Habitat apologises for ‘hashtag spam’

Today’s Daily Telegraph carries an interesting story illustrating just how badly wrong an ill-conceived Social Media marketing campaign can go. Up-market furniture store Habitat has apparently been caught adding inappropriate keywords – called hashtags –to its corporate Twitter feeds.

Tagging marketing messages with keywords like #Iranelection and#iPhone, the firm tried to ensure its messages achieved a much higher ranking in users’ searches than should have been the case. But, it appears the stunt has backfired badly, and the well-known chain has apparently been forced to issue an apology.

The Telegraph reports: 

Twitter users reacted with anger to the publicity stunt: “Just read about your hashtag abuses,” wrote Caramboo. “You utter scumbags, I’ll never visit your shop again”, while another user, Brownbare, tweeted: “Naughty, money-grabbing furniture outlet. Bad bad bad. Now I’m glad I can’t afford your overpriced Ikea replicas”.

What is very interesting is just how powerful the inherent democracy of social networks is, and how quickly it can bring the errant marketeer to heel once a breach of “Netiquette” (remember that term?) is collectively perceived. The sanction of this electronic plebiscite is swift and decisive. However Netiquette evolves to encompass Social Media, one thing is for sure; Habitat’s ham-fisted, spammy attempts at manipulation will be long-cited as how not to do it.

Habitat apologises for Twitter ‘hashtag spam’ – Telegraph

Shot in the foot by Cupid’s arrow – a cautionary tale of Social Media marketing

It seems that the topic of Social Media is never far from the headlines of the business press. From Twitter to YouTube, debate rages back and forth amongst communications professionals as to the worth – or otherwise – of these sites as valid business communication channels.

Some of the more Ludditic (if there’s such a word) persuasion dismiss it all as a passing fad; others claim with equally unbridled passion that Twitter et al represents a new era of engagement and hyper-responsive communications.

Now – interestingly – a new dynamic has entered the debate in the shape of one Trent Reznor, singer with legendary industrial rock band Nine Inch Nails. Reznor, formerly an enthusiastic Tweeter and Internet music pioneer, has reportedly closed his Twitter account after his candid, heart-warming posts prompted negative reactions from some of his 600,000 followers.

Writing on Japan Inc, Michael Condon suggests this is an event of far greater significance than it may first appear.

Reznor’s departure from Twitter is interesting for two reasons. Firstly, Reznor is one of the more Web-savvy, forward thinking members of the music industry out there. It should be noted that Reznor was one of the first major artists to take advantage of changing distribution and promotional systems with the Nine Inch Nails release of "Ghosts I IV."  Reznor himself has been a prolific "tweeter" with, as mentioned before, over 600,000
followers.

Michael’s second, and most interesting conjecture is that even for die-hard fans of blogging and Social Media, there is a point where “engagement” and interaction becomes a bit too real. Specifically, when the candid reality of Tweeting starts to diverge from the perceived reality of the “brand”, it can only lead to trouble, as Reznor has apparently discovered to his cost.

It seems, among other things, a big problem was that Reznor was, well, in love. HERE are some of the tweets that infuriated angsty fans:
Reznor: "Now that I’m in love and gone all soft on you, can anyone recommend any romantic comedies? Got a weird urge."

And

Reznor: "I am missing someone. Boo hoo."

And

Reznor: "Wait – I’m in love and getting married! I’d give you all free tickets if I could. (hugs)"

All sweet and innocent, until you remember that these utterances come from the creator of albums such as "Pretty Hate Machine", "Broken" and "The Downward Spiral." And it seems this romantic epiphany has not gone down well with the band’s more moribund fans.

There were proclamations of "selling out," "going soft" and worlds being turned "upside down."
And so, in the end, Reznor got sick of it all and pulled the plug on his Twitter feed.

For some celebrities – and increasing numbers of corporate marketeers – Twitter is regarded merely as a marketing tool. Yet it was never intended as such. It was always supposed to be much more personal than that. Ironically, in using it as it was originally intended, Reznor appears to have unwittingly undone the marketing work of many years and many record company dollars – at least in the eyes of some fans.

And therein lies a sobering lesson for those considering Social Media as part of their marketing mix. Twitter feeds and Facebook pages might be fine in some circumstances, but not all, and they need to managed with particular care: Social Media is far from being the silver bullet of marketing; and it’s all too easy to get hit by those ricochets. 

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You can read the original post on Creative Deconstruction here

Intel helps shape Japan’s WiMax future

From Businessweek

A Japanese company is planning to launch the world’s fastest wireless broadband services using WiMax technology. On June 7, Intel Capital said it plans to invest $43 million in Tokyo-based UQ Communications, which also has financial backing from Japan’s second-largest wireless operator, KDDI.

In recent months, UQ Communications has been building a network of WiMax transmitters in Tokyo and neighbouring cities of Kawasaki and Yokohama and aims to reach 90% of Japan’s population by 2012. Today, UQ and KDDI formally announced plans to start offering WiMax services to businesses from July 1.

The promise of WiMax isn’t that it offers another phone network for voice calls. Rather the network is expected make wireless e-mail and Internet-surfing available from more places. WiMax resembles Wi-Fi but WiMax can reach up to 30 miles compared to Wi-Fi’s far more limited range of a few hundred of feet. That means anyone with a laptop computer or other portable gizmo that comes with WiMax technology can tap into the Net wirelessly over a zippy wireless network without a Wi-Fi router or a cable connection. (Calls made over online telephony outfits such as Skype are possible but it’s still unclear whether UQ and other WiMax service providers will try to steer users to their own packaged services.)

UQ enters Japan’s market for wireless data-transmission services as manufacturers unleash an array of wireless gizmos: everything from touch-screen mobile phones resembling Apple’s iPhone to netbooks which are smaller than laptops but can tap cellular networks to do e-mail and Web searches. UQ Communications applied 18 months ago for a license to offer WiMax services.

The company won’t have the WiMax sector all to itself. Japan’s number one wireless carrier, NTT DoCoMo, will begin offering similar services—albeit at much slower speeds than UQ’s–in the coming months. UQ will also have to compete against a crop of other companies known as mobile virtual network operators, or MVNOs, that lease the major cellular networks to offer tailored data and voice services targeting specific kinds of users.

The first WiMax-enabled gizmos will be laptops. Three manufacturers–Toshiba, Panasonic and Onkyo—showed off laptops today that will run on Intel chips with WiMax capability when UQ’s services start. WiMax download speeds in Japan will be as fast as 40 Mbps, comparable to Wi-Fi connections already in use and faster than broadband Internet connections over a land-based line in most other countries. (Upload speeds are slower at 10 Mbps.)

Besides Intel and KDDI, other big-name supporters are behind UQ: Kyocera, railway operator JR East, Tokyo Mitsubishi Bank and Daiwa Securities. That should help in landing deals with businesses and perhaps even give UQ a chance to test new services in conjunction with JR East, which runs commuter and bullet trains from Tokyo to major Japanese cities.

Intel Helps Shape Japan’s WiMax Future – BusinessWeek

Intrusive video: The future for web advertising?

A report on the Adweek website brings a – frankly – chilling insight into the way advertising online might be headed.

According to Adweek, a US company called ShortTail Media…

…wants to radically alter what online ads look like and how they get sold. And he’s recruiting some of Web publishing’s heavy hitters to help in his cause: the creation of a new standard video ad unit for the Internet that can be sold much like TV. This summer ShortTail Media, will initiate a beta test of what it’s calling the Digital 30 (D30), a full-page, deliberately intrusive placement built to showcase traditional 15- and 30-second TV spots. But unlike most Web video ads, the D30 loads between Web pages much like an interstitial.

In plain English, that means your web browsing will be interrupted by full page, tv commercials between page loads. Personally, I can’t think of anything more likely to enrage the target audience and create precisely the wrong perception of your brand. Let’s hope that – if not the company – then media buyers see sense and consign this one to the dustbin.

AJ

“Give your fingers a rest”, advises editor

Barnaby Page of Screens.tv and aka.tv is a highly-respected commentator on the latest developments in digital OOH and other new forms of communication. As such, he is perhaps better placed than most to comment on the latest internet craze/scourge, Twitter. With an elegantly argued case that there is a time and a place for Twittering, Barnaby is perhaps illustrating that, as a serious communications medium, Twitter is reaching – if not maturity – then at least a sober adolescence in the minds of media professionals.

Give your fingers a rest (1)

Barnaby Page – 06 Apr 09, 17:08 PM

With Screen Media Expo Europe nearly upon us, to all those sitting itchy-fingered in the conference rooms (you know who you are) I have just one polite request:

STOP THAT TWITTERING.
Trust me on this: there is nothing to be gained by Twittering conferences in real time, except the irritation of your followers and a spurious sense of “being first”.
Twitter is great for big, unpredictable events unfolding moment-by-moment – things like election nights, Windows reinstalls, soap opera Christmas specials. But when it comes to conferences, what those people who couldn’t attend really need is a thoughtful round-up of key points after the event, all accessible in one place. An article or an email or a blog post, in other words.
Being told what speaker X said five seconds ago, when you the Twitterer aren’t in any position to know whether it’s a trivial throwaway or the lead-in to an important revelation, is useless.
So just don’t do it. The world can wait.

Give your fingers a rest – SCREENS.tv Blog

Second Life’s span is virtually over as firms decide to get real – Telegraph

 

“Just three years ago technology experts predicted Second Life would become the internet sensation of the decade, overtaking YouTube and MySpace in the process. Now the same experts are predicting its imminent demise”, writes Rupert Neate in the Daily Telegraph.

Published in the Daily Telegraph 8:19PM BST 30 Mar 2009

While the site is still beloved by geeks and the socially awkward, Deloitte’s director of technology research, Paul Lee, says it has been “virtually abandoned” by “normal” people and businesses.

In 2006 multinational companies, including BT, Coca-Cola, Adidas and Toyota, were scrabbling to create “in world” presences to profit from what was expected to be the next great internet cash cow.

But today the Second Life high street is mostly deserted, as businesses have realised that despite management claims that the site has 15m members, far fewer people actually play the game. Research for The Daily Telegraph shows just 580,000 people logged on to the game last week.

Matthew Brotherton who runs BT’s presence on Second Life, says most major businesses “have gone cold” on the game as they “can’t see how it is possible to make any money out of it”.

“T-Mobile, Vodafone and a host of our competitors all had public presences, now you cannot find them, they are all taking a step back to save money,” he says. “There are definitely far fewer businesses than there used to be, it is a struggle to find the ones that were there just a year ago.”

Mr Brotherton says he would not be surprised if Second Life has died a death by the end of the year.

At the peak of its hype, Reuters even set-up a bureau on the site but it closed down its operations last year. Eric Krangel, who reported under the byline Eric Reuters, explains why the news agency left: “The very things that most appeal to Second Life’s hardcore enthusiasts are either boring or creepy for most people: spending hundreds of hours of effort to make insignificant amounts of money selling virtual clothes, experimenting with changing your gender or species, getting into random conversations with strangers from around the world, or having pseudo-nonymous sex (and let’s not kid ourselves, sex is a huge draw into Second Life).

“As part of walking my ‘beat’, I’d get invited by sources to virtual nightclubs, where I’d right-click the dance floor to send my avatar [Second Life character] gyrating as I sat at home at my computer. It was about as fun as watching paint dry.”

The overt seediness has caused businesses to think twice about whether they want to be associated with the game.

Concerns about the ubiquity of adult content have forced Mark Kingdon, the chief executive of Linden Lab, the company behind Second Life, to introduce tough new rules to restrict sexual activity to “red light” zones within the site.

But he insists users come to Second Life for more than just sex. “You can learn French art at a Parisian café, go on an African safari and meet interesting people from all around the world,” he says.

Paul Jackson, of Forrester Research, warns that if Second Life is too draconian in clamping down on its seedier side it risks alienating its current users without the guarantee of securing new followers.

He believes the site is close to “stagnation” in terms of user growth as the concept only excites a small subset of internet users.

“The gloss has gone off the whole virtual world segment,” he says. “It only appeals to a very specific mindset, most people don’t have the time to sit in front of their computers for hours on end playing a virtual game.”

Mr Kingdon, who took over as chief executive of Second Life last year after its creator Philip Rosedale stood down from day-to-day operations, claims the site is attracting new players at the rate of one every 10 seconds and is adamant that a “good number” of companies are still present in the game. But he refuses to state how many, claiming Second Life does not keep a record of businesses in the game.

And even if businesses, faced with recession, are pulling back from hyper-reality, ordinary users may end up using the site more, according to Mr Kingdon. “People who can’t afford to go dancing in the real world, will buy a tux for a $1 in Second Life and dance the night away,” he says.

Mr Kingdon also stresses that Linden Lab itself is “very profitable”, though he refuses to disclose any financial information on the privately-held company. Second Life makes money by exchanging real money for Linden dollars, which players can use to buy land, goods and services in the game. Mr Kingdon says $37m (£26m) worth of Linden dollars were transferred between users last month alone.

Repeated requests for financial data on the company were ignored despite Linden Lab’s press office saying they would “love” to provide figures to back-up their claims of profitability.

The company is owned by a host of venture capital funds, including those run by Amazon chief executive Jeff Bezos, eBay founder Pierre Omidyar and Benchmark Capital, the backers of eBay. To date, Linden Lab has not publicly released any details of its revenue or profits. Valley Wag, the respected Silicon Valley gossip blog, has meanwhile created a Second Life “death watch” as it believes the site is on its last legs.

There are fears that as the cost of data storage rise the company is struggling to fund enough servers to run the site. Users complain that the website crashes frequently.

The booming popularity of newer social networking sites, like Facebook and Twitter, is also bound to affect Second Life’s usership and its cache.

“It is a very different proposition [to Twitter and Facebook],” says Mr Kingdon. “We have an incredible business model that any social media property would envy. Facebook and Twitter may have more users, but Second Life actually has a business model and makes money. I wouldn’t trade places with them.”

Second Life has also suffered an exodus of executives over the past year. Mr Kingdon, a former online advertising executive and senior partner at PricewaterhouseCoopers, took over from Mr Rosedale last year. A couple of months earlier its chief technology officer, Cory Ondrejka, left for EMI after a spat with Mr Rosedale.

Only last Friday, finance director John Zdanowski left the company, completing a near total shake-up of the senior management team.

Gone are the days when Linden Lab’s executives — as a frog, a beagle and a jellyfish in one instance — had their meetings in the virtual world they created. Instead, perhaps, as Second Life’s critics would have it, it’s time for Linden Labs’ management to face reality.

Second Life’s span is virtually over as firms decide to get real – Telegraph

Interaction is the key to success in recession marketing

In the current business climate, survival means being adaptable and resourceful enough to create opportunities where others see none. Easy to say, but not so easy to do when your competitors are also leaving no stone unturned in their own survival efforts. In tough conditions, interaction with your customers is absolutely vital. Interaction makes it easier to judge whether your marketing is working; face-to-face negotiation gives you the chance to close the deal rather than merely talk around it. To fully explore every opportunity, you need a way to talk directly and cost-effectively with your customers and potentials, and to gauge their response quickly. You could invest in advertising; you could spend hours on the phone, or visiting them in person. But is this really the most cost-effective use of your valuable time and marketing resource?

The email newsletter is hard to beat in terms of its immediacy and cost-effectiveness, and is perhaps the reason why electronic forms of customer relationship management are experiencing such unprecedented interest at the moment.

Proctor and Gamble’s CEO A.G. Lafley is reported to have once said, “We have a philosophy and a strategy. When times are tough, you build (market) share.” Building share means staying active and engaged with the market; looking for opportunities rather than running for cover when the clouds of recession gather. The logic behind this strategy is not hard to understand. In difficult times, customers are looking for the best possible deals and competition for every euro of revenue is more intense. The pressures bring existing business relationships under scrutiny and incentivise the hunt for alternatives. This means that while there are clearly threats, there are opportunities too for those with the courage to fight for them. Previous recessions have shown that those businesses that stayed engaged with their customers, kept up their marketing and were quick to seize upon new opportunities gained – and retained – significant market share once conditions started to improve; usually at the expense of their more cautious competitors.

A well-written and presented email newsletter gives you the opportunity to engage with your target audience in a way that no other medium can deliver. It’s versatile, fast and responsive, with a very low unit cost. High-quality content is the key to success: Anyone can send an email, but as PR professionals we know better than most how counter-productive a poorly written or poorly-targeted message can be.

The keyword is “value”: To be effective at building a relationship with your customer or prospect, your offering has to deliver value to them. Nobody likes being spammed, but informative and useful email newsletters are generally very welcome and give you the perfect platform to portray your organisation as being both pro-active in its customer relationships and an opinion leader in its field.

The need for PR or journalistic skills in this environment is self-evident. Companies engaged in this kind of activity are effectively moving into the publishing business and consequently it is vital that content is conceived and delivered with the utmost professionalism if it is to be effective. This is why we’ve launched our own email campaign management system, Eido Direct – to be able to deliver both the content AND the delivery of email communications within the context of a broad PR campaign. Eido Direct allows us to create and manage email campaigns of any size – from tens, to tens of thousands of recipients – quickly and easily. Visit www.eido-pr.eu or email enquiries@eido-pr.eu for more information.

Japan’s bloggers show us the future

Blogging and participation in social media services is growing more popular with each passing month, and nowhere more so than in Japan. In fact, when it comes to the popularity of web 2.0, Japan is a world leader. According to Technorati, Japanese is now the commonest language in the blogosphere at 37%, and is in the top five countries in the world for the number of blogs  – an amazing achievement if you think of the relative size of the country compared to, say, the US. As well as being amongst the most prolific writers, the Japanese are the most avid blog readers, with 74% of people regularly reading blogs. But all that pales in comparison to the numbers participating in social networking sites.

A number of popular services are now available in Japanese, including MySpace, but by far the most popular is Mixi. Boasting over 14 million users and one million interest communities, the popularity of Mixi is quite extraordinary. Mixi clocks up 10 billion page views a month. The mobile version is even more popular: In January 2007, Mixi Mobile recorded 100 million page views in a single day! Another mobile-only service, Mobagetown, gets around 15 billion page views a month.

The popularity of web 2.0 in Japan is driven by the country’s highly developed telecoms infrastructure – particularly for mobile devices – which is several years ahead of the US and Europe. High-speed fibre internet connections are common, with speeds of 100mbps and above, and the use of web services on mobile devices is extremely popular. In technology terms, where Japan leads, the world follows and it seems certain that the trends seen in Japan will be repeated globally as wide-area social networking becomes more an integral feature of our culture.

Yet in spite of this strong predicted growth, many companies have been slow to pick up on the trend – clinging to outdated methods and increasingly ineffective communication channels to promote themselves. I was chatting to an editor of a well-known electronics magazine the other day, and he was laughing about a PR company that still sends him paper press releases with a printed photograph. The online delivery of content is a fact of life now and, as the Japanese experience shows us very clearly, certain to become ever-more important in coming years.

The power of the internet still under-utilised by business, says new report

The internet has 10 times more influence than traditional print media on the average consumer, says a report from global PR agency, Fleishman-Hillard. According to PR Week, the company interviewed 5000 internet users in the UK, France and Germany to determine the influence that the internet held over their buying patterns. The study concluded  – not surprisingly perhaps – that the internet was the most powerful medium for this group, with television second and traditional print media ambling in a disappointing third. The report cites travel, leisure and health as the sectors most dependent on internet usage.

Whether these results would be accurately duplicated within the industrial world is debatable; nevertheless, the fact that the internet wields incredible power in the b2b world is undeniable. And this makes another key finding of F-H’s research entirely relevant.

Despite all the evidence pointing to the diminishing effectiveness of ‘traditional’ approaches, promotional budgets are still grossly slewed towards print advertising, with online spend only making up a paltry 8% of the total in 2007. The report also notes the increasing influence of online PR , as advertising planning fails to adapt to the web 2.0 world. Yet many companies are apparently still cautious about using the power of PR to reach and influence customers. Surprisingly, it appears that technical b2b businesses are the the worst culprits.

While PR can sometimes seem like a black art, the simple fact is that a well-written press release can reach parts of the internet – and therefore customers – that other forms of communication simply cannot reach.  Well-written in this case means being accessible by both human and non-human readers. Combined with basic search marketing and clever dissemination, well-written PR is an extremely effective way to reach out to potential customers at a fraction of the cost of an advertising blitz.

Remote working here to stay

Seventy per cent of businesses are doing it, reports Natasha Lomas on Silicon.com

Published: 13 March 2008 12:59 GMT

The megalithic corporate HQ which deforms the city skyline could be a thing of the past if a technology trend toward remote working continues.

In a research report into the 21st century workforce, analyst house Quocirca predicts: “In the future it may make sense for businesses to have more numerous small locations near to centres of population to reduce commuting and be closer to customers. Businesses that do this will rely increasingly on electronic collaboration technology to keep employees in communication with each other.”

While most businesses are still based on a traditional HQ plus branch offices structure, remote working is now commonplace; according to the research, around 70 per cent of enterprises polled said at least a quarter of their staff work remotely at some point during the working week.

Pressure to shrink carbon footprints and attract and retain talented staff could see workforces becoming more distributed, said Quocirca.

The report said: “In the future, carbon taxes may drive businesses to open smaller locations, relying on technology for collaboration between workers and reducing the distance that both employees and customers have to travel.”

The research shows once a business develops a culture of remote working the level of service experienced by remote workers becomes increasingly important to it – or, as Quocirca analyst and report author Bob Tarzey explains, distributed working becomes “a fundamental part of what they do”.

Laptops are currently the most embedded devices in distributed business practices, said Tarzey – having been around for longest – but he said he expects to see that change as more and more business processes are enabled on mobile devices such as smart phones.

The Quocirca research was commissioned by Riverbed Technology.

A separate survey of UK and North American IT chiefs, conducted by network security company AEP Networks, has found 94 per cent either already allow or plan to allow network access to remote workers.