March 2014 - Inspiral

THOUGHT STARTERS: CONTENT THAT HAS GOT ME THINKING 12

Ben Thompson continues his series looking at the weakening position of the newspaper sector. He points to the fact that newspapers doesn’t necessarily have the best content or a wealth of customer weakening its ability to personalise its media and advertising offering . Thompson instead see a more atomised media sector with specialist providers and a smaller number of dedicated news organisations delivering the news we traditionally associate with newspapers.

Bloomberg looks at the Internet of Money as cryptocurrencies develop a growing range of use cases beyond simply acting as an alternative to fiat currency. For more of a background look at the pros and cons of Bitcoin, try Freakonomics’ recent podcast

Andreessen Horowitz’s podcast series is proving a great source of insights into the technology and startup sector with recent episodes looking at full stack startups, mobile discovery and Bitcoin among others. Definitely worth following.

Twitter has an issue with onboarding, with users typically requiring a considerable investment in time before they get that ‘aha’ moment. Quartz looks at some of the obstacles Twitter faces in making the social network a more comfortable place for consumers.

Filmed in 2011 and still sounding fresh is Rory Sutherland’s TED talk looking at the importance of framing an issue or problem in engaging consumers.

Simon Kemp posts some thought starters for We Are Social looking at the evolving nature of marketing in an increasingly social and data driven age.

Felix Salmon looks at Facebook’s acquisition of Oculus Rift as the former’s move to become a tech conglomerate rather than an attempt to bring the world of virtual reality into social media.

GigaOm looks at the less friendly reception received by Oculus Rift’s Kickstarter supporters to the news that its being acquired by Facebook. As with many crowdfunding initiatives, supporters have no equity but strong identification with the funded projects.

Courtney Myers gives an overview of the London startup sector for General Assembly.

It’s men rather than women that are more likely to be living with their parents as young adults in the Western world according to figures from FiveThirtyEight.

Giving a rather amusing and scary view of the male species is Dissent’s reporting on the pick up artist community’s response to Ukraine’s attempts to align itself with Europe.

Going rather against my own preconceptions about the Australian male is this campaign from Snickers in Australia

The featured image is ELLIPSE by GoddoG in Arles, France.

Events: Getting the word out

We are moving to a world where organisations are looking to engage rather than simply broadcast to their communities (customers, members, stakeholders etc).

Online media is making it increasingly easy for organisations to publicise and manage these. I put together a deck recently looking at some of the more prominent solutions as well as an emerging platform. This doesn’t propose to provide a comprehensive list but it does showcase some of the more prominent solutions and business models.

Meetup and Facebook provide social networks with added on meeting functionality, facilitating the process of recruiting participants. The flip side to the coin is that these options are also keen to keep providers locked in making movement to other platforms more difficult.

Meetup differs from the majority of other providers in charging users a monthly subscription regardless of whether events take place.

An interesting alternative to this approach is Microco.sm forum platforim which provides event functionality and data portability but doesn’t come with the inbuilt audience of say Facebook or Meetup.

Eventbrite is the most widely recognised of the online ticketing providers and it has looked to capitalise on its popularity by providing event organisers with an additional channel to publicise their events through its website and mobile apps.

Eventbrite doesn’t charge for free events, making it easier for event providers to start small then graduate to paid events. I’ve also profiled eventbee but among the other more well known providers which I haven’t covered are guestlist, RegOnline and eventsbot.

All the options with the exception of Event Espresso are hosted applications, minimising users technical needs but also arguably reducing the options for customisation. Event Espresso requires users to licence the software rather than charging users on the basis of ticket purchases made.

A new entrant into the field is Attending.io, from London based startup Makeshift that’s looking to provide a stripped back user friendly alternative for organisers of free events. Attending.io does away with QR codes, entry manager apps and APIs, instead providing an uncluttered device agnostic platform which allowd you to quickly get your word out.

Slideshare presentation below gives you a run through of each of the mentioned platforms.

Feel free to provide your own commentary on these and other alternatives in the comments section.

The featured image is by Russian artist Morik in Perm, Russia and was found on Graffuturism.

THOUGHT STARTERS: CONTENT THAT HAS GOT ME THINKING 11

Drew Tyndell, Ben Niznik and Derek Bruno at Living Walls

Enders Analysis figures point to the increasingly important role of mobile as consumers onramp to the internet in the UK. Mobile apps apparently account for 4 in 5 of consumers mobile minutes.

Ofcom figures point to UK having the fastest broadband access among the big five economies of Europe. UK also has the highest broadband take-up (83%); highest proportion of people to have bought goods online over a year (77%); highest weekly usage of the internet (87%); and lowest proportion of people who have never used the internet (8%). Figures aren’t always so flattering when comparisons include the Nordics and Denmark.

Mathilde Collin provides a valuable look at where email is and isn’t relevant within organisational communications on the Intercom blog.

Venture capitalist Chris Dixon looks at where we’re seeing innovation and startups in the Bitcoin sector.

The “outing” of Dorian Nakamoto as founder of Satoshi Nakamoto has prompted a whirlwind of press interest and some valuable analysis of the role of the media. Felix Salmon has used RapGenius as a novel means of analysing Dorian Nakamoto’s recent statement denying involvement whilst Mike Hearn gives a breakdown of some of the key holes in the Newsweek story.

Debate continues on the pros and cons of Google Glass. Among the range of opinions is Joe Schoech arguing that the product is poorly implemented whilst Mike Elgan argues that concerns about privacy are misplaced.

Nate Silver puts forward his agenda with the newly launched FiveThirtyEight data journalism platform which should provide a valuable new voice to the media sector. Building on this is Ben Thompson looking at FiveThirtyEight’s launch in the context of an increasingly rich selection of journalism that’s available online:

No longer are my reading choices constrained by time and especially place. Why should I pick up the Wisconsin State Journal – or the Taipei Times – when I can read Nate Silver, Ezra Klein, Bill Simmons, and the myriad other links served up by Twitter? I, and everyone else interested in news, politics, or sports, can read the best with less effort – and cost – than it ever took to read the merely average just a few short years ago.

The New Yorker profiles the shopping mall whose role in American society is beginning to fray in the face of online competition and consumers quest for a more authentic experience.

The malls are busy, well-tended, and vibrant, though they are still malls: a simulacrum of culture, in the same way that the Cinderella Castle at Disney’s Magic Kingdom is a representation of medieval life, without the chamber pots and periodic sieges.

Einar Öberg has developed a website that provides you with the opportunity to turn your neighbourhood into an urban jungle.

The featured image is a Drew Tyndell, Ben Niznik and Derek Bruno mural from Living Walls and was found on Drew’s Flickr page.

The Foxes and the Hedgehogs

Know Hope x Aakash Nihalani - "Uncornered"

I recently started reading Nate Silver’s book The Signal and the Noise and it’s proving an enlightening read. His comparisons of specialist (hedgehogs) versus more generalist thinkers (foxes) particularly caught my attention .

Silver points to ‘hedgehogs’ as garnering more media attention but unfortunately this is not reflected in the accuracy of their predictions, pointing to the work of Philip E Tetlock :

While the experts’ performance was poor in the aggregate, however, Tetlock found that some had done better than others. On the losing side were those experts whose predictions were cited most frequently in the media. The more interviews that an expert had done with the press, Tetlock found, the worse his predictions tended to be.

Silver points to generalists as being more able to bring together a range of views and sources and not being so hidebound to ideology.

The following gives a run through of how the two groups are characterised:

The book is well worth adding to your reading list, particularly for those of you who are interested in the shortcomings of crystal ball gazing.

The featured image is the Know Hope x Aakash Nihalani collaboration Uncornered and was found on StreetArtNews.

The Forum is Dead, Long Live the Forum!

We get a lot of coverage of ‘the next big thing’ in the media, creating a hype cycle which all too often leads to the trough of disillusionment as consumers find services that don’t fulfill consumers’ expectations or they simply move on to the next service to to be championed.

This is particularly apparent in the social media sector where we have seen many services emerge and decline. Among the winners and losers are Friendster, Myspace, Facebook, Google+, Twitter, Pinterest and more recently, the emergence of mobile centred channels such as Tinder, Snapchat, Instagram and WeChat.

Predating what we now generally know as social media where bulletin boards which evolved into what we now know as internet forums. These typically provided an open environment based around particular interests with conversational threads which discussions can coalesce around.

The growth of social media has taken much of the media’s attention away from internet forums with the possible exception of Reddit which is something of a special case. But forums continue to play an important role in crowdsourcing expertise, particular in more specialised areas where knowledge is evolving and/or far from formalised.

The typically open and searchable nature of the content makes it easy for the novice user to see if content is available and post a query should the answer not be available (albeit at the risk of being flamed). Wikipedia plays a similar role in capturing and ultimately formalising information and Quora (and arguably Twitter) offers a Q&A platform. What these mediums arguably don’t have is a passionate community of interest that can be readily reached by the uninitiated.

Online forums have also provided an important bridge between the virtual and physical, as online communities move into real world spaces. I can remember clearly the trepidation of going to my first LFGSS forum gathering with the inevitable ‘what’s your forum name?’ heard many times.

But forums also have considerable utility for organisations as well as communities of interest. Research conducted by the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon University published in the Journal of Marketing Research pointed to the value of online forums including those run by the brands themselves as Pratik Dholakiya comments:

In other words, it would be extremely foolish to assume that the traditional media coverage was more important than the community activity. In reality, sales were being primarily driven by community activity, reflecting what we learned in the first study above. Just as importantly, blog and traditional media coverage were being driven, in part, by community activity.

This study also brings with it an important insight: these discussions were taking place on forums, and most of the discussion was taking place on Kiva’s own forum.

Research from one forum does not make for a sound statistical forum and Kiva’s audience will have some different characteristics to the typical Western organisation. But unlike Facebook and Twitter, communities and brands have the opportunity to own their own channel for a relatively nominal sum, avoiding the social media toll collectors.

A New Forum

Given the opportunity that online forums provide, it has been exciting to see the launch of Microco.sm. The London-based startup aims to bring the forum forward into a more contemporary social media age with a cleaner interface , adaptive web design, built in events functionality and exportable data.

Microco.sm is not simply resting on its laurels, with a pricing strategy that sees it undercutting the market incumbents whilst offering an enviable feature set.

You can get a feel for the platform on the Islington Cycle Club’s forum which was the first client to launch and if you want a more hands on experience, Microco.sm are enabling consumers and organisations to launch their own forum for a month for free. For those of you still hungry for more information about Microco.sm, I’d recommend checking out the ShedCast interview with founder David Kitchen.

The featured image is Fish by Evgeniy Dikson

THOUGHT STARTERS: CONTENT THAT HAS GOT ME THINKING 10

Nelio, Caffarena 86, Con Poeta en La Boca (Buenos Aires)

The following provides a roundup of some of the articles, thought pieces and content which have got me thinking recently.

I still require some convincing on whether Facebook’s acquisition of WhatsApp makes financial sense. There has been a lot of talk of how WhatsApp will retain much of its management independence and will honour existing privacy arrangements including not collecting user data for advertising. These restrictions will hamstring the service’s utility for Facebook, but the service’s astonishing growth may make the question moot as these figures from Om Malik suggest.

The Flurry Blog looks at the growth of Android personalisation apps such as Facebook Home and Yahoo’s Aviate as being the next mobile battleground. Rapid growth, albeit off a small base and an interesting counterpoint to the growing attention to mobile messaging.

Casey Research takes a critical view on Bitcoin, pointing out that the system is only as strong as its weakest link with a shortage of security and trust likely to encumber the currency for the time being.

Marc Andreessen provides some of the more intelligent commentary on the technology sector and his forecast for the media sector definitely provides food for thought. As a counterpoint, the Columbia Journalism Review takes a less rosy view of the disruption technology is bringing to the sector.

The Wall Street Journal points to the continuing dominance of bricks and mortar in America’s retail sector – Amazon (and other eCommerce operators) still has plenty of opportunity to take a greater share of the pie.

Microco.sm has publicly launched its online forum offering, providing some much needed competition to Vanilla, vBulletin and Invision PB. It’s worth adding that despite all the talk of social media channels such as Twitter and Facebook, forums retain an important role in enabling conversations with customers as profiled in research published in the Journal of Marketing Research and profiled in Convince & Convert.

The Government Digital Service (GDS) has done some great work making Britain’s public services more available online. The GDS‘ dashboard provides a valuable window into what devices consumers are using in the UK.

The Financial Times looks at how automation is making growing inroads into white collar employment as software increasingly eats the world.

Satellites are continuing to make images of Earth more and more available so its intriguing to see video now coming into play as Skybox’s offering comes online.

Most societies at least play lip service to the issue of social mobility, so its interesting to read Professor Gregory Clark’s research which points to mobility as being comparatively unaffected by social policy. We are better off addressing the results of inequality rather than expecting social reforms to enable the move from barrow boy to banker.

Evan Selinger in Wired looks critically at the launch of BroApp and suggests we might be outsourcing our humanity by relying on such tools.

The Wellcome Trust looks through its Mosaic website looks at the health benefits of cycling and what different cities are doing (or not doing) to encourage it.

Southwark Bridge, London by Sarah Maycock/Handsome Frank

The featured image is Caffarena 86 by Nelio from La Boca, Buenos Aires.

Month: March 2014

THOUGHT STARTERS: CONTENT THAT HAS GOT ME THINKING 12

Events: Getting the word out

THOUGHT STARTERS: CONTENT THAT HAS GOT ME THINKING 11

The Foxes and the Hedgehogs

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