A study about user revolution

von | März 11, 2007 | Ad News, Blog, Digital Marketing, Marketing, Marketing Trends, Online Advertising, SEO / SEA, Social Media Marketing

This seems interesting and obvious at the same time – a study about user revolution:

The report defines user revolution as a major trend that is happening primarily with consumers, who are taking control of content consumption and branding. The historically passive consumer is changing rapidly, not only becoming more informed and confident about purchase decisions, but also increasingly taking control of the consumption of information and content that used to be distributed by networks, studios, publishers and retailers […] We believe this will cause a significant rise in prominence of the Internet as a major content consumption and marketing medium.

The „news“ is from a report by Piper&Jaffrey. They list 12 key findings, such as predicted online advertising growth rates over the next few years (around 20% per year), the rise of communitainment (careful: new buzzword!), the rise of Usites (another one!) – sites with user generated content, and the increase of video ads.

At the end, they list the companies most likely to profit from these trends:

Google (and YouTube), Yahoo!, Disney, News Corp., Time Warner, Microsoft, InterActive, Facebook, Craigslist, Brightcove, Yelp, SINA Corp., Baidu, aQuantive, ValueClick, 24/7 Media, Netflix, Wikipedia, MobiTV, Digg and Hakia.

Worldwide internet shutdown day

von | Feb. 25, 2007 | Blog, Digital Culture, Social Media Marketing

Here is a tough assignment: Shut down your computer for a whole day and become analog, as PSFK pointed out. They quote the official site with this:

Be a part of one of the biggest global experiments ever to take place on the Internet. The idea behind the experiment is to find out how many people can go without a computer for one whole day, and what will happen if we all participate!

PSFK continues with a few thoughts on what might happen:

A few scenarios come to mind. Emails will go unanswered, and blogs will not be updated. During lunch breaks, people might talk to their co-workers and go for walks outside. One might even buy a newspaper to catch up on the latest.

At home, computer games will wonder what they’ve done to cause their players to ignore them so completely. The echoes of IM bleeps and pings will temporarily cease.

But the underlying questions beneath Shutdown Day are: Are we so addicted and dependent on our computers that we cannot go without them even for a day? How do we relate to the world when computers are not the biggest blips on our radar screens?

I am uncertain if this is really worthwile. The vote currently goes at 17k „I can“ vs 2.6k „I cannot“. Well, of course. This is a Saturday. People won’t be working, and they can easily postpone their few emails to the following Sunday…

But hey. I will participate. I will be on vacation – I will hopefully be doing something fantastically analogue, like reading a book (yes, information printed on dead wood) in the sun (yes, real light, much brighter than anything I am used to)

Second Life user statistics by country

von | Feb. 11, 2007 | Blog, Digital Culture, Digital Marketing, Marketing Trends, Social Media Marketing

Finally, finally, there are some numbers on the nationalities of Second Life residents. OK, you might argue, they’re all Second Life citizens – true. But nevertheless it was interesting for me as an advertising person to know who actually visits this virtual space.

Now Reuters writes about the latest statistics.And it seems like Europe is well represented – something I never thought:

Europeans make up the largest block of Second Life residents with more than 54 percent of active users in January ahead of North America’s 34.5 percent, according to new Linden Lab data.

Interestingly enough it was especially the French who boosted the european numbers – mainly due to the fact that during their presidential elections in January both parties got actively involved in this virtual world – opening up offices and such.

France has the second-highest number of users after the virtual world became a battleground for the country’s presidential election. Although French residents had long been a part of Second Life, thousands more joined Second Life in January as demonstrators picketed the virtual offices of Jean Marie Le Pen’s far-right National Front party. Socialist candidate Ségolène Royal also established a Second Life presence.

Here is the complete overview:

Active residents by country

  • United States 31.19%
  • France 12.73%
  • Germany 10.46%
  • United Kingdom 8.09%
  • Netherlands 6.55%
  • Spain 3.83%
  • Brazil 3.77%
  • Canada 3.30%
  • Belgium 2.63%
  • Italy 1.93%

The numbers add up to round about 85% – which means that 15% are spread out over the remaining +/-150 nations worldwide. And I guess that China makes up a large part of that 15% – even though I would have expected them within this list…

The average resident is 33 years old, and:

58.9 percent of residents declared themselves as men when they registered, compared with 55.5 percent a year earlier.

I like the way that is put: „declared themselves as men“. But it’s true. On the web, you never know – and in Second Life this is just as well the case…

One more link: these news were posted within the Reuters Second Life News Center Website. (I just want to keep track of this link for myself…)

Ageless web2.0: 80+ year old digital immigrants on the rise.

von | Feb. 1, 2007 | Blog, Digital Culture, Marketing Trends, Social Media Marketing

Seems like there is no age limit for any web2.0 application. We were already amazed with geriatric1927, who started fiddling with a webcam and quickly gathered a huge crowd of fans.

As of August 16, 2006, geriatric1927 was the most subscribed user on YouTube. His rise to the #1 position took place in just over a week.

Not quite as „multimedia“, but a little older instead, is Don. He blogs on his blog „Don to Earth“ and with 93 years old, he is probably one of the oldest, if not THE oldest blogger on earth.

I am certain, that in 40-50 years time, there will be millions of 80+ year old webusers blogging and youtubing away (if blogs and youtube then still exist). But at the moment this is an amazing step by these two guys. If I look at my grand dad, who has trouble understanding the concept of any modern digital device, I cannot imagine him writing a blog. (He does own and use a cell phone, though).

At the same time, I am curious (as I already wrote earlier on), how much (personal) content will float around a most probably gigantic social web. There might be 80+ year old bloggers who have an archive of 40+ years of blog posts…

The dangers of a „microchunk web culture“

von | Jan. 27, 2007 | Blog, Digital Culture, Marketing Trends, Social Media Marketing

Nicholas Carr has an interesting post titled: Honey, I shrunk the culture

In this post, he goes on about the fact that the new possibilities to deliver and consume content – i.e. through wikis, blogs, youtube-style videos, etc. – we all receive micro-chunked particles of information that increases our propensity to turn into ADD victims. That might be useful for managing that information but it also means, that our attention decreasingly focuses on longform content:

Many of man’s greatest works demand and deserve extended, steady attention. They can’t be boiled down. They can’t be snippetized, widgetized, or otherwise turned into bite-sized morsels. You can’t compress culture into a Zip file.And that’s the danger here. The new medium doesn’t just promote the proliferation of small pieces; it devalues the long form. In fact, it doesn’t even make room for big, extended works. It’s actively biased against them, technologically and economically.

Scary, if we loose the ability to focus on longform content in the future! But at the same time I think you need to differentiate between types of content. I don’t need the news in longform content, as long as the main facts are delivered. Many articles I read in newspapers in the past focused too much on storytelling for news where I was only interested in the main facts.

But: sometimes storytelling is important. Either because there are news that I want to have some background information on (and while newspapers and magazines are generally prognosed to face a difficult future, I still think this deliverance of background information is a good niche for them, when trying to compete with online media). Or, because we are really interested in the story, the athmosphere and the characters, much more than pure facts and the plot (i.e. facts).

I don’t think, for example, that it would delight many people, to read the last Harry Potter through a number of interlinked microchunks on the internet. We want that book, and we will take our time to read it, the more pages, the better!