Uba Kontrovasie

Kool collaboration

I was on the Vice website and saw this yesterday. Yes I know, I know, I read Vice. What can I say…I like the quirky photo journalism.

I think it’s great how Volvo, Yahoo, Vice and The Independent have come together for this brand mash-up concept.

All the underpinnings of a good social media exercise seem to have been ticked off. I’m sure this concept will go viral like wildfire, giving the brands involved lots of exposure from a very young and enabled audience.

This concept is also another grenade from Volvo’s arsenal, who seem to be working hard to change their brand image and make it more, dare I say “cool”.

Poke seem to of had some sort of involvement with this whole project and Mr Waterfall is also on the very cool panel of judges for the design competition.

I’ll be watching this one evolve.

Tags: collaboration, independent, mash up, social media, vice, volvo, Yahoo

Geek Meet

So I attented twestival earlier during the week, a sort of social media, web2 and netrentrepreneur gathering all organised via twitter.

This was definitely the first media event I had attended, which had been organised through twitter. Some people were shocked about how many agency bods had attended but then what did they expect? A web2 gathering in the middle of the west end, I’ll say no more.

Amongst all free booze and food, there was talk of xmpp, cisco systems delivering the next big thing and apparently twitter being dead in the next year or so, oh well you can’t please them all.

I had a laugh catching up with a few familiar faces and I look forward to next twitter co-ordinated bash.

Tags: geeks, Micro Blogging, social media, twestival, Twitter, web2

Thinking about who reads your content

I remember studying an e-learning module at University during my final year, it involved learning about different learning styles and the psychology behind learning.

One of the learning theories we covered was called VARK learning styles by Flemming and Mills.

The theory outlined four main types of learning style/persona:

- Visual
People who are visually stimulated learn more effectively through images and videos
- Auditory
Learning through sound based mediums such as lectures, music etc
- Read/Write
People who learn most effectively through reading and writing
- Kinesthetic
Learning via vocation or “doing”

Some of my day to day work involves content consulting and advising clients how, what and where to place content on their websites. One key person I always keep in mind is the reader.

If we refer back to VARK we can see four distinct personalities, it is therefore important to identify how your website and its content will cater for these personalities.

Some will argue that a lot of this is hard to determine without quantitive and qualitative research, however, stepping back and using a common sense approach can sometimes be quite effective.

Take an insurance company for example: they could publish online information about their policies in so many ways, some people (including me admittedly) are lazy about the reading the small print so why not publish it onto a video as an alternative?

A couple of years ago I was working on a project with the Beeb for children, it allowed me to gain an insight into how they were teaching children in a Kinesthetic manner, through games and learning tools. The project seemed to take into account the attention spans of their audiences (children) and then provide them with learning tools, which kept them engaged through participation.

So what’s the moral of my story? People absorb information in different ways, the Read/Write types just want the facts and the text, whilst others will prefer different mediums. It is important to make sure the core pieces of content on your website cater all types of learning style/persona.

The easier you make it for people to learn about your brand and it’s offerings, the faster they will understand what your brand has to offer.

(Just chucking it out there… I’m no UE expert, just thinking aloud)

Tags: content optimisation, content planning, elearning, VARK

Kids and Kom-pu-ters

I was with family on Sunday, my little nephew (aged 9) went into his bedroom came back out with his laptop. Not just any old laptop my I add, a state of the art Dell Inspiron. 

As he was loading up Roxio photo software to show me a slideshow of their holiday (which he compiled and edited) he continued to tell me the spec including; clock speed, hard drive capacity and other particulars.

Coming from a big family all my nieces and nephews from the age of 9+ seem to be on Facebook and they all have fast computers and broadband at home. 

Noticing all of this was quite a fortunate coincidence as I had to recently cook up some research ideas for a project centered around children. 

Naturally the project would require understanding digital natives and carrying out qualitative and quantitative research. However, without doing a single piece of work I learned a lot from just watching the kids play with their gadgetry at our family get together. 

I sound like my Dad but when I was their age I used to word process my homework on a hand me down IBM DOS based machine, using Wordstar and a dot matrix printer, which was basically a typewriter with a printer cable. 

I got my first all singing and dancing “multimedia” PC in year 9 of upper school, oh how things have changed!

Tags: children, digital natives, elearning, kids, research

I see the little ones have grown up, Chai?

When I was a kid I used to get taken to asian fabric shops by my parents every other Saturday. As my parents were regular customers they used to have a bit of banter with the shop keepers who used to serve them complimentary chai and food.

You don’t exactly see this happening in John Lewis, but we may not be too far away from it now.

Brand owners are definitely trying to get closer to their clients as they’re understanding the benefits of WOM and client retention. WOM, Social Media and advanced CRM techniques seem to be at the top of every brief I see at the moment.

I believe we’re seeing this trend for a couple reasons, firstly the credit crunch! The cost of acquiring a new customer and educating them about your brand’s product offering is expensive in comparison to up-selling to existing customers.

Secondly brand owners are understanding the effectiveness of WOM coupled with good CRM. Good CRM = happy and loyal customers > happy and loyal customers tell their friends about good brands (the WOM bit) > friends end up buying from a brand they partially trust due to WOM recommendations.

Tags: CRM, eCRM, social media, WOM, WOMMA

Hosting parties and making friends

One of my favourite quotes is:

“You can make more friends in two months by becoming interested in other people than you can in two years by trying to get other people interested in you” - Dale Carnegie

That quote has long sat on my Facebook profile even before I started to understand Social Media and it’s underpinnings.

There seems to be a recent trend of brands owners running out to their creative shops and getting branded social networks built. The brands that are taking this somewhat hasty approach seem to think it’s the answer to ticking another box in their advertising/media check list.

There are even white label social network platforms available on the web, which provide easy, low cost, out of the box platforms for brands owners to start building their own social networks. The popular ones of course being Ning, KickApps, CrowdVine, GoingOn and new to the white label arena is Groupsites.

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So…the platforms already exist, with a bit of savvy they can be quite easily customised and this is already being done quite successfully.

For some brands, however, I do not think branded social networks are the most suitable and immediate solutions. Social Media is all about creating a dialogue between brands and consumers.

Brand owners need to start conversing with their audiences in baby steps, listening to them, participating in conversations and providing them with content and dialogue which delivers value.

The best way to start doing this it to go where the conversations are taking place such as existing, blogs, social networks and interest groups. This is a very labour intensive exercise, however, it is a sure fire way of “making friends”. You’ll now understand how my Dale Canergie quote fits in to all of this.

It’s not just about talking either, listening is massively important too, what are your new friends saying? what do they want? how do they feel?

As result of all the socialising and listening, brand owners should develop what audiences are asking for. A branded social network only becomes a realistic option if it is part of greater solution which addresses understood audience needs, if it is not a viable option then brand owners should consider alternative solutions such as:

- Product feed back or suggestion mechanisms, Dell Ideastorm is a good example of this.
- Branded applications and utilities
- Branded content on websites

Owning branded social networks is akin to hosting a party. You can’t host a big party without knowing lots of friends and finding out what they’d enjoy or whether they’d want to come at all?

In every case brand owners should start off small and evolve their social media strategy in a Darwninesq manner, branded social networks should really appear during the maturity stages of a brands social strategy and not at the start.

Tags: brand audiences, brand conversation, crowdvine, goingon, groupsites, kickapps, ning, recent social media, social network, Social networks, white label social networks