von Roland Hachmann | Nov 14, 2006 | Blog, Digital Culture, Digital Marketing, Digital News
Logic+Emotion points me to the WOMMA Releases Blog Ethics Guidelines:
This document is a public draft of guidelines for marketers to follow when doing outreach within the blogosphere. It is neither a „how to blog“ nor a „what to blog“ document. Rather, its intent is to give clarity and guidance to marketers who are working and corresponding with bloggers, and to ensure that their efforts adhere to the standards set by the WOMMA Ethics Code.
1. I will always be truthful and will never knowingly relay false information. I will never ask someone else to deceive bloggers for me.
2. I will fully disclose who I am and who I work for (my identity and affiliations) from the very first encounter when communicating with bloggers or commenting on blogs.
3. I will never take action contrary to the boundaries set by bloggers. I will respect all community guidelines regarding posting messages and comments.
4. I will never ask bloggers to lie for me.
5. I will use extreme care when communicating with minors or blogs intended to be read by minors.
6. I will not manipulate advertising or affiliate programs to impact blogger income.
7. I will not use automated systems for posting comments or distributing information.
8. I understand that compensating bloggers may give the appearance of a conflict of interest, and I will therefore fully disclose any and all compensation or incentives.
9. I understand that if I send bloggers products for review, they are not obligated to comment on them. Bloggers can return products at their own discretion.
10. If bloggers write about products I send them, I will proactively ask them to disclose the products’ source.
Good to have this summary, even though this really should be common sense, since it means: act honestly and transparently. A basic prerequisite when dealing with people. (In theory.)
von Roland Hachmann | Nov 12, 2006 | Blog, Digital Culture, Digital News
Again, german blogger Robert Basic pointed me to something interesting: the digital identity map by Frédéric Cavazza.
A „map“ with all the web2.0 names you could possibly sign up with nowadays. (Did we need to sign up for bloody everything during web1.0, too, or is signing up just a 2.0 phenomenon?)
Unfortunately, I still don’t read french perfectly, even after a year in Paris, but for those who do, check out the theoretical derivation of this map.
For everyone else, just check out the map, it’s self-explanatory enough as it is:
von Roland Hachmann | Nov 11, 2006 | Blog, Digital Culture, Digital Marketing, Digital News
At Reuters there is a story of IBM moving into virtual worlds such as Second Life – with a considerable budget:
IBM is ramping up its push into virtual worlds with an investment of roughly $10 million over the next 12 months, including an expanded presence within the popular 3D online universe Second Life.
Now that is scary. Considering the still relatively small size of SecondLife, such an investment seems enormous. On the other hand, people already spend almost $1 mio. per day. (I had to check twice, coz I couldn’t believe it!) And who knows how much they’ll really spend in Second Life?
Apparently they have been active in this space already:
IBM has already established the biggest Second Life presence of any Fortune 500 company. It uses the world primarily for training and meetings but has also built a simulation of the Wimbledon tennis tournament.
One thing I found interesting, as further on they write about the adoption of VR within the regular internet user base:
„The essence of e-commerce today is built around the idea of catalogs. That’s very useful, it fits with the idea of Web pages and catalog pages, but most people don’t think of shopping in terms of catalogs and pages, but in terms of stores that they go into,“ said IBM chief technology strategist Irving Wladawsky-Berger.
Well, I don’t necessarily agree with what Irving is hinting at. Switching on the computer and logging on to a virtual world still isn’t the same as visiting a real store to go shopping. Not with todays user interfaces anyway, which lack 3D presentation and have no haptic sensation at all.
But I am sure we will get there. It’s just a matter of T&T (time&technology), as always. And most likely we’ll someday smile when we look back at the days when we had to surf the net with screens, mice and keyboards, moving in a two-dimensional space with most of the content displayed in writing. I hope I will remember to link back to this post, once this has become reality.
(via PSFK)
von Roland Hachmann | Nov 11, 2006 | Blog, Digital Culture, Digital News
In an article with the headline „DIGITAL UTOPIA A new breed of technologists envisions a democratic world improved by the Internet“ Dan Fost writes about the Hippie-esque dream of the social web:
Dubbed Digital Utopians by some, and Web 2.0 innovators by others, this latest wave of tech gurus champion community over commerce, sharing ideas over sharing profits. By using Web sites that stress group thinking and sharing, these Internet idealists want to topple the power silos of Hollywood, Washington, Wall Street and even Silicon Valley. And like countless populists throughout history, they hope to disperse power and control, an idea that delights many and horrifies others.
All very idealistic, and considering the following quote, Web2.0 seems to simply follow on an ageless debate:
The core of the Web 2.0 movement resurrects an age-old debate about governance and democracy, one that was argued by political philosophers such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Alexis de Tocqueville: Are the benefits of democracy — taking advantage of what Web 2.0 proponents call the wisdom of the crowds — worth risking the dark side of mob rule?
Tim O’Reilly, who coined the term, doesn’t quite see it that way:
Yet while people, perhaps reacting to the greed that fueled the IPOs of the dot-com years, saw in Web 2.0 a chance to create a new collectivism, O’Reilly said, „I don’t see it that way at all.“
Web 2.0, he says, is about business.
He says many tech movements start out with similar idealism, only to give way to capitalism. For instance, O’Reilly says, Napster introduced file sharing, but now iTunes has people comfortable with paying for music online.
Interesting article, and an inspiring (yet rather useless) discussion.
von Roland Hachmann | Nov 11, 2006 | Ad News, Blog, Digital Marketing, Digital News, Online Advertising
Marketing.fm wants to revise a famous quote by John Wanamaker:
Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half. -John Wanamaker, US department store merchant (1838 – 1922)
I know the quote, of course, as I suppose everyone in advertising does. But I didn’t know it was of someone as unknown as this chap. On the contrary, I was almost tempted to assign the quote to Mark Twain, purely because lately if feels like most thoughtful quotes come from Mark Twain, as if he is some sort of a quote-goat anytime people don’t know the real source.
In the same blog post, they write:
The advent of interactive media and online measurement has allowed marketers to target advertising messages much more precisely. Morover, it is possible to access comprehensive data on the viewers of your campagin: page views, geographic location, clicks, links, etc.
Is it time that we revised the 50/50 Wanamaker quote? Should it be more like 70/30 now?
I ain’t sure that the hard measurements that the web provides, should redefine investments alone. This might sound strange coming from someone working in digital marketing. But if you think about it: applying these measurements, you de-value the web to a purely interactional medium (which it is, most of the time, admittingly). However, by that you omitt all the effects of the contacts people have with your brand that cannot be exactly measured:
- The impression an ad made with that one page view, even if the user didn’t click on it.
- time spent interacting with the ad piece all together
- triggered purchase consideration, fulfilled in brick&mortar store
Online Advertising can be measured and therefore it should be. Always.
But we should not forget, that there are so called key performance indicators that can help us understand the effect of advertising, and that can’t be measured by interaction, but purely by qualitative research. Asking the target audience about their perception of the brand, the channel interaction, etc.
Classical Advertising has been working with this kind of research all the time. And while it never helped to solve the puzzle of where the 50% of investments „got lost“, I think, purely relying on data measured through interaction, will not help either. It sounds more like a quick fix of Marketeers trying to answer tough questions by providing hard results – irrespectively of context.
von Roland Hachmann | Sep 29, 2006 | Blog, Digital Culture, Digital News
I love it. There is always someone in the whole webosphere, who’s got the time, brains and curiosity to dive deep into things that we can’t be bothered with until we see the results.
This guy here, for example, was wondering about the fact that MySpace has 100 mio users. So he looked at a couple of hundred of them, clustered them, and found out that many profiles are probably abandoned or at least currently inactive.
Whew. Looks like the popular claim that MySpace has 100,000,000 users is hot air. More than 50% can’t even bother to visit again after a month. Based on assuming that type 5 and type 6 are the real ‚users‘ of MySpace, it turns out that MySpace really has roughly 43,000,000 users. Very unscientific? Yep. More accurate than the 100,000,000 myth? Damn straight. The 100,000,000 number is inflated by 133%.
Might be unscientific, but at least he put his data into some nice bar- and pie-charts, which makes a marketeer like myself happy in any case 😉
Wo ich sonst so bin...