesses must adapt and embrace it or become irrelevant – it's realy quite that simply.

One last funny note, Larry Page, co-founder of Google said he thinks Google should be working on problems like that of a toothbrush; meaning Google should be focusing on issues that affect people as much as their toothbrush affects them everyday. Interesting analogy, and I think I'll just leave it at that.

You can see all the sessions compliments of YouTube. Thanks for a great two days Google. I appreciate the invitation and inclusion in your very interesting event.

Technorati Tags: zeitgeist,google,Marketing,social media,social media marketing

Zeitgeist Day 1

I had the pleasure this year of being invited to Google's premiere conference called Zeitgeist. It's taking place today and tomorrow in the UK. The main goal of the conference is to discuss global issues we are all, as stewards of this planet, responsible for (AIDS, poverty, famine). The other topic of discussion is the internet and how it changes every part of our lives and businesses.

There were a few main themes today

• People are more interested in access than ownership
  Whether people are buying cars or music or books consumers don't have the need to 'own' anymore. This has profound impacts on how companies make money in the future. Daimler Benz is building a car sharing program for it's younger audience with the hope this will bring tomorrow's customers in today. Lord Mandelson, UK Secretary of State, believes constant consumer access and demand for information means business leaders and politicians are spending far too much time on media fires and not enough on the business at hand. Are we as citizens comfortable knowing our world leaders spend up to 50% of their week dealing with media concerns largely driven by consumers need for constant access to information rather than focusing on global issues?
• Business models have been changed forever
  Ian Bremmer, Political Scientist, believes 5 year graphics and data points are useless because historic data is based on trends before internet/Twitter/wikipedia, etc and the internet has had such a profound effect on the way the world communicates and does business data from pre-internet is no longer comparable. Businesses cannot accurately build a business strategy looking more than 18 months out because of ever changing technology. Not too long ago consumers paid for services such as newspapers (information) and entertainment (CD's). Today consumers expect information for free and on demand. They expect to only pay for music they like, not the whole CD. Vevo is building a business model based on the theory people will pay for music videos as a form of entertainment rather than get them for free. It assumes consumers will accept UGC for free but understand the value of high quality content and be willing to pay for it like they do a movie ticket today.
• Media companies business models must evolve
  Carolyn McCall, Chief Officer of The Guardian, believes the display ad model is flawed and will not support her business long term. The Guardian is focused on classified ad revenue because they believe consumers will find value for that content and will be willing to pay for it. It's unclear what impact businesses like CraigsList, free classified ads, will have on this model. Pedro Ramirez, Editor of El Mundo took serious issue with recent comment from Google that said "consumption of the news is no longer through the newspaper." Ramirez believes consumers will still be willing to pay for top journalist content. Charlie Leadbeater, author of 'We Think' countered that position with the advice media agencies should be investing in ways their consumers can contribute and participate, recognizing young people are interested in paragraphs, not articles.

What was clearly evident from today's speakers is no one has figured out how the internet will impact traditional business long term. Can traditional media companies survive? I think El Mundo has a somewhat dinosaur perspective and if they don't evolve their thinking by becoming a partner with content syndication platforms like Google and MSN they will be left in the dust much the way AOL was once it was clear the subscription model was flawed. Carolyn McCall from the Guardian said it best, "Newspaper companies need to learn how to partner with aggregators. Many other publishing houses will go down because they can't afford to invest in strong content." It does beg the question, what will happen if consumers continue to demand free information and subsequently threaten the future business of even the largest news agencies? What will become of our most trusted news sources? Can we live in a world where Wikipedia is THE news source? Will there be a time when citizen journalism replaces traditional journalism?

Technorati Tags: marketing,zeitgeist,media,The Guardian,BBC,wikipedia,citizen journalism

Latest Social Media Reports

I've blocked off my whole calendar for today and created my own 'offsite'. I have two goals; 1. get caught up on some new Forrester reports that came out in the last month and 2. develop international guidance for my Windows subs regarding what they should be doing in Social Media in FY10. The guidance is the really hard one, I'll cover that another day. But here is my overview of two reports I read this week.

Forrester Reports:

Social Technology Strategies for 'Boring' Consumer Brands by Josh Bernoff

I think this paper will be super helpful to the majority of brands out there. Let's face it, there is really only a handful of brands that are really exciting and can talk about themselves all day. I know I don't have one of those brands. Windows is an operating system, it runs in the background. People know they need it but the majority of our users don't really know what it does or quite frankly even care. They just want it to work when they turn their PC on. They are more passionate about their hardware (Dell, HP, Sony) than the operating system. As Josh suggests in the report, we focus on what people love DOING with their PC because that they are passionate about. Gaming, photo sharing, document storage. People could talk all day about these things which have a relationship to Windows but it's not the focus on the conversation.

Two great takeaways from the paper are:

• Concentrate on your customers' problems, not on your products or services.
• No matter the objective, the key is to recognize that you're creating a long-term asset, not an advertising campaign

Using Social Apps in Ad Campaigns by Sean Corcoran

About a month ago I had a opportunity to talk with Sean about how I think about social applications and the role they play in our ad campaigns. It was fun to be a part of his research for this paper. A challenge for agencies (and therefore marketers who use agencies) is the quick fix. It's getting easier and easier to come up with new ways to gain attention for a brand. Micro-sites spring up all the time with cool user generated contests or 'submit your favorite' whatever. YouTube is filled with brands looking to give away stuff to people who will upload recipes or videos and these are great ways to get the conversation started with your customers. But then what?

The best way to leverage the investment you make in these campaigns is to make sure it can work for you when the campaign is over. I asked someone on our Win7 launch team this week how much we are willing to spend on throw away campaigns and how much are we spending on sustaining programs. I think there is a value to the big bang campaigns for PR, momentum, etc. but it should be a conscious decision that we are okay spending X amount of dollars on short term pushes rather than long term investments (ie. community building activities that pay off again and again over time).

My two favorite points from this paper are:

• Commit to the community
• Plan a transition or exit strategy

Technorati Tags: windows marketing,social media marketing,forrester reports,social media,Youtube,user generated content