Communities Dominate Brands

The great junk mail revolt

Now this is a first - us quoting the Daily Mail.

But I first became aware of this particular story whilst listening to BBC radio 1. The news item was that a Welsh postman had been suspended from work for misconduct - for - delivering to all the housholds on his route a form that would enable them to stop JUNK MAIL.

The Mail writes on its front page August 30 2006

The furore follows Royal Mail's decision to suspend a postman who tried to help people who are fed up with junk mail.

Roger Annies, 48, sent a letter to customers in Barry, South Wales explaining how they could opt out of receiving the mailshots by filling out a form. He has been suspended on full pay pending an inquiry into alleged misconduct. Spurred on by his example, thousands of householders tried yesterday to sign up to the postal giant's opt-out service.

But as their phone hotline went into meltdown it emerged that even if they are successful in signing up, there is a substantial catch.

The catch is apparently that the post office cannot seperate all junk mail from important government information that needs to be posted to households.

Bullshit. The post office will have segmented the country into ABCD and E's - Direct Mail will be targeted to particular geographic locations and income levels. And the post office will have a presentation and data demonstrating the financial benefit of direct mail.

If you ask to opt out, you are sent a letter by Royal Mail which warns that it wants you to be 'fully aware of the implications.'

It says: 'It is not possible for us to separate advertising material and information that you may want, such as leaflets from Central and Local Government and other public bodies.

Oh come on!!!!!!!

But there is more :-)

Consumer groups insist customers must have the right to opt out, without being kept in the dark about Government information.

It could include anything from vital information about changes to rubbish collection times to Home Office handouts about dealing with a terrorist threat.

So we have to keep receiving dead trees just in case there might be vital information about a terrorist threat? Yawn.

Junk mail is a vital and rapidly-growing part of Royal Mail's business - and it is set to get even bigger. Last year, it delivered a record 3.3 billion items through its door-to-door service, a rise of 12.1 per cent on the previous year.

At present, there is a strict limit that it cannot deliver more than three items of junk mail every week to each of the 27 million households in Britain. But this limit will go in the next few months, depending on negotiations with the Communication Workers Union.

Sadly the article points out that if the post office does not do it - then their rivals will.

The madness is that junk mail is exactly that. Whilst the the reality is that more and more people are going online to search for the information they want - so why on earth should junk mail be increasing?

The internet is ripping the heart out of unwanted messaging - because we are now in control of inormation and the information we want to consume.

The post office and the direct mail companies are caught between a rock and a hard plac. let me explain...

From a standing start, online players have shot from winning £200m of the £14.1bn spent on UK advertising in 2001 to £1.3bn of the £15.3bn spent last year, according to the Advertising Association. That's from 1.4% to 8.5% of the market. In the same period, TV advertising has gone from £3.5bn to £3.8bn, but the proliferation of channels means the networks are having a tough time, as evidenced by the travails of ITV.

According to a recent study by one of the world's biggest media buyers, GroupM, online advertising will account for 13.3% of all advertising this year - stripping out direct marketing. This is up from 9.8% in 2005 and for the first time beating national newspapers' share.

And

The European Interactive Advertising Association reckons that of the 54.5 hours a week the average Brit spent watching TV, listening to the radio, reading newspapers and magazines and surfing the web last year, 10.7 hours were spent online. That means 20% of all media time attracted only 9.8% - or 8.5% using the Advertising Association's figures - of advertising cash. And in the crucial 16- to-34-year-old bracket, the figure for online usage is much, much higher.

So that is an ironic joke - internet consumption up - advertising down - junk mail not read - but increasing - cooool

Now back to the daily mail and another joke

One of Royal Mail's biggest rivals, TNT Post, which does not have an opt out service, insisted yesterday that junk mail is popular in some households.

Its almost as good as - Man walks into a bar..... OUCH!

Yes we wait for the junk mail - we dream of the junk mail - we yearn for mountains of junk mail - to discuss it over the family meal table and with our friends at work

"hey did you see that really cool piece of junk mail from fatty freddies burger bar? Man I read it cover to cover"

I find it fascinating - that so many companies have not woken up to the fact that PUSH media is OLD WORLD not NEW WORLD. NEW WORLD is engagment and all about attraction - search and valubale information.

I feel sorry for the poor old posty who thought he was doing a good thing for his community.

How about this for a question - who found out about the postman Roger Annies who sent the letter to all in his post round? Was it the post office? Was it he customer service dept that then informaed superiors? Or, was it companies that were paying large sums of money to spam various communities and households??

As I was once told – being right is not always the right thing to do.

However, the erosion in the trust of organisations is not something to be taken lightly.

I am all for efficiency but surely if a postman trying to do his best, gets suspended for wanting to do the right thing, we have to admit someting is very wrong.

The Daily Mail comments section, has one person commenting

I think its very cheeky and the opt out policy should actually be opt-in.

When people spam your email they can be arrested and charged. Perhaps this is no differnet and the Royal Mail should seriously look at their policy of spamming by default.

They certainly spam more people than any spammer I have heard of.

Cheeky indeed...My pennyworth it is engagement not unwnated messaging that will drive the companies of tommorow. Postman Roger Annies is a local hero

Universal to offer all of its music online for free

A quick note, yesterday CNN and BBC reported that Universal Music (the world's largest music publisher) will launch an online music download service where (as far as I understood it) all music will be available for free. The service will be funded by advertising. We'll write more about it as further details become available (and Alan and I return from summer vacation).

Google and ebay following the money - in contextual content and search

Google and eBay form alliance to tailor ads to every customer

Was the headline in the Guardian today.

Don't tell me ITV is not in trouble! Its business model is defunct as is the same model used by other terrestrial giants in media, audio-visual and print. also read here

But search will be curated, and that will be delivered by communties of interest and passion.
Its a new socio-economic busiiness model

The world's biggest internet auction company, eBay, has signed up Google to help create a range of sophisticated online advertisements individually tailored to each of its customers.

In an alliance between two of cyberspace's best-known names, eBay announced that Google would be the exclusive provider of advertising on its sites in all countries outside America.

Whenever a potential bidder seeks a product on eBay, Google will use its search expertise to come up with relevant promotional links. To make the links more lucrative, the two companies will collaborate on so-called "click-to-call" advertising, which allows shoppers to talk to vendors at the touch of a button.

It will be good, contextual and relevant content that people will search for. This is not demographics and this is where search comes in ever so handy.

Combat soldier videos in the line of fire

MTV has broadcast a documentary on the phenomenon, entitled Iraq Uploaded: The War Network TV Won't Show You.

Time says that never before has there been such an uncensored "visual document" of life during wartime.

Every soldier seems to have some form of video camera device; some affix them to their helmets to film firefights. This is a generation raised on games consoles; many of the clips are set to music.

Journalists from MTV have interviewed returning US troops, some of who have shot hours of footage. Some of the troops say making clips has been cathartic and, when they are back home, helps them feel a connection to friends still in Iraq.

Says The Guardian

On You Tube there are 9785 videos on Iraq

However there is as always an alternative perspective on the role of this video footage

implication is that the soldiers' videos offer "unfiltered" access to the soldiers' experiences of the war. As MTV reporter Gideon Yago describes it, "from the hilarious, to the sublime, to the gruesome and the terrifying, these are anonymous, unspun visions of Iraq in their raw, stark reality." But the MTV report doesn't address the implications of this policy, what it means that the military is allowing this footage to appear online, and that is, by far, the more crucial question.

I think the answer to this question is hiding in plain sight in Yago's interview with a 20-year old consumer of Iraq War videos. While the interviewee acknowledged that the violence in the videos deterred him from joining the Marines, it's clear that the videos produced an explicit sense of identification with the soldiers and with the excitement and adrenaline of the war. It's also worth noting that this "unfiltered" perspective on the war is consciously contrasted with the coverage of the war by the major TV networks. While it's certainly fair to be critical of the networks' decision not to show the coffins of dead soldiers, for example, the implication that the soldiers' videos are providing access to a truth unavailable on the news needs to be interrogated more carefully.

At the same time, Iraq Uploaded is remarkably uncritical when it comes to comparing the US soldiers' videos with similar videos produced by the insurgents. There's a strange transition in which Yago interviews a wounded Iraq veteran who was hit in the chest by gunfire. The soldier was wearing a bulletproof vest and along with members of his unit managed to capture the insurgents who shot him. We then learn from a Homeland Security worker that the footage was taken by insurgents who ostensibly intended to use the video for "propaganda purposes," with the implication being that US soldiers' video footage serves a more complicated purpose, whether that's to depict the war to others back home or to help the sodleirs recover from the trauma of war. I'm not suggesting that the soldiers' videos don't serve those functions, of course, but the report failed to consider how Iraqi audiences might have more complicated uses for video footage of the war.

The Washington Post reported on the rise of these massive data and information flows , and I think we need now to move forward towards now a deeper understanding of what is happening to our media, how it is created and the role of citizen journalism.

In a matter of weeks, YouTube has become a video Dumpster for a global audience to share first-hand reports, military strategies, propaganda videos and personal commentary about a violent conflict as it unfolds. Anyone can post movies for free, and the site boasts that 100 million videos are watched daily. It is a disorganized bazaar of images that requires visitors to search for a specific topic; searches for both "Hezbollah" and "Israel" yield hundreds of videos, some of them violently graphic, others not so serious.

And

Supporters of citizen journalism, the idea that ordinary people are best positioned to provide information and reports about current events, say that verifying information is often difficult but that eventually there will be a way to make doing so easier.

"The next generation in this will be people who recognize we need a YouTube that has some kind of identity verification behind it, to assign credibility to particular sources," said Robert Niles, editor of the Online Journalism Review at University of Southern California.

The issue is taking on more weight every day, as YouTube gains viewers to the Internet's most popular amateur video site. YouTube's audience "in real numbers, I think any broadcast executive would consider it a huge audience -- it's just dispersed around the globe. It would probably challenge hourly ratings at NBC or CNN," Niles said.

My space has a higer Nielsen rating than MTV

At Mediashift there is a full and expansive report on the Combat Soldier Videos

Significantly the U.S. military seems to have a more relaxed policy to these combat videos

When I first queried the military on this issue in January, they told me that CENTCOM (the U.S. Central Command) prohibited photographing or filming detainees or human casualties, but that the videos they saw on YouTube didn’t appear to violate policy — they were simply in bad taste.

But that bad taste crossed a line when Corporal Joshua Belile recently recorded a song called Hadji Girl on video. The song is about a soldier who falls in love with an Iraqi girl, but then is ambushed by the family when he goes to meet them. He then uses her sister as a human shield

Joshua Belile had to issue an apology.

The pressing implication is that control of the an "open media ecology" is very hard if not impossible to do. OK and there is much debate to be had here.

But what is the true driver to these massive date flows in the broadest sense one can imagine? From porn blogs to combat videos and everything else in between. If you start to get to the bottom of this issue you will be looking beyond the immediate phenomena of You Tube and Myspace to think more strategically about engagement.

DVD market squeezed by free DVDs

Still in todays' Financial Times. An amazing statistic from Screen Digest. Apparently in the first quarter of 2006 in Britain, for every DVD sold, another one was given away for free, as a front-mounted free give-away DVD on magazines and newspapers. Apparently this is a UK led innovation, the rest of the world is still only learning to use free give-away DVDs to boost magazine and newspaper circulations. The cost to provide a DVD is about 30 pence which includes the printing and packaging and mounting - and the royalties involved even to give away "expensive content" liek some movies.

The FT quote Screen Digest's video analyst Helen David Jayalath who says that this practise reduces demand of full-price DVDs bought in stores. This tend devalues the value of the DVD as a product, in the minds of consumers. The overall household purchases of DVDs are slightly down from a rate of 12.5 DVDs per year last year to 11.4 this year.

Also bear in mind the previous stories here at our blogsite that video and music content is migrating to VOD, IPTV, podcasting, MP3 download (and iTunes), and mobile TV formats. DVDs themselves obviously are increasingly sold on the web. And further, that supermarkets are becoming the biggest outlets for selling DVDs. Not a good time to be in the music CD and DVD retailing business...

Magazines continue slide in readership: UK mens magazines now measured

Today's Financial Times reports also on the continuing downward spiral in circulation in the print media. This time they focus on Men's magazines (FHM, Nuts, Loaded, Maxim, Men's Health etc). The sector sees an overall decline of 13% from last year, and some leading titles like Maxim and Loaded have seen circulation figures drop by over 20% in one year. The article also mentions that womens' magazines are witnessing continuing drops in circulation but of smaller overall percentages, with titles such as Marie Claire, Good Housekeeping and Yours all dropping 5% or more from last year.

Regular readers of our blogsite know this continuing story - yes, those readers are increasingly on more interactive media - online on the web, in multiplayer environments, on mobile content etc. Expect the trends to continue and to see ever more famous long-lasting titles discontinued because of diminishing circulations.

TV Broadcast news lost half of its audience from peak - CBS now simulcasts online

Today's Financial Times reported that American broadcast TV nightly news audiences have shrunk to half from their peak in 1980. As a move to counter that, CBS is now the first major (American) broadcaster to simulcast their nightly news online, live, and for free (sponsored by advertising).

The age gap between those who watch broadcast CBS channels and those who watch the online versions, is about 10-15 years, with the younger audiences obviously online. CBS earlier this year experimented with the basketball championships which were simulcast online and found that this does not dimish broadcast viewing. Larry Kramer, the President of CBS Digital, said, "News and sports are the two most obvious content fits for the web because they have a short shelf life."

Robot Journalists? Yes in USA press stories are now produced automatically

Today's Financial Times seemed to be a special issue relating to our blogsite. Many fascinating little stories all throughout the business newspaper.

On the cover a story entitled "Need for speed sees computers writing the news". The FT discusses Thomson Financial of the USA, and since March the financial analysis company has been releasing news stories written completely by computer, based on the quarterly reports press releases from the various American corporations. The stories are written in 0.3 seconds! They are using a specialized software which has in it preloaded the previous quarterly data and the expectations of Wall Street. Then the new fresh-off-the-press press release is fed into the system, and in one third of a second, a full analysis report story is released, which Thomson Financial then releases. They are extremely satisfied with this robotic means of writing financial news.

Thomson Financial makes a point of stating that this is not killing off the journalist jobs, it just shifts them from the mechanical reporting of how IBM, Exxon, Boeing, General Electric etc have performed in the last quarter, to the more insightful analysis for which insights, understanding and knowledge are needed. For this they foresee a need for human journalists into the indefinitely future.

But fascinating. Even such a human-intensive job as journalism, can be automated, to at least the degree of standardized performance news (when will this happen to sports results reporting?)

Can Jimmy Come Out to Play - no more

I spent a week in my native Finland vacationing, visiting relatives and thoroughly enjoying the tail end of the hottest summer in 100 years.

In one chat with my nephews Jon and Ere, we came across a funny concept. Ere asked me if when I was a kid, children used to walk up to my home to ring the door bell and ask me out to play. Sure, that was of course how it was in my youth.

Not anymore. Today kids ask each other out directly, via SMS text messaging, and then meet at the specified location. Again another twist on how Generation-C (the Community Generation) behaves. For teenagers today they wouldn't think of walking up to a friend's house to see if they are home, and if they can come out to play. Each is connected and all contact is digital. Even though I had observed it, and I look out for these signs, I had missed that one. No, today kids no longer ring the doorbell to ask friends to come out to play...

politics - communities and communication technologies

We asked Andre Serranho to write from first hand experience his acount of two examples of communities coming together, empowered by communication technologies to make a radical impact on what were then the exisiting political and social status quo.

Alpha users and communities in politics—March 2004 Spanish general elections

Spain was preparing for a peaceful “change of guard” after the March 14 2004 elections. The ruling Popular Party (PP) was comfortably ahead in the polls, and the incumbent prime minister was bound to deliver the government to his recently chosen successor. Instead, in March 11 the country woke in horror as ten bombs blew up in commuter trains, the first right outside the Atocha station, killing almost two hundred and injuring more than one thousand, five hundred. Panic spread throughout Spain—and the world. Only after five hours painful hours the prime minister comes forth, accusing the Basque terrorist group: it was the proof that his party’s hard line against ETA terrorists had been justified. Meanwhile, a cassette tape recorded in Arab is found in an abandoned van, suggesting connections with Al-Qaida. In fact, by 21:30 an Islamic group claims responsibility for the attack, justifying it on the Spanish government support for the invasion of Iraq.

During the next day, as more artefacts linked to the attacks are discovered, the government continued to sustain the ETA responsibility. The group issues a statement denying any knowledge or involvement in the act. In the evening, all over Spain, around eleven million people gather in city squares shouting NO to terrorism.

Saturday, March 13 should have been a calm reflection day before the elections. Instead, as evidences contradicting the government thesis kept appearing, many started to wonder about the honesty of the officials’ declarations: simply put, had the terrorist attack come from ETA, it would benefit their political agenda; had it come from Al-Qaeda, it would be a severe blow. Around noon, the first SMS with the simple message "

The government lied. Pass it on.

started to show up. No one really knows who started it, but not much after there were several other SMS and e-mails circulating throughout Spain already:

18:00 PP head office Genova St. no parties silence for the truth.

Today at 18 at PP Genova no political signs demanding truthful information pass it on.

Information poisoning at 18:00 PP Genova pass it on.

The phenomenon was of such importance that by 23:00 there were more than 10 000 people gathered in front of the PP Madrid headquarters (according to Euronews), while similar rallies occurred also in the main Spanish cities. PP accused the PSOE (the main opposition party) of starting the rallies, in a way to pressure the voters on the following day; the PSOE noticed that, not only they had not started the SMS chains, they had actually kept a sense of State because they knew the government was wrong in their ETA thesis, yet they refused to challenge the official version for electoral purposes. Later on, they realised they were indeed the main beneficiaries of the phenomenon, but have reinstated time and time again that at the time they

had no control of what was happening on the streets.

Not only the parties, but also the media, tried to find the source of the messages—some say they still are, after two years—in vain. Most of all, everyone was baffled with the remarks from people present at the rallies that

some claimed had received the same message from five different people; even traditional PP supporters joined the rallies because it was not a political gathering from only one side of the society, but a quest for truth. Whoever started the phenomenon, the consequence was that the elections were utterly influenced by the sheer amount of SMS launched during the weekend.

From political militants to people on the street wanting to know the real truth about the attacks, it seems like (at least) one person in every Spanish family got one or more of the above-mentioned messages, and was sufficiently motivated to literally pass it on to their acquaintances. Young users (15-24 y.o.) were particularly active, with many saying when I got the SMS, I basically sent it to everyone in my contact list.

This was to be the first time when the results of a national election could be ultimately traced to the activity of a minority of well-connected individuals, which originated a snowball effect: the alpha-users and their communities arrived in politics.

The power of self-motivated crowds in politics were recently recognised in the US, and indeed parties are launching politically-charged messages to its potential voters, hoping they will spread the word. It remains to be seen if this won’t backfire—when it will be seen as yet another form of spam, lacking what was the foundation of the March 2004 Spanish elections phenomenon: spontaneity.
If the March 11 were the first attacks to be triggered by mobile phone, the March 14 elections were the first ones decided by SMS.

Social networks as a survival skill—tourism in Cuba
When Cuba opened itself to tourism in the '90s, many independent tourists thought it would be a great chance to visit a cheaper Caribbean, without being flocked into overpriced hotels or tourist-filled resorts. The reality was indeed that the few hotels were quite European-priced (unlike the service), and there were simply no budget offers.

Only from 1994, the Cuban government let private individuals rent rooms in their houses for tourists, which became the favourite option (in many places the only one) for those independent travellers. Many Cubans with spare rooms in their houses saw this as an opportunity to round up their (hard currency) earnings, especially when dealing with the hardships of the Special Period, and applied for a licence. However, it was a poisoned gift : the owners of a licence have to pay a fixed rate per month, which can be as high as what an owner would receive in a fortnight. In plus there are other licences to pay if the owner wants to provide meals. The owner of a licence has also to inform the authorities of any tourist arrival within 24 hours. Irregularity found by the inspectors or complaint of misconduct are paid with draconian fines, and the revoking of the licence. As any Cuban would say, it’s not easy.

Thus living with a Damocles sword, licence holders have resorted to two main approaches:
1). the negative, which is contracting a hustler—for most tourist are aware that there is a commission involved, there is plenty of offer, and plainly that after the initial polite refusals no one can stand them hovering around anymore;

2). the positive, which is utilise their social network in other towns—tourists who felt good in one place wish and trust that they will be sent to a similar place.

Being a host becomes a full-time job, often to the lady of the house, and it is with no surprise that they are always at arm’s length of their telephone—which is fixed, of course. Fortunately for them, the price of the calls is minimal, easing the burden.

The positive approach is indeed a triple win situation:
1). the receiving host gets another client,
2). the tourist is happy to pass through the hustler crowd, and does not need to worry about the quality of the food;
3). the sending host knows that whenever his connection will send a tourist to his town he will be the receiver.

There is also a post-experience social network effect, coming from the tourist itself when returning home: friends will ask where to stay, and the hosts who provided positive experiences to influent people (read alpha users ) will be rewarded through extended word-of-mouth. This comes to prove that the economic effects of establishing a social networks can be noted everywhere, and in a developing country they assume the contours of an essential survival skill.

Thanks Andre for taking the time to write for CDB - we very much appreciate it. Alan and Tomi