By Will McInnes

MeasurementCamp II - notes on the goodness

Another interesting and useful session with the MeasurementCampers (ahem) yesterday.

Each time (this was the second session) I really don't expect anyone to turn up: if you've organised a worky type event without tickets then you'll know the fear. Added to this, due to every other priority in life I'm pretty poor at getting the word out there: the odd tweet, maybe a lone blog post! And yet the quality of people joining the conversations is actually upsettingly good.

Relief to see just plain numbers, bodies on the ground, and then delight to see just who turned out!

We always kick things off with the well-worn and cheesey corporate tradition of introducing ourselves, what we do and why we came to MeasurementCamp. And as the spotlight moved around the room I was blown away by the breadth and intelligence of the contributors: we had reps from some of the best admired 'traditional' (sorry guys :) and Online PR firms in the country; we had reps from some of the leading measurement technology companies in the world; a couple of the smartest clients I've met yet in Dan Macquillan (Make Your Mark) and Helen Aspell (University of Southampton); a gaggle of social media planners and digital strategists;  one shiny podcaster; a smattering of SEO hats and an increasing number of people calling themselves social media agencies (what kinda silly person goes into that business?).

As usual we collaboratively suggested topics for work & discussion, and then hived off in little focused work groups to tackle those topics which motivated us most.

I think this time we had a group of Benchmarks and benchmarking, a group on What to Measure and another group of What to Measure, but with a different angle on it.

In the group I joined, benchmarking, we had aimed to find ways to help the industry benchmark successes in social media communications and marketing.

We quickly acknowledged that, with the help of the Diffusion of Innovation model, this being a new immature and evolving marketplace, those with the precious data on what worked, what didn't work and what some good yardsticks were would understandably be protecting such precious intellectual property, and that whereas in mature markets (say email marketing, or Direct Mail) information sharing was the norm, here, at the pioneering edges, such data was unlikely to be forthcoming.

What we moved onto instead was 'how to benchmark' to describe a simple flow that will allow clients and agencies to at least begin benchmarking themselves and developing their own IP in this area: a valuable asset for any organisation; and an important step towards the eventual goal of sharing such data.

The flow isn't exactly effing rocket science, but nonetheless I believe it'll help my team at least to have a point of reference and an explicit 'way to do this' on each project or campaign we work on.

And it shook out another interesting thread to the conversation: the range of tools available to do the 'snapshot' bit of the per-client-benchmarking exercise. So we then finished by getting down a long list of useful tools for measuring social media. There were some superb suggestions that I'd never heard of (Facebook Lexicon, searches Walls for key words - haven't yet checked it out, but sounds v.v.useful indeedy; a Yahoo Pipes tool developed specifically for this kinda malarkey) - brilliant. So all of this will be wikified. Which is the point of all of this: pooling knowledge; sharing resources; being useful, and so breaking important ground for all.

So what next for MeasurementCamp?

1. Momentum building
2. Wikifying everything
3. Building resilience around a core

1. Momentum building

This is about keeping things rolling.
About making our fancy big talk really *stick* by growing our wider base of contributors and fans of the project (we don't actually need more people at each session, but given that we all have different commitments and demanding work lives we need a certain critical mass to sustain us). And we want this work, this energy, and this collaborative approach to seed into the wider industry - in citations, in awards, whatever, buzz - I believe that's what it's called ;-) All because this will help achieve our goals - our goals of developing ever-better clarity around measuring social media so that we can improve the way organisations communicate with their stakeholders (which develops our businesses too) and accelerate the pace of this inevitable change.

2. Wikifying everything

This is about actually making a difference.
In small, face-to-face groups we create the sparks.
But by wikifying everything useful - processes, lists of resources, case studies - we create the roaring bonfire, the beacon that will help those we want to help. And we're getting better at this. There is a growing recognition that it's only *really* useful if it's comprehensible, meaningful and useful to those that have never sat at a small wooden table in The Coach & Horses, so our role is to contribute to the platform, our wonderful and blossoming wiki. So notes were taken, commitments were made - let's make it happen. (Indeed, hat tip to Helen from Dare, who made wonderful contributions on the day, and has already overhauled the wiki - thanks @helenium :) and also to Simon Quance from Hyperlaunch - thanks man - fuck me it's working!!! The wiki is ALIVE!!!! (Cue stormy music, seaweed on face, howling winds, and the drawn out groan of a very creaky door).

3. Building resilience around a core

This is about sustainability. In their inimicable way Chinwag brought the first conversations together, I suggested the idea whilst sat on the panel, and from there we kinda made it happen, together. To be resilient, to sustain, we need a hardcore, we need our own Wikipedians, the 1%ers that commit. And we've been very fortunate already with the influence and power (!) of our attendees, and I feel particularly grateful for Rachel Clarke, Adrian Moss, Helen Aspell and Anna Carlson who have been involved both sessions so far. (I've racked my brains for any others, if I missed you I'm terribly sorry, I am a little hungover if that helps ease the pain?). What I've suggested and can see happening is a core forming, some people who can help make the good stuff happening so that there isn't a single point of failure: this is a networked organisation, luvvies, ya? YA?!

So I'm running out of time here but I hope you get the idea.

Next event: Weds 4th June, 10 am - 12 pm, Coach and Horses (subject to them having availability)

Be there, or be a clueless big talking hippified no-tangible-proof social media 'it's not about measurement...oooh is that a UFO' muppet.

PS. Any feedback gratefully received on how we can make this even better either from real-world attendees or hidden farway interested parties, or general thoughts and next steps

Social Innovation Camp: the moo-vee

I am fascinated by the emerging ways that social media and internet-fuelled innovations can be leveraged 'for the good'; that is, to solve profound problems in the world.

So Social Innovation Camp, which I couldn't attend, has been rocking my world, from afar.

I find the energy in this little film about the Camp absolutely inspirational and deeply exciting. Hope you enjoy too.

 

Avoid risk - sprint towards the online people monster

The most frequently cited reason for not starting to learn, experiment and invest in social media initiatives is ‘risk’, I am told. 

‘Risk’. Oooh, the thrill of the danger, those hushed tones. ‘We’re safe, we avoid these risks’. What misplaced cowardly fearful reactionary bollocks. Medieval logic applied to contemporary culture – ‘stay away, pestilent creature, nay! Nay! Get back foul beastie from whence thee came!’ Crapola.

This is not second hand knowledge: I’m told this by senior business, marketing and PR people at conferences, at executive briefings and in training rooms, at client meetings, and this is backed up through anecdotes from my peers scattered through the industry. This risk is often most pressingly felt and feared one step removed, by the marketer’s boss, by the CEO, the FD, the invisible other person.

This is fear of risk by doing something is deeply, deeply perverse and flawed.

As a marketing community we need to reconsider and then communicate and persuade the business world of the real risks that come with experimenting in social media, and quickly.

In the stable times of yesterday, ah…those halcyon days the rules were known and appreciated, when business was fair, we could re-employ and re-use a known marketing formulae, working with a proven and stable business value chain, it was textbook stuff.

But safe marketing isn’t like safe home security measures – you can’t lock up the doors and windows and be safe by staying in and blanketing yourself to the wilds of the night outside. Do that, and you’re fucked.

Safe marketing is the same as it ever was: it is actually about embracing and managing risk. Risk is what fuels great marketing.

It isn’t about staying indoors – it’s about deciding when to venture out and how, it’s about taking risks, being bold and judging and evaluating and learning and evolving and LEARNING (again!), learning faster than competitors.

Many people believe that the marketing landscape, the fundamental rules of the jungle, are entirely different to how they once were during those halcyon days. I agree in the most part. In fact, sharing that belief has been my job and my mission for the last few years. Yes we do have a new book of philosophies, a new humility and authenticity to find and unlock in our communications, a new value chain, new business models and marketing techniques in the networked world.

But I fundamentally believe that marketing is an evolutionary activity, one that builds on great ideas, and that the core risks we face today in digital social media are exactly the same as they ever were with every other form of change in media creation, communication and consumption.

So what were the risks then, in the good ol’ days?

1.    Failing to meet our consumers needs
2.    Failing to communicate to consumers how their needs will be met by our offer
3.    Not doing either of these well enough to stand out and be chosen over our competitors

And in detailed, straightforward terms, how did these risks manifest themselves?

1.    By being slow to innovate
2.    By being crap at identifying and then meeting needs
3.    By having awful, ineffective communications
4.    By being forgettable, uninspiring, useless, unremarkable

The risks [cue arm-waving and air-punching big shouty body language] are the same today as they ever have been.

And the perversity is quite simply that by avoiding the 'risks' of social media by waiting, by ignoring or denying, is to actually inflame and exaggerate these risks.

To ask ‘can you provide a case study of someone else in our industry sector who has done this exact same proposed activity’ is an analogue for ‘I don’t want to lead, I want to wait ‘til the opportunity has mostly passed and by the way I have no marketing balls, no guts and am actually a lily-livered goat herd better suited to managing a crazy golf course on Bournemouth seafront than a multi-squillion pound marketing P&L’.

You cannot hide from social media – that increases risk, this thing that scares you so. To truly manage risk you can only embrace the new and learn-by-doing.

As with every other disruptive innovation in communications, the best way to avoid risk in this new changed jungle is to run towards the disruption, to sprint right at the monster disrupting our old media channels, and to throw our marketing-selves headlong into the gaping toothy maw of the online people monster.

Stop hiding, start learning, evolve, win. Don't you think?

MeasurementCamp: and so the conversations began

In amongst some heavy shit elsewhere in some of the more fundamental aspects of my life, I wanted to find the time to blog about this because I care about it.

So we had the first MeasurementCamp.

Some background for those that haven't heard of this movement:
The smart people at Chinwag (and I don't say smart cos I wanna suck up to them, I say smart because event after event they seem to nail the digital zeitgeist right in the effing jugular and I admire that proximity, insight and timing) put on an event called Measuring Social Media and I was lucky to be invited onto the panel. More background on that event here and elsewhere.

What I tangibly felt in that room that night were those mercurial and compelling twins: need and opportunity. Given that overt calling, and the incredible turnout and breadth of people in the room (in terms of background, role etc) my top-of-head suggestion was collaboration: 'an open-source set of agreed measurements for social media'.

With a bit of help from a wiki, out of that first night some twenty five (?) of us met earlier this week at the first MeasurementCamp.

The purpose of MeasurementCamp is:

...to create a set of open source resources which allow interested parties to measure their social media communications online and offline.

That's shit wording - my wording so far, but it's wikified so let's hope it 'heals' - but I hope you get the idea...

The MeasurementCamp movement is about fundamentally addressing these issues of what do we measure, what do we believe in, what can we learn from measurement, what can we all agree on and work towards as an industry, what do we report back on and share and benchmark against. That kinda shizzle.

Why? Because it matters. Drucker, the guru's guru, said what get measured get's done. Because the SEO industry and Google's billions owe their existence to their ability to prove. Because we all know it's brilliant and fun and profound and the right-thing-to-do, so why can't we prove it? Because.

And the name MeasurementCamp is probably clumsy too.
Geek purists will say that a somethingCamp should run over a weekend and this that and the other. I don't give a flying flea-bitten donkeyfied horseshit. What those geek purists have done for the world is create a format of events that is profound and wonderful that it is bleeding into horrible soulless and broken worlds like that of business conferences incredibly quickly (e.g. 'Marketing Tech: Tailormade' where delegates chose the talks to go to on the fly from 4 concurrently running options, where all speakers were clearly briefed to be very very practical in their content) - so we're gonna take that goodness and apply it here, regardless of what the purists might snark. Because at the very core of the MeasurementCamp movement will be the same essence of BarCamps (and TransitCamps and - perhaps most breathtaking of all - Social Innovation Camps) and apply it: collaboration in its true form; small groups working on practial things; no hierarchy; goodness.

I don't know how many people exactly were there, and I don't know how many of the gang came to the original Chinwag event. That kinda shit *really doesn't matter now*.

What matters is what we started. And the 'we' was a really exciting group of PR folk, digital agency and independent peeps, some of the big players in the buzz monitoring/technology space, a really cool group.

From an initial open discussion we came out with the following things that'd be useful to each of our selfish needs:

• Metrics to measure - what do we measure
• Shared vocabulary - making life easier within the industry
• Benchmarking - how do our results compare with everyone else?
• Standards - ensuring apples-for-apples comparisons across industry
• Proof or evidence (of social media success) - case studies to convince colleagues or clients to participate in what we inherently know to be right
• Tools - to measure stuff with

Social Media Cafe majordomo Lloyd Davis suggested that any who felt strongly about spending the next 1.5 hrs talking about a given subject say it out loud and that people could gravitate towards the topics they felt interested by. That worked well and so the MeasurementCampers split into 3 groups of similar sizes:

• Metrics to measure
• Proxies to measure - at Lloyd's suggestion, so I think this was about finding other things that already exist (e.g. sales data) to measure social media 'marketing' performance
• Proof

Then in true caring-sharing fashion each group reported back before we all departed.
It felt to me that real progress made.
The groups are going to be updating the wiki - it looks like some of that has started already. I'll flag it up here when there's some real progress for the rest of the world to benefit from.

Next steps:

• Sign up on Upcoming for the next installment
• Contribute to the wiki

Whirlwind few weeks

Sorry for the lack of blogging - I doubt it has significantly impacted on your quality of life nor on that bad case of botty nits that your donkey is suffering from, but I can say that normal service will resume soon.

In the meantime, as a team we were at MarketingTech: Tailormade earlier this week with our little stand, our little social media ebooks and a medium-sized talk on Practical Tips for Web 2.0. Nice bunch of peeps, good interactive, practical format is what client-side attendees demand, and some great conversations started...

Tomorrow is Social Media for Business with the good people at NMK - really looking forward to a nice training day sharing the new shizzle goodness with a group of mainly industry peeps.

Thursday is my first international assignment at Search Marketing World in Dublin, where I'll be talking about the future of digital social media for a few minutes and then being part of a panel - I try to give good panel ;) And more importantly looking fwd to a bursty hour or two of touristy nobbiness in Dublin city centre (please add any suggestions or recommendations to the comments!)

And Friday is a private in-house briefing for a very well known food goods company.

Friday afternoon will be a period of intense exhaustion, lifted only by regular doses of office Peroni supplies.

In the real world, we've had a couple of great clients join in the last few weeks so we're not just prancing around talking about high fakery and silly nonny bonkersness, but you can find that kinda news on the team blog as and when we get to it.

Hope you're well, and if you're gonna be at the Dublin thing please drop me an email - be great to hook up.

MeasurementCamp, 8th April morning, Soho, London

People of the digital frontier, filthy rag-bedraggling peasants that ye be, get your Twitterdicted bee-hinds to:

Tuesday April 8th, 10 am - 12 pm

The Coach & Horses
29 Greek Street
W1D 5DH

Assembled there will be the mighty and the wise of this thing they call digital social media mumble mumble muble, and there will be plotting, discussion, back-slapping and a few of those American sports coach bum slaps that are acceptable between non-lovers.

Seriously though.
Be there.
The list of interested parties alone is frankly interesting enough to make me feel fizzy in my tummy and upper leg regions.

Bulleted review of Sauze d'Oulx as a snowboarding resort

I believe in ratings and reviews so I gotta do Sauze a favour and review it for the rest of the interweb's population in case they want to book a holiday and need a reliably unreliable normal person's view.

Here it is...

• Sauze d'Oulx is pronounced 'Sow-zee Dooo'
• Massive ski area, once you link up with Sestrierre and potentially beyond
• Very few blue, tons of red runs, very few black, and a few dedicated nursery slopes complete with travelators for the lazy, weak learners
• Good for learners in that lots of room, reasonable tuition and no particular snobbiness on the slopes (unlike Les Arcs, France, where I learnt/wiped innocent skiers out at random with rugby-like grand-piano aplomb)
• Reasonable board park at Sestrierre but no travelator or drag lift
• In mid-March, really nicely unpopulated pistes, with very few queues at lifts and almost empty runs towards the end of the day
• Lift attendants are as surly, useless and negative as in France - total bastards
• Lifts are mainly good, modern and fast, but there are a few very ropey metal jobs that feel enjoyably precarious

• Good apres ski: lots of bars; good friendly bar staff; happy hours
• Equally, good restaurants and broad enough mix of accomodation that it doesn't feel like a go-ka-ray-zee party town where a quiet week would be impossible
• Disappointing mix of nationalities - mainly British, Irish and Italian on the slopes, and just the Brits and Paddies out on the town - needed some bonkers Austrians
• Italian Sambuca is rougher than that served in the UK but seems to achieve broadly the same results, particularly once into double figures
• Even basic Italian food is 100x better than English - the Minestrone, Pizza and Ravioli may all looks the same but are each a taste sensation in their own right, which is seriously eye-opening into all of those resentful comments over the years from European mates about the crapness of what us English expect from food served

• Even the crappy cheap takeway pizza place, the guy was kneading the dough on demand to each order...
• Tons of kids, especially Italian young families - looked great for families and I'd definitely take mine there
• Reasonable transfer time from Turin - 1.5 hrs ish
• We went with Directski.com booked last minute - no unnecessary embellishments or frills in the service, but the rep was very very good and everything worked just fine - oh, and the lady that helped us organise it in their call centre was also lovely, so I guess that worked out well too

All in all, definitely go there unless you're advanced level and expect loads of black runs and boardpark galore.

Ciao bella, tutti frutti, molto bravo, scusi, cinque birra, uova, i promesi sposi.

"Don't mention the economy"

Image: frankfarm

We had a discussion about recession, downturn and the likely affects on digital agencies a while ago when the sub-prime thing kicked off.

The consensus then was that we'd all be OK :)

The real-world ramifications of those early signs of a changing economy, back then, are now starting to bite.

And I'm now thinking that a 'it won't affect us' or a 'let's not talk ourselves into a downturn' is a non-view, an irresponsible burying-head-in sand and for me personally would be an avoidance of a responsibility that I have as an employer of great people.

From today's FT: 'Dollar plunges to record low'

The dollar plummeted to record lows and the price of gold touched $1,000 on Thursday as retail sales figures confirmed that the US is in recession and concern intensified about spreading distress in the hedge fund sector.

At our board meeting in forty minutes time I am going to suggest that we as a company take a view, and plan for it.

That view will be flexible, it will evolve according to what we see and feel and hear, and we will not allow it to stifle our growth if smart growth (vs. bloat) is possible and sensible.

That view will inform our decision making around people, clients, services we offer, investments we make and whatever happens we definitely won't stop 'marketing'.

Lastly, that view will also affect my personal planning. I've been tempted in recent times by the lure of consumer credit - all friendly and fluffy and 'take it, no please take it' in good times, and somewhat darker, I'd guess, when their (the lenders) situations worsen. I plan to get my financial house in order. And if it never materialises, great. But if it does, I'll be ready.

I better go buy some tinned food and bottled water too, and maybe build an air raid shelter in me back garden.

MeasurementCamp 'activist' list so far

These are the people that have declared themselves up for the first meeting to start working on open source standards for measuring social media:

• Craig Hepburn, STA Travel
• Will McInnes, Nixon McInnes
• Giles Palmer, Brandwatch (from Magpie)
• Michelle Goodall, E-consultancy
• Daljit Bhurji, PR & Social Media Consultant
• Jonathan Hopkins, Bite/Shed/middledigit.net
• Tom Hume, Future Platforms
• Tim Hoang, Rainier PR / New Media Knowledge
• Jenny Brown (jenny-bee.net)
• Jez Nicholson, NCsoft
• Helen Lawrence, Dare Digital
• Ged Carroll, Waggener Edstrom Worldwide
• Kelvin Newman SiteVisibility
• Alex Stacey FATdrop
• Dan Thornton, Bauer Consumer Media
• Mark Rogers, Market Sentinel
• Chris Reed, Fishburn Hedges
• Nathan Gilliatt, Social Target
• Rob Dobson

Frankly I'm in awe at the breadth and quality of people keen to get stuck in.

We have clients, agencies, specialist buzz monitoring firms, mobile, music, PR, SEO, and internal communications represented.

A date and venue will now quickly follow - Sam Michel from Chinwag has something in mind.

It will never be too late to join in - head to the wiki and edit the page there: http://measurementcamp.wikidot.com/

First impressions of the O2 XDA Orbit 2

Disclosure: O2 is a client of mine. In a different capacity I am on the receiving end of a blogger outreach programme run by VCCP, one of their roster agencies, where they send out pre-release phones/devices for people to play with and keep. This is the second phone I've been sent - first time was the Coccoon which I never got round to writing about (oops) but I can say sincerely that my wife LOVES it and says she gets lots of positive comments about it, so there you go.

So first impressions of the O2 XDA Orbit 2.

Love the packaging - this is the kind of feel O2 needs to evoke in people if its own-label devices are to live up to the brand promise and the position that O2 wants to take in the marketplace. Packaging shouldn't mean anything, but we're not rational people really, and any Apple fanboi will tell you that great packaging does matter: it's the fullness of design and experience applied across every touchpoint.

Love the user-friendly instructions and stickers.
There is so much ground to be gained in consumer tech by being easy to use. Although it may not be the cool brand amongst the young people, I personally believe Nokia owes so much of its position to having always offered the most intuitive, usable menu systems. In the USA there is much re-balancing of the Apple iPhone see-saw towards tried and tested Blackberries which super-users can bang out message on much easier (their words, not mine) than on the swish haptic iPhone interface.
So simple instructions and on-device in-location stickers that make it clear what I need to do using PICTURES (!) is great - I don't read the manul, I'm afraid it's just that simple.

Size-wise, I think this device is reasonable enough for the market: it's not staggeringly thin and small, but it's certainly not chunky - check this pic which highlights the lack of thickness:

BBC iPlayer and Apple Inc. - brand frenemies or just enemies?

The BBC is a powerful brand with fantastic heritage and global distribution.  Fair enuff.

Even so, to take the name iPlayer for their incredibly important and well executed on demand service was a bold, BOLD move considering that Apple is the cult aspirational consumer technology brand [1] and has established the style of the i[insertproductname] in its brand architecture.

I just find that really interesting and wonder what the view was from Jobs' Cupertino HQ, a famously controlling organisation led by a famously controlling man, well willing to use the strong arm of the law in its dealings.

 

It would be wonderful to have been a fly on the wall as the naming discussions opened up. I can well imagine the smiles on the faces of the BBC people as they played with the idea of going head to head. Perhaps they even spoke with Apple - it's certainly not impossible, the Beeb having an incredible ecosystem of global partners in its various supply chains and dealings.

Just an interesting contrast, this: The Beeb, not for profit, generally loved in a kind of benign and slightly straightlaced way and held in high regard around the world, vs. Apple, intercosmic kings of branding and foaming consumer tech desire, and unofficial owners of the letter i...

[1] Yes, Superbrands says Google is the top brand but in my option it's not an aspirational brand - it's a brand I love and believe in (and trust is such a key word for Google going forward) but it's not aspirational like Apple is in that Californian, luxury big ticket way. Oh no. Different territory entirely.

Twitter: 11 Pointless Personal Observations

1. Represents something important culturally - the asynchronousness, the lean feature-ness, the humanity of it actually, it's wonderful - we will look back at Twitter as the first whiff of an essence that sticks around for a long time
2. Most enjoyable online social network I have ever belonged to, no question
3. Most addictive web service I have ever used - I neeeeed it, not so much in terms of output, but input, to scrolly-scrolly and read the updates
4. 50% of my consumption reading-wise of Twitter is on my N95 using the m.twitter.com mobile site - lean, mean and good-to-go
5. I never used to care when it was down, I was really chilled out about it, now all of a sudden I find it as infuriating as others did way back when the bad juu juus started - it took time, but eventually I flipped too (but what is the justification? I pay nothing, I give nothing, yet I demand...)
6. When I read the Twitter tech/scaling updates I feel for those guys - it seems like they are in a world of pain, and it doesn't seem to end - I have a horrible feeling that there is a dark heart to Twitter's technology woes and that soon some very ruthless decisions will need to be made
7. How cool that Evan Williams started blogger and now twitter - that's going down in history type contributions as an entrepreneur, not bad going..!
8. I have truly formed and developed real relationships with lovely, interesting people I haven't yet or may never meet in the real world - in that respect it's much more like a forum than a Facebook
9. A-listers don't work for me in Twitter - too noisy, too newsy, too me-me-me - my favourite people in Twitter belong to Brighton or to the social media (inc. tech PR, enterprise software etc) melting pot, my real world communities
10. That said, I see nice decent people that I follow successfully engaging with A-listers internationally via Twitter - it has a unusually level feeling to it and a sense of accessibility and informality that is wonderful; if you want to make new and valuable contacts it's definitely there to be had
11. Originally my Twitter time destroyed my RSS consumption - that's bounced back now

Notes from FT Digital Media & Broadcasting conference 2008

Ashley Highfield, Head of Future Media and Technology, BBC

• iPlayer is, of course, proving long-tail.
• Growing all time, with recent peak of 660k uses last weekend, due to Six Nations rugby
• 1/8th quality of BBC Freeview in terms of picture quality
• Took 3 years due to work across whole supply chain
• Virgin Media launching BBC iPlayer march 31st – and BBC wants roll out across playforms from there, inc cable tv players, apple platform,
• Project Kangaroo – BBC, ITV, C4 – to monetise and expire content.
• BBC has 1.3 m hours of archives, yet less than 1% avail on iPlayer - huge opportunity...
• 16 – 24 yo is fast moving audience segment in terms of consumption, migrating online but decreasing engagement from 10 hrs tv watching to 1 hr online engagement so that’s the challenge – not the numbers but the volume of consumption.
• BBC currently handles 3m inbound items of user-generated content per day: sms, comments, photos etc. (Holy moly!!!!)
• Figures show that iPlayer isn’t (yet) cannabilising audiences but in fact adding audiences that would have otherwise missed the content, also feel better to host themselves than have someone else cannabilise it (e.g. bittorrent)
• Biggest strategic issue: disintermediation and controlling the brand ‘credit’ when content goes through others channels.

Rona Fairhead, CEO, Financial Times Group
•    Ongoing shift in revenues:
•    2000 – 72% print, 28% online –
•    2008 – 43% vs 57%
•    Future trends:
•    Continued growth but polarised btw mass and super niche
•    Greater interaction with customers
•    New skills in their workforce to innovate and attract hottest talent

Great question to this first panel from Julie Meyer, who was then still in the audience, on what is your Achilles heel?
Answer from BBC: a cross-platform consistent form of measurement  in a multimedia world…(sounds like a similar thing to our measuring social media movement to me!)

Dr Robert Cailliau, co-developer of the World Wide Web

This guy was fantastic. Humble, funny, sweet, and so absolutely on the money when it came to the ethos of the web. I didn't expect that (I don't know why), and was delighted to get it.

•    ‘The web succeeded because it was like a virus’ - and so has every web service since, ebay, google, skype, craigslist. Simple, but easy to overlook.
•    On free wifi: ‘They don’t charge you for the lift, right, and I’m certain the lift costs more to maintain than the wifi...' cue laughter from the audience
•    On banner advertising: ‘I hate these things that move around’ cue more laughter, even though by day 2 it was clear that they were all intent on advertising-supported being their biz model

Habbo hotel

•    “Habbo Hotel users sell more items of furniture to one another than Ikea does worldwide in the real world” – 3i guy

Ron Galloway

This guy is very interesting. From Georgia, USA, he has the southern drawl and all of the misconceptions that can bring with it (which he plays on!) but has been a day trader, a filmmaker, a political activist of sorts - the kind of breadth that makes for interesting perspectives.

His talk was relating the technology prowess of Wal-mart with tagging and the shifting relationships between content, databases, value and sales.

I only wrote down a few fun facts as I was listening and enjoying Ron's talk:

• Walmart annual shrinkage would be 600th biggest company in usa by turnover which demonstrates not so much a problem with dishonesty but the sheer scale of the operation ('shrinkage' is the retailing term for inventory which is stolen by your own staff)
• According to Wal-mart's sophisticated data mining and analysis, before hurricanes people buy beer and strawberry poptarts...

Nova Spivack, Radar Networks

This was one of the most educational talks of the two days for me personally because I know little about the semantic web and this got me started on the topic.

• ‘The semantic graph’ connects everything.
• Interesting point about pendulum swinging between back-end and front-end innovation each decade – Web 2.0 is about UI (user interface - AJAX, nice usable front-ends); Web 3.0 is about the database, the infrastructure of the web.
• A lot of this inputting of data to build the semantic graph will be inputted via speech rather than typing which does have implications for privacy, but NASA has a technology that recognises whispers!
• Tagging is lightweight semantics.
• Natural language search allows natural questions and conversational interactions to occur -> Semantic search will recognise the relationships between data, and therefore in the questions that you pose of it -> Reasoning will involve logic, where the system takes into account pertinent variables to provide logical answers.
• Italy is bizarrely strongly represented in semantic web development.

Blake Chandlee, Facebook

I thought Blake was one of the most convincing representatives at the 2 day conference which is high praise in a way, when you consider that we saw people from Microsoft, Yahoo, Mozilla, AOL, MTV, Orange, NBC etc etc. Straight talking, knew his stuff, wasn't afraid to be assertive - I thought he came across well and I'm glad that we've got someone like that heading things up in the UK because it's a style that works here. I picked up some nice little stats and anecdotes to take away with me, which are here.

• Facebook developed an app to crowdsource the translation of the site into non-English languages
• 50% of Facebook users visit daily
• Average Facebook user has 115 friends
• A key concept is to enable ‘social actions’ in a ‘frictionless’ environment
• Facebook is the 2nd biggest source of traffic for TripAdvisor, the bulk of which it was inferred comes from Cities I’ve Visited app.
• Mindshare is running a campaign solely advertising to the Starcom network on Facebook – its main competitor - which is getting a ‘very high response rate’!

Moray MacLennan, Chairman, Europe, M&C Saatchi

• When you put 50% of your budget into search, you’re depleting your marketing budget by half. It’s not marketing, it’s ‘distribution’.

A fantastically valid, and interesting point. Indeed. I wonder what a search expert would say to that? Please comment if you have a come-back or further thought!

Hamish Pringle, IPA

"We know from the IPA Effectiveness awards that the average winning case uses 4 different marketing channels." - useful stat

Interesting concepts and themes I picked up across the 2 days:

• Total media value – cross platform content, where some channels subsidise strategically valuable other channels
• Micropayments for accessing content as complementary payment type to subscription - paying by the article, per itunes, rather than by the period
• “Luxury content” – Julie Meyer.
• Business model innovations other than advertising-supported.
• Always stepping up a layer: so phase 1 is web content businesses, stepping up a layer is becoming an aggregator; phase 1 is ecommerce biz, stepping up a layer is being an affiliate; what is stepping up from being an agency? What is stepping up from being twitter?
• Super-affiliates are the Wal-mart of the web. This will grow...
• Variables of social media properties, as looked for by financiers: eyeballs; network scale; lock-in; global reach; 'quality'.

Remaining challenges for media cos:

• Cannabalisation – they’re all worried about this and don’t know how this will emerge – my thoughts on this are: “eat yourself alive first or ultimately let others devour you”
• Ad-supported cornflakes syndrome – overwhelmingly they believe in ad-supported models, so do they realise that too many chase too few ad dollars?
• Peak attention – is a concept they don’t seem to be thinking about…
• Owning the relationship with the consumer vs reach via disintermediation and piracy - this seems like a damn hard one to solve

In summary:

• Big media cos still don't know what to do, but they definitely know what the challenges are now and are clearly working on finding solutions
• However, they're not (ahem) thinking outside the box - it's still advertising-supported everything, and it's still locked down command-and-control thinking - we needed Umair on the stage doing his 'decay' thing
• The event was attended by a good level of people but the networking side of things was tame
• The location and general slickness of the event was true to the FT brand - top-end stuff
• I went to find out where the entertainment and media orgs were up to so I'd give it a 7/10, but had I been going to learn it woulda been a 4/10 (but to be fair and decent this event isn't aimed at me, so it's a pointless score really!).

An open source movement for measuring social media - Part II

Thank you to those that have commented and emailed to say you're up for contributing to the measuring social media movement. Great to have you on the team :)

OK, so here's the plan:

• Here's the wiki where we'll *all* (e.g. it's not mine, I don't own it, nor does anyone - it either works or it doesn't and we together determine that) run things from - please add your name if you're in, there are also some things you may be able to help with so chip in if you can - let's build this thing!
• Sam at Chinwag, whose event was the catalyst for all of this, has been organising the second bite of this, and as soon as that's nailed we can all meet up again
• Let's drive this thing forward - weirdly excited by the whole thing...

I'm at Financial Times Digital Media & Broadcasting Conference

Really looking forward to and expecting big things from this event tomorrow which runs for two-days: The annual Financial Times Digital Media & Broadcasting Conference.

Why?

Because the changes imposed on media businesses by the internet are incredibly interesting, challenging and we are still at the formative stages of those changes.

Because the speakers represent the cream of the businesses that *need* to change - it's going to be fascinating to see if they talk the talk or really get this new world.

There's free wifi so I plan to twitter and blog and all that other real time crapola.

Onwards!