17:33h – Ok, I skipped a session: quantitative vs qualitative viral marketing by viral seeding company elbkind. Very interesting session with a goood discussion about reach of campaigns in generell (i.e. millions of views) vs reach within a certain target group (wich might result in viewer, but qualitatively lesser views).
Now I am sitting in this (last) session:
Agenturgezwitscher: Twittern zwischen Tratsch 2.0 und echtem Mehrwert
Bastian Scherbeck and Nicole Simon about twitter for agencies.
One opportunity: internal communication instead of mail and IMs: it can reduce mail but doesn’t offer all functionalities needed.
External Communications for clients: it’s all about transparency and trust. The agency needs empowerment when doing this, clients need „courage“.
(missed the third scenario, as I had to answer an email for work)
Interesting question from the audience: why should companies twitter? Answer: It depends. And: you can, you don’t have to.
A further discussion with lots of questions from the audience arose about why should you twitter, personal accounts vs corporate accounts, etc. Temporarily it was stated that you can do customer service well (not cheaper) – in the future I believe that. Currently twitter has around 60-80.000 users in Germany. That’s a bit small to be a relevant channel for customer service…
14:00h – the first afternoon session started with:
XING und die Klassiker
wahlfreie Informationen und Networking statt einfach nur Werbung
Oliver Nickels of IBM starts the session explaining how IBM uses WoM and direct networking to sell their solutions to the German Mittelstand, because it works better than pure advertising.
Networking is extremely important in German Mittelstand – when it is based on trust. Advertising is too expensive because it’s too broad for this B2B segment.
IBM created and advertised a „mittelstands“-group in Xing. IBM employees actively posts articles and comments, even distributes flyers during events, etc.
Speaker changed: now it’s Dirk Reimers of FAT IT Solutions, speaking about benefits of the IBM Xing group.
In total, it appears to be completely logical to build awareness and consideration via networking – isn’t that how B2B usually works best? Only difference: with Xing these networks expand over time and space…
14:45h Next up is Wolfgang Hünnekens talking about crowdsourcing:
Crowdsourcing
Funktioniert die Kreativität der Massen für das Agenturgeschäft?
The session runs with Markus Roder and Oliver Nickels, but first Wolfgang Hünnekens speaks about crowdsourcing.
Hünnekens starts way at the beginning and tells the old tale of how crowdsourcing was first noticed and researched…
The cases mentioned are the usual suspects: Tchibo, Dell, Fiat500… And now that he wants to show a clip, there are technical difficulties.
The discussion starts with the question: what is creativity? That was a discussion during the last ADC awards.
Markus Roder doesn’t believe in crowdsourcing, because even if a single person gets to estimate things several times in a row, his aggregated estimates are more on target than each individual estimate. Also: people quite often don’t know what they want from a brand. Cites Henry Ford: if he had asked people what they want, they would have said: faster horses.
Oliver Nickels: the examples for advertising crowdsourcing were all „risk-free“. Crowdsourcing in product development is always possible. A brand should not be handed over to the „crowd“.
Interesting question being debated: for which brands could crowdsourcing be relevant? Some brands need to uphold an illusion, a placebo effect to keep up their brand values (Markus Roder).
Next question is: how do you manage consumer perception of a brand – how does crowdsourcing contribute, if a brand needs to be lived?
Another fact: brands have to face an increasing lack of control.
The year the media died… This video is great. almost 10 minutes long, like the original song by Don Mclean, and in bits seemingly redundant, but fun to watch and listen to nevertheless – well done!
Mark Lazen is bold on the idea that facebook might soon be on death watch. One of the main points is that Facebook is trying to be all things to all people. (Sort of like AOL a few years ago.) Which is supposedly the first step of being nothing to nobody, resulting in comparative irrelevance.
I am of a more cynical mindset. I believe that when you’re everything, you are actually nothing.
Right – and not, at the same time. Yes, there will always be more specialized sites for everything FB offers. Flickr is better for photos (in quality, not quantity!), twitter is better for realtime status updates. Many community sites are more topically focused, gaming sites offer better games,… the list can go on and on.
But yet: Spreading your digital acitivities and personas over x-many sites is tedious. Especially if you have different IDs (ok, there will be solutions) and different social networks everywhere. Trying out the top-notch applications everywhere is only fun for the digitally inspired early adopters. For everyone else, a good solution will just do. And believe me: the majority is „everyone else“.
In my own personal circle of friends, facebook is still growing, gaining new fans everyday. (And watching the newsfeed has only become interesting in the last couple of months, as my own network of friends grew.)
I am convinced that the digitally inspired (native or immigrant) underestimate the size and power of the late majority. These people (most of my friends amongst these) will praise those sites, that make a digital whatever easy with a one-stop-shop solution. Of course the quality of the applications and offers can’t be sub-optimal. And for certain topics of interest people might migrate to a specialised competitor. But the rest of their digital activities they might still keep at places like facebook or other sites like it.
The key factor is relevance: as long as facebook offers sufficient relevance, aggregated across all service offers, applications and the individual social network, it will stay top of mind with a large audience. The problem only arises, if facebook becomes second rate at everything they offer. Here I assume: the personal social network is the last resort of stickiness. As soon as your own social network has mostly migrated to other sites, you don’t care to stay either.
During the last couple of days at the next09 conference here in Hamburg Germany, I enjoyed quite a few very interesting presentations, talks and discussions. Amongst the internationally known people were bloggers/thinkers such as Jeff Jarvis, Brian Solis, Umair Haque, Steve Rubel, Stowe Boyd plus a few others. Of course, there were also many well known digerati from Germany/Europe, checkout the next conference homepage for a list of the speakers.
One of the most inspiring speaches was the keynote of Jeff Jarvis, who just wrote the book „what would Google do„.
Techcrunch’s Robin Wauters interviewed Jeff Jarvis during the conference for a quick take on the points he made during his presentations at next09:
In Germany in 2006, we had Opel (of GM) giving 4 Opel cars to bloggers for 4 weeks. Now, 3 years later and in the US, where everything is bigger, longer, etc. Ford does something even bigger and longer:
In the ultimate foreign exchange program, our 100 agents are spending six months behind the wheel of their own Fiesta, sharing their experiences, and completing monthly missions to show you what experiencing the Ford Fiesta is all about, way in advance of the U.S. launch in 2010.
FiestaMovement.com pulls in all of our agents’ content across the web to let you follow the Movement in one convenient place. And each month will highlight different themed Missions, from Travel, Adventure, and Social Activism to Technology, Style & Design, and Entertainment.
Apparently, over 4.000 people applied for this. You can follow the agents on all the usual social media suspects: twitter, facebook, youtube, flickr and on blogs. Plus potentially a few more – it seems to be up to the individual agents, where they want to be present.
The main campaign site is an aggregator of all the agents‘ content. All photos, blog entries, youtube videos,tweets, etc. you can follow on this site, or alternatively via one common RSS feed. Unfortunately, you are not able to participate in any way on the campaign site. No comment option, no voting, etc. At least for now. Once they start the monthly missions (from May 3rd) this might change, we’ll see. However, it might well be their strategy to keep participation in those places, where the content is, where users are used to participate with content: within the social networks themselves.
According to this source here (in German), the project is the single most important piece of „marketing“ for that car. Sounds like there will be no TV, no print advertising, etc. Quite an interesting approach, definitely one I will follow and see how it develops.
I really like social media aggregation projects like this. They are amongst the most complex to implement, believe me, both in terms of technical integration, as well as working out responsibilities and processes within the agency and with the client. Especially when you’re dealing with time frames that last longer than the usual campaign, i.e. at least 6 months, as in this case (if you include recruitment and teaser phase, which we seem to be in right now).
Last, but not least, you need considerable staff 24/7 to maintain the community to filter not acceptable content (yes, for most projects, there will be some!), if they do actually monitor external commentary. (Because, as mentioned above, you don’t seem to be able to comment or participate at all.)
(By the way, does anyone know the agency behind this?)
Wo ich sonst so bin...