Among the uses we identified was employing Twitter in PR and product announcements. The goal must be to get your message across to as many people as possible. So, having many followers is good, having many more followers is even better, meaning the more followers your Twitter-Account has, the more return on your announcements you will see. But this is only half of the truth. Even more important is the question whether your followers re-tweet, i.e. redistribute, your tweets – and in doing so spread your announcement further and attract new followers to your account. This is exactly what HP Labs Research tried to analyse in a recent study called “Influence and Passivity in Social Media”.

HP-Researchers determined that the average Twitter-user only re-tweets one out of 318 tweets he receives. However, this average does not tell the whole story, because the vast majority of users almost never redistribute messages, while a select few are very active in doing so. Now, seeing that in order to make your tweets as widespread as possible it is important to get your followers to re-tweet them, you could just measure the total amount of re-tweets you get. But if you consider the difference in activity across users, as mentioned before, such a total would be biased depending on which users follow you and their general likeliness to re-tweet messages they receive. HP’s study tries to amend this by introducing their IP-algorithm, a way to assign relative influence and passivity scores to every user. In this model, influence depends on the quantity and quality of the audience a user influences, and passivity is a measure of how difficult it is for other users to influence him. In short, HP-Researchers try to determine the degree to which a Twitter-user can get his followers to re-tweet his tweets and visit the URLs he links in those tweets – given that most users are passive by nature and not easily motivated to re-distribute or visit URLs they receive in the first place. In that sense, the attention a user gets from normally passive followers is even more valuable than that of generally active ones.

After analysing 22 million tweets with this method, HP Labs Research determined that the Twitter-account “Mashable” is the most influential one. This, as you probably know, is the account of Pete Cashmore, CEO and founder of Mashable.com, currently rated second on Technorati.com’s Top 100 blogs worldwide. Pete founded his blog in 2005 at the age of 19 and has since risen to “must-read-status” on all topics concerning technology and social media in particular.

What is his secret then? It is very good content. In a world of social communications, wisdom of the crowd and the long tail it is not enough to simply have good content. Aside from being interesting to readers, very good content not only sparks the interest of people but is also wrapped in a form that stimulates reflection and comments on the topic – and motivates readers to tell their friends about it. As a business user, you need to keep this in mind. It is not enough to send out PR and marketing material clearly identifiable as such. Instead, you need to try to talk to your customers on a personal level, engage them in an open conversation. In so doing, you will not only develop a favourable reputation with customers but will achieve referrals, too, bringing your customer’s contacts and their contacts’ contacts into the conversation. Making the information you distribute viral, as the term goes. Aside from referrals, reputation gains and ultimately ROI, there is another use in engaging your customers (and your partners and employees, for that matter): In the true spirit of crowd sourcing, it could very well be that you will be able to gain additional insight into the mind of your stakeholders, harness their knowledge and experience and ultimately develop better services and products for your customers – all based on talking to them as equals.

The company is partly funded by venture capitalist Creathor Venture, who is engaged in more than 20 companies, mainly from Germany and Switzerland. Additionally, Doodle has also received funds from the Cantonal Bank of Schwyz (Schwyzer Kantonalbank) through that bank’s innovation foundation. In terms of income, Doodle offers targeted adverts that are displayed to users of the free basic service. Users can, however, buy “Premium Doodle” for CHF 28 to get rid of the ads. Another interesting service introduced in 2009 is “Branded Doodle”, which targets business users in particular and allows for a branded, corporate Doodle instance and offers additional efficiency and security features (CHF 480 for the whole package).

Doodle has created quite a buzz in the three years since its incorporation. The service has not only been featured in several big Swiss and European print and online media, but has also been recognized across the big pond. Doodle was mentioned in well-known blogs like Techcrunch, WebWorkerDaily or CNet and has even made it onto washingtonpost.com.

Among several national and international prizes, Doodle has also won Mashable’s 2008 Open Web Award in both the Places & Events and the Blogger’s Choice categories. In 2009 the University of St.Gallen, a renowned Swiss business school, listed Doodle as the third most innovative Swiss ITC Company, trailing industry heavyweights Logitech and Swisscom.

In May 2010 Doodle reported 6 million unique monthly visitors to their website, double the numbers of 2009. In June 2010 a new calendar view option was introduced to Doodle. The company described this as a major improvement and core of the next generation of their product. The main idea was to integrate Doodle scheduling into a user’s existing calendars (e.g. Google Calendar, Lotus Notes or Outlook Calendar). This is a smart move. It eliminates the need for checking both your Doodle and your calendar separately and also converts the traditional, old fashioned table form of Doodle into a more practical calendar view that users are familiar with. Still, it remains to be seen if Doodle can turn its success in Switzerland, a relatively small market, into a global success story.

Regardless of such future developments, Doodle is a fine example of how Web 2.0 and social communications is meant to work. First of all, a service needs to be instantly understandable and usable. Even if there is quite a lot of code, servers and what not in the background, users do not want to be bothered by lengthy introductions or hand books. Secondly, Doodle facilitates daily communications by a smart, non-intrusive way. People want and need to communicate, even if a day today does not have more hours than a day 100 years ago. The solution is to communicate more effectively. And that is what Doodle is all about.

So, let me ask you again: Do you still use email CC back and forth – or do you doodle?

Instead of having to tell each caller the same things (check if your flight is leaving at all and only come to the airport if you have a confirmation), the Facebook fan site served as a self-service support community. On such a community, customers profit from an accumulated knowledge base and can get help from other customers who might have had a similar problem or have other insider information. Only if this self-service support fails will the customer have to actually call a corporate hot-line. This frees up a lot of support resources and support operatives can use their time for the “serious cases” instead of having to answer the same basic questions again and again.

Dell, for example, has institutionalized this concept in their Social Community. They offer support forums, blogs with additional industry insights and IdeaStorm, an innovation community that lets customers post ideas on how to improve Dell’s products and services.

But, having a huge amount of information and knowledge available through the community doesn’t only free up support resources on the corporate level. It also improves a customer’s support experience, because even a skilled support operative can’t have an answer to every possible problem. If a problem is very specific and maybe not yet addressed in support handbooks or procedures, then other community members might be able to help instead. Of course, this only works if there are enough skilled community members. So key to a successful Social Support Community is to attract valuable members, give them incentives to participate, reward member efforts and maintain a helpful and open community culture. In creating a self-service Support Community and motivating customers to help each other, customers will get better help faster, feel valued and thus are positively inclined towards the company. So, not only can support costs be lowered, but such viral effects benefit the corporate image and ultimately sales, too. The power of Social Communities!

Our next FREE monthly Webinar:

“Business Social Communities: What are the Secrets that Make Them a Success?”

attendance by invitation only (but you can send us an e-mail requesting an invitation)

Business Social Communities are one of the fastest-growing changes to enterprises worldwide, making group communication easier, faster and more productive. Companies like VMware, Cisco Systems, PepsiCo and Dell use them to accelerate their time to market, focus their market research and enhance innovation. But creating a successful community is not simple, and it is not a matter of luck - it takes care and know-how.

Business Social Communities can be used in four areas:

• Sales & Marketing: run campaigns, improve brand visibility and loyalty, market research
• Technical Support: reduce costs while improving quality
• Innovation: use input from your customers to improve products and services
• Collaboration: improve sharing of resources and provide a tool to better collaborate in projects and day-to-day work

There have been tremendous success stories such as VMware’svirtual world, which expanded their in-house trade show attendances from 15k to 45k visitors, and PepsiCo, who decided to run a community Refresh Everything instead of wasting money with Super Bowl ads, not forgetting Dell’s IdeaStorm community, where the crowd bring up new product ideas. So why is Gartner predicting that through 2012, 70% of all IT-led social media initiatives will fail - and that means Business Social Communities, too?

“PepsiCo’s Refresh Everything gets 10x media coverage over Coca Cola”. According to a recent survey by Nielsen, this social media-powered campaign has already paid off in terms of increased media coverage for the soft-drink maker: The survey shows that Pepsi accounted for more than 21 per cent of the media coverage and online buzz around Super Bowl advertising - about 10 times as much as Coca-Cola. And the icing on the cake: The $20 million Pepsi is spending on its crowdsourcing project is about $10 million less than it usually spends on a Super Bowl ad.

Extendance has looked at hundreds of Business Social Communities and studied the 100 most successful ones in details to find answers to the question: “What makes a Business Social Community a success and what leads to failure?”

In this one-hour webinar we will show the secrets of some of the most successful private communities and also summarize the key findings of our survey.

How does it work? You don’t need to register, just go the site, hit the “new game” button and chat away. If you don’t like who you see, click “next” and you get a new partner. As Robert J. Moore stated on techcrunch.com, 89% of participants are male, 11% female. There is an age restriction of 16 in place for the site, but no formal verification is conducted. This is certainly an issue, as chatroulette isn’t for minors. In fact, there are quite a few perverts taking advantage of the completely anonymous character of the service, as a sample of screenshots on tumblr.com shows.

Aside from such unfortunate encounters, which are a sad reality in cyberspace, there are a lot of  “relatively” normal people playing chatroulette as well. Compete.com shows a veritable hockey-stick-effect of pageviews for www.chatroulette.com, currently reaching nearly 1 million unique visitors, while Alexa.com ranks the site among the top1000, traffic-wise.

A quick ad hoc experiment by myself taught me one thing: The whole idea sounds quite fascinating, in theory. But after connecting to my first handful of random strangers, the whole thing started to bore me. And when my next “partner” revealed more than I ever wanted to know, I knew – this was my first and last chat roulette.

That’s why TechCrunch quickly made a big deal of it this week when an intern of theirs got caught being rewarded with a laptop for a post: he got fired and all his posts got wiped immediately. No names were given, and reaction seems to be that TechCrunch’s responded well and maintained their credibility. A few bloggers though, traced the guy’s identity and wondered who was willing to pay him - it’s a known rule of the game that any interests must be declared. The unfortunate thing is that innocent startups had posts about them removed and may also come under suspicion of bribery, too!

If a positive blog post is worth getting, it is prominent enough to get some scrutiny too. If the writer gets paid, the truth will comes out, readers will naturally react in three ways:

1. Not to trust the writer again
2. To assume a company paying for positive mentions could not get them any other way
3. Not to trust such a company

This is something that has not really dawned on some European companies, who see blogging as a legitimate form of paid advertising - in fact, one Swiss social media marketing company, Trigami, bases its business on getting paid blogging coverage. It will eventually dawn on their customers, I think, that this is not what social media marketing really is. The fact that their business model is not big news in the blogosphere is probably simply because they are only doing it in German - if they start with English-language ones, wait for the storm! However, regardless of language, the basic rules of SMM - be open and helpful, and network for all you are worth - may mean hard work, but they are there for a reason!

Those groups are searchable by activity or by number of participants. Additionally, there are photos, forums, blogs, a chat and a studio webcam available to users. The groups are mostly topical, e.g. fan groups of certain shows and their hosts or numerous groups for lovers of cats, bbq or travel. Among the more unusual ones are one for singles, one to combat smoking and a continuous, user driven story about a character called Alfon Erbsengrill. This group actually is among the most active at the moment. It was started in June 2009 and already features 54 pages of forum posts, together making up one huge story - or fairy tale, as the original poster calls it.

This example shows the whole point of creating a social community and at the same time demonstrates what is needed for it to succeed: People need to be motivated to participate and fill the community with life - and thus be positively inclined towards the brand behind the community. Such a favorable opinion creates positive word-to-mouth advertising, or viral marketing, if you will.

Now, how to make this happen? Well, first of all the platform needs to be as open as possible, i.e. leave people room to express themselves and use the community in the way they want. Because who better to know which topics the users might be interested in than the users themselves? Nevertheless, there are certain to be some fail-safe, premier topics a company can create in order to seed activity in the community. In the case of a radio station these would obviously be fan groups of its signature shows, like SWR3’s “Wirby & Zeus” show for example. Reference the community group in your show, host “bring your own content” competitions, ask for listeners opinions and so on. Once the community gets under way, more groups will start to sprout and the users will “take over management” of the community content and activity.

What else is out there? The very popular KIIS-FM, from Los Angeles, also lets its listeners sign up online. The KIIS VIP club isn’t really a social community, though, more a straightforward means for marketing and marketing research. Users can earn points by participating in surveys, listening to the station and referring friends. Points can then be traded in for special prizes and promotions. In short, there isn’t much interactivity or user generated content. America’s most popular radio station, talk radio WABC from New York, offers a similar insider club, where people benefit from promotions and special alerts in exchange for their personal information. Additionally, WABC has an official fan site on Facebook, though only 1798 fans, which doesn’t even come close to the numbers of SWR3!

So, what can businesses learn from SWR3land.de? Well, certainly that it helps to have a positive and distinct brand to serve as a label for the community. But THE winning arguments for a community are its openness and the liberty of use it offers to users, as opposed to being “just” another marketing platform. People tend to notice this and are more inclined to participate if they feel that their efforts and opinions are genuinely appreciated. And that’s what viral marketing is all about. If people feel they are being coaxed into providing free advertisment or buying stuff, however, they won’t take part and the community won’t work.

Now what is “box computing” and what kind of functions does it offer? Basically it’s like an input field (box) being the your interface on the PC or mobile. You key in what you want to do and then Baidu identifies the search requirements, connects to relevant services running in its backend (and probably in third party services), retrieves the result and returns it to the user. The technical framework of box computing was shown here. Box computing provides a one-stop online service by intelligently identifying clients’ demands before giving optimized treatments and responses. For example, a man who wants to buy a BlackBerry in Beijing would only have to type in the sentence “Where can I buy a BlackBerry in Beijing” and then the box engine will provide a product list attached with more detailed information. After you click on the product it may lead you onto another website to finish the payment; or you can do it with Baidu. In some way it is kind of similar to the App Store model. At first, service providers submit service programs to Baidu, after verification Baidu will embed these programs with the box computing platform. Box computing is used to transform Baidu from a pure search service provider to a much broader services provider.

It has been claimed that box computing concept is not a new technical achievement and has already been realized by other search engine companies, such as WolframAlpha, Microsoft’s BING and Google Square.

In the past three Innovation Conferences Baidu focused more on marketing activities and announcements, but this time many people got the impression that Baidu wants to deliver the message that it is a technology-driven company and leader. Other experts still think though that “box computing” is only another marketing focused activity rather than a technical revolution.

There is not much concrete information about Baidu’s box computing out there right now and even on the official website you can’t find much details. In any way it’s probably a good thing, if it’s true, since it will make Chinese internet users’ life much easier. So we have to wait and see what it really is once they open it for trials…

Compared with the vigorous development of personal blogs (the number of blog users was 181 million by the end of June 2009), the use of corporate blogs is still in the warm-up phase in China. Only a small number of enterprises have set up their own corporate blogs.

Since there are not many cases to be learnt from, many companies have taken a wait-and-see attitude and some companies who have set up a corporate blog have adopted a more conservative approach. Take the Google China Blog (Chinese: 谷歌黑板报) for example, there is no function for leaving messages or comments for readers.

Since so many Chinese people like reading or writing blogs one could draw the quick conclusion that making a profit from writing blogs in China could be quite easy. But this is actually not the case. Take keso (the most famous IT blogger) as an example. He signed an agreement with Hexun, which is the biggest finance portal in China, to put some ads on his blog. After the expiration of the contract, keso decided to not extend the contract since he made razor-thin margins from it only. Keso is already a big shot in the Chinese blogosphere but even he can’t make a good profit from advertising, so one can imagine how difficult it is for Chinese bloggers to do so.

How does it work?
Students are asked to plan and run an event, real or fictional, using EventManager. In doing so, they develop knowledge and competencies related to running projects. Initially, you have to create your group or join an existing one. Then there are three different rounds of play: Budgeting, Financing, Investing. Each of these educational modules offers different clips for participants to watch, e.g. “account types“ or “my budget“. The idea is for students to work on these educational modules and clips and prepare for the event manager job. To give feedback and check on progress, there are five test questions to be answered afterwords. And then the actual game starts: Firstly, the event has to be planned by booking artists and providing infrastructure. Then the whole thing is run and, finally, the results of the job are analyzed and feedback is given.

I think that this is an interesting project, as it isn’t your typical one-size-fits-all social community.  Still, it shows the main ideas behind using social media for business purposes:

• interactivity; students budget, plan and run their own events, fictional or real
• entertainment; students are educated by guiding them through a game instead of just a textbook lesson
• benefit; educational software usually costs something while EventManager is free, making it easy to use for teachers
• viral; of course, PostFinance’s logo is there, but the game itself does not bear the typical hallmarks of a marketing campaign, giving credence to PostFinance’s claim of primarily wanting to educate young people on consumption and money.

What’s your take? Please comment here or send me a tweet.

Swiss energy and energy service company Alpiq has just launched a community-based website at www.immergenugstrom.ch (immer genug Strom means “always enough electrical current”), and at first glance this is a really nice initiative. There is a forum, a TV channel, surveys and lots of content. Quite a big move for a company of this kind in Switzerland, or at least at first glance. But, being Swiss, it is also a bit conservative, and actually not as social as it looks. So the good news is that it is a first, here; the bad news that it’s not all there and others will do it better, or maybe not at all if it doesn’t work!

What is nice about the site? For one thing, the design is nice and the separation into different content and activities is good. For another, there is lots of content, e.g. lots of videos to see on the “TV” link. So what doesn’t work? Well, the problem is that it is not a full-on social site. The “forum” section is not fully-featured, much more like the comments list on a blog site. There are four “threads” — basically just a paragraph with comments, and no user-generated threads. On what looks like a community video page, the videos are from their four in-house “Strom Scouts”. The TV page is a page full of short videos and clips, with no live content. They videos are all good for a job, but there is no shared comment feature — the “comment” button leads to a normal “contact us” page with no mention of moderation or what would be done with the comment. The Q&A section is a very nice FAQ page, but again with nothing user-generated.

Now, I suspect the half measures are partly because it’s a trial run, and partly because this is a very technical area so Alpiq are probably wondering about the role of user-generated content. But its attractive content and one or two real social features are more than offset by the lack of full social media tools that will get users generating content — and energy is a topic that positively invites this content. If it does not come from users, you end up doing it all yourself and not getting their active engagement, so where is the real point? I think this site will end up in disappointment for Alpiq, which would be a pity as it is in some sense in the right direction. However, what bothers me most is that other utilities and service providers may look at this venture as an example for social media in this part of the world and draw completely the wrong conclusions. There is little doubt now that social media works, but it has to be done in a wholeheartedly social way.

So why did it turn out like this? Overall it looks like it was done and driven by IT departments with some oversight from Marcom and the - financial - blessing from management, plus one staged video clip done by the CEO. The results show the shortcomings of this compartmentalized approach. Real success depends on a business-centred planning approach. To do social media well you need to have sales, marketing, operational, and often HR and other departments involved, doing excellent planning that cuts across the departments. Not something where IT companies or even PR companies excel, as they both miss important parts — and may well not even have noticed the site’s deficiencies.

I have started the promotion this week using many different approaches. Chinese internet users get used to keeping 2 or 3 different IM tools on at the same time, like myself — I keep QQ, MSN, and Skype on when I am online. So I used IM tools to promote our e-book. First I updated my QQ/MSN/Skype signature with “This is my first e-book I have translated, and please go to our e-book website to take a look. If you can help me promote it, I will appreciate it”, of course in Chinese. Then I sent the message to all of my contacts with the same content, informing some guys who are not always online. I have 200+ contacts at QQ and 100+ contacts at MSN, it’s already a good base, if some of them help me promote it that would be great. I also used QQ or MSN and posted some messages in group talks, which may have bigger influence.

I wrote some emails to Chinese general portals, tech portals, and specific IT or ICT portals, asking them to take a look at the e-book website and see if they are interested in promoting the e-book or not. Some bloggers and tech events have a big influence on the public opinion. It is definitely worthwhile sending them emails as well. Often they protect their e-mail inboxes from spammers and you need to subscribe first before being able to contact them.

Social media networks are actually a very important way to do promotions nowadays. Bulletin Board Systems (BBS) are a very popular way in China to deliver information. I wrote some posts in the most popular BBSs in China, such as MOP.com and Tianya.cn to talk about our e-book. Maybe I still need to find more professional BBSs related to IT or ICT, which are more targeted. Social Network Services (SNS) started to boom in China since 2006, I set up some group sites in Kaixin001, 51.com, Myspace.cn and Weaklink, which are similiar to our Chinese e-book website. Since Facebook and Twitter are disabled in China, I prefer using local stuff, naturally.

Thanks to Alex’s efforts, the e-book and website are now also available in Chinese (Mandarin). Here’s a little reminder of what the e-book is all about (the English language version can be found here):

Published in June, “How to Market in ICT Today” is a collection of six interviews with marketing professionals from leading European ICT companies. Why European companies? We wanted to give voice to a perspective outside the US-centered mainstream and see how world-leading businesses based in Europe view marketing across the world.

As we hear every day (every minute, even), social media and digital marketing seem to be the new magic words, especially in the US. Is the buzz coming to Europe, too? We wanted to learn about these experts’ views on the numerous tools and services that are out there. What is useful, what do they use now and what do they plan to use in the future?

Additionally, we asked them about the applicability of US marketing strategies in Europe and about the need (or lack thereof) to locally adapt them. Last, but not least, our interview partners talked about marketing during difficult times and shared there opinion on the question: When the going gets tough, do less or do more?

What do you think? Reply here or talk to us on Twitter!

According to Rupert Murdoch, The Times and other newspapers in the News International stable will begin charging for access to their online portals next year. Murdoch says that he expects other publishers to follow suit. The New York Times is contemplating a similar move. But is it, as Switzerland’s Tages Anzeiger speculates, tantamount to suicide?

Murdoch seems to be saying that newspapers simply will not make money online with free content. Like nearly all the major news organizations, News International has made big losses this year. The Guardian’s management group, too, is looking at closing the Observer newspaper, the world’s first Sunday newspaper, in order to safeguard the Guardian, which has pumped a lot of money into its online venture. Part of the newspapers’ frustration also comes from their content being widely read and often quoted without payment, so they feel that charging is only a matter of justice.

The problem is whether charging is good business. Previously governments have been able to intervene to ensure some kind of rules for newspapers to compete fairly, but that’s just not going to happen on the Internet, so the only thing that matters is how many people are going to pay. Personally, I don’t see where the numbers will come from. The attraction of reading online is immediate choice. Given the choice of restricting yourself to a single paper, paying out subscriptions to lots of them, or finding free content and analysis from among the many news channels, blogs and other feeds, I think it’s not hard to see where most people will go.

Loss of influence, not just readers, is also a problem. One link here was to a Times Online report about the Guardian. Next year, like many others, I won’t be linking to The Times, not out of spite but out of consideration to readers. Paid-content publications will lose visibility online. Or people will lift lots of content and repeat it — which certainly is not the model these newspapers want.

There isn’t an easy solution to the online dilemma for newspapers, and the period of experimentation can’t last forever. The best chance for papers is to understand and leverage the Internet, and stay in the game as long as possible offering free content and services, forging links, and adding incentives, content and services for paying subscribers. In fact, that’s probably the only chance.

China Mobile (the largest Chinese telecommunications operator) has officially announced a customized interface OMS (Open Mobile System), which is Android-based. As we all know, the mobile web is not like the World Wide Web. Not every device can run on every mobile network; not every mobile app can operate on every mobile device that is connected to the mobile web. Google did a good thing with Android, which is going to be a big success. They’ve got the right approach to the market, they are open in every way possible. To add to this current dynamic, Lenovo, which is China’s number one mobile phone vendor, is going to launch the oPhone (the 1st OMS mobile) and are now accelerating its time-to-market. According to one mobile phone assessment report, the Lenovo oPhone has good performance and looks well designed. However, as this report says, the OMS still has the same large number of residual defects as the Android system. And its weak third-party software support is an another shortcoming as well.

Overall, though, the oPhone is on eye-level with the iPhone and is not to be underestimated. They are following a different application distribution model, which also shows why Apple and China Mobile have so far not warmed to each other: oPhone apps are embedded with many services from China Mobile, such as Fetion, newsletter, phone mail, etc. Some people think that even when the iPhone enters the Chinese market, it’s still doubtful that the apps of the App Store will become popular among Chinese users. The iPhone is hugely popular in the US and Europe because Apple has many loyal fans there and it has been able to extend the success of iTunes to the launch of the App Store. China Mobile knows this model and it will focus on the localization of design and promotion as much as possible when they promote the oPhone. It is to launch the Mobile Market in August, which had already provided 582 games, 178 mobile theme, and 344 apps up to July 3rd. Whether Mobile Market can be equally as successful as the App Store or not still depends on China Mobile’s operational and organizational abilities.

Some people may think that the oPhone will even kill the iPhone, but I do not share this view. The iPhone is not an ordinary mobile, so its launch will have some deep influence in the 3G market of China. That’s why both China Mobile and China Unicom are thinking a great deal about the iPhone’s launch in China. I believe competition will be increasing in the 3G market day by day. For a large number of Chinese mobile users, this is actually not bad news.

Twitter’s main audience is adults rather than teens - that’s been known for a while, and figures from Nielsen now confirm this. What I find interesting about this is not that Twitter should be doing more to attract teens, as some people seem to suggest, but rather that is shows what Twitter is good at. Twitter’s service has been quite a blank canvas in many ways, with people using it however they want, and a huge number of third party apps tweaking and adding features such as groups and search, to name just a couple. So to show a large adult following confirms that a very large number of people - particularly in the US and the UK - find it useful.

So why adults, mainly? A good blog post from Ben Parr at Mashable discusses some reasons behind this, and I think puts the main reasons well (and has lots of good comments). To summarise and add a little of my own point of view, it’s not primarily a venue for chatting with friends and sharing pictures, music and videos. It’s more of a broadcasting platform where celebrities, news organisations and companies try to entertain and update an audience. Like a very big, lightweight, multiple RSS service. Twitter is also very much an open community, and young people tend more to stay within communities they know. It’s also a great platform for sharing and developing knowledge rather than getting a quick overview from answers.com, wikipedia and so on. So, to put it in a nutshell, most teenagers get what they want elsewhere, and more easily.

Which, given Twitter’s overall popularity, is hardly a problem. The age profile is actually an advantage for Twitter, I think. One of MySpace’s problems is that a younger audience gets older fast, and their habits change. Having an audience mostly in middle adulthood is perfect for customer retention and the service’s long-term stability. Additionally, the fact that a lot of people use the service professionally means there are opportunities for paid premium content and services.

I think what surprises many people about Twittter’s age profile is that it’s pretty new. Young people tend to be early adopters, and are well understood by developers of social media applications, who are often also young. But actually, despite its youth, Twitter is now well established, in its maturity rather than early adoption phase. Who uses a mature product depends on who needs it. In this case, the wider community. Granted, it still hasn’t settled on a long-term business model, and it’s a relatively new entrant to a relatively new set of social technologies, but it should be taken seriously, and recognized for what it is - which is now much clearer.

Not for the first time, a giant corporation is attracted by the value proposition for online marketing, but gets caught disrespecting its rules, and loses the positive impact it was looking for. According to a recent Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung article Vodafone is reputed to be spending up to €200 million on persuading young people (”Generation Upload”) via placards and via the Web (YouTube, Twitter, etc), to use their mobile phone as their primary Internet access device at all times of day. But they are openly paying bloggers to promote them. One of these bloggers, Sascha Lobo (pictured), has up to now opposed Vodafone’s stance of supporting government proposals about restricting internet access, and his involvement is causing a real storm.

Some of the other criticisms of the campaign in the article:

1. “Generation Upload”  consists mostly of people who’ve uploaded one or two videos in their lives. So is the market really there? At some point, probably, but via paid-for access on their mobile phone? The evidence is at best equivocal - even iPhone users predominantly use wifi access rather than mobile internet.

2.  It’s not at all clear what the value proposition is - the campaign seems to be mostly about image projection. According to Tobias Langner, Professor of Marketing at the University of Wuppertal, getting people to spend more time online is best served by making the tariff more competitive - particularly difficult if ROI means covering a massive advertising campaign.

3. How will glossy posters in train stations convince an audience defined by its adherence to the web?

The fundamental principle in online marketing is authenticity -  products and presence that inspire people to blog about you, not paying them to do so. Vodafone has not convinced yet with its offering, and is paying for blogs, both of which are likely to provoke criticism. But even criticism provides an opportunity for positive engagement. Is that opportunity taken well? This is the comment that Fritz Joussen, CEO of Vodafone Deutschland, made in response to critical blog posts:

“We’re talking about 500 blog contributions, and we make products for 40 million customers. I’m happy to talk with bloggers about our products, but not to discuss my view of the world.” (my translation). In a few weeks Vodafone may realise that they don’t want all the flak that is coming their way and follow the golden rules - listen respectfully, admit problems, be positive, engage. But I’m not betting on it yet.

Xiaonei, meaning “inside the campus”, has 40 million members already, and most of them are students. Actually, Xiaonei is known as “Facebook clone”, as it mimics Facebook in many ways. So why is Xiaonei much more successful than Facebook in China? It’s the issue of localization. When Facebook had a Chinese version, many users complained that the translations lacked accuracy. So when coming across Facebook’s apparent obliviousness to the Chinese language, many users got turned off. In a word, Facebook doesn’t understand Chinese culture. They thought other countries and cultures would adjust to US style. Xiaonei is more like a combination of blog and social interaction. It inherited the alumni website phenomenon which was very popular around seven years ago in China, by narrowing down Facebook’s usual targets to students. The interface is quite well designed. Clean and clear color with user-friendly format. Xiaonei is actually doing a good job as a copycat Social Network Site.

Kaixin001 (”Kaixin” means happy in Chinese) is another social media network with a  big focus on online games. It targets white collar workers. “Growing vegetables”, “snatching parking lots” and “friends for sale” are the most popular game applications of Kaixin001, and some people (called Kaixiners hereafter) are crazy about these games. This could be the most important reason why Kaixin001 can realize “viral marketing” among many companies. It’s not very good if you are too close to your superior or a female colleague in the company (in China, at least), but it’s OK to play Kaixin001 with them. Many white collar workers keep Kaixin001 pages open during work. This might explain why Kaixin001 can surpass Xiaonei in traffic: its white collar strategy does work.

Someone says Xiaonei imitates the idea of campus-oriented and real-name registration from Facebook, while Kaixin001 imitates game applications from Facebook. None of them imitate the whole thing. So actually if you want to be successful, you don’t have to be a lot better than Facebook, you only need to excel in one area to achieve success. Some Chinese Social Network Sites did some imitation and localization, and achieved some success as well. However, if they still want to beat the competitors and be more successful, they need to find their own path. Some large Chinese Social Network Sites have started to launch open API platforms one after another, I think it’s a good start.

QQ is definitely the most popular instant messaging network in China with 300 million users. However, QQ is not a pure social networking websites, it’s a “complex”, which includes IM (Instant Messaging), online gaming, online music, social networking services, etc., and that makes QQ different from other social networking websites such as Facebook, Myspace, or Chinese local SNS websites like Xiaonei, Kaixin, etc. So you might question whether it should really count in this table.

What is clear, though, is how successful it has become. QQ has its own IM base. At the beginning, it was just a simple IM tool with no difference from others (Picq, Ricq, Ticq(TQ), Qicq, Micq, PCicq, Oicq, OMMO, who all imitated ICQ’s idea and were published in China in 1999). But why did only QQ succeed while the others all failed? One of reason is QQ had a very friendly user interface from the very beginning, that’s why QQ has been able to retain the same style from the start. Later on, QQ integrated multiple mobile communication methods, enabling users to send messages to mobile phone users through the platform. QQ also offers several other services such as QQ.com (news portals), QQ Game (online gaming), QQ Show (virtual image design system), Paipai.com (e-commercial transaction platform), and QZone (social networking service). So if we want to compare QQ with other social networking websites, we can only count in QZone, maybe as well as QQ Xiaoyou, launched in January 2009, which targets students in high schools and universities.

So actually QQ is a special case. The service first built a huge base of users, then they tried to make use of this base to promote their social networking service, a different approach to those original social networking websites. A ranking list of Chinese SNS Websites from CR-Nielsen in December, 2008 shows: 51.com, Xiaonei.com, Chinaren.com, Kaixin001.com, Myspace.cn, 5460.net, Wangyou.com, Ipart.cn, 360quan.com, and Cyworld.com.cn. QQ (or Qzone) is not included in the top ten SNS websites in China. I agree more with this viewpoint, that QQ is more like a combined IM tool. Tencent have declared many times that in the future they will focus more on the idea “community-based instant messaging”, which could lead to their future success. All in all, social networking has just started in China!

The key findings:
The report finds four different types among the surveyed companies, depending on the quantity of channels they use and the depth of their relative engagement in those channels. Furthermore, and now it gets really interesting, the report manages to show a certain positive correlation between social media engagement and financial performance. The authors relativize their findings (maybe they were a little scared by their own success?), but still.

Some details:

Overall, Starbucks gets the highest score, followed by Dell and eBay, while Allianz, AIG, Wrigley and Mercedes-Benz have an almost non-existing social media engagement (p.23-25). Judging by industry  averages, the report shows that technology and media firms are the most engaged in social media, while financial or food and beverage firms lack both in channel quantity and engagement depth (p.4).
Additionally to these quantitative results, the report also includes four case studies, trying to establish best practices in social media engagement by showing what Starbucks, Toyota, SAP and Dell do.

What do you think? Do the results match your own perception or is there something the report misses? Tell us on Twitter!

Ian Drew, Sr. VP Marketing at ARM

A new excerpt from our e-book “How to Market in ICT Today” is now available at techmarketing.ch. It features Ian Drew of ARM, the world’s leading semiconductor intellectual property (IP) supplier. The ARM business model involves the designing and licensing of IP to a network of partners that includes the world’s leading semiconductor and systems companies. These partners utilise ARM’s IP designs to create and manufacture system-on-chip designs found in OEM applications ranging from digital set top boxes and more than 90% of the world’s mobile handsets, to car braking systems and network routers.

To provide you with a little amuse-bouche, here’s Ian’s view on marketing failures:
“The answer is, we’ve never failed, but sometimes we haven’t been successful! Some of our early online stuff didn’t go very well, because we thought the web was more of a front door to show our products, but really what people wanted from our website was a home with various ways to get in, a very porous place.”

After two weeks hard work, I finally finished the first draft of the Chinese version of the e-book. I read this e-book for several times and find it’s a good book to read, not only for marketing guys, but also for people who are interested in social media marketing or online marketing. The six experts from ICT companies have lots of experiences of product management and product marketing, and most of them are actually VP Marketing. They have done lots of traditional marketing such as trade shows, big events, etc. However, they are making use of more and more online ways and benefit from them. All of them have positive attitude towards online marketing stuff. I think it’s a trend.

Online marketing in China is just at the very beginning stage, Chinese companies really need good examples set for them, especially those who would like to expand their business to European and American markets. In this e-book, the six experts all talked about the differences of doing marketing in Europe, US, and Asia. Even for different regions in Europe, the style could be totally different. For those Chinese companies who have already succeeded in Chinese local market and also want to win in international markets, there is a gap between them. For me this is natural, because we do have different culture, which leads to a different way of doing business.

I will mainly take charge of promoting the e-book to P.R. China. But first I need to translate the e-book into Chinese, and the website of the e-book as well. Because most Chinese may not wish to read an English book, even if it’s a very good one. I started my job from this Monday, and it took me two days to translate the e-book website (www.techmarketing.ch) and another one day to set up the webpage, and the Chinese website of the e-book is available now, even if it’s not perfect. I have also translated the PowerPoint excerpt of this e-book; it’s an overview of the e-book and the bios of the participants of this interview. I am just a little delayed from what I planned in starting to translate the e-book. However, I think I will catch up and finish the translation of the e-book within two weeks, at least for the first draft.

I think this e-book will be worthwhile reading for Chinese companies, because they always want to learn experiences from successful companies in Europe and the US, not only the technology but also the business aspects. In this e-book, the specialists from top European ICT companies talked about their experience of online marketing and international marketing. Maybe some Chinese companies can find something useful which they can apply to themselves.

We’ll pass on the results of the discussion to you once the discussion concludes, so be sure to drop by the blog from time to time. In the mean time, we’re very much interested in your opinion. Please feel free to either drop me a note by email or to visit our Facebook group.

It’s particularly important to preserve this individuality because one theme we ask about is online marketing. That normally means interactivity, for which personality and authenticity are not just valued, but essential. Prose that could come off the companies’ own websites would give the impression that all the answers had been vetted by the PR department rather than given to add value to a conversation.

Of course, we have to make allowances for it being in print, so have trimmed and tidied here and there, but we hope to preserve as exactly as we can how our interviewees see the world and think about the issues they face as marketers. We hope that our readers will find their stories far more interesting and vital as a result.

Now, let me tell you a bit about “Terre des Hommes” (TdH). The TdH movement first started in Switzerland in 1960 and today numbers eleven independent, national organisations in Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Holland, Italy, Luxembourg, Spain, Switzerland and Syria. Together they form the International Federation of TdH.
The federation’s global income for 2007 was over 100 million Euros, of which 80% went to actual field projects, 14% to administration and 5% to advocacy and information. Almost half of the funds were donated by the general public, while government and EU funds contributed another quarter. TdH runs development and humanitarian projects and provides advocacy programmes in order to advance children’s rights on a local and international level.
One very important engagement, in my opinion, is TdH’s fight against child trafficking. The value of the global human trafficking trade is estimated at 32 billion USD, and the exploitation of children is the most abominable form of this modern day slave trade. TdH has succeeded in encouraging anti-child-traffic legislation in Africa and South Asia and has played a major part in establishing child protection units on a local and national level in European countries of origin of trafficked children (Albania, Kosovo, Moldova, etc.). (sources: Terre des Hommes)

Children are both our future and our biggest responsibility and TdH takes a stand here. A worthwhile cause to donate to.

One thing we’re especially thrilled about is the discussion forum we are running. Right now, our interview partners are privately discussing the topic “How is online marketing influencing your company strategy right now?” We believe that such a follow-up discussion will yield additional insights and we plan on releasing it to the public soon. So, please keep an eye out for it.

For those of you who like Facebook, we’ve set up a Facebook group for the e-book, too (Techmarketing - How to market in ICT today). The idea is to keep it streamlined with current topics discussed in our forum. So, if you’d like to post your own view on how online marketing is influencing your company strategy, please refer to the Facebook group.

Last but not least, the e-book is also on Twitter now. Following Tech2Market, you’ll be the first to know about news and events concerning the e-book and the topics discussed.

Mark and Alice

Hi everyone, my name is Mark and I’m the newest addition to the blogging team here at extendance.com. From now on, I’ll be regularly posting how we get on publishing and promoting our upcoming e-book “How to market in ICT today”, a collection of interviews with representatives of seven leading European ICT companies.

So, what’s this e-book really about? That’s what I asked myself when I first heard of the project. I’m a graduate student of business and economics at the University of Zurich, and though I’ve had a solid education in marketing theory, taking it to a hands-on level is something else. Especially when it comes to the Internet, there seem to be a huge amount of possibilities, of which some are better then others and some are no good at all.

Alice, my little puppy dog, is sitting on my lap as I write, trying to help me make a good impression with my first post here. And she’s also reminding me that it’s OK for me to get a little confused about the endless possibilities of Social Media Marketing: the blogosphere, Facebook, Xing, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, or what not. Her take on it? I think it would be: you can only chase a ball for so long before it becomes pointless, and then you need to think about dinner.

So, for me, that’s what I’m getting from working for Extendance, finding out what people are really doing in marketing and actually using these tools. Putting meat on the bones, rather than just playing in the park. And that’s what this e-book does, too.

Along with location-based and other mobile apps, social network search and real-time search of Twitter and other streams, Google is no longer the only touchstone in search, and companies can miss important, even potentially crucial, conversations by ignoring others - Amazon, for example, recently was slow to pick up on a storm of criticism created by its policy on homosexual themes because it didn’t take Twitter seriously enough.

Of course you can combine tools such as FriendFeed (for Twitter and social networking site content) and IceRocket (for blogs), but at the moment this looks to me like the best stand-alone solution short of signing up with all-round social media software or services like those offered by Jive, Leverage or Telligent, who include monitoring in the package.

The first thing to note is that the 5 dimensions are generalized — different regions and even different companies also have their own cultures, and so doing it country by country means a level of generalization. The terms themselves also mask detail. For example, Switzerland rates slightly higher on masculinity than the UK, and it is certainly a more patriarchal society. But at the same time the Swiss (at least in the North) are noticeably less “macho” than in much of the UK. A further issue is that reflexivity is also important - so, while a US businessman may be aware of how the Japanese prefer to do business, the Japanese will also be aware of how US businessmen do business. The final point is that all views of culture also reflect a cultural viewpoint and a particular agenda. To be fair, the disclaimer on the download site hints at these limitations. In a sense, then, this app is a bit like a travel phrase book, something that addresses the basics that you need to avoid misunderstandings and causing offence.

If you’re interested in taking the idea further, a great place to start is Edward T. Hall’s classic book from 1976, Beyond Culture. Hofstede’s 3rd scale, individualism, is similar to one of the key ideas in that book, namely high- and low-context societies. High-context societies typically discuss everything that seems to be of any importance at all within the “in-group” — close colleagues, friends and relatives. So, for example, business meetings are often simply formal ratification of decisions that have been reached already, and companies are likely to hire and to do business with people they are already connected to by family or social ties. Examples of high-context cultures are most Asian countries, France and Italy. The US is very much a low-context culture and, according to some, so are the UK and Germany, so information is discussed on a need-to-know basis, with less distinction between in- and out-groups. One application of this is that when low-context people bring fresh information and issues for discussion and decision at meetings, this strikes people from high-context cultures as abrupt or unnecessary, as the idea of a meeting is so different.

The slight caution I would offer offer over the app is that Hofstede over-emphasizes cultural differences. In my view, it is important to see the other side — differences stand out because we look for commonality, and the search for commonality is important. It is actually at the heart of developing cultural competence, so to focus solely on differences should not be the main thing. To find commonality, it’s important to learn as much about the way a society works — history, governance, entertainment, customs, culture — as possible.

So these indices are really a helpful first step to developing cultural competence, a quick guide for instant use and to clearing up or avoiding major misunderstandings. The next steps you could characterize as “learn, imagine, enrich”. Firstly, learn more about the culture. Secondly, imagine yourself as you might be perceived from a different cultural mindset - not just your behaviour style, but your way of thinking. The final step is to see that another frame of cultural reference offers things that are not included in yours, so offering opportunities to enrich communication, and move beyond do’s and don’ts.

This guest post on TechCrunch  by Eric Clemons I found really thought-provoking. It is quite a long and detailed argument, pointing out step-by-step not only why advertising is failing on the Internet at present, but why it is bound to fail in the longer run. It’s well worth reading in its entirety, but I’ll just give a summary in case you’re in a hurry.

Clemons says that advertising revenues are falling in the mainstream media because people don’t really trust advertising and don’t particularly want it. For example, broadcast networks put on their advertising the same time so that viewers can’t switch channels to avoid it. Even AdWords, Google’s big revenue source, depends on misdirection, or at least the threat of it. And location-based advertising, pushing messages that you are very likely to want because of where you are, the content of your recent e-mails, where your friends go etc, he thinks will also fail because of the trust issue.

It could be argued that the decline in advertising revenues in conventional media is a natural response to the increasing diversity of information sources, and that Clemons is overstating the user’s role in it, but I think there would be a smokescreen. The real point is that users have more of a choice of ways to find out more about any service or product for themselves, which weakens the persuasiveness of advertising content hugely.

To give my own take on Clemons’s argument, the fact is that advertising clearly works best where information is restricted. Where information is free, easily available, and easy to select and compare, users can easily select between information they trust and information that they don’t. A recommendation by friends or from clearly neutral sources has an inherently higher value. So, as social platforms are more and more popular, their role in disseminating information becomes increasingly important.

We’re certainly not the only people saying that the key is to be authentic, and offer users the information they want when they want it. But Clemons’s critique of the paid advertising model makes the most cogent case for this that I have seen to date. To put it in a nutshell, there are two clear consequences, one for marketing, one for PR. In marketing, the point is to engage the prospect more directly, openly and personally, using the best tools and content you can. In PR, same thing, different target, i.e. the blogger, commentator or analyst rather than the prospect. That’s got to be good for the market, the vendor and the customer.

Publicity is getting unpaid media to pay attention, write you up, point to you, run a picture, make a commotion.

PR is the strategic crafting of your story. It’s the focused examination of your interactions and tactics and products and pricing that, when combined, determine what and how people talk about you.

In a funny way, this post, and its implicit criticism of the kind of follow-my-leader thinking that befalls many companies, reminded me of an interesting recent Slashdot post, The Formula That Killed Wall Street. Slashdot criticized the over-reliance on computer models that produced a single number to characterize risk, which led to investment decisions way beyond brokers’ financial and professional depth.

At Extendance, we often get asked about how we monitor results. It’s a legitimate question, but often I get the feeling that what the client would love is a magic formula or tool that will be the key to measuring PR success. However, the secret of PR is, as Godin says, not numbers of mentions or hits, but the creation of identity, something that just has to be understood and worked at. In reality, it’s much more important to work from the story, and set more store by the relationships and leads that build week on week than quick indications of impact.

First, quite an old one on where B2B sites often go wrong

Most B2B sites emphasize internally focused design, fail to answer customers’ main questions or concerns, and block prospects’ paths as they search for companies to place on their shortlists.

Most online interactions are demand-driven: you either give people what they want or watch as they abandon your site for the competition’s. The result of poor design on B2B sites? In our user testing, B2B sites earned a mere 58% success rate (measured as the percentage of time users accomplished their tasks on a site).

Nielsen does make the point, to be fair, that B2B sites have a complex selling task and need to address a group of people. B2C is usually for an individual who is able to make an instant decision. However, that only means that B2B sites must work extra hard to support, inform and involve users. Particular usability glitches cited are absence of pricing information of any kind, having to register for information without knowing how useful it will be, and poor segmentation, so that users are marshalled along a route that does not contain all the most relevant information for them.

What interests me about these findings is that these are clear signs that buyer personae have not been examined properly, and that companies are not putting themselves in the shoes of their prospective customers. Both of these we see as fundamental elements of marketing and PR planning.

The report, with 144 usability guidelines and 158 screenshots can be downloaded for $198 - so just a small fraction of the cost of a website redesign.

A more recent one on bounce rates

I found this really interesting because it shows how user behavior has evolved along with website design. As users are directed to landing pages deep within a site, many of them refuse to commit to the second click. Partly I think this reflects the speed of browsing nowadays, as it is now easy to have a quick look and leave. The lack of appeal seems to be often due to low-relevance link sharing or over-general SEO.

This phenomenon points to one of our key principles in online PR: tuning your SEO to people that are genuinely interested, by increasing the specificity of key phrases. The Nielsen report views the bounce rate of search-directed traffic as particularly critical - and this is the one to test the real effectiveness of the landing page on.

Do About Us pages do their job?

First, a positive: contact info has improved. Now the negative: fewer companies are making clear what they do in a single paragraph - the information that makes most people go to the page in the first place is now unclear in nearly 20% of sites. You can probably guess what the bounce rate is like! The worst thing, though, is that user satisfaction has actually decreased over the past 5 years.

The reason I don’t find that a surprise is that I reviewed about 100 About Us pages of European tech businesses a while ago. Many were pretty much interchangeable even in widely different industry sectors, and almost all said they were leading the world in something. Which means that the prospect, instead of getting a clear impression of what makes a company different, reads about what makes them the same! I’m not going to give any of my own tips here, because there’s not much I would add to Nielsen’s advice in this blog.

We recommend providing About Us information at 4 levels of detail:

1. Tagline on the homepage: A few words or a brief sentence summarizing what the organization does.
2. Summary: 1-2 paragraphs at the top of the main About Us page that offer a bit more detail about the organization’s goal and main accomplishments.
3. Fact sheet: A section following the summary that elaborates on its key points and other essential facts about the organization.
4. Detailed information: Subsidiary pages with more depth for people who want to learn more about the organization.

This layered content presentation forms an inverted pyramid that uses hypertext to shield users from overwhelming details, while making specific information available to those who need it.

The full guidelines for this run to 253 pages, again not too expensive at $124, but a lot of work for a single page?

Pros: Very accurate for speakers with American accents in quiet places. Easy to use. Reduce the need for typing.

Cons: Struggle with background noise and non-American accents. Don’t work for SMS or e-mail on iPhone.

Bottom line: Breakthrough applications that will change the way you use your iPhone or BlackBerry. Download immediately.

These products are clearly maturing nicely. However, according to the BBC, they’re going to be blown out of the water before year end by a small British company based in Hereford, who are planning to offer the world’s first ‘fully accurate’ totally voice-controlled phone. The BBC video shows a presenter standing in a rather low-tech looking factory holding a prototype of the Zumba, a small, very plain looking box, with a kind of a flat clip that is looped over the ear, speaking text to the user, and transmitting voice replies to be converted to text by the Zumba server (which the company claims to be 100% secure). “Whatever happens, this is very exciting tech indeed!” comments the dialaphone blog, and even The Register gave it a straightfaced report. Wired, however, is less convinced, put off not only by the “100% accurate, 100% secure” tag, but also by the fact that the company would not let the presenter actually test a prototype for “security reasons”:

Is your snake-oil sense a-tinglin’? It should be. This video further charts the descent of the Beeb from an internationally respected and neutral reporting machine into a populist tabloid of a TV company.

Ouch!

I’ve actually been using MacSpeech (which is based on Nuance’s Dragon NaturallySpeaking engine) to write most of this post. Oddly enough, the only words it’s really struggled with was “nuances” — it refused to give me the option of a capital letter and an apostrophe — and Zumba (for obvious enough reasons). I cut and paste URLs using a mouse, I have to confess, but even so, I’m pretty impressed with the performance of this software. It doesn’t enable me to produce a mountain of prose at breakneck speed. But that’s because I just don’t think that fast — this thing is way faster than my typing speed.

Given that I had to train MacSpeech for about 15 minutes so that it can recognize my speech patterns, that they recommend processor speed of a least 1GHz and a 1Gb of RAM, and that the support folders also require over 1Gb of hard disk space, you can understand why getting this sort of thing to work on a mobile phone is something of a challenge, and why I tend to agree with Wired’s view of the Zumba phone!

The predicted demise of paid-for print journalism is once again a hot topic, as speculation builds on the future of the NY Times. Pretty much all the US newspapers’ debts have now been given junk status, and the NY Times had been investing so heavily that it is now over $1bn in debt and stands to potentially default on $400m in the coming months, leading The Atlantic to speculate: Virtually all the predictions about the death of old media have assumed a comfortingly long time frame…what if The New York Times goes out of business—like, this May?

An excellent post in Slate points out one major cause of the problem. Newspapers, contrary to popular belief, migrated to the web early and put a lot of resources there. However, they just didn’t quite get its values: From the beginning, newspapers sought to invent the Web in their own image by repurposing the copy, values, and temperament found in their ink-and-paper editions.

A number of newspaper apologists have examined ways of holding back the tide, lamely suggesting curbs or taxes on blogging, but while blogs increase the pressure on journalists to get it right, they don’t undermine journalism and can actually help. Interestingly, in a recent Harvard University Nieman Report on journalists’ experience of blogging, blogging journalists felt they worked more quickly, breaking stories on their blogs before following up online and in print or broadcast. They also write shorter, more tightly edited pieces, not just for blogs but also for print and broadcast.

Many journalists are highly skilled at producing valuable, attractive and accurate news that is highly valued. The problem is not the medium, but the news organizations. In their present form they have to be big, complex businesses. In print, people can’t switch and browse - they buy the paper and need to find coverage of all their interests in it. The business problem is doing this at a profit. John Batelle comments on the inefficiency of newspapers, for example: When I wrote for the LA Times, I often wrote two stories a day. Is the Chronicle pumping out 800 stories a day? Is it breaking all sorts of amazing stories and being a leader in the community with those 400 journalists? Hell no!

And supporting this level of infrastructure is expensive. A lot of advertising revenue has departed for good, and the next couple of years are not going to be kind. Online costs are obviously lower, but the tiny revenue per online user simply can’t support print newspapers in their existing form. And without the resources of their print version, newspapers cannot maintain their web versions properly either! According to GigaOm, who comment that there are 8,400 followers of this topic on Twitter, The destruction of the old business model for news is clear, certain, even inevitable. The model replacing it is fragmented, innovative and frustratingly incomplete.

Eric Schmidt, Google CEO, talked to Fortune magazine to the effect that the news organizations are essential but he wouldn’t buy one even though they could easily afford to because of the lack of a coherent business model. And if it can’t be funded because of these business problems, then that’s a real loss in terms of voices and diversity. And I don’t think bloggers make up the difference. The historic model of investigative journalists in any industry is something that is very fundamental. So the question is, what can you do about this? And a fair statement is, we’re still looking for the right answer.

One possibility is subscription or donation for stories of genuine public interest, as reported by Business Week, on a startup doing just that. So far, Spot.Us has raised nearly $6,000 and published four stories, which have covered locally oriented environmental issues, political campaigns, and energy. But this is a bit of a filler for local news.

The bigger answer is collaboration. If, to be profitable, newspapers need a streamlined online offering, they also need a streamlined print offering that maintains comprehensive, quality coverage. No newspaper can be the best at everything, but they all know someone else who is, so they need to use in-house resources for what is unique and crucial to them and collaboration with others for the rest.

To give an example, for non-business and non-tech news I am fond of The Guardian Online, because it is pretty web-savvy and carries a lot of insight pieces that I enjoy. But the breadth of minute-to-minute coverage is not as good as the BBC’s, and it is not a great news portal, so I use the BBC (unfair competition because of the state subsidy, but the demands of neutrality also sometimes limit their ability to delve into depth) as my first news site and RSS feeds to various others. What I’d like is a portal for the best breaking news worldwide and specialist coverage, plus insight pieces and good UK news. Ideally with widgets so I can customize.

To give one example, I like to follow Test Cricket. If you ask most cricket fans they will tell you that Cricinfo is the site. If The Guardian were to embed a few pages from CricInfo (just to give an example), I’d definitely be a more frequent user. I’d be quite happy have a lot of their content like this and for them to focus on what they are in the top division for. And not only for online news: The point is that the print version could use the same model. There is every reason for The Guardian to have its political reporters and correspondents for home and, to some extent, foreign affairs. But newspaper journalism can’t be the best way to report all of it - science, technology, sports, fashion, literature, you name it. But newspapers are potentially a great way to distribute it, and this could be the key to their survival. I hope so.

1. Business social networking to grow

Brad Shimmin, principal analyst at Current Analysis in a group podcast for Briefings Direct:

The first one for me is vendors tackling enterprise-plus-consumer based social networks, a blended view of those. Enterprise-focused vendors are going to do more than simply sink info from public sites like Facebook. They’re going to take that information and build into or out from the enterprise into those social networks and drive information from those. It’s going to become a two-way street.

You’re going to see folks like Facebook, and most notably, LinkedIn, working in the other direction themselves, and with third parties, to develop enterprise-bound social networks. Look for those to emerge next year.

And from Drupal CEO Dries Buytaert
Social publishing (blogs, forums, wikis, social networks, etc.) will become more pervasive and continue to make inroads in organizations seeking to facilitate collaboration between teams and departments. These applications, while nothing new, make many aspects of business better, are here to stay, and will mature over time.

2. Brands get promoted directly via microblogging & social networking

From The Marketing Consigliere:

Brands will use Twitter and some people will tolerate push communication.
Just as the original commercial Internet “pioneers” were eclipsed by corporate suits in regard to the continued development and exploitation of the Internet, brands will become a more dominant player in this tool. While the Innovators and Early Adopters who embraced Twitter may feel their “find” has been violated, this is just another stage in the product life cycle as the Early Majority and Late Majority get on board. Many of these later adopters will be complacent with one-way messaging, just as they have been while using other media…

As B2B buyers become less reluctant to use “consumer” apps in their daily work routine, they will accept this relatively new form of blogging as the primary means of communication with their vendors. (Personally, I doubt we will see Twitter etc. being the primary means in Europe this year, but interesting that it is taking off so fast in the US. )

3. New market entrants make fast impact using online marketing

From Joe McKendrick, also for Briefings Direct:

We are going to see folks — maybe IT people, or people who work for vendors and have been laid off — have the ability to start their own business at a very low cost of entry. On the flip side of that, the whole social-networking and cloud-computing phenomena, companies have these tools as well to employ low-cost methods to reach their markets and to interact with their customers. We’re going to see a lot more of that as well. A marketing campaign doesn’t have to cost $200,000 to reach your customers. You can use the social network, the Web 2.0 tools, to interact and collaborate and find out what’s going on in your markets at a very relatively low cost.

With the end of the year almost here, iand a number of recent stories, now seems like a good time to take stock of what’s happening on the social web. A mini news-roundup:

1. Facebook recently tried to buy to Twitter, perhaps just before their own valuation fell too far, but for that or other reasons, Twitter held out.
2. Facebook Connect service was launched, immediately followed by a competitive open-source solution from Google, called Friend Connect, supported by MySpace and others. Bot services extend users’ web personae and logins across participating sites.
3. Browser plugins support Google’s favoured OpenID website login system, and are offered as an integral part of Flock, the ’social web browser’.

I don’t want to go in-depth on these - links are to ars technica’s

excellent coverage. But they don’t name what I think is the elephant in the room, the iPhone, and other smartphones and small portables. I think 2009 will be an important year for them, recession or not. Laptops and desktops are essentially for work, and businesses and private users properly want to separate work and personal activities. The mobile phone is anyway right at the heart of interpersonal communication anyway and now offers better keyboards, screen resolution and apps. Mobile computing for business travellers is also pretty easy now on these devices. So for one thing I think both Google, Facebook and MySpace could become a little less dominant.

So this is a time of experimentation with a lot of new potential players creating apps, and brand loyalty is less of an issue when crossing platforms, so plenty of developments are possible, e.g:

1. Social networks are used more to organize the web experience and integrate it with users social experience more.
2. Location-based apps are increasingly players in both social networking and search functions.
3. Smaller screens create opportunities for a less complicated news aggregator than Google’s igoogle page, for example.
4. The browser and home page may become less crucial because of how apps are accessed on smartphones.
5. Aggregators of social networking sites, plus systems like OpenID, mean it is easy to have multiple memberships.
6. Twitter will continue to do well because of their minimalism.

OpenID and Friend Connect might also create opportunities for business social networking apps, though people will probably use them with caution at first for security and reputation reasons. Hard to see anyone getting ahead of Twitter’s combination of usability, flexibility, and discretion over how open to be, and Twitter groups could be key to directing traffic - functioning like a bunch of loose social networks and a dynamic news and views portal at the same time. Facebook might wish they had been able to grab them while they could.

Twitter made headlines even on the airwaves last week as it poured out instant updates on the Mumbai terrorist attacks, leading CNN to say that the events would be as famous as a landmark for social media as for terrorism. But they probably spoke too soon, and maybe a bit disrespectfully, too. Twitter repeatedly broke the story in two ways - i.e. not just new, but ‘unusable’, as the flurry of updates turned into a whirlwind. So not just Twitter’s finest hour, but perhaps the one where, following its big successes in keeping track of Apple expos and presidential campaigns, its limitations became clear.

It will be interesting to see where this goes next. It is clear that Twitter is now very much a part of life, and it seems to be even clearer that the need for such a service, though strongly felt, is in some ways not being met. Putting these facts together, perhaps the market is open to a new brand of Twitter, aimed particularly at journalists or those in the news community, but open to others, too, provided they adhere to tagging rules, for example. It’s also clear that a good service of this kind is worth paying for if you are a news professional - so time for a really creative business model…

For large or fast-growing organisations, where collaboration and business models are constantly evolving, Web2.0 is becoming as important for its enterprise business applications as it is for the Internet ones. Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) increasingly uses Web 2.0 technologies to integrate processes (some experts suggest SOA is now superseded by Web-Oriented Architecture, but that’s probably mainly just a matter of what you call it).

Worth thinking about if you are selling to companies using SOA - and more companies are now doing so. For them, Web2.0 apps such as wikis, mashups, blogs and so on are not about window-dressing but about resource and communication efficiency, and speed of innovation and response. In the case of innovation factories and other cross-company collaboration, these tools are being increasingly located in the cloud, too.

A few of the benefits of these apps are outlined on Dion Hinchcliffe’s blog How to Survive and Thrive in Business Today with Web 2.0 - Part 1 (see image above - I’m looking forward to part 2, btw).

This is not to say that all large companies are on this track. According to  Bob Gourley’s  executivebiz blog post Web2.0 Adoption in Large Enterprises

…there are three ways to reap the benefit of Web2.0 in large enterprises:

1) Just wait and do nothing.  Eventually all people in large organizations leave, either on their feet or on their back, and as they do they will be replaced by people who probably know more about Web2.0 so these new capabilities will slowly be more widely used.

2) Encourage self learning and an individual examination of Web2.0 capabilities and use grass-roots efforts to change big organizations, or

3) Establish formal training programs, strong evangelism and executive leadership towards a vision of Web2.0.

I think you can guess which track he favours! The point I’m making is not to sell Web2.0 business tools: however, if you are trying to sell to companies who are actively using or exploring these tools, using them in your own communications doesn’t just get the message across more directly, but also shows you are on their wavelength. If you are not convinced, you can test it with a thought experiment: imagine your competitors using e-books, webinars, podcasts, mashups, wikis or whatever they can find to communicate their message to such customers, while you stick firmly to news releases, magazine articles and adverts.

The New York Times this week produced a very good analysis of the way Obama used the Internet to rise from relative obscurity to President-elect in an amazingly short period, illustrating how the senator grasped the power of Web 2.0 just as Thomas Jefferson “got” the power of the newspaper, Roosevelt the radio and John F. Kennedy television.

A few months back, during his battle with Hillary Clinton in the primaries, I thought that if he gained the nomination this would be the first proof of a seismic shift of power away from traditional media to the Internet. That shift can no longer be doubted. Where other candidates rely on phone banks, journalists, voter lists and direct mail, the Obama campaign relied on direct spread through social networks and opt-in emailing lists. From a purely business point of view, Obama’s fundraising record was phenomenal, but the ability of a campaign to mobilise support was if anything even more impressive.

The New York Times article also suggests that Obama’s use of social networking platforms, which he has indicated will be an integral part of this government, is a two-way street, entailing commitments to supporters as well as help from them. He seems to be anticipating this quite happily using his change.gov to encourage participation. This certainly seems to be a healthy antidote to being led by special interest groups. Increased internet influence will no doubt scare some, but, though it might be a little idealistic to say so, the whole story seems to affirm the power of the Internet to harness the common sense of the masses. Election smears that would have sunk as junior a candidate as Obama in any other election were quickly rebutted on the web, supporting the old adage that you can’t fool all the people all the time.

Now it would be very easy to say that what Obama’s supporters achieved applies just to political campaigns, and perhaps to business-to-consumer markets. But it’s important to be very critical of that attitude: after all, it’s not so different from the attitude that Republican party and the Clintons had. The fact is that there are now just many more ways to communicate and collaborate, and the greening of technology will probably accelerate this as it becomes less acceptable to pile on the business miles (there is already speculation about how this will affect telecom sector in the US under an Obama presidency). Even in specialized markets, there is likely to be some impact from these new modes of communication.

Perhaps I’m being a bit forward, but I think we will already be moving towards “Web 3.0” by the time of the next presidential race, given the speed the development of apps on mobile platforms, increases in connection speed, and more intelligent and interoperable software. It will be interesting to see which politicians, in the US and in other democracies, will be ready for that, and whether the Obama initiative will still be setting the agenda. And, of course, which companies learn from his strategies.

‘Today, whatever you say inside of a company will end up on a blog,’ said Rusty Rueff, a former human resources executive at Electronic Arts and PepsiCo. ‘So you have a choice as a company — you can either be proactive and take the offensive and say, ‘Here’s what’s going on,’ or you can let someone else write the story for you.’

Yes, it is based on Silicon Valley, an extreme case, but it probably won’t be long before this need is much more widespread, and it is worth considering when you have bad news, or even when your employees think you might have bad news, whether you want to be the one who announces it or whether you would prefer to leave it to somebody else. If you want to appear open and honest, that’s a pretty clear choice, and maybe in itself sufficient reason to start your corporate blog.

Sometimes living in Switzerland can be a little puzzling for foreigners like me. Familiar things are done just that little bit differently. This example gave me a real surprise, for example - Migros, Switzerland’s biggest supermarket and retail chain and one of its biggest companies, decided to use Web 2.0 tools to involve the public in redefining its product range, as reported by Barnaby Skinner for the country’s Sonntagszeitung newspaper. Fine, so far, but in order to keep any new ideas to itself, the company decided to restrict the blog’s four sections - ‘wellness’, cosmetics, household products and Migros employees - to a community of 50 users each (calling the policy ‘first at the pool’). Very productive bloggers will get SFr. 100 each.

So what is strange about this? Well, it’s basically another customer focus group but with a different vehicle. Using a closed version of Web 2.0 in a social network for this seems a bit, well, pointless really. Comments from Jorg Dietz of Nielsen Netratings to that effect made me smile:

Allerdings befürchtet er, dass in einer Community von bezahlten Bloggern ein verzerrtes Marktbild entstehe. Ein richtiges Anreizsystem sei ausschlaggebend für gute Inhalte, ansonsten würden Vielschreiber nur ihr Sackgeld aufbessern wollen.

Das grösste Problem ist jedoch die Abgeschlossenheit. Web-2.0-Gemeinschaften wie Wikipedia oder Myspace leben vom freien Informationsaustausch und -zugang… Er vergleicht diese Marktforschungsmethode mit jemandem, der gewaschen werden will, ohne dabei nass zu werden.

To paraphrase, Dietz thinks Migros hasn’t quite got it, and that paying people regardless of content encourages them to write anything for a bit more pocket money. Dietz also says that a closed community undermines the whole ethos of Web 2.0 networks that live and die by information exchange. He likens the venture to trying to wash yourself without getting wet. It’s not a highly original saying (in German), but one I’m fond of. I couldn’t agree more.

Now, a lot of the more authoritative blogs are done on a professional basis, but the ecosystem in which they operate is one in which amateur or semi-professional bloggers predominate. This ‘mixed economy’ model is also the basis of the profit in the Open Source movement — companies can use Open Source profitably by using part Open Source, part proprietary software.

So how does this mixed professional and amateur, commercial and free environment affect the way you conduct online PR and marketing?

1. It’s important not to make too big a distinction between amateurs and professionals. Professional is not better, commercial is not more reliable, so hierarchical thinking of this kind can be counter-productive. Mutual respect is the watchword.

2. It’s not all about money. The fact there is so much good discussion in blogs, that Wikipedia is now so reliable, and that the open source movement has produced so much reliable software proves that a lot can be done without money. But it can’t be done without trustworthiness and reliable information. Web presence comes with being a provider of information - not a tit-for-tat process of buying favours but one of becoming a participator. The investment is time and energy.

So perhaps the model companies should use for such participation is Google’s ‘We offer our engineers ‘20-percent time‘ so that they’re free to work on what they’re really passionate about’, but in this case the free time is for participation.

When Jakob Nielsen speaks…

Jakob Nielsen is the website usability guru, and when he talks about usability, he is credited with complete authority. May seem strange when you visit his site — it looks like sites of 10 or more years ago. But everyone knew how to use them. His point is not that all sites should be like his, but that they should be as functional: to know when to behave like a user manual (easy to use, easy to navigate, and has all you will need in it) and when like a magazine (visually impressive, surprising, involving).

What Nielsen thinks of online ads

Nielsen’s ideas aren’t based on personal impressions, but on a great deal of observational research of web users behaviour. Now, speaking at the inaugural Web Experience Forum in Boston, Mass. he has some important news for advertisers as reported by Alistair Croll at GigaOm: Forget banner ads, which are purely interruptive, so users ignore them. Go for search ads, which users click more often than generally thought. Nielsen in this case does not give figures for his survey, but according to Croll:

Jakob showed the audience at WEF08 several videos, including heat charts of eye movement, to demonstrate this process. Some testers skimmed picture ads that contained text — but only briefly…Pictures that are content get attention; pictures that are “fluff,” visitors treat as an obstacle course to bypass, particularly when it’s bland photographs of “smiling lady with a headset” or “guy who looks happy with a service.”
…He even produced an example of a gigantic rat on ask.com (celebrating the year of the rat) that testers didn’t recall seeing. And this thing was half the screen!

Is Nielsen right about banner ads?

Mostly, I think. Banner ads can and do work, but only if they draw the eye and are relevant to the user’s reason to be there. Portals are an example, review sites another, and you could find others. But outside of these, when they are interruptive, they are mimicking the display ad world rather than the newspaper classified ads. Even in print media, it’s the classified ads that pay for themselves, and that’s why search-related ads do so well. Even then, billboards and newspapers often attract your attention when you aren’t particularly doing something else — e.g. waiting at the traffic lights or skimming through the pages — whereas web users tend to be more purposive, so the bar is pretty high. So although it’s too much to say they don’t work, they’ve got to be attractive and relevant at the same time.

Where banners win over search ads, though, is in catching people who didn’t already see themselves as potential customers. If a small number of clicks are converted into high value sales as a result, banner ads can pay for themselves many times over. The other important case where banners work is sponsorship, i.e. promotion rather than advertising. Their purpose is brand enhancement, rather than selling, so they don’t have to interrupt, just get the name noticed.

A good PR tip from Nielsen’s site

While it’s worth looking at the resources on Nielsen’s main site, it’s also worth looking at his biography page - which, despite a bit less navigation than I would like, does a very good job of publicizing him- I particularly like a couple of the spoofs he links to: Jakob Nielsen Declares the Letter ‘C’ Unusable and Davezilla’s Jakob Nielsen’s Usability Fighting Styles (as shown above). Not only are they fun to read, but Nielsen’s listing them makes his otherwise rather austere presence much friendlier.

The Washington Post did a good review of location-based social networks for the iPhone last week, so here’s a very short view of the main players. The early leaders, Loopt and Moximity, came out well before the iPhone, but are heavily targeting it now. Moximity uses your existing contacts from Facebook and Twitter; Loopt has even given TechCrunch its own version so TechCrunch followers can meet each other at conferences. Pelago’s Whrrl, for example, is strong on local information, whereas uLocate’s ‘Where‘ app or the Limbo service, with its own Facebook-style wall, provide the chance to meet new people. Zintin, has a group chat feature, too. All are on Washington Post partner TechCrunch’s Crunchbase service for more business background details. Washington Post’s view is that none of them is quite a killer app yet, and that it’s a matter of time before MySpace and Facebook come in and take over.

What’s wrong with this picture? Well, for one thing Facebook was there when the iPhone launched, and that has not stopped others getting the funding or the kudos, e.g. Pelago’s recent successful round. I don’t think we can be sure Facebook is going to be a winner here despite an early advantage. Location-based services are different from the home social network, because they are perfect when you are not at home, and not much use when you are. ‘Cometh the platform, cometh the app’ could be the story.

It’s not just the nature of the service, but the way the market grows. Though Loopt etc. were originally aimed at the whole mobile market, the key platform is now the iPhone, with strong sales, user-friendliness, strong sales, and of course the Appstore. So the market also contains an interesting positive feedback loop that is different from PC sales. The mobile phone is a social instrument at heart, and location-based social networking apps could be as attractive to some users as SMS. If the vehicle is the iPhone, and the app catches on among groups of friends, that will push sales of both phone and app, a from of localized viral growth that depends completely on adoption within particular groups. Perhaps a key to what happens next is how other phone manufacturers will respond to the threat of Apple getting the kind of market traction they did with the iPod.

When asked about specific types of interactions, Americans believe:

• Companies should use social networks to solve my problems (43%)
• Companies should solicit feedback on their products and services (41%)
• Companies should develop new ways for consumers to interact with their brand (37%)
• Companies should market to consumers (25%)

Cone also point out that this is a marketing lifeline for desirable but elusive prospects such as men in general, particularly, young men, and wealthy households. I think anyone would say these figures are high, but a little thought suggests they shouldn’t really be so surprising. In online marketing, the classic AIDA rules, Attention, Interest, Desire, Action, are more like:

• Get attention
• Drive to your website
• Encourage interaction
• Move to action

The middle two points can be weak points in the chain, and this is where I think social media make marketing more effective.

Why ‘driving to your website’ is hard

People come online with a view formed already of where they want to go. Particularly, I suspect, men. Most men I know like to (in theory at least) do their shopping with a kind of military attitude – decide on the shop/s, what they’ll buy, how much they’ll pay, and what time they’ll be home again. If we imagine them transferring that mentality to the web, diverting them is going to be much harder than interacting with them where they are, and much easier if you have already started the interaction there.

Really encourage interaction!

People like the feeling that they are the one holding the remote control. No matter how friendly your website is, users don’t normally get that sense, because you decide the content and the rules. Social media offers a “home space”. If users can interact with you there, they don’t relinquish control.

In Europe, too?

Social media sites, YouTube, Flickr, MySpace, Facebook etc, are doing pretty well in Europe. Facebook is apparently having difficulty getting the numbers in Germany, and actually hiring students to introduce them, but I think this reflects their being a little slow to localize, and maybe a preference for local rather than US sites. So with younger people social media are important, and the US experience is definitely relevant. For the rest of the market, we may still be a few years behind the US in using web features, so perhaps there is time to let this develop. But there’s no disadvantage to being on the scene early.

For more than twenty years, Microsoft has relentlessly commodified itself and the software it makes. It has worked to become a monopoly, a semi-faceless organization that cranks out very good (or pretty good) software that gets a job done for the middle of the market. It’s been a profitable strategy. But now they have Apple envy.

But from my point of view, Microsoft had made a good start to a difficult but limited job. Basically, they needed to show the benefits of ubiquity and affordability, i.e. that they had brought computing and communication between computers to huge numbers of ordinary folk. At the same time they needed to defuse Apple’s advertising message without giving Apple more ammunition. I thought they put across the message in a funny and oblique way, even if it was not hugely accessible. They just needed to move it a little further to show that they have done a pretty good job that no-one else could have done, and they will carry on doing a good job for ordinary folks.

Instead they decided to go head-to-head with Apple, which always looked like a no-no to me. It sends the wrong message: That Apple are setting the agenda and Microsoft doesn’t like it. The new ad is trying to imply that Apple ads are disrespectful to the people that use Microsoft. But by doing so, they’ve put the ball in Apple’s court and, on past evidence, I doubt Apple will waste their chance.

I can imagine the Apple guy in the guise of the therapist, for example. A user worries, ‘My friends think I bought my Mac to look cool, but I just wanted a computer I could use without having to call the helpline all the time’. The response could remind them the user that ‘Apple just doesn’t see why you have to do it all the hard way. That’s why we introduced the desktop and mouse to personal computing all those years ago - which everyone else copied. Anyway, why shouldn’t you enjoy looking at your computer? It’s a great machine. It should look good.’ OK, I’m not an ad copywriter, but you get the idea. Apple can just tone down the cool, emphasize reliability and that they see the user as a friend. They’ve done it before, and it worked. Now’s they’ve got the chance to do it all over again.

When we talk about participation in an online conversation, some people feel they already do this by creating relationships with specialist journalists, sending news releases, and getting onto blogs published by mainstream news sites. But that is not the same thing at all. Participatory activities are fundamentally different. They’re not a way of broadcasting your message, but of creating a presence. That demands a different mindset, in which dialogue has to be more spontaneous. Normally this is also a method that suits the longer term, not a substitute for news releases.

Participation requires a different idea of speed and scale, and this is where the benefit is hard to see at first, If relationships are initially with a few bloggers whose readership is orders of magnitude smaller than those of TechCrunch and Engadget, why should a limited ‘live presence’ matter? The answer depends on how we see Web 2.0. Web 2.0 is not primarily about social networking - that’s important for young people, but in some ways it has been over-hyped both because MySpace etc. are popular and because they showcase many Web 2.0 features. But the key for businesses is that browser and email are points of entry to lots of different applications and forms of communication (features that the Chrome browser in particular is pointed at). The attraction to business is functionality. In all kinds of businesses, people are spending an increasing amount of time, and engaging in an increasing range of activities.

As business activities move online, ‘live participation’ become more valuable for three reasons.

1. Neutrality is highly valued

Vendor-neutral blogs are highly visible for search terms that are highly specific to them - and that does not just mean for Internet search, but for services like Google alerts, widely used to keep up to date with breaking news in all industry sectors. The well-known blogs are usually not talking about your subject and even when they are they will often approach it from a completely different point of view from yours. The ‘magic middle’ blogs - with thousands rather than millions of readers - can be a powerful presence, because search engines give precedence to what they see as neutral content. Good posts on a new topic (together with comments sent to them) are likely to get referenced many times and stay high in search rankings for a long time, maybe years.

2. Conversation is a two-way process

Dialogue will really show you what works and what doesn’t. Normally, when you talk to PR and advertising agencies, they take your message and convert it into a sales message. They may turn it this way and that first, but they are unlikely to really challenge your information. When you are in a conversation where no-one gets a financial benefit, sales messages don’t work, and you have to be more objective and informative. As that kind of communication acquires added value, you will find out how to make it work for you online. How else are you going to do that?

3. Advocacy multiplies your efforts

When you develop relationships with people who are strongly interested in you, those people will often turn into advocates. If they like you and think you provide a genuinely useful service, they will be happy to help you promote it by providing links to your website and other offerings. That is particularly true if you can help them with insight or expertise. Relationships of this kind can then create advocacy. That advocacy is priceless because you are not directly promoting it, or paying for it, and neither is your PR company. But it depends on risking a degree of directness and openness.

I think the new ad is both subtle and funny. They’ve come to stay with a ‘typical’ family to get back in touch with what life is really like for average folks, with all its little moments of awkwardness and embarrassment, of which there are plenty. This episode wrong-footed all the pundits: Jerry, rather than being yesterday’s comedian trying to be today’s, something for which Microsoft was widely ridiculed, actually says, (more or less), ‘look at us Bill, you in your Moon House and me with so many cars I’m driving in my own traffic jam - we both need to get back in touch with everyday folks’. Clever concept, clever casting.

From the comments I saw, the ad people got it, no problem, and commentators from the ITU world, such as Michael Arrington (’I remain confused‘), just scratched their heads and wondered what Microsoft was thinking of. They’re doing something funny, and bits of this one wouldn’t be out of place (IMHO) in the Seinfeld creator Larry David’s own cult series, Curb Your Enthusiasm - of which I am a big fan. In this one, Bill actually takes a real part in the comedy duo. First one, I thought he just got away with being geeky and saying almost nothing; this one I think you fall for his understated wry style.

I think a lot of IT people still hold the opinion that Microsoft is simply trying to rehabilitate Vista. As I said last week, it’s a much bigger exercise than that, it’s about the company. Getting more acceptance of Vista is more than a side-effect, but still essentially a bonus. The ads are making the admission that Microsoft is out of touch, but in a way that actually shows the opposite - i.e. ‘we have been out of touch, but we’re not any more’. Putting the founder in very humbling circumstances really takes the wind out of Apple’s sails, too, because the success of those ads depends on Microsoft’s perceived arrogance. This series - which will have a massive audience - may well succeed in creating sympathy for the Microsoft geek in the Apple adverts and making the cool apple guy look that little bit snobbish. In a way, the ad out-cools Apple in its post-modern sensibility, something few brands manage, including Apple and Steve Jobs (not that this seems to have hurt them so far). All in all, well done Microsoft.

A couple of weeks ago, Seth Godin did a nice blog post on why cartoons work, referring to Tom Fishburne’s book This One Time, at Brand Camp on the subject. Three days later, Google announced its Chrome browser using a cartoon strip - either a coincidence or a response even faster than the browser.

When you look at the Chrome comic strip content, it presents exactly what Google wants to say, but makes you read it, too. They don’t do a sort of phony FAQ-style “it’s interesting you say you’re always typing your search in the address bar – because that’s exactly what you can do with Chrome” dialogue. They just illustrate the product history, aims and benefits in real detail in a way that makes you want to read on. As cartoons go, it’s OK: you keep reading, but you wouldn’t buy it in the news-stand. As marketing, it’s brilliant - there is so much here that would take ages to say in prose, and the combination of white paper and user manual would be a horrible structure that few readers would struggle all the way through. To circumvent that problem, Google cleverly uses a tab and address bar structure.

I was impressed by the readability of Google’s strip, as it switches seamlessly between visuals and prose and has characters point at features in the graphics and ’speak’ at the same time. Some of the stuff in there is pretty technical, but I was still happy to keep reading even where it went beyond my knowledge (e.g. the garbage collection page - I still got the point, i.e. no memory leaks and more efficient and faster garbage collection).

The number one advantage, as Seth Godin points out, is that we love dialogues, because folks are talking in front of us rather than at us. I agree. There’s something that reminds me in this of people-watching. It’s plain interesting (though I wouldn’t pay to do it). And I’m not alone. Go to any discussion forum and you will see the number of people reading it is always more than the number actually submitting. For marketers, the beauty of this is that you represent your customer benefit in a way that is interesting and appears authentic.

A word of warning, as always when a medium catches on. You need to do it well, and subtly, otherwise it will be either too “me-too”, funny in the wrong way, or plain cheesy (if plain cheesy isn’t self-contradictory). Just show it to your friends first, and tell them they have to be cruel to be kind sometimes.