Communities Dominate Brands

eBay Supplements Income for One and a Half Million US Entrepreneurs

According to a new  survey conducted by eBay, entrepreneurs in record  numbers are setting up shop on eBay. More than 724,000 Americans report that eBay is their primary  or secondary source of income. In addition to these professional eBay  sellers, another 1.5 million individuals say they supplement their income by selling on eBay, according to the July 2005 survey.

In the first six months of 2005, eBay members in the U.S. sold merchandise  worth approximately $10.6 billion. The report concludes that the  number of eBay entrepreneurs in the U.S. has increased 68 percent since the last time a comparable study was conducted in 2003. That study indicated  that 430,000 Americans at the time were making some or all of their income selling on eBay.

Bill Cobb, president of eBay North  America, said "In just 10 years, eBay has become the destination for Americans pursuing  their visions of entrepreneurship. It's exciting to think that many of them will go on to build thriving  businesses, create jobs and fuel their local economies -- while achieving  the satisfaction of turning their vision into reality."  

Via The Media Research Centre

Alan & Mark Earls in conversation

Mark Earls from Ogilvy and I had an interesting debate last night organised by the IPA . And my thanks must go to Isabella von Bulow and Rory Sutherland for organising and promoting the event.

Lots of interesting dialogue and the meme that emerged from our chat was that what is currently happening around us is not about technology, its about what the technology does, it reveals that we are deeply social animals, and that it is the interactivity between us that businesses should be thinking about promoting. Rather than thinking about one-2-one marketing, for example.

Combine that with the significant challenges that digital economics throws at nearly all businesses, then one can argue that there is something of a paradigm shift going on. which means we need to start to reframe our thinking around what marketing is and what marketing does. From the sides of both businesses and the marketing specialist forms that they employ.

We had lots of questions from the floor. But if anyone who attened the event wanted to ask more questions, I would be happy to continue the conversation.

Wall St Journal gets Business Blogging - they quote Adriana Cronin-Lukas

The Wall Street Journal Europe in an article today entitled Blogging for Business are clearly getting the actual point of business blogging, that it is not a mere hobbyist opinion-argument vehicle, but a most potent tool for real business communication needs. Not only for external communication, but very importantly for internal communication - as our blogging guru Adriana Cronin-Lukas of the Big Blog Company has been saying for a long time already.  The WSJE has also discovered Adriana's impressive insights into this topic and quote her at length in the article, including this:

Rather than trying to generate ideas in meetings, Ms. Cronin-Lukas advises, companies should create an internal blog on which employees can share ideas. A blog allows employees to show tangible evidence of their thinking and expertise, getting ideas out of their heads and putting them to work for the company.

Good job WSJE ! A very good article on business and blogging.

Consumers are doing it for themselves

The IPA have very kindly invited me to speak at an event on Monday 25th July 2005 with the esteemed Mark Earls - Head of Planning and Strategy at Ogilvy.

We will be at Rootstein Hopkins Space, London College of Fashion, 20 John Princes St, London W1G 0BJ. Kick-off starts at 6.30pm Final whistle 8.30pm.

The title of the conversation Mark and I are going to have is:

Consumers are doing it for themselves!

We will be discussing quite a few things from our recently published book Communities Dominate Brands and also Mark will be drawing from his exstensive experience and knowledge.

I am looking forward to it.

why should you come along? well The Economist's leader editorial of 2 April 2005 stated that

Many firms do not yet seem aware of the revolutionary implications of newly empowered consumers. Only those firms ready and able to serve these new customers will survive.

Rory Sutherland, Vice-Chairman and Executive Creative Director of Ogilvy One, and Chair of the IPA Creative Forum will chair the discussion.

Tickets are £35+vat (£41.13) for members and £45+vat (52.88) for non-members.

To attend this event, please download the booking form Ideas beyond Ads and fax it to 020 7235 6202 addressed to Martin Albers or email it to [email protected]

If you have any queries, please call Martin on 0207 2018247. Seats are limited and available on a strictly first come, first served basis.

Click here to go to the IPA website.

Dell Hell

I read about Jeff Jarvis's Dell Hell the other day...

Adriana has blogged about it over at Media influencer

Adriana says

Yesterday, I waded through Jeff Jarvis's record of his experiences with a new Dell laptop that is on the way of becoming another case study in 'customers-bite-back-online' trend. The last post is:

And Jeff gets stuck in

One of the great lessons of the cluetrain era is that your customers are your best customer support agents and marketers if only you allow them ... and respect them enough to listen to them. Dell does't. As we reported the other day, Dell shut its general customer forums... which should be the place for customers to help each other.

Adriana mentions CNETnews.com that writes about the the closure of the forums as Dell struggles with complaints. CNETnews says:

Considering its customer-friendly track record, Dell's recent decision to shut down its Customer Care message boards is getting pilloried as an act of monumental stupidity, if not monumental arrogance. The company says the closure is necessary because authorized Dell representatives--and not customers--need to handle the oh-so-complicated issues that were being handled on the message board.

Am I missing something here?

Jeff muses:

Considering its customer-friendly track record, Dell's recent decision to shut down its Customer Care message boards is getting pilloried as an act of monumental stupidity, if not monumental arrogance.... Dell chose to shut down the forum rather than engage with its customers.

Neville Hobson leaves a post that refers to another ongoing debate with Landrover and one unfortunate blogger Adrian Melrose

Landrover haveyoursay

Neville also posts on the issue here

MTV turns 24, discussion with Kerry Woo of Motricity USA

I had a very interesting discussion with Kerry Woo of Motricity. He used to work for Warner Cable when they launched MTV. Kerry blogged about our meeting and the MTV history at his blogsite Wonderdawg under topic of "I want my MTV (still)"

Those who have seen me probably have heard me with MTV related comments. I have had several, but two MTV related stories have been recurring themes. I should mention that I am one of those "heretics" who are true "vidiots" who prefer a music video to live concert footage (just as I also prefer the recorded versions of any pop/rock/rap/dance music to the live versions). So perhaps MTV rings a particularly strong bell inside my head..

Nonetheless, MTV has given us a fantastic example of what any advertising/promotion should strive for. Back in the 1970s the music recording industry was trying to capitalise on the emergence of pop music TV shows. Global artists like Queen, David Bowie, Abba and the Rolling Stones in the 1970s were finding that they could send "film clips" of their latest hits to be played on the shows, even when the artists themselves did not have time to fly all around the world promoting every new release of singles and albums. These precursors to the modern music video were very clearly developed as the promotional tools for new music. They were advertisements.

MTV came along in 1981 and took these music film clips, and started to play them in rotation. Originally back in 1981 there wasn't enough of this content to fill 24 hours of broadcasting, so MTV ran at a 12 hour clock with the same programming repeated twice per day. And even that was not enough, so they also ran feature-length concert films to fill out the time.

Nonetheless, what MTV was doing was a fantastic innovation. They took what had been built as advertising, and what was definitely free content to MTV - the music film clips - and turned these into the early music videos shown on MTV. And then, here is the part that always makes me smile - to a show already consisting 100% of advertising, MTV had the nerve to SELL advertising. Now Pepsi, Nike, Levis etc were all fighting for paid advertising slots between the MTV videoclips, which themselves were obviously advertising. As MTV was only available on cable TV, it meant that viewers were paying to view a channel of 100% advertising. Arguably MTV was one of the early killer applications of cable/satellite broadcasting, so for those customers who made their purchase decision based on the availability of MTV, they actually paid quite a significant sum per month to get to see advertising 24 hours a day...

In the process MTV became the most desired youth brand in the world. This is what I hold as the example when I lecture to the mobile telecoms, wireless content, and advertising industries. Lets take the MTV example, and try to build advertising/promotional content which is so compelling that users will WANT to receive it.

The other popular MTV story comes from Sweden where MTV has launched itself as an MVNO (Mobile Virtual Network Operator) - ie a service provider that competes with the major local mobile network operators (carriers) and thus sells its own branded mobile phones and subscriptions. Yes, voice minutes, text messages etc on an MTV phone? What do you think about your kids. If they are given the option of a Vodafone mobile phone or an Orange mobile phone - or an MTV mobile phone, which would they take?  No contest. If MTV is an option and especially the text messaging costs are competitive, most young people will rush for that?

August 1, 2005 - MTV turns 24 years old. The first music video they played was "Video killed the Radio Star" by the Bugles. Happy birthday MTV !  And yes, I want my MTV. I cannot imagine a cable/satellite subscription without at least one channel of 24 hours of music videos..

GM Vice Chairman gives advice to would be corporate bloggers

JUMP

Via the wonderful Neville Hobsons blog

From Nevilles post

Writing in Information Week , Lutz says a blog provides no better opportunity to engage in an open dialogue and exchange of ideas with customers and potential customers, illustrating his experiences with the GM FastLane Blog:

Since January, I've been participating, along with other members of General Motors' senior management, in the GM Fastlane blog (fastlane.gmblogs.com). We've found the blog to be a hugely effective communications tool and a terrific way to conduct a grassroots, largely unfiltered conversation with GM fans and nonfans alike.

The key is to leave the corporate-speak behind and keep the tone conversational, open, and honest. Anyone who has read our blog sees the real deal, as produced by us and not polished by several layers of trained communications pros.

Another aspect that helps keep things real is the wealth of comments posted by readers and other bloggers. We don't filter out negative comments, complaints, or hate mail. All we do is screen for spam and posts from crackpots using language that most people would find offensive.

It's important that we run the bad with the good. We'd take a credibility hit if we posted only rosy compliments, and credibility is the most important attribute a corporate blog can have. Once it's gone, your blog is meaningless.

Neville also suggest reading up on

New York Times interview with Bob Lutz

And from the NevOn Vaults

GM Blog continues to push the envelope
Why every company should blog
GM stays on track

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.