23 Musings

Here's an interesting series of articles and audio/video from Business Week on the subject of widgets. The series is designed to help influence CEO's as to whether it's worth dipping your toes in the waters of widgets (I'm a believer so I'd say yes, go for it).

Building a brand with widgets gives a good overview as to why it may be important to your brand to embrace new technologies and distribution channels such as widgets in order to promote your brand and discusses the viral aspects that can make brands fly online.

Widgets: The future of online ads is a piece singing the praises of widgets and all they stand for. On the flip side Why widgets don't work is a counterpoint playing devils advocate.

A widget mogul in between classes is about the up and coming Facebook app developer Ankur Nagpal who's made six figures at the age of 19 creating apps for Facebook.

When Facebook ads flop introduces us to some of the many unused Facebook applications and gives reasons for their failure. What's good about this piece is the fact that most of the apps are from large companies with mature marketing strategies and yet they've still got it wrong, should be a warning to us all.

The CEO guide to widgets is a podcast talking about the use of widgets for advertising on social networks.

Finally, Making money from widgets is a video interview with VideoEgg CEO Matt Sanchez discussing how to go about monetising the widget world.

Great series of articles, definitely recommend sending this to your CEO (or manager...) if they really don't seem to get it yet!

The Coolbrands UK top 20 has been announced. This is the 20 brands which were voted as most cool in a YouGov survey recently. There's a few tech brands in there (unsurprisingly) and more of a surprise to me was Virgin Atlantic's appearance at 10.

Here's the whole list, seems Google still have a bit of work to do to shake off the geek factor, if they manage that I reckon they'll move up the list next year.

1. Aston Martin
2. iPod
3. YouTube
4. Bang and Olufsen
5. Google
6. Playstation
7. Apple
8. Agent Provocateur
9. Nintendo
10. Virgin Atlantic
11. Ferrari
12. Ducati
13. eBay
14. Rolex
15. Tate Modern
16. Prada
17. Lamborghini
18. Green & Blacks
19. iTunes
20. Amazon

There's a great article in Wired Magazine talking about the wasted marketing dollars that are being ploughed into Second Life at the moment. Here's some excerpts below:

At least 50 major companies have ventured into the virtual world to date, spending millions in the process. IBM has created a massive complex of adjoining islands dedicated to recruitment, employee training, and in-world business meetings. Coldwell Banker has opened a virtual real estate office. Brands like Adidas, H&R Block, and Sears have set up shop. CNET and Reuters have opened virtual bureaus there. It's as if the moon suddenly had oxygen. Nobody wants to miss out.

On a random day in June, the most popular location was Money Island (where Linden dollars, the official currency, are given away gratis), with a score of 136,000. Sexy Beach, one of several regions that offer virtual sex shops, dancing, and no-strings hookups, came in at 133,000. The Sears store on IBM's Innovation Island had a traffic score of 281; Coke's Virtual Thirst pavilion, a mere 27. And even when corporate destinations actually draw people, the PR can be less than ideal.

This shows that for all the money invested, Second Life residents just don't seem to be into the type of offerings that are placing themselves in the virtual world. Does this make it a waste of money? I reckon so for large investments, it's still worth getting into Second Life because it could be turned around and become more valuable to marketers and to win it you will have to be in it. Just don't jump in with a huge investment straight away! It is with having brand presence!

I've decided that every time I come across a great piece of viral marketing I will post it up here. Viral is one area of digital marketing that I find fascinating. The effect a good viral can have is quite staggering, from massive acquisition of potential customer details to generation of huge brand buzz, and big brand who hasn't yet at least investigated viral is missing out!

Here's a great example from Carlsberg. It plays off the Coke & Mentos video virals really well and while not about acquisition, it will get many eyeballs and generate huge brand awareness for them. It's also pretty damn clever!

Microsoft has been knocked off the top spot of the most powerful brands list by Google. The ranking from Milward Brown Optimor shows the most powerful brands and it's aim is to show the value a brand is expected to generate for its owner in the future.

It's the second year in a row that a tech company has beaten the household names such as Coca-Cola and Wal Mart. It's yet another indication of just how all pervasive Google is.

The 10 most powerful global brands of 2007 plus value are:

1. Google - $66.4bn
2. General Electric - $61.9bn
3. Microsoft - $55bn
4. Coca-Cola - $44.1bn
5. China Mobile - $41.2bn
6. Marlboro - $39.2bn
7. Wal-Mart - $36.9bn
8. Citi - $33.7bn
9. IBM - $33.6bn
10. Toyota - $33.4bn
    

The 10 most powerful UK brands of 2007

1. Vodafone
2. HSBC
3. Tesco
4. M&S
5. Royal Bank of Scotland
6. Barclays
7. BP
8. Asda
9. Standard Chartered Bank
10. Lloyds TSB

Quite surprised by the UK brands that Vodafone is top considering they have consistently underdelivered to me and caused me to change my mobile service provider!

Spannerworks are a great agency, I use them for SEO currently, but my relationship with them goes a long way back (a start-up I worked for built sites for their Chief Exec many years ago). Plus they're the local boys made good in the web world as possibly the most successful Brighton based new media concern.

So it's great to learn that they are still breaking new ground by launching innovative new products. Their latest offering is called Network Sense, and it's being touted by them as 'giving companies critical insights into the relationship between their brand and social media networks, such as blogs and wikis, and online communities such as MySpace and Bebo'.

Sounds like a very smart move to me! The buzz around social media and reputation is huge at the moment. It's also a topic very close to my heart as I used to program intelligent search agents designed specifically to track reputation, buzz and commentary on large companies when at that same start-up many years ago. Great to see this all coming full circle!

Smart move by Yahoo reported by Mashable yesterday. Yahoo are going to launch 'brand' mini-sites. The move by Yahoo to engage some of the biggest brands around is being touted as a possible way out of the doldrums for belaguered Yahoo who seem to have been in a spell of static growth for quite some time now.

It's an opportunity for Yahoo to leverage some of the social aspects of their holdings such as Flickr, del.icio.us, Answers and MyWeb. The aim is to build mini portals based on a brand and pull content from these sources together with original content to build a hub around which fans of the brand will want to browse.

Yahoo says they don't necessarily need to have engagement from the brands, but of course that will help dramatically if they can get their buy-in and leverage the brands own content to make something really unique.

So far they have launched Wii Portal and talk is of moving into big name brands such as Lord of the Rings and American Idol.

I think it's a smart move as it will give Yahoo a chance to build something pretty unique and also useful to it's visitors. These types of mini-sites should command high traffic and with buy-in from brands offer a good experience to users. I'm sure advertising will feature heavily, perhaps that's something that may hold some brands back from getting really involved, but whatever happens I'm sure the brands will be pleased for the extra PR and it does address the need for them to get more involved in the 'social' revolution.

John Chow reports on a CPM display advertising network being run by Google today. Interestingly he claims it's being aimed at Fortune 1000 advertisers and the publishers carrying the ads are selected on an invite only basis (most probably based on their past history with Adsense I would have thought).

It's Google first foray into brand building display advertising as far as I can see. Adsense has always been much more functional and aimed at selling a specific product, where as we all know a lot of CPM advertising is purely about brand. Display is available on a CPM basis through Adsense, but in reality it's aimed at smaller advertisers than the F1000. Aiming for these large brands and helping them get placed on sites with high relevance and high traffic should see Google make a success of this venture.

Dell are apparently trying to seem all hip and in-touch by holding a press conference today in the virtual world Second Life.

Apparently this event is purely to announce their ongoing involvement inside Second Life, hardly breaking news as this has been talked about for months.

As Mike Arrington says on TechCrunch, this is hardly revolutionary and Dell should stick to what they are good at. I know they've had poor sales figures (or at least not as good as expected) lately, but jumping on every bandwagon is not the way to help yourself out of a rut.

I'm still convinces Second Life is a great place for brands to be involved but taking it as far as closed press conferences is a little extreme, I'd rather see them make an announcement to the real world once their activities in the virtual world become established.

I wouldn't normally blog about Big Brother, I can't stand the tv programme. It churns out wanabee celebs who really have no talent or anything interesting to offer me. I find the nations fascination in these people incredible, I have zero interest in knowing what they are all getting up to in that house.

But being a tech freak I am interested when Endemol (the production company behind Big Brother) announce that they are going to do a virtual version of the show in Second Life.

Fifteen international Second Life residents will occupy a glass house on the site, with each one being voted off over a month until a winner remains. The final contestant will receive a virtual island within Second Life. It's said that contestants will spend up to 8 hours a day in the virtual world (sounds rather boring to me).

I find this interesting as it's another example of a real world brand moving into the virtual world. I hope Endemol use this as a learning experience to broaden their knowledge of Second Life so that they can keep improving their integration with the virtual world. It's such a good way to raise your profile, make yourself look cutting edge and expand awareness of your brand offering!