Another RIM #fail?

February 8th, 2012

The recent RIM BeBold Twitter campaign started well enough, but did it eventually #fail? I’ll let you decide!

RIM asked users to tweet their resolutions for the New Year, using the hashtag #BeBold. The initial start to the campaign received a good response, however it didn’t end so well.

The campaign closed with an infographic “The Bold Team” in which RIM unveiled four cartoon characters designed to reflect the main themes featured in the resolutions – Achievers, Adventurers, Advocates and Authentics.

Unfortunately for RIM this went down like a lead balloon. One tweeter writing: “The BlackBerry new #BeBold campaign is really, really cringeworthy. Dated characters and painfully bad copy. They should just die gracefully.” The Huffington post Canada tweeted ”RIM when we suggested you #beBold with your business strategy this is not what we had in mind”

This was RIM’s response.

We’ve noticed The BeBold Team has received a lot of attention over the last couple of days, and wanted to clarify – this infographic is just intended to be a bit of fun. On New Year’s Eve, we asked BlackBerry Twitter followers and their friends to submit their resolutions on how they plan to Be Bold in 2012. More than 35,000 resolutions streamed across Twitter, Facebook, and giant billboards in Times Square. As we looked at the resolutions and the data, majority patterns and categories emerged. We decided to organize the data and share it in a fun way, and the result is the infographic. This is not a new ad campaign.”

You can find the notorious infographic here. We would love to hear what you think about it.

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Facebook users bring in 10 times less cash than traditional media users

February 8th, 2012

An excellent article in Guardian’s Monday Note caught my attention earlier this week, titled ‘Facebook’s strange economics‘

The piece, written by Frédéric Filloux compared Facebook’s valuation 3 years ago, with its valuation now and pulled up some interesting data on its profit and value per user, then compared this to other social and traditional media.

The article set the scene with a snapshot of a Marc Andreessen interview, from February 2009, who was the creator of Netscape and a Facebook board member. At that time, the social network had 175 million users and Microsoft had just made an investment setting Facebook’s valuation at $15bn.

Andreessen was quoted on the vision for Facebook, saying: “6 billion people on the planet. Probably 3 billion of them with modern electricity and maybe telephones. So maybe the total addressable market today is 3 billion people. 175 million to 3 billion is a big challenge. A big opportunity.”

I’m sure there were a few raised eyebrows in 2009, but perhaps his statement is a little more believable today, although there are other issues such as strong competition in key markets, the member opportunity is indeed there.

Fast forward to last year (2011) when Andreessen was quoted commenting on Facebook’s funding ($1.3bn as of January 2011). Andreessen said the whole amount was actually a shrewd investment as it translated into an acquisition cost of “one or two dollars per user” ($1.53), which sounded perfectly acceptable to him.

As Filloux mentions in the article, if you look at Facebook’s pre-iPO filing: Marc Andreessen was right both in 2009 and in 2011.

So why the title of ‘Facebook’s strange economics?‘ Well, this is where it gets interesting.

As Filloux points out, last year, each of the 845 million active members on Facebook brought in $4.39 in revenue and $1.18 in net income. He also pointed out that based on the $3.9bn in cash and marketable securities on Facebook’s balance sheet, each of these users actually generated a cash input of $1.53 dollars.

The article then suggests the expected market value for each user after the IPO, which is based on the $100bn valuation, comes out at a value of $118 per user.

Filloux then goes on to compare this to other social networks and more traditional media.

Looking at LinkedIn, which is obviously more specialised than Facebook, and has about 145 million users, it has a $7.7bn market cap and a value of $57 per user. However, LinkedIn makes $3.5 in revenue and $0.78 in profit.

The New York Times, until recently the most read online newspaper in the world, is a less straight forward case, as Filloux notes, simply because the company has numerous websites that deal with domestic and global users as well as traditional readers of multiple hardcopy titles.

Filloux suggested a figure of 50 million people worldwide who are in regular contact with one of NYT’s titles. Based on today’s $1.14bn market cap, this yields a valuation of $23 per NYT customer, five times less than Facebook.

However, there is a large anomaly because in 2011, each NYT customer brought $46 in revenue, almost 10 times more than Facebook. As for the profit ($56m for the NYT), each customer brought in a little more than a dollar.

Looking at traditional media company Gannett, Filloux noted it makes between $50 and $80 per year in revenue per customer, and, depending on the way you estimate it, the market values that customer at about $50.

This means Facebook or LinkedIn are flying high while traditional media are struggling; when Facebook achieves a 47% profit margin, Gannett or News Corp are in the 10% range.

This in no surprise in terms of the way social media are over taking traditional media, but the value per user is much lower. 10 times lower in fact, but the market values these users up to five times more.

Bringing this in to context, Facebook looks set to offer shares a multiple of 100 times its earning and 25 times its revenue. Apple is worth 13 times its earnings and Google 20 times. These kinds of figures do not tend to stand the test of time very well when the market matures, so beware of the Facebook Bubble as Filloux puts it.

The article offers real clarity on what has been one of the most dramatic valuations since the dotcom boom. Facebook’s success is undeniable and its meteoric rise to success/power is there for all to see, but surely the valuation is generous to a fault. Or too generous not to fault.

I have no doubt Facebook’s IPO will be a massive success, and the future of the organisation is bright, but why do we need to make a success story into a super success with falsely inflated valuations, when the real story is still pretty damn impressive?

Posted in Blog, Digital communications, Digital media, Journalism, Liberate Media news, Trends and research, Useful resources | 3 Comments »

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A Day-off after the Super Bowl?

February 7th, 2012

The Super Bowl has run its course for another year, but Coke Zero has come up with a cheeky little campaign asking to make the day after Super Bowl Sunday an American public holiday, calling it ‘Magnificent Monday’.

The reason behind this is clear, they say 7million people call in sick after the big event and another 4 million show up late to work.

Coca Cola is asking the Twitterverse to submit ideas and show your support using the hashtag #magmonday let’s just hope it doesn’t get hijacked like some other high profile brand campaigns recently!

Good luck Coke Zero, we are fully behind you.

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BMW Interactive Projection campaign

February 1st, 2012

We do love a good interactive campaign here on the Liberate Media blog, none more so than the BMW Interactive Video Projections campaign by iLogic from Johannesburg, South Africa.

The campaign:

To Promote the BMW 1 Series in South Africa.

The Idea:

An interactive racing game was beamed on to buildings and scaffolding. Assistants on the ground helped participants enter their Facebook details via a Galaxy Pad (steering wheel) in order to compete. Facebook was integrated by posting the user’s interaction to the BMW 1 Series fan page, as well as the racer’s personal profile.

The Result:

A Facebook post congratulated the user on engaging with the BMW interactive projection and listed the activation’s location. There were 810 campaign Facebook posts.

The video:

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Tweet limit impacts Social CRM effectiveness - just ask O2

February 1st, 2012

The development of Social CRM has been well documented over the last few years, and we have written a number of posts on the subject, sharing Liberate Media’s experiences of Social CRM campaigns.

However, a very real issue in the development of Social CRM, at least in terms of Twitter usage, was highlighted last week by O2 who exceeded their daily limit while attempting to respond to a breaking communications crisis. O2 asked Twitter for an extension on the amount of tweets it could send, (Twitter’s daily limit is 250 direct messages a day, and 1,000 tweets) but this was refused.

O2′s PR and social media campaigns manager, James Paterson, confirmed the issue at last week’s 1-2-1 Digital Strategy Summit, run by Marketing Week. In fact, he confirmed that O2 actually accrued the same amount of ‘mentions’ in one day as it does in a normal week.

If you are not familiar with the issue, O2 was attempting to respond to the news that user’s mobile phone numbers were being leaked to websites that they visited.

In the Marketing Week piece, Paterson said it was important that O2 did “not stay quietly in [its] shell” as news circulated about the data leaks and that the company employed a strategy immediately to respond to user questions and communicate that it was investigating the issue.

The mobile operator did utilise other tactics as part of its Social CRM response, i.e. preparing a “Q&A” blog post to explain the technical reasons behind the data leak and to apologise for the concern caused.

Paterson said: “We wanted to respond to as many people as possible with fair answers. In the past we may have just given a Q&A to the well-known media outlets, but our people understand that if you answer queries and communicate to people on social media straight away, problems tend to be resolved more quickly.”

However, although O2 followed a clear strategy for its response, it was hindered by Twitter’s account limit.

Twitter has commented on the limit issue: “Limits alleviate some of the strain on the behind-the-scenes part of Twitter, and reduce downtime and error pages. For the sake of reliability, we’ve placed some limits on account actions like following, API requests, direct messages, and updates.”

“The daily update limit is further broken down into smaller limits for semi-hourly intervals. Retweets are counted as updates.”

These rules obviously reduce the effectiveness of Social CRM response mechanisms for large brands, although in fairness Twitter was not designed as a CRM channel, therefore it has no responsibility to look out for such problems.

However, as Twitter continually looks towards brands to bolster its revenue strategy, it’s likely that it will not only expand this function, but also charge for it, a charge that i’m sure the majority of brands would be willing to pay.

In this instance O2 responded to a breaking issue well, and tried to be open by answering as many of its customer tweets as possible, but this was quickly curtailed when Twitter would not allow any further tweets that day.

This issue, and the others that are sure to follow, further highlight a real flaw in many social CRM strategies, while also drawing attention to a revenue opportunity for Twitter. If Twitter is not already working on a paid response they are likely to be jumping on it rapidly in the near future.

Posted in Blog, Blogging, Digital communications, Digital media, Emerging technology, PR, Social media, Social networking, Useful resources | No Comments »

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When social media bites back

January 25th, 2012

It’s been an interesting week for a couple of major brands that have found themselves in a rather sticky social media situation.

Late last week, McDonalds felt the full force of a misfiring campaign when its idea to use a promoted tweet campaign, supported by hashtags, to highlight real life stories from farmers that grow its food backfired in a big way. Oddly the process started well, when McDonalds used the hashtag #MeetThe Farmers, which was a great choice as it focused on the issue rather than promoting the brand.

Unfortunately, or perhaps as a result of an overzealous brand marketer, the hashtag was changed to #McDStories and within an hour it had been hijacked to talk about unpleasant stories from McDonald’s customers, and instead of charming stories from hard working farmers, McDonalds received a stream of less than desirable comments.

You can see some of the tweets in this story from the Daily Mail.

Then, this week, after a rather moving letter in the ‘consumer champions‘ section of the Guardian (which you can see in full below),  LA Fitness was forced to back down on a contract dispute with a customer. But it didn’t make it easy on itself.

In a nutshell, the story goes like this: LA Fitness had previous refused to allow a pregnant woman and her husband out of a 24 month contract after he recently lost his job, and they had moved away from the gym. She writes a letter to the Guardian’s consumer champions section, they contact LA Fitness with no favourable outcome, the story goes online, and The Twitter nation does the rest.

We all know that customer contract rules can be ridiculous, but a little bit of common sense from LA Fitness would have gone a long way to averting the communications disaster that it now finds itself in. It’s not as though it didn’t have a warning or two, and even if the customer’s tale of difficulty didn’t stir a social conscience, the contact from a broadsheet newspaper certainly should have rung alarm bells. However it was a relentless torrent of Twitter abuse that dealt the killer blow, and although LA Fitness has now refunded the couple’s money, the damage is done, and the story is accessible online for all to see.

You can read the full overview on the Wall Blog, and the original letter to the Guardian below.

Although the McDonald’s case didn’t relate to a customer issue, both cases show a real lack of understanding of how social communications work, and what it means to be a brand online. In McDonalds’ case if they had stuck to the heart of the matter, and focused on sharing stories of farmers the campaign would have probably worked. In LA Fitness’ case, if we look beyond their lack of human empathy, the knowledge that this CRM failing had gone to a national paper should have resulted in an immediate crisis communications response, without letting it go that far.

That letter as featured in the Guardian ‘consumer champions‘ section:

“My husband and I have been loyal customers of gym chain LA Fitness for six years. I am seven months pregnant, we are moving 12 miles away from the gym and don’t drive. My husband has lost his job and we are now on benefits. We can barely feed our children right now and can’t afford the two-year contract.

“Despite us sending LA Fitness a letter proving my husband has been let go from his job, his employer didn’t use the word “redundant” in the letter, so LA Fitness will not accept it as a valid reason to terminate the contract. I have been told that being pregnant entitles me only to temporarily freeze my membership. Moving away does not apply, as we need to be 20 miles from the nearest gym to cancel. We just cannot pay.“

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First impressions of streaming Lovefilm

January 25th, 2012

I have been a Lovefilm subscriber for years now and have been happily receiving DVDs through my post box. It’s fair to say i have always found the service to be quick and reliable.

Over the last few weeks I have been following the Netflix Vs Lovefilm story with interest. It recently dawned on me that within my existing subscription package, I was allowed to consume as much online content as I liked.

I hooked up my PS3 with ease, and within a few minutes I was checking out the online content. The navigation was simple enough, with all the content easily categorised by genre, most popular and highest rated. The picture quality was good and I had no problems whatsoever with the streaming, although Lovefilm does not yet offer HD streaming.

Lovefilm offers around 2,400 TV shows and over 5,000 movies available to view free with your package. The TV series selection was a little disappointing as most options were none US series, most of which I have already seen on UK screens. Unfortunately Lovefilm seems to be lacking in this department.

However, the movie selection was better. I found enough content to keep me going for the foreseeable future, although there seemed to be a lack of new blockbusters.

If you’re interested in the service, Lovefilm offers a number of packages and its unlimited streaming package starts at £4.99. If you want to be able to stream unlimited content and make use of Lovefilm’s postal service, then packages start at £7.99 per month, with one disc allowed at home at a time.

So, overall the Lovefilm online experience was good. The best thing was the simplicity of just picking a movie and watching it, without all the hassle of trailers and menu selections. The only downside would be that there was a lot of repetition through the genre categories, and you have to dig deep to find what you are looking for.

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iPad flips pages just like a book

January 24th, 2012

The feeling of turning the page of a book is a great sensation for all avid book readers. To date the iPad has found it hard to replicate this bond.

Until now that is, if the team at the KAIST Institute of Information Technology Convergence can get their patented Smart E-Book Interface Prototype out of the lab and into the market place.

I’m not going to tell you how similar the experience is to reading a book, just watch the video and judge for yourself. You will notice page flipping that lets you scan 20 or 30 pages at a time, multiple page flips controlled by finger swipe, and a way to hold your thumb on one page and flip through the book with your fingers. Cool!

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Google changes the rules and upsets Twitter, among others

January 12th, 2012

Earlier this week Google announced a number of changes, which apply to the U.S. only at this stage, and are designed to accelerate personal search, and move towards social search.

The three changes fall under the following categories:

First: Personal results, aimed at helping you to find more relevant to…well…you.
Second: Profiles in search, meaning you can more easily identify people you’re close to or want to follow.
Third: People and pages, which focuses on helping you to find profiles and Google+ pages related to memes or topics of interest.

The additions offer more meaningful ways to connect with people around you, straight from the search results.

This all sounds well and good, and personalising and or customising results to be more relevant can only be more positive, can’t it?

Many commentators such as the Guardian and BBC have picked up on the other side effect of these changes which is to make Google+ much more relevant. For example, when you search for information, particularly about individuals, results from the social network will be prominently displayed on the first page of results, assuming you are a member.

That makes Google+ a much more attractive social network, as users will see fewer results from outside it when they search for information.

As you might expect, Twitter has offered its opinion on the issue, as it has perhaps the most to lose. Twitter’s lead lawyer, Alex Macgillivray, called it a “bad day for the internet“, and suggested - as a former Google employee - that there would have been dissent internally “at search being warped this way“.

Twitter later made a formal statement: “For years, people have relied on Google to deliver the most relevant results any time they wanted to find something on the internet.

“As we’ve seen time and time again, news breaks first on Twitter, as a result, Twitter accounts and tweets are often the most relevant results. We’re concerned that as a result of Google’s changes, finding this information will be much harder for everyone. We think that’s bad for people, publishers, news organisations and Twitter users.”

Others have also criticised the change, Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land commented: “Search engines are supposed to send you away to the best information, even if they don’t have their own in stock. Google has previously been excellent at providing links to the most suitable information.

“Today’s change is one of the few times where I’m thinking ‘What the hell are you doing, Google?’”

Getting to the heart of the matter, Google was always going to find a way to move its social network, which is so far behind the game, to the front. Its best strategy to achieve this is to link its social network more closely to its search engine, which is after all the most popular in the U.S and Europe. But is that fair?

Google’s decision to favour Google+ posts which would not rank highly by its normal criteria (defined by the number of “authoritative” pages on the web linking to it) could suggest that it is favouring its own product in order to grow it more quickly. That in turn could breach antitrust (or competition) laws.

Twitter and Facebook content does not generally appear in Google search results because neither site provides Google with unlimited access to their content.

Twitter formerly had an agreement in which Google paid for access to index its database directly, but Twitter chose not to renew the agreement, according to a statement placed on Google+ by an official Google account, which said it was “a bit surprised by Twitter’s comments” because “they chose not to renew their agreement with us last summer“.

Although these changes are likely to head to Europe eventually, the Guardian piece suggests Google may have to think twice about introducing the changes over here because it has a greater share of search in European countries, meaning a ruling on it affecting the market is more likely, and also if the changes extend to results on Android phones, then it may face more urgent calls for an antitrust investigation.

This wouldn’t be the first time that there has been a call for Google to be investigated on such grounds, but if these changes do come to Europe as expected, we could be on the verge of a few interesting legal actions.

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Forget the smart phone, here comes the smart camera

January 11th, 2012

Forget all the talk of integrated TVs at CES and check out the new device from Polaroid.

Polaroid has just announced an Android-powered camera device called the Polaroid SC1630. It looks just like your everyday smart phone, that is apart from the fact you cannot make calls on it!

Because it has the Android operating system, Polaroid SC1630 users can download apps from the Android Market until that perfect shot appears!

The Full specifications:

A 16Mp CCD sensor and 3x optical zoom.

3.2in touchscreen display, used to access apps, as well as a host of production functions, various scene modes and editing tools.

Bluetooth and Wi-Fi and 3G connection too.

If you like the look of it check official site for more details.

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