News Update – Best of the Day

Although the mobile hype is massive, there are studies that question the power of smartphone mobile advertising and it’s efficiency. A new research from YouGov shows consumers accept placements as part of their day-to-day mobile experience but consider them intrusive (79%) and tend to ignore them altogether. Only 5% think mobile ads are a good idea and welcome them. However, the general apathy smartphone users have toward seems to equal ignorance: 88% ignore ads on applications and 86% have ignored placements on the mobile internet.

The security company Imperva released a study that states “web applications, on average, experience twenty seven attacks per hour, or roughly one attack every two minutes.” Imperva monitored 10 million attacks between December of last year and May of this year “targeting 30 different enterprise and government web applications.” Of the 27 attacks per hour most of them are trying to identify vulnerabilities on websites. If a vulnerability is found, attacks can increase to 25,000 per hour which would be seven attacks per second.

What is the future of Twitter? During a keynote interview at Fortune BrainstormTech in Aspen, Twitter CEO Dick Costolo gave insights in his vision of the company’s business model.

PS: Just in case you ask why Twitter is cool, Steven Winterburn has got the answer: “”Twitter is like a fridge. If you’re bored you keep opening & closing it every few minutes to see if there’s anything good in it.”

Outlook or flashback? The (mobile) reward advertising model…

About 12 years ago, when I was about to join silicon, I remember my first meeting in the Chelsea office. I got to know the founders and management team in London and we had first discussions about the future of the business model. It was all very exciting to be in the UK, talking business with that innovative team that was reaching out to the big VC’s for more venture capital as web TV and community building seemed to have been the new rising starts for the next hundred years. And today all business is focussing on mobile…

At that day, we were brainstorming opportunities how to engage users in advertising, and how to reward them. Reward them, when they were watching the pre-rolls at our daily (on-demand) three minutes news show, when they were clicking on display ads, when were reading articles that might fit their business needs and then send them personalized advertising… and reward them when paying attention to any forms and activities of sponsored areas.

To be frankly open, the time was not ready for these types of advertising rewards from a user perspective (as well as the ad industry understanding the capabilities). However, we thought about clever loyalty programs and how to let users participate in the revenues we are generating. As we were working in the B2B scenario it was even more difficult to get this into the heads of our users. I remember, we even tested the silicon point reward model and had a personalized point counter on our side for some days. Yes, we were quite ahead of our times…

So, where are we today with the reward advertising model?

Some weeks ago, I met Julian Fourgeaud at Rovio (Angry Birds) when I was speaking at the istrategyconference in Amsterdam. Julian told me all about the opportunities they have with their mobile gaming business. If you think about their reach – Angry Birds just cracked the 200 Mio. downloads barrier- it all makes perfect sense. I was surprised how much time people spend with the game, and how addicted people became during the istrategyconference dinner (just ask my kids…) but wondered how to make a clever advertising model out of it. And I thought if reach is as benefitial as relevance form an advertising point of view. But that is another story…

Today, I was reminded of the old silicon days. I came across a new business model which is called kiip. Their business is quite simple. A code is implemented in a game which is basically an ad. The ad is a reward points model or coupon that shows up in mobile games when people achieve certain high-scores or levels in the game. So, when you beat a level, you might get a coffee from Starbucks or a discount from MINI’s merchandising shop. Or you just collect points via their loyalty schemes which motivate you to think about purchasing their latest products.

Here is the video how kiip works…

Kiip: An Introduction from kiip on Vimeo.

Spot On!
There are so many advertising opportunities or loyalty programs (i.e. like Multiply to increase the worth of brand fans) these days that won’t be as offensive as the traditional advertising model. HOWEVER, in my eyes there is one thing which needs to happen: Personalization. With silicon those days we saw who was logged in, just like Youtube, Facebook and Twitter do. So, personalized reward advertising ad models should no be a challenge anymore (under given permission). Still, I cannot see any of these rewarding systems really working for now. Or is Facebook Stories heading towards this idea? Groupon, Foursquare and Gowalla could come up with similar ideas if they just collaborate with the guys from kiip. And if credit card providers as well as loyalty card providers would change their strategies and group with these guys, chances would be amazing to make advertising engaging, personal, rewarding and finally efficient for brands. We would get offers in a personalized format, at the right time and in the right environment.

What do you think about reward advertising models? Is this an exiting area to focus on? Do you fear that data privacy (remember this Google spoof commercial…) becomes an issue as usual? Let us know…

Personal Scoring Index = The future of digital identity?

Three years ago, I was sitting together with a colleague in a coffee shop. It was snowing. We were watching the snowflakes falling down. We were talking some philosophy on how the future of individuality will look like ten years ahead, refering to the snow flakes and how their “individual dna” changes the world around us into a new one we have never seen before.

Sure, we were not sure what the future will bring. However, that day we were realizing some critical development that people define themselves through blog posts (like our fathers did with books), reviews (Amazon and the likes), ratings (in communities and networks, not only social ones…), and comments on articles and posts on websites all over the world. We saw that CV’s might loose their relevance for job search as there was an option to recommend a person’s capabillities and intelligence just by checking their digital engagement, output – their digital DNA. The feeling that humanity and ethic values will have a massive effect on how people might be defined from the outside world was obvious to us. Just like “perfect” snow flakes have somehow perfect formats than others. They have scored and thus indexed themselves as superior to the others.

Today, I know, see and read that scoring and indexing becomes a crucial part of our lives, our individuality, and our identity. Although it might just affect those who are really active social web users… for now. Still, the trend is alive. Platforms are tracking our digital footprints, our shopping behaviour like Blippy, our deepest desires, and try to predict our future purchase decision. The question is not whether we will continue to score value to our index, and/or if others will follow. It is more like… Will social pofiles, writing status updates, and sharing brain value enhance our individuality, and thus how will this influence our credibility? And who or which organization or association will be judging upon it? Or even more important, who will secure the validity of such an index process?

Just imagine we had some kind of trusted source or association that knows our scoring index on the personal likelihood of sharing some piece of information, the potential of reach and relevance? Ideas, news, rumors, and visions around brands, products and services would be addressed to that person via a newly-created trust agency. Agencies and brands would be much more interested in the long-tail ad market, in bloggers or in social medians in general. Artifical user reach would be shifting to real personal relevance. Brand intensity could be enlarged by user credibility. If the users voluntarily share their believe in brands, products and companies. But is this realistic? It must be, or how could Facebook pages have become so important for some of us? We love to score, define and index ourselves via the social web. And personal search engines like 123people or yasni are just two examples of possible scoring index platforms that undermine our aasumptions.

Obviously the social web will be changing into a pervasive web which people need to be aware of (and understand). Semantic impact needs to evolve, become a trustworty basis for credible metric which people could rely upon. And how does the amout of time invested in web engagement pay into the credit of our professional individuality? Is less more, or more less? How will Google change it’s algorithm and thereby the impact on our personal scoring index? Should we invest in Facebook, Diaspora or on Path (which by its definition may become the real base for our personal brandvangelism). And just think about the possibilities if you can match the personal index in a room via mobile and augmented reality tools? There will be no way around a personal web manager controling, checking and optimizing your personal branding in the future. Don’t you think?

“Like Larry Page and Sergey Brin changed the way websites are measured with their Pagerank, reputation scores will change the way people will be treated in the future. Reputation scores will change the classical customer relationship management as it was done bei companies in the past and will enable them to identify opinion leaders within their customers and attract them with special offers and treatment in order to use them as evangelists for their products. Knowing who the most valuable peers are provides marketing experts a complete new angle of doing campaigns – offline and online,” says Marcel Hollerbach, CEO of SiRANK (…a company that is working on a business model on indexing people’s reputation).

I am just waiting that there will be a platform that aggregates all the data that we leave as score data on the web, and that this platform then indexes us. Or is that a threat? Already becoming reality when we look at Klout, the first personal scoring index? Or is it just an assessment of social media influence?

Today, the snow flakes keep falling down…. Many of us have built an intense relationship on the basis of sharing and matching our most inner brain credentials. We work on our personal scoring index and hope whenever we need to differentiate ourselves from others, our social graph can enrich our digital identity.

Do you still wonder if and in which way some format of Personal Scoring Index (PSI) could become alive…?

LeWeb10 – web strategy catch-up with Jeremiah Owyang

When I joined the LeWeb10 in Paris last week, I was fortunate to spend some time with Jeremiah Owyang, partner at Altimeter Group and Blogger at web-strategist.com. We to talk about the future of web-strategy, the evolution of brands in the social web era and exchanged thoughts on how businesses need to integrate social media in their web activities. And it was good to see that our views matched nicely.

Afterwards, I did a quick video snapshot on three topics…

Where is web-strategy heading to in 2011?
The main trend that Jeremiah foresees is the integration of social media into the corporate website. In 2010, I have seen many companies already challenging this topic, and it improves. Although I have to admit, in many cases I found often tiny mistakes like the way social media conquers websites while important information gets lost or hidden in the backend or also placement of share items/buttons in the wrong corner apart from other things. Yes, companies are integrating their social affinity and activity but should not forget the business model, the target-group (or should I say friends or followers?) and the main existing user behavior…

What are the main trends from a long-term perspective?
Social analytics and Social CRM will emerge (active, pervasive), he said, and he differentiates this from social media monitoring (passive, reactive). I defintely agree in that point. Companies need to understand and react immediately whenever a client approaches a brand or a company how to match the data of all website and lead generation traffic stats with the CRM system in order to pro-actively supply relevant offers to them – be it on mobile, online or offline. Otherwise any competitive advantage will get lost in the future.

What is the role of brand vangelists/brand advocates in the future?
Microsoft, Intel, Oracle, SAP, Wall-Mart amongst others have already deployed brand vangelist/brand advocates for their purposes. He makes clear that by using these people brands get ahead of the 1:1 dialogue which he thinks does not work on the social web. Brand advocates make the communication programs scale, he argues – I could not agree more as I see the main ROI factor from a user perspective in the time factor.

Thank you, Jeremiah! Looking forward to catching up in 2011…

The World after Advertising & The Internet of Things

Last week, I had the opportunity to take part in (and speak about the future of targeting at) an interesting event called The World after Advertising. The well-organized day offered a full program on the future of media and web business from all aspects: advertising, collaboration and insights, insights, insights which will help us understand the new ways of monetization and how to turn our business models in the direction of a cultural change that is happening already.

For me the most inspiring speech was held by Rob Gonda, Director of Strategy at SapientNitro. Rob was giving a broad overview of the digital landscape and his interactive outlook into 2020. I liked his approach to make people understand that in principle our business stays simple. It is based on technology, media and data, and the way these will be interacting in the future. When he quoted data from Morgan Stanley that there is a global opportunity for internet advertising of 50 Billion USD, he got the right switch to the main technology that will drive these bucks: Go mobile!

Thinking about the future of the internet and the future of advertising (if the future of advertising will be advertising), I actually got two views this week: Rob Gonda’s and Dean Donaldson’s (Mediamind). Having attended a Mediamind event on Monday, the output of both speeches sounded alike: Sensors are the future drivers of the (mobile) internet and might replace (or even become?) the cookie technology at some point in the future. “Sensors are the cookies of the future,” said Dean Donaldson. And Rob showed examples like Ray Ban’s virtual mirror and Unilever’s ShareHappy (see video).

In his key-note he also talked about the Internet of Things, he mentioned that Wallmart uses RFID codes for better tracking of their inventory and expects manufacturers to put RFID codes on products before they come to their stores. Although Rob considers a “normal level” evolving and adapting from a user perspective when maschines start talking to each other. I base my view more on a sceptic user behaviour, a privacy debate which will arise from it (or people will simply cut out the labels…), and also a cultural alongside the evolution of a new generation. He made clear that he sees the tipping point of the Internet of Things (see IBM explanation video) not before 2020 – another view I share with him. Though there are many reasons of why the Internet of Things could be with us earlier than we think.

After his speech I had the option to touch base with him on the Internet of Things. Watch it…

Spot On!
His six predictions were definitely something to think about. Though I rate his visions, I would doubt that all of these will become reality…
- Location-Based-Services will die – My answer: Depending on user flexibility and information overflow, and whether the user wants to receive information from things like wallpapers and the likes when they are passing by…
- Facebook own 50% of advertising – My answer: Whenever a market-leader became to popular, some new start-up or competitor took market share of them. Do I not see an advent on the horizont from the guys at Paths and Diaspora…?!
- Facebook penetrates APAC >2bn users – My answer: Defintely worth a try for Facebook, no surprise…
- Android + GoogleMe – My answer: Yep…!
- MediaTradeFloor: My answer: The danger for a jobtitle like media planer to die becomes reality, it seems…
- Media budgets will shift – My answer: Yes, the challenge will be to integrate the user in this process. If he/she voluntarily tells us their preferences, ad technology will deliver more precisely and ads/commercials will receive new conversion levels.

Looking forward to get your views on the Internet of Things or on Rob’s predictions… Share them with us! Let’s discuss…

Social Media: Internal, external or who to use?

Internal or external resources, agencies, consultants or publishers? Many companies still give the responsibility for social media to the hands of the existing marketing and communications teams. A new study by the public relations agency MS&L and PR Week shows that companies leave it to these teams to handle the activities. Only 5% said they outcource the social media planning and execution to external agency partners.

It is still interesting to see which companies are addressed to get the responsible for their social media activities…
- 21% direct marketing agencies
- 20% ad agencies
- 17% digital agencies
- 16% PR agencies
- 12% media buying and planning agencies

In the online survey with 262 marketers taking part, 47% of those with social media programs handle social media activities using in-house resources. Some companies are hiring their expertise: 13% stated additional staff was recruited to handle the conversations.

Most companies understand the impact for business. The reason why companies make it a business critical topic becomes clear when 79% agree social media management and reacting in real-time to customer needs is a competitive advantage. 26% encourage their employees to share social media input for the company’s benefit. The effect on R&D is in between the lines of the result that 33% of companies have changed their products or marketing efforts based on feedback they’ve gathered from social media.

Interestingly enough Social Media education comes from…? Kids (26%)! – Coming in as third important source after internal discussions (46%) and vendor sponsored conferenes and webinars (33%), says the report. This result actually comes at the same time as a study by Nielsen Norman Group that comes to a similar conclusion. Kids are not even 10 years old to tell us more about the Internet than we might know but still get confused by advertising if it is directed towards them.

Spot On!
Social Web experts argue the aspect of a cultural shift – handling social media is a challenge for the whole company and all departments – be it HR, R&D, Sales, PR, Marketing or Customer Service. If we look at who is responsible when the social media business is outsourced, it becomes obvious that traditional agencies are the leading edge of the social media activities. Sometimes, I am asking myself, if companies like business consultants (whole company approach), strategy consultants (business model apporach) or even publishers (experts in audience building) could not be a better partner for making social media strategy work.

Curious to listen what your ideas about that might be…

Reloaded – Personal Web Manager

One of my most popular posts was my vision of the personal web manager. Most of my friends or business cotacts even thought that my next business follows this idea and invitations to next web generation events followed.

And yes, I still think and know from C-level executives that it would solve one of their biggest problems when getting engaged in the social web: Having more time when they need it in the future while staying in contact and up to date in the social web world!

Now the vision of the personal web manager is reloaded. Gina Trapani tries to “work against” the idea in her post Work Smart: Mastering Your Social Media Life with a new solution named “funneling”. And thus, she brings the value of my personal web manager vision back to live. Most comments go against her vision and obviously, I have to disagree as well.

Nevertheless, watch the video and maybe rate her funneling against the personal web manager…

The problem of personal productivity versus being a “perfect” social median remains unsolved. Vision are there, the world wants this problem to be solved and someone will realize the personal web manager business model in the future. Don’t you think?

The future – is paid service the ‘old’ paid content?

The idea for this post came with the following idea. What is paid content and what is paid service? Would you know the difference?

So, if a news site charges for an amount of time, for an amount of activities or clicks, and not exclusively for mere access to a news site, are we still talking about paid content then? Or will this become paid service?

OK, CoTweet gave the kick off for this post. Although I am still using Twitter, I have thought about CoTweet for a while as it is a good Twitter CRM tool and offers more opportunity to handle multiple accounts with multiple people. Yesterday, the company announced to launch an enterprise edition as a paid service version – probably in order to monetize their business model. The new enterprise program plans to start with $1,500 per month.

Among the first booking clients that will use the fee-based service are top companies like Ford and McDonalds. They profit from the new paid service offer in terms of benefits for data storage, usability and analytic features versus pure conversational options. And CoTweet makes way -and becomes another test- for Twitter to launch their commercial accounts soon.

Now, I don’t want to discuss whether it makes sense to start the paid service era. As in my eyes the need for paid service offers is definitely evident if content will still be valued the way it deserves to be valued. Content production costs time, resources and fees for service partners. It costs money. And somebody has got to pay the bill…

No wonder, Murdoch openly discussed the idea of removing the News Corp sites from Google’s index in the following interview. He wants to make money with ‘his’ content.

And as a consequence Hulu, a joint venture of Murdoch’s News Corp. and NBC Universal, just recently thought about the launch of a paid service subscription offer.

Spot On!
In my eyes, the future of content monetization will be some kind of fee-based subscription model for those web businesses that want to survive. The question remains: Which model will the users finally accept? Paid content or paid service? But it is not as easy as you might think. As paid content could become paid service in the future – no matter if indexed on Google, or not- are we not talking about a new word for the same idea: Getting money for content value.

Curious about your views…

IBM study: The end of advertising is near – as we know it…

Sometimes studies come back too late. When I was the host of the dmexco social media panel ‘Show me the money – effective ways to advertise’, I would have loved to talk about these study results.

IBM did a global study where more than 2.400 consumers and 80 advertising experts were asked about how they think the advertising world is changing. And they start their presentation of the study with the following words…

The next 5 years will hold more change for the advertising industry than the previous 50 did. Increasingly empowered consumers, more self-reliant advertisers and ever-evolving technologies are redefining how advertising is sold, created, consumed and tracked. Our research points to four evolving future scenarios – and the catalysts that will be driving them. Traditional advertising players – broadcasters, distributors and advertising agencies – may get squeezed unless they can successfully implement consumer, business model and business design innovation.

Why is this study so interesting? Well, there are different topics to talk about. Companies are shifting budgets more and more to the digital world – and not only in the States. But we also know that social media is on the rise. But what we do not know is, how to define the budgets that marketers spend with social media. Are these called advertising dollars – and will these be called the same way in the future? Will these advertising dollars be moving into PR budgets?

Why PR budgets? Because social media is all about the dialogue – the antithesis of a monologue like advertising. Social media is more, it is even a multilogue (company to customers and customers amongst customers). And this is how IBM argues the change…

Attention: The consumer are in control of the sales process. They define the way they receive, perceive and appreciate advertising.

Creativity: The value of advertising comes from the new ‘digital natives’ that create content for their peers, work with new ad revenue-sharing models (e.g., YouTube, Crackle, Current TV) – all based on new technology. The professional does not rule the process, it will be the semis.

Measurement: Mass reach gets replaced by a new wave customers demanding more individual-specific and involvement- based measurements.

Advertising space: In the ad sales process the Traditional intermediaries will be made redundant by efficient exchanges

Spot On!
A lot of interesting (and researched) thesis that might become true for the future of the advertising industry. One thing is for sure: Advertising is a one way street – not a dialogue. The company wants the customers – who decides himself if he wants to be addressed by the ad. The truth is that we do more sales by talking to each other, right? Social media will become the new form of lead generation, and lead generation is based on customer service (not on clicks!) which is the basis of building trust – formerly generated via advertising.

Nevertheless, TV did not kill the radio star. But can social media kill the advertising industry?

Hey, Twitter wants to make money…

Some month ago, Twitter founder Biz Stone told us that he sees ‘tools not ads for revenue”, planning with commercial accounts for the future. And in this Reuter article he announces to start with monetization efforts by the end of the year. Now, he seems to realign his monetization strategy…

Now, after having changed their Twitter terms and conditions last night, it seems that Twitter introduced a new system of rules as well as more options for advertisers, users and Twitter itself. It seems as if they are preparing their monetization

In his post, Stone makes three changes that will have important relevance to the new Twitter monetization strategy:

1. Advertising
Twitter has the right to book advertisements, meaning to place ads on Twitter pages – if in streams or just on the background is not quite clear yet. The terms and conditions were changed accordingly. To some respect this is quite surprising as Stone mentioned some months ago that advertising is not his prior interest for monetization. He also said that it gets on users nerves and none of his employers has a deep insight in the advertising industry.

2. Ownership
Twitter is clever and starts a smooth approach towards changing the terms and conditions on this point – not like Facebook that got flagged by their users when doing so. But in terms of advertising, there is a big point in it. Although the tweets belong to the account-holders, Twitter takes the right “to use, copy, reproduce, process, adapt, modify, publish, transmit, display and distribute such Content in any and all media or distribution methods (now known or later developed).” This gives Twitter a good starting point for targeted advertising opportunities which might become part of their monetization strategy.

3. Spam
Spam is out and -with the introduction of the new terms and conditions- officially forbidden! This is big change for the spam account holders. We all know that there are some of these spam accounts in our follower list and if we clear it up, we might loose probably 10-20% of our follower list. but who does it once he/she is over 1000 followers? So, if your company sends advertising messages to dead spam bots, you should be more careful from now on. Sanctions against spam could become expensive and won’t be positive for the reputation of your business. And it is not allowed to sell followers (probably as of the uSocial business). All sanctions resulting in a permanent-ban.

Spot On!
What does all this mean? Twitter wants to make money. Hey, who is surprised? The whole bloggosphere has been wondering why they did not do this earlier. Who expected something different? Tweets will be shorter (100 words instead of 140?) as ads need some space to create a message. And a lot of people will unsubscribe and wait for the next big revolution.

What is your view? Will you kill your Twitter account just because a media business is trying to make money? Will you be advertising on Twitter once they have a business model for it?

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