Communities Dominate Brands

Blogs give some companies the willies

MARKETERS AT AD:TECH Tuesday indicated a deep ambivalence towards blogs, saying that their companies urgently want a blog presence but, at the same time, fear the consequences of letting consumers freely express their opinions.

Steve Pinetti, senior vice president of marketing at Kimpton Hotels, said

with 60 percent of the hotels' business coming from word of mouth referrals, unflattering comments can be devastating. When consumers start bad-mouthing his hotels on the Web, "I have a heart attack,"

Mediapost reports

Catherine Muriel, chief marketing officer of E-Loan, countered that the free publicity conferred by bloggers outweighs any potential negative comments. "If you have a heart attack every time someone writes something that's not nice about you, you're going to be ... spending a lot of time at the cardiologist," she said.

As Perry de Havilland says peole will talk about you whether yoou like it or not, the good the bad and the ugly. SO you might as well join in the debate.

Via mediapost

Guest Smoothies

Those inventive bods at Innocent smoothies demonstrate that co-creation can exist even in a simple drink.

a guest smoothie designed by you...

The idea with this one is to get fresh ideas out of our kitchen and into the shops as quickly as we can. The first escapee is pineapples, blueberries and ginger. Delicious with subtle hint of ginger malice. Dangerous

Via PSFK

Citizen Jounalists writing the first draft of history

Tomi has already posted on the phenomonen of Citizen Journalists who came to the fore as a consequence of the tragic London Bombings - but I wanted to add my piece.

My friend Rob Castle of Korg UK sent me a link to a Newsweek article and from there I went in search of more information.

The Newsweeks headline states History's New First Draft

The headline is based upon the musings of guru Dan Gilmour who was mentioned in a New York Times piece.

Dan Gillmor, founder of Grassroots Media, which promotes what it calls "citizen journalism," said witnesses' photos and online accounts would reshape the role of traditional news media over time. As more and more photographs and blogs go online with major events, Mr. Gillmor said, the mainstream news media should search those postings and point their readers to the best ones.

"A lot of what's being done by the citizen-journalist will be most useful as people start pulling together the best images and stories," he said. "There was a cliché that journalists write the first draft of history. Now I think these people are writing the first draft of history at some level, and that's an important shift."

What Tomi outlines in the previous post is the scale, speed and reach of how citizen reporters, and traditional news media and the blogosphere converged to deliver news in realtime.

Cian O'Donovan posted 17 of his photos online at flickr.com, this aggregated into hundreds of nonprofessional images at Flickr.

The New York Times said, The BBC posted photographs and videos taken by witnesses, and The Guardian posted experiences that readers submitted on a running Web log .

Newsweek said

Take, as a case study, the most instantly iconic photo to emerge from the bombings: a hazy picture of a man in a crowded, eerily lit subway tunnel, holding a handkerchief to his mouth. That picture was taken on a camera phone by Adam Stacey, by no means a professional photographer, who happened to be on the subway train that was hit in a tunnel outside the Kings Cross tube station. Stacey instantly beamed the image to his friend Alfie Dennen, who runs moblog.co.uk. Dennen published the snapshot with a Creative Commons license permitting anybody to reprint it provided Stacey received credit for the photo. From there the image was picked up by picturephoning.com and then Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia that is edited by its readers, followed by Sky News, the Associated Press and finally the BBC and the Guardian newspaper. It has since been everywhere.

The photo-sharing site flickr.com allows users to attach a keyword, or “tag,” to their pictures. The current list of the hottest tags are: londonbombblast, aftermath, july7, terrorism, mourning, unionjack, londres and kingscross.

On CNN the first video footage of the event that appeared was videophone footage from inside one of the damaged trains.

Newsweek goes onto say

Technorati.com, a site that monitors what is going on in the world of blogs, created a page to track the latest news, conversation and firsthand reports from London. The site reports that "As of 4:30 p.m. on July 7, 2005, Technorati measured a 30 percent increase in blog posting over the normal level. And nine out of 10 Top Searches were about the bombings."

Then comes perhaps the most powerful demonstration of connected communities and the collective effort defining and refining in real time the information that was coming from the chaotic streets of London

But perhaps the biggest story on Thursday was Wikipedia , the online encyclopedia that Internet users around the world freely add to and edit. Yesterday’s entry on the London bombings was amended, edited and updated by hundreds of readers no fewer than 2,800 times throughout the day. The entry has photographs, detailed timelines, contact numbers, a complete translated statement by the jihadist group claiming responsibility for the attacks and links to other Wikipedia entries.

The sheer magnitude of the information provided at such speed is astonishing. All created by individuals and peer-to-peer networks, all becoming a community around a significant issue.

Jeff Jarvis at Buzz machine describes this type of activity as hot media ; blogs, online message boards, wikipedia are all dynamic media - where collective social interaction sits at the epicentre.

Cold media is the traditional one way broadcast model - and minus the social interaction. The rawness and immediacy of wikipedia, blogs, the images generated by mobile phones, strips away the veneer of traditional media, unfiltered becomes authentic, more visceral. The information is built communually off, and then, online. It somehow has a power and urgency that supersedes traditional media

There are many lessons here about communities, communication, the media, the rise of social media read here or here or here that are worth pondering on.

Review of our book at Amazon

I am feeling very chuffed this afternoon, as I went to the Amazon site to check up on our book to see that a chap called Aaron had reviewed our book .

Aaron says

This book impresses on every page with statistics, quotes, evidence and logic. The book proceeds logically from one concept to another. It forces the reader to re-examine assumptions, and constantly presents impressive examples from all around the world. The concepts are real, the trends sustainable and therefore their conclusions are indisputable.

The book is loaded with insightful examples and revealing case studies. The brand names and companies are all household names but the reader will be surprised how many unrelated industries are now involved with communities, from Adidas to Red Bull. Many times you have to put the book down to fully grasp the extent of their meaning.

There are chapters on blogging, on virtual worlds/videogaming and on cellphone based Generation-C. These are used as the three primary areas where digital communities already exist. The book then shows how just about every industry from TV and the internet to locksmiths and aerospace are feeling the impacts of communities.

The early part of the book discusses familiar themes of disruptive technologies, convergence and fragmentation. These are amplified with alarming facts, stats and examples. The second half of the book takes the reader deep into the near future, showing what changes are already happening to society. The book makes a compelling case as it so broadly provides examples from countries such as Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong, England, Finland, Holland etc, in addition to USA and Canada.

The book concludes with the earth-shattering impacts to all of business, that brand dominance is now being superceded by community power. But where most books might end at introducing a revolutionary new problem or issue, this book goes on with another chapter to explain how that problem can be solved.

A remarkable book, thoroughly captivating, immensely insightful. I recommend it to anyone in business or technology.

I think I am going to have myself a cold beer.

Blogs, culture and the mediating power of blogging

I have been reading Shel Israels and Robert Scobles blog - Naked Conversations - which is proving to be required reading. As if it would be anything else.

I sneaked off to their blog to avoid finishing up a piece I am currently writing for Market Leader. And I well be adding more stuff to it now as a consequence of reading the blog!

The guys have just posted Ch 8— Non-English Speaking Blogs

This chapter looks at culture and why some countries take to blogging and why others do not. Hence the quote.

“ We are all so different.” —Dr. Alfred Kinsey

“We are all alike.” —The 14th Dali Lama

An excerpt I found particuarly interesting was where Shel and Robert discuss in depth a prominent French businessman who has started to blog himself and has found it a valuable experience.

Shel and Robert inform us that Leclerc is president of the Association des Centres Distributeurs E. Leclerc, a co-op association of about 600 small and large retailers, mostly in France, but throughout Europe, particularly Italy. Its strategy is to negotiate tough and in volume with suppliers to keep customer prices low. The association was established in 1949, by M.E.’s father Edouard Leclerc, who owned and operated a single retail shop in Brittainy, then decided to organize like-minded retailers across France... There are few French citizens who do not shop at one or more E. Leclerc association stores and the popularity of the association is as immense with the general public as it is reviled by high margin competitors.

The popular Leclerc was mentioned so often as a candidate in the last presidential election that he had to go on television to declare he would not run.

This is how Leclerc describes his experience of blogging and the rewards it brings.

Although he finds unevenness in the quality of comments he receives, he told us they “oblige me to polish up my arguments. These are good tests before I take the floor at conferences. I was, for instance, very fond of reducing the VAT [ European Community Value Added Tax] for products that most respect the environment (organic, fair trade, etc.). I thought that would boost their sales to the detriment of products that pollute more. But comments kept insisting the idea would be nearly impossible to implement and I moderated my position.” Another time, Leclerc used his blog to take on a member of French Parliament who proposed banning merchants from bagging up buyer’s goods in non-biodegradable bags. Leclerc suggested recyclable bags as a more pragmatic alternative...” both cases,”been supported by many bloggers in their comments. So, the member of Parliament moderated his proposal.

The mediating power of dicussion, time for reflection and response via blogs is powerfully communicated in this piece.

what I value in the Naked Conversations blog is the considered writing and thinking that brings blogging into context minus the hype.

I will be placing my order for book.

London bombings: Citizen Journalism arrives to TV

Continuing on Alan's theme in the previous posting.. 

We've seen the advent of citizen journalism in the print media in such cases as Oh My News (and the web obviously especially with blogging). There have been many isolated cases of citizens happening to capture amateur video from the Rodney King's beating to the World Trade Center attacks of 7/11. In the TV world, these were still the exceptions, and TV broadcasting did the majority of the coverage. The last big event to be still dominated by professional TV journalism was the Boxing Day Tsunami of 2004, where for example the BBC received some 70 amateur video clips, but their vast majority of clips aired were by professional journalists.

The 7/7 bombings of London last week, are now the first major news event to have the majority of the video content provided by amateur journalists. In an event that was shorter in duration, and much much MUCH more condensed in geographical area coverage - than the Tsunami half a year earlier - yet the London event had over 300 video clips sent to the BBC alone (in addition to over 1000 still images) according to today's Financial Times. Helen Boaden, Director of the BBC News said, "No one knows where this is going to take us. The gap between the professional and non-professional news gatherers is getting narrower." Simon Bucks, Associate Editor of Sky News echoes these themes by saying, "This is probably the first big story in Britain where we have seen this effect, where camera phones allow eyewitnesses a method of recording news and getting it broadcast."

With the rapid spread of cameraphones worldwide, such citizen journalism becomes a much more widely spread resource than even the world's largest news gathering organizations, like CNN or BBC can hope to maintain. Thus increasingly we will see the early footage of unanticipated breaking news stories captured by amateour journalists.

Now an editorial comment by me (and I believe Alan would agree) - I think these citizen journalists should be both recognised and paid, like we show in the Oh My News case study in our book. The BBC is taking full rights of anything submitted but does not pay its amateur contributors. Shame on you BBC, how dare you! Sky News pays half of its freelance rate, or 250 UKP for material that is used. That is how it should be. And the BBC cannot possibly claim any financial reasons for not paying for this content. If the BBC cannot rush a reporter onto the site, and wants to air footage of a news event, then pay the person who produced it !

News to mobile video

Via 3G

Europe : Mobile video specialist, All New Video, announced that it has completed trials and has gone live with a video blogging service for UK broadcaster, ITN.

Launched to coincide with the G8 summit being held in Gleneagles, the service allows ITV News viewers to dial in from a 3G phone and leave a video message of their views of the conference and surrounding issues. The messages are presented to the editorial team for selection and broadcast on live television news programmes.

All New Video provide this functionality for ITN as a managed service from one of their European hosted facilities. The packaged service is comprised of the specialist software necessary to provide a two-way video call between mobile networks and studio-based networks, as well as the hardware and software necessary to host the carrier class service. This allows ITN to use and deploy the service with very low initial outlay and a manageable total cost of ownership.

All New Video were successful in winning the ITN contract because they offered great flexibility and innovation. Keith Cass, ITN’s Director of Technology explained:

News broadcasting increasingly involves representing the opinions of our viewers, live, along with the breaking news. As a leading news broadcaster in the UK, we are always keen to deploy new technologies to improve our coverage and representation of views. All New Video was able to deliver a branded service for us to use at the G8 summit at very short notice. As well as being able to work to our tight deadline, we have been very impressed with the quality of their service and plan to use it as part of our wider news gathering capability.