The Fifth Wave: mobile revolution and mobile futures

March 9th, 2012

The Fifth Wave: A Strategic Vision for Mobile Internet Innovation, Investment and Return caught my attention last week and I blogged briefly on it.

The book, by Robert Marcus and Collins Hemingway, deserved a more detailed read – there were enough hooks to warrant it and I’ve spent some time this week working out the weight of the ideas they put forward.

The Fifth Wave is written for anyone who wants to know where we are going online: mobile network operators, mobile companies, entrepreneurs, governments, media companies, content owners and distributors, mobile evangelists, mobile experts… the list goes on.

But the book, to my mind, is much more than a rapid excursion around the mobile terrain. We’ve seen more than enough tomes that promise more than they deliver, rehashing old ideas in new clothes.

Robert Marcus and Collins Hemingway (who, with Bill Gates, co-authored Business @ the Speed of Thought) have written a volume that I think is rare – because it picks up on a defining moment that is obscured for most people, explains this in detail and then draws lessons from which it then lays out a path and process for the future.

The authors call this defining moment and what will follow the Fifth Wave. They use an ancient Greek concept, kiaros, to explain the idea. I urge you to read the book if only for this, because their explanation of a convergence of rapidly evolving but disparate forces - technical, cultural and economic – to form a revolutionary time is exceptional.

The Fifth Wave is, of course, mobile in every sense. Robert Marcus and Collins Hemingway run fluidly through the first half of the book, setting the scene and explaining the revolutionary conditions that we live with right now.

The second half of the book is if anything better than the first because for the first time it offers a clear exposition of what is needed and an astute strategy for everyone touched by mobile internet, from the biggest mobile operator to mobile manufacturers from Apple to Microsoft and from Samsung to HTC, to the mobile apps makers and the movers and shakers in the global market and to every mobile handset user (around 2 billion now – 6 billion soon).

I am old enough to have read Nicholas Negroponte’s Being Digital, published in 1995. That book changed the weltanshauung of an entire generation with its definitional, cultural view of technological developments led by the Web/Internet.

The Fifth Wave: A Strategic Vision for Mobile Internet Innovation, Investment and Return is a book from the same cast and should be required reading in schools, colleges and universities. While the book should stand on its own merits, Robert Marcus was the architect of Microsoft’s early mobile internet strategy and solutions and was a director on the M&A team and now leads QuantumWave Capital, which means he’s qualified.

If you want to know where we’re at and where we’re going, then read The Fifth Wave. You could even do as I did, download it and read it on your iPhone (.. or Kindle, Android, laptop, notebook…). If someone had told me 10 years ago that I would be reading books on my mobile, I would have laughed out loud. How times change.

You can follow Robert Marcus on Twitter @RobertMarcus5W

Posted in Blog, Content, Digital communications, Digital media, Education, Emerging technology, Smartphones, Social media, Social networking, Trends and research | No Comments »

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The #tweetaconda needs feeding

March 7th, 2012

The tweetaconda is a Twitter campaign by Denver Museum of Nature & Science. The idea is simple, feed the tweetaconda and he grows. Hopefully creating the worlds longest snake, which currently measures in at more than 32.75 feet (based on a snake found in Celebes, Indonesia).

If you want to get involved, Tweet with the hashtag #tweetaconda or type in a message over at tweetaconda.com.

The goal of the site is to drive traffic to the exhibit and increase the Museum’s digital footprint by engaging its 25,000+social media followers. “We want the community to keep learning beyond the walls of the Museum,” said Amanda Bennett, director of marketing for the Denver Museum of Nature & Science.

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RIP Privacy - Google changes the rules

March 6th, 2012

It’s been a dramatic few weeks for issues around internet privacy. Alongside a string of high profile cases in the mobile arena focused on consumers’ private data being harvested without consent, Google has ploughed ahead in the last few days with the consolidation of its privacy rules, to widespread dissent.

Google announced the changes back on the 24th January which were designed to streamline the privacy rules of over 60 web services under one policy, enabling services like Gmail and YouTube to share data with each other. The company contends that these changes are primarily motivated by the need to streamline overall data flow and improve the relevancy and quality of service to its users.

But the move has been pilloried by critics and privacy advocates, who argue that this aggregation of personal consumer data is unlawful and driven by competitive agendas. Indeed, the EU Justice Commissioner, Viviane Reding, has announced that the changes directly contravene European data laws, and a full investigation is underway.

Online privacy is clearly entering a new phase and no one knows for certain how we will negotiate this delicate balance between maintaining our privacy and driving progress in the digital age. If you are online, then you already have a digital footprint, and how your personal information is managed is becoming increasingly unclear and difficult to control.

It’s important to bear in mind that online, just as in the real world, nothing comes for free. Whether you’re using social networks like Facebook and Pinterest, or photo sites like Picasa, then the pay-off is your personal information and it’s a marketing goldmine.

Consumers do still have a choice and can vote with their feet to leave certain services, although this is obviously easier said than done in an awful lot of cases. But with a bit of research, it’s possible to find great alternative search engines and email clients that have better privacy controls and won’t share your data without your say so. However, that’s really up to the individuals and many will choose mass market popularity and ease of use over privacy concerns.

The Google story will clearly run and run, with no one quite knowing the long term outcomes for privacy. We’ll be watching this space but in the meantime, here’s some excellent further reading from digital commentators Joss Wright and Tom Chatfield in The Guardian, who look at how our notions of privacy in the digital age will inevitably change - well worth a read.

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When Larry met Sergey is more than just an infographic

February 22nd, 2012

The Google story is a fascinating one, and one that I have personally followed very closely. A great way of finding out more about how Google started, way back in 1995, and its journey to success since then, is the embeddable Evolution of Google timeline aka When Larry met Sergey.

When Larry met Sergey is a creative infographic that actually made me stop and read the facts highlighted throughout, which include such gems as:

“Google implements industrial shipping containers to house their servers, each containing 1,160, for an estimated total of 200,000. Each is powered by Intel and AMD x86 processors and comes with an integrated 12-volt battery in case of failure”.

My favourite aspect is the fact that when you scroll down through the years, you get an ever increasing update on the number of Google users and the number of employees working for the company. In 2011 that figure stood at 2,100,000,000 web users, 31,353 employees with a current net income of $7,032,000,000 (in quarters 1 through 3). Not bad for 16 years work!

If that isn’t enough, there is a link to a list of sources found on the bottom right hand corner of the timeline, encouraging you to dig even deeper into the the world of Google.

So what does the future hold for Google? Will people begin to move away? Will the likes of Bing, Facebook and Twitter halt Google’s progression? Please let us know your thoughts in the comments section of this blog.

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Amnesty International unlock campaign

February 15th, 2012

Guantanamo Bay detention camp, which is described by Wikipedia as ‘an extrajudicial detainment and interrogation facility of the United States located within Guantanamo Bay Naval Base, Cuba‘ is well known for many reasons, and often the target of campaigns aimed at closing it down.

On the camp’s 10th anniversary, Sweden’s Amnesty International arm devised a campaign using iPads and an animation across a digital billboard. The idea was that you signed a petition on the iPad using your finger, which would unlock a prisoner on the digital billboard across the road, to highlight the cause.

If you would like to support this campaign, please get the free mobile wallpapers from here http://m.amnesty.se/slidetounlock/. They are used as the images when you unlock and lock your phone.

Check out this video to see how it worked in real time.

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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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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.

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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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