Earning social currency

Tripped over this lovely infographic via Fast Company. Well worth a double click, a read and a ponder.  

Then when you've done that read this piece on brand super users and put your thinking caps back on. 

It raises some very valid and interesting questions about what's right for what sort of brands and how you should be approaching content and social media.  As with everything, a healthy balance between brand and consumer needs / wants / desires needs factoring in.  Get too brand-tunnel-visioned and you'll end up missing the gap between what you want to get across as the brand manager and what consumers actually like to engage with and how / why they like to take part.

The who wants to be talented Prime Minister Idol competition

The panel cast their votes but the jury is out as the semi-final results were inconclusive:

Lots of "Con-Dem" jokes flying around Twitter this morning, will be interesting to see what happens next.

Non-roman character domain names go live...

Way back in the autumn I mentioned that countries /cultures/languages that operate in non-roman alphabets were soon going to be able to have domain names in their own scripts. Today's the day!

More than half the people in the world don't use a Roman Alphabet / English so it's probably more than about time this happened. Google recently added "pop up virtual keyboards" to its search engine to make life easier for some countries where Roman character keyboards lead to quirky clumsy searching.. Here's an image from the Google Blog.

Website owners across the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and Egypt will now be able to apply for website addresses that can be written in Arabic and read right to left. That means that they no longer have to be websitename.eg (for Egypt etc).Check out this BBC Article to see the pictures, as with my Roman alphabet keyboard, I couldn't recreate it even if I could read it!

ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) has apparently had 21 requests for new internet domain names in 11 languages including Chinese, Russian & Thai amongst others.

Which just reminds me of a picture I took in Bangkok last year which made me smile.Just looks like pretty patterns to me in Thai script :-)

...

Voluntary voting : Election Day UK

Emmeline Pankhurst & her suffragettes fought hard for the vote for women, and personally I've voted in every election I've been able to, even if politics aren't a particular passion of mine.  If I don't exercise my right to vote, what right have I got to complain about whatever the state of things is?

In the UK voting is a privilege but not an obligation, in Australia you are fined if you don't vote. Part of me thinks that's not such a mad idea.  Young people are increasingly reported to be disinterested in politics and can't be bothered becaue they don't believe they can make a difference. 

No doubt we'll see later today / tomorrow how many people did actually vote.

However, going by what I've been following intermittently on Facebook all day, there's a healthy amount of people who have actually said they've voted.  I logged in this morning at 9.30am to find the Facebook prime real estate newsfeed 1st position asking me if I'd voted and having clicked yes (keen bean me, 0745am!) it displayed a counter....

I've been tracking the figures all day, partly out of curiosity, but also because the data shows some interesting things:

Approx 40k-ish people were standing up and saying they'd voted every half an hour this morning. One click triggered this message in the newsfeeds of people they know (and in itself I've seen lots of "Likes" of that newsfeed item).

It linked to a Democracy UK page (in case you were interested), offering simplification of who was standing for what / links to other materials to help you make up your mind. (Maybe I've just missed this in the run up to the election but as I was travelling last week I wasn't logging in as frequently).

Back to the numbers....

Predictably there was a greater jump in numbers / %'s mid-morning, over lunchtime and now towards the end of the working day, which in itself confirms the logical point that people hop in and out of Facebook for some distraction at natural punctuation points during the day. It's hardly rocket science, but now I've got numbers to back up the intuition.

So now, at 1740, beyond the end of the working day for many, the cumulative total  of those stating they have voted today stands at 939,722.  That's 771.5 more than the position at 0930 this morning.  Not bad as a reach figure.  Ok, it wasn't asking much to just ask for a click but.....

I'm sure, irrespective of the result, that there will be much debate over the coming days about the role digital / social media, televised debates etc played in the campaign period, but for now I'm going to leave the sign off of this post to my furry friend Aleksandr Orlov, who aptly summed up what so many people have really been thinking: This election turned into a reality tv contest.

But whilst I am it, let's test the new facility to "embed" a real tweet rather than clumsily having to screengrab and insert it.

Today is final chance to vote on ‘Britain has a prime minister’ final. Myself I would vote for mongoose with largest cuts on centipede tax.less than a minute ago via webAleksandr Orlov
Aleksandr_Orlov

Hmm, not so sure that works so well for Blogger. Maybe it's better in Wordpress. I'll play with the html another day.

UPDATE: It's 2215, Voting at the Ballot Box has officially now closed, and the grand total of people saying they've voted on Facebook stands at....

That's 827.6k more people saying "yup, I voted" in a little over 4 hours. Close to double the number of people who voted during the previous 8 hours or so.

1.7m off a Facebook UK membership of 22m might not seem like a lot, but when you think that's just one day, and a fair few of that 22m aren't old enough to vote anyway, I reckon that's pretty respectable.

Now for results time.

Brand Managers: Take a step back!

I was a brand manager once. Admittedly a long time ago now. I was very passionate about my brands.  So I understand that it's hard to have real perspective when you are so close to something day in, day out.

 That's why you need to have agency partners and advisors that challenge you and aren't just yes-men. It's why you need to listen, and think beyond your brand bubble once in a while. Go crazy, think about a category perspective, think about where that category fits in the WHOLE busy life of the people who buy your products. It will help your approach to comms, search, your business overall and hopefully avoid creative clangers like this one.

I am sure the brand manager signed off this poster creative with a thought along the lines of "wow, my products look great in that ad".  Just as well I knew that GHD make hair straighteners as had I seen this poster at a tube station not a million miles from some of the more colourful parts of Soho, and not known that, I might have thought they were advertising something entirely different.  I'll leave that open to your own interpretation.

Ok, I admit I might be being a touch harsh, it was part of a tunnel takeover and there were multiple executions, most of which did feature head/hairshots but....

Creative Clangers & Election Day creative fun

I spotted this clanger last week - a print ad that ran without anyone noticing that the Terms & Conditions placeholder text hadn't been updated with the final copy and was left as Lorem Ipsum. Oooops. (Click on the image to enlarge).

That said, nowhere near as bad as this Daily Express example my friend Trevor flagged up. Eeek.

Today is UK general election day, & The Sun (UK tabloid newspaper) ran a very Obama campaign-esque image on it's front page

It has prompted a heap of parodies.... check this out.

Then take a step back and remind yourself that people will participate and play with creative if the idea is powerful or engaging enough.

My quote of the day (so far) came from a Comscore (digital industry measurement company) newsletter:

"What are you telling the consumer? How are you saying it? comScore ARS, the newest member of the comScore family, finds that the creative execution is four times as important as media vehicle selection in driving the success of an advertising campaign. You can’t save bad advertising with good media."  :-)


UPDATE: Here's a link to Comscore's piece that backs up that creative point with propensity to purchase

One in a million....iPads

Yup, I was in Chicago last week and managed to get my sticky paws on just one of the million iPads Steve Jobs announced he'd sold in just 28 days.  Apparently it took 74 days to sell 1 million iPhones from when they launched in July 2008.

So here's the picture to date:  1 market only (USA), WiFi only model, 1 million units, 12k apps downloaded from the 5k now available and 1.5k eBooks downloaded.

Quirkily, the free iBook the iBook app came with was AA Milne's Winnie the Pooh :-)

Ok, ok, I have to admit that it's not exactly mine, but bought for the office, but just for context, that meant I had this many options of internet connectivity and search / entertainment possibility to hand on Monday night.

And that's with my netbook out on loan at the minute. Too many devices, not enough hands, needs or eyes!

Full marks as ever to Apple for making the purchase process pleasurable. I logged in to the Apple concierge site, reserved my iPad, received a confirmation email and subsequently this notification that it was ready and waiting for me. Nice touch. (Forgive the pun).

The dude in the store was amazing, set it all up, gave me some cunning work around tips as obviously the iPad Appstore is currently only available to US users, and was genuinely passionate about the product, and the fact that I bought the USB and SD card adapter widget (separate, grrrrr). It was the first time they'd had them in stock / seen them at work. So enthusiastic was he that a pile of his colleagues appeared to check it out too. All adding up to a great purchase experience from reservation to leaving the store, new toy in hand and ready to play with as soon as I got to the airport.

So first impressions?

I'm not going to waver from my original position that it's primarily a coffee table device.

A damn sexy one, and you can't argue with the fabulous-ness of the touch interface on the bigger, more gratifying scale of the iPad over the iPhone or iTouch, but... it's a big, expensive, digital photo frame with lots of extra functionality.

Do I  love it? Absolutely!

For me, I need some work horse computing capability, and this isn't it, unless I'd gone to the lengths of buying the keyboard and stand-y thing or a separate bluetooth keyboard, it's not a device that would be comfy or practical for writing long emails, documents or blog posts on, but as an always to hand, totally capable of dealing with many internet requirements (let's not totally overlook the Flash / HTML5 war) device, it's perfect. Which goes back to the points I've previously made, if I was a primarily leisure user, was more style over price conscious and didn't already have a heap of other options, it's a serious contender.

I haven't had it for long enough to play with the more "work" related apps like Keynote (i.e Powerpoint) with the touch interface but watch this space....