see you there!

vlad

Here’s Google’s how to:

With 12 million iPhone users globally currently and over 200 million iPhone app downloads in little over 100 days eliminate the old (and popular) discussions about whether or not mobile users really want to do anything else but talking and texting on cell phones.

The opportunity for marketers will be two-fold:

1. Use insights on iPhone & T1 Android owners to segment, target a group of early adopters. This will only be short term as the products become more mainstream.

2. Marry the new Google tool with the developing area of geo-targeting with mobiles. If I’ve done a search on a hardware tool in the last two days, Bill’s hardware shop should be able to contact me when I’m within walking distance to the store.

If Google’s profits finally do drop, it won’t be from lack of innovation & product offering, Faber Novel has a great presentation on Google’s next innovations/strategy here.

Stanford University research students have recently released ZunaVision site which enables anyone to easily embed images and other motion graphics into video footage… for free!

Though the service is free, ZunaVision has already worked with some major brands such as Coke, ebay, IBM and Dove to monetize its service.

The technology allows anyone with a mediocre following on youtube to update clips with branded sponsorship, giving marketers another clever way to reach the long tail of the web audience.

Consumer behaviour is changing, it wasn’t long ago that bloggers and information online was considered light-hearted dribble. In a few short years people’s habits have evolved to jumping to Google as soon as they have any query and trusting bloggers more than their friends.

We’ve come a long way in how we use digital technology but we’ve still got a way to go…

The next step is giving away our information and IP.  We’re not there yet and it will probably take a while, but once people in general begin sharing all information we’ll see a plethora of new ideas and human advancement take place.

In this light businesses need to be open and honest with consumers, better yet utilise consumers for product development in order to create advocates.

Given the large pressure on ROI in a reccesion, marketers will be forced to be smarter with their budgets and make smaller investments work harder. A large factor influencing increased digital investment will be accountablility and ability to measure/react to market behaviour in real-time. More and more marketing professionals/corporations are learning the advantages of digital communications over traditional media.

Entering your user name, generates this:

Clicking through takes you to this – a cool data visualization of your musical taste over time:

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/2009_tips_for_big_web_companies.php

This is a perfect example of Kevin Kelly’s hypothesis that the next stage of the web in that it will include material as well as digital objects. 

Here’s a great example of how Nike utilized the technology:

I’m not aware of any campaigns in Australia however Clemenger BBDO NZ recently won a Gold at Cannes for their 3D animals for Wellington Zoo which used a similar technology.

As we all know digital gives us interaction and analytics between brands and consumers beyond what marketers have been able to achieve in the past. Enabling everyday objects with digital capacity will give way to an array of highly relevant communication where brands help consumers in their day-to-day rather than hinder them.

But if marketing departments adopt it, an extremely powerful communication tool.

Great service no cost

Build a great product/service, attract vast numbers of people, attract some major investors and figure out how you’ll make money sometime down the track. Google had no revenue model for a few years, it’s taken two years to figure out a model for making money out of youtube… funny how it’s KINDA similar to the revenue streams they’ve used in the past.

Extremely popular sites and services are being given away and attracting large followings of involved people.

Money wasted

With new great ideas being constantly created and developed it amazes me that larger companies still pump large sums of money into their mass-market media and productions budgets. Less people are spending time watching television, more people are spending time being entertained and using useful services online to help with their daily lives… transfer some investment from one to the other… am I being too naive here?

The utelitarian web

You’re more likely to revisit a site if it’s entertaining or useful. As processing power online continues to grow we continue to see niche tools online that will help make our lives easier (I’ve listed some examples below). Once people start relying on a truly useful tool that’s it, they’re hooked, remember life without mobiles? Seems like another world.

Online photo editing software:

• http://a.viary.com/home
• http://www.getpaint.net/index.html

 Dairy:

• http://www.memiary.com/

 Crowd sourcing:

• http://sidetaker.com/
• http://www.gather.com/
• http://dailystrength.org/
• http://groupswim.com/

 Financial management:

• http://www.mint.com/
• http://quicken.intuit.com/online-banking-finances.jsp
• http://www.freshbooks.com/
• http://www.wesabe.com/
• https://www.expensr.com/

There’s no reason a CBA, NAB or Westpac can’t move some of their media & production budget to create one of the financial management services above. The best example I’ve seen is the Nike Plus site which blends runner, mp3, exercise and social networking all in one.

Utilitarian brands

It’s in the interests of brands to look at how they can provide tools that truely add value to their consumer’s lives in order to become a necessity rather than an avoidance.

Four considerations on successful digital utilities…

1. They look at the user first. Twitter openly states that they’re happy to focus on their users and spend more money than they make. The main factor here is to get a product out early, get feedback and readily revise and adapt to consumer reactions. Build, attract, revise, attract, revise, revise, revise.

2. They’re not afraid to fail. Again, getting it right the first time isn’t everything, what’s important is that there are measures in place so that you can constantly work towards refining the user experience.

3. They’re made by smart people. These companies aren’t made by Joe’s Banner Agency down the road, it takes bright, entrepenurially-minded Engeneers to not only come up with these ideas but see them through. Universities like Stanford in the heart of Sillicon Valley is a production farm for these cleaver cookies. The problem is making them work for the man… if you can show them they can still save the world within your organisation and make a couple of bucks doing so you may nab a couple.

4. The first to market gets the lion’s share. To have maximum impact within the online space you need something new. The great thing is that at any given point there are hundreds if not thousands of entrepenures looking for funding to get their ideas of the ground. Finding them is a bit trickier – form relationships with VCs who have these ideas pitched to them on a regular basis, run scholorship programs through some of the leading tech universities,  keep your ear to the blogosphere ground, there are plenty of ways to get in touch with these people, they want to be found.

Conclusion

 It comes down to changing the way we think about communications. Let’s help people out by creating something useful rather than blanket people with advertising that costs a bomb. I think there will certainly be a movement towards utalitarian brands these tools can become profit streams in their own right, just look at the progression of iTunes.

Last week’s Web 2.0 Summit saw IBM discuss what they claim as the next evolution of the web browser which is set to make the Microsoft, Adobe and Google’s take notice thanks to the new level of functionality in the Blue Spruce platform.

So what does it look like?

It’s basically made up of two components: the client toolkit and co-web server that runs through browsers to provide a user-friendly mash up of technology and data.

The application platform is being planned to run across browsers with opend standards technologies. It’s currently being run as a community sourced project with the potential of becoming open-source. The project’s main goal is to provide rich desktop-app like experiences within any web-browser opening projects up for collaboration and data sharing.

Currently IBM is foccussing on finance, health and heavy industry sectors with several proof of concept platforms in existance. 

Rich functionality with simultaneous users, live streaming, mashups, IM and feeds - multi-faceted components and users interacting at the same time in the same place.

Certainly a big step in the right direction for helping open data spread as a trend. As we see more platforms that facilitate open data we’ll also see it enter mainstream usage. Once the tipping point happens for open data our ability to catapolt ideas in all sectors will allow some big steps forward for humans… and quick. Can’t wait to see Google’s version.