VIDEO: ad tech – From Hype to Stereotype

NB: This is a mirror of a post I originally did for Campaign Asia.

 

Damn, this is hilarious!

 

 

Although in true satirical fashion, it’s funny because it’s a bit too close to the reality – conversations about marketing technologies today are orgies of jargon!

When I used to do media training, senior technology execs would argue that geeky, techhie jargon was the only way people in the industry could explain to others in the industry what they were doing – without having to get into rocket-scientist speak.

I think jargon is a poison, but movies like The Social Network show and the current flood of investment money into social media/marketing technology firms, means we’re not likely to see a reduction anytime soon.

I think we all just need a good purge. Okay, I’ll admit it – just yesterday I said “-exchange based buys with complete transparency.” C’mon, you know you know you want to release your jargon – and the truth shall set you free…

Hat Tip to Media Memo via David Armano for the video

Race to the Bottom of Social Media Ethics

NOTE: This is a mirror of a post I first wrote for Campaign Asia.

Today, Reverb Communications settled with the FTC over a claim that it misrepresented itself by having staff post positive comments and reviews about a client’s video game on iTunes without full disclosure of the paid relationship between the brand and the endorser – otherwise known as sock-puppetry, or simply fraud.

This is a case that has been going on for two years, ever since Reverb was rumbled by MobileCrunch. As Adam Curry warns “There are no secrets, only information you do not yet have.” MobileCrunch even managing to get a hold of one of Reverb’s proposal documents, posting it in its entirety. It wasn’t pretty.

I doubt it’s coincidence that last year The FTC revised its endorsements and testimonials guides that online posts of any nature must disclose the connection between reviews or comments left and the seller of the service or product in question. This rule goes for employees associated with a product any agency advertising the product and any third-party paid money or consideration in kind to write something about the product – ie. A blogger, or even a journalist. Many governments in Asia are evaluating bringing in similar guidelines.

I’m not naive – sock puppetry is rife in many countries across our region. I know smart in-house marketers and communicators who believe there is no problem in doing this. They should know better and I do my best to explain why this kind of practice is dangerous for their careers and the reputation of their employers. Despite Reverb being a PR firm, this practice is industry-wide.

In short, if anything is going to change, it’s going to take the various industry bodies – from the 4As, to the PR institutes, to ADMA to the IAB etc to take the issue of ethics in marketing seriously and drive a code of practice and educational curriculum around this to its membership – it’s what WOMMA has done with it’s Honesty ROI – but in a region where ethical leadership is most needed, I worry it’s still sorely lacking.

2 Billion Mobile Subscribers across Asia!!! Now what??

NOTE: This is a mirror of a blog post I original wrote for Campaign Asia.

Every client meeting, every conference and every colleague debate I’m involved in has the mobile marketing opportunity across Asia as a central theme (ok – I’m a bit sad like that!).

However, I finally got a chance to go through the always-excellent and recently-released Asia Digital Marketing Association 2010 Yearbook (freely available here – Neilsen Asia social media report also worth a read) and among the array of big numbers that jumped out, three in particular struck me:

1. There are now over 2 billion mobile subscribers in Asia Pacific, with the expectation that this will grow to over 2.5 billion by 2013, an increase of 25%. I still remember the celebration that was crossing the 1 billion threshold for PCs in 2008… seems like small change now…
2. Around 30% of the global market for smartphones is in AP, with Asian (ex-Japan) smartphone users expected to number 347 million by 2015. This despite the fact that only 6% of mobile users in Southeast Asia subscribe to 3G and that 3G is still in its infancy in China.
3. The mobile phone is becoming (I believe has already become) the favoured device for young Asians to connect to social networking sites, with more than 50% of Chinese, Indian, South Korean and Thai mobile users preferring to use their handsets over their PCs. All you have to do is walk the streets of any Asian city to know that this is a trend that will accelerate fast.

When I presented at the Mobile Marketing Association Forum (MMAF) Asia in April and at a mobile marketing conference last week, the convergence of real-time social media, mobile broadband and smartphone usage was clear to all. Everybody was also violently in agreement about the importance of themes like: “putting the consumer at the centre of social media,” the “higher interaction of consumers via mobile handsets versus desktop” and the need to “move from content campaigns to deep engagement.” In fact, I don’t think I’d heard the words “deep engagement” used so often at an event – the overall buzz-wordiness was jarring…

What was hardly touched on at all was the strategies and practical tips for brands/agencies to actually roll their sleeves up and get involved with mobile internet users via social media. Six of the top 10 mobile internet sites accessed from most Asian countries and two of the top five applications downloaded are to access social media. It felt like words such as content and application were being used as ways for brands to keep the consumer at arms length, while still “doing social media.”

However, during the networking opps one theme was clear – the incredible spread of Facebook, Twitter and the mobile internet has left communicators and marketers no choice but to get engaged – I mean really engaged. However, it’s still slow going.  I just hope it doesn’t require us to get to 4 billion subscribers in order to get it right.

What do you think – has the boom of the mobile internet and social media in the past 12 months made online engagement inevitability, or are we still miles away?

NOTE: This is a mirror of a post I first ran on edelmandigital.com

Over the past year, Edelman Digital APAC and our partners at Brandtology have mined and analyzed 12 months of online conversation about major technology brands covering:

• 8 million posts,
• representing the perspectives of millions of netizens,
• housed in 4,000 regional online channels,
• across eight Asian markets.

So what? Well apart from improving the insights; targeting and relevance to our client’s digital programs; and helping us to win some new clients; the DBI has answered many of the questions we had when we launched it. Further, the DBI has tracked and enabled us to better appreciate macro-trends in the social media landscape across Asia. For example:

1. Online chatter grows and grows: The first DBI (October 2009) tracked 800,000 mentions of survey brands in the quarter, while the fourth and most recent DBI (10.3, August 2010) tracked 2 million. This finding demonstrates that as more Asians come online, they are happy to build or join communities to discuss (technology) brands, pass verdict on products, and share content that catches their eye. The unprecedented rise in social network usage across the region has also not gone unnoticed in the DBI. For example, this quarter, the DBI (10.3) in China saw social networks finally overtaking bulletin boards in terms of total conversation about surveyed technology brands. We all knew people were talking – but the speed of increase has been startling!
2. The Twitter Phenomenon: Asia has been a major contributor to the 100+ percent increase in the platform’s usage over the past 12 months. In October last year, Twitter represented approximately 18 percent of the conversations found in the first DBI (ex-China). This has since grown to represent almost half of all posts tracked about technology brands surveyed in influential local channels monitored – with a high in India where microblogs account for a whopping 69 percent of all conversations! As Steve Rubel eloquently puts it
   – we are quickly moving from a Web of pages to a Web of streams, and one where tech brands need to be omnipresent and working in, and reacting, in real time.
3. Tech brands joining the conversation: The past 12 months has also seen technology brands expand their local blogger engagement outreach programs, with some running online competitions for advocate communities (Canon being a great example) to build their social presence on Facebook and Twitter in particular. In Singapore, seven of the 50 technology brands tracked now have a local Twitter presence, with others contributing to a regional or global Twitter ID. Facebook pages are also springing up, with tech brands taking a regional, local or product line approach towards building communities – with some building communities across all three at the same time! However, presence alone is not enough – more needs to be done to build engaged and active communities – but more on that another time.
4. Telcos and mobile chatter dominates: Local telcos are prominent in the Top 10 brands across all eight Asian markets where we run the DBI. Netizens either love or hate their telcos – there seems to be little middle-ground. When you consider the fact that telcos are often the access point to the hottest devices we have tracked – smart-phones – then local telcos have the best opportunity to lead and define successful online brand engagement. For example, Bakrie Telecom in Indonesia, a new entrant to the local list of Top 10 ‘Buzziest Brands’ had 90.9 percent of brand mentions take place on Twitter – mainly referring to its “Esia” product and service – and has done a good job at engagement. It will be especially interesting to track how such telco social engagement strategies and efforts evolve as people seek increasing amounts of information about popular smart-phone brands that we continue to track such as including BlackBerry, iPhone and Android.

As the DBI evolves, we see the opportunity to dig deeper into the hottest technology products, as well as into the specific content that brands are using and creating to engage with online communities. Further, we’ll be able to track specific branded Facebook pages to measure engagement on an ongoing basis.

However, that’s for the future. In the interim, you can read more about the fourth Asia Pacific Digital Brand Index (10.3) in the following documents – a personal favorite of mine is how World Cup initiatives helping drive buzz for consumer electronic brands in China.

Finally – I knew you’d ask, so below are the Top 10 most discussed technology brands we’ve tracked in the 12 months (ending June 2010) across our eight Asian markets:

1. Google
2. Microsoft
3. Apple
4. Samsung
5. Intel
6. Nokia
7. Sony
8. Hewlett-Packard
9. Yahoo!
10. Research in Motion

You can access the media releases for all seven countries here.

We’re looking to evolve the DBI going going forward, what do you think might be interesting to focus on from here?

LMAO: If Dinosaurs Had Twitter

Too good not to share… HT to http://twitter.com/ben_israel

…especially in light of the split of people right now who either believe Twitter is a waste of time and those who believe it’s the future of the social graph. My view for now, is that’s it’s a Facebook world (ok – plus SNS in North Asia!) and the tide is rising for everyone, including email marketers and Twitter, because of that. Note that I said “for now…”

What do you think?

LMAO: Chinese Guy vs. iPad [VIDEO]

This is too funny – esp. for someone like me, who should have an iPad, but really still can’t see the point yet…

Maybe it will be different in version 2.0, when it hopefully has a USB port and I don’t have to run everything through iTunes? Feel free to flame me on the below:

- Do you have one?
- If so, is it really ‘necessary?’

When Digital Viewpoints Collide

NOTE: first run on my blog on Campaign Asia.

One of the most debated (and I believe pointless) questions asked in our industry today is “who owns social media?” Through five days the end of September in Singapore, we won’t have the answer, but pretty much every viewpoint is sure to be covered. Only realized today that from 19-21 Sept SPIKES Asia will take place, followed directly on 22-23 Sept by the Social Media World Forum Asia.

Both have great speaker line-ups, but while SPIKES will be graced by the great and the good of the advertising industry, SMWF’s stage gives voice to marketers, social luminaries and communications agencies. There is no doubt that every part of the marketing industry – from PR to direct, interactive to media has a different point-of-view about how brands can take advantage of digital. This variation is the exciting element that is creating innovation – even if it does drive internal marketers and communicators crazy!

Anyone attending all five days (my goal) will either walk away very confused about the hottest topics in digital today – incl. creativity, content, social media and mobile – or find surprising commonality for the first time (my hope). While innovation is always important, there’s no doubt that some common ground needs to be found across industries and agencies – and quickly, esp. in the areas of planning, engagement and measurement.

Let’s hope the end of September finds the industry running the right balance between the two. I’ll share my perspectives, but until then what do you think?

- which event do you think you’d learn more from?
- who should own social media? Why should we care?
- is attending just an excuse to go to the Formula 1 race the following weekend?

Asia Pacific Digital Brand Index

Over the past couple of weeks I’ve revisited why I never pursued a career in research – it’s seriously hard work! However, many weeks of hard slog have resulted in a great pay-off, with the launch of the Asia-Pacific Digital Brand Index (DBI), a regional study of online conversations about major technology brands that Edelman APAC conducted with our partners Brandtology. All the details are on this site – but it spans eight APAC countries and incorporates 800,000 mentions of 233 major technology and telco brands, spread across over 4,000 online sites. Whew!

After looking through the data, we decided to focus on country-by-country launches and results, because (mock shock, horror), when you roll the results up at a regional level, the insights become less meaningful. If anything, this exercise has reinforced just how hyper-local social media environments, channels, topics and successful brand engagement really is.

It’s a point well-made by Blair Currie in a recent MEDIA post. However, my point is not that regional social media strategies are not important, but that any expectation that regional silver-bullet targeting, content and engagement strategies exist is misguided. The recent downturn really stressed local over regional and for social media this is also true. Regional marketers still have a very important role to play – esp. in terms of social media policy and strategy formation, driving best practice, benchmarking/measurement and central creation of strong online content. The more that regional marketers can gain a deep understand what’s hot in key markets, which people and sites are most influential for a particular topic and what other firms are doing that is successful or can be learnt from, the more valuable they become.

Shared insight and measurement also helps to better connect regional and local colleagues, so we hope that the DBI helps in the age-old debate about measuring the impact and effectiveness of social media. This is especially so in comparing the performance of brands in markets and across the region - that’s why we created a series of indices that help local and regional marketers to find a common language and measurement benchmark around important areas such as conversation volume, engagement (or mentions per unique voice) and channel volume and breadth.

Just because I know you want to know, here is the ranking of the most discussed technology brands across the eight markets in Asia Pacific:

1. Google
2. Microsoft
3. Nokia
4. Samsung
5. Sony
6. Intel
7. AMD
8. Apple
9. Yahoo!
10. Dell

Disclosure: Edelman represents technology brands around the world, many of which are included in the Digital Brand Index.

With 800,000 pieces of data to review, there’s a whole range of other interesting insights, but more on those at a later date. Would love any questions or feedback you have on the DBI (apart from how bad I look on the below video, ok?!) - let me know.

NOTE: This is a mirror of a post that I did for the MEDIA blog

Mobile Marketing to Become Reality by 2011?

I love the Silicon Alley insider chart-of-the-day feed (and it’s well worth subscribing to). The chart belowwas especially surprising, because I knew that the smartphone (esp. touchscreen) market is hot, but it seems that we’re only 2 years away from the pivot point where the phone really starts to become a seriously major way to access web and social media sites.

Mobile Marketing for real by 2011

However, the reality is that I’m still hearing (and seeing case studies of) very few brands talking about mobile marketing in a serious way. Asia still has a way to go before broadband is ubiquitous, but it is the fastest region in the world for mobile adoption. I’m still not having many conversations with brands about mobile marketing – many are still not optimising websites for mobile. However, forecasts like this show it’s a format that will soon be impossible to ignore. Will that be enough – I hope so!

I presented at last April’s Mobile Marketing forum in Singapore and the general consensus remained that mobile remained a massive opportunity unrealised (SMS Gupshop not-withstanding). I’m looking foward to discussing the Asian reality of the opportunity further around mobile marketing further at SPIKES Asia in September and will actually probe clients and industry people I’m meeting more about mobile in the next few weeks and will share what I hear/find.

Interested in your insights and perspectives about mobile marketing – it is massively interesting – but from a marketing perspective is it for real, about to happen, or still a fad? As always, let me know.

Note – this is a mirror of a post I wrote for the MEDIA blog.

Paul Holmes – Why Edelman is Asia PR Consultancy of the Year

Paul Holmes talks about why he named Edelman the Asia Pacific Consultancy of the Year and why Edelman is the first firm to win Agency of the Year in all three regions

Shameless self-promotion – I love it!