Buy British (it’s cheap) !

“The Sterling is K.O., buy British!

I am not 100% sure the British will love it but eBay is trying hard to make other Europeans love UK. With a clever campaign called “I Love UK” targeted at its Euro countries, the auction service is prompting ebayers to take advantage of a flailing sterling to drive bargains. After all, eBay is in a unique position to push cross-national deals within European boundaries.

I Love UK - French landing page

In order to help their users cross the Channel online, eBay give them easy access to UK products and offers advice on conversion rates, international payment (“well, hum, we happen to own this thing called Paypal”) and even how to cross the cultural and language barriers!

Conversion rates, language and Paypal

Seizing the spirit of the age and its society

Good example of how to take advantage of international news and concerns to boost your sales. After all, marketing is all about staying in touch with the world around you and cleverly tapping into the zeitgeist.

A design change at Facebook is always hugely anticipated, debated and fought over. Even the smallest details give the blogosphere a fever, prompting a wave of outraged articles describing how everyone feels their furniture has just been moved without their permission.

Well, take cover! Soon, Facebook will be changing something so you better get ready for another dozen of invites to ‘bring back the old FB’ groups. Nevertheless, these changes are going to be big:

Your new homepage: FriendFeed

The newsfeed is getting a more prominent placement and updates are now in real-time. All information can be filtered by groups and it gets easier to post statuses, pictures, articles, videos. Sounds familiar ? It’s perfectly normal, it alrady exists and it is called FriendFeed.

It makes perfect sense for Facebook to make that move though. First, they couldn’t buy Twitter so a quick pissing contest is a good outlet for them. Second, Facebook is the very service which inspired micro-blogging in the first place - through the newsfeed feature - so it is only fair that they take back what somehow belongs to them. It is such a natural move it shouldn’t surprise anyone. As far as I am concerned, the new redesign is the opportunity for Facebook to become what it was always meant to be: micro-blogging for the masses.

New Facebook fan pages: profiles

Image found via Techcrunch

Lots of companies have been complaining about Facebook pages being too messy and not feature-rich enough. This too is being addressed with the upcoming revamp: new fan pages will look just like profiles for simplicity’s sake with - here too - a strong emphasis on the newsfeed. Beyond layout change, the pages are also getting more flexible as administrators will be able to select which content is public and which is only accessible to members (fans). This opens the interesting door of proper CRM for brands from within Facebook. Add complementary options to charge membership fees, sell products or services and you just got yourself an integrated shop. But where the whole thing gets really powerful is that fan pages updates will appear on their members’ feeds and thus get a huge viral push.

This is end… my Twitter friends ?

So in a few words: the new Facebook is going to be simpler, more focussed on its core unifying features and more viral. I really think this could be a huge step forward for the service. So huge it could simply kill Twitter.

Some say that Facebook offering everything Twitter does and more (e.g. groups filtering) combined with a ridiculously larger audience means game over. I am not 100% sure about this. The reason is that it is very difficult to know if Twitter’s model can be applied successfully to Facebook.

Different crowds, different needs

Lots of people have very different contacts on Twitter that they have on Facebook. That’s because the purpose of each platform is different:

- Twitter is for sharing information with like-minded strangers
Despite impressive growth, Twitter still is nothing more than the web intelligentsia’s new favourite private club. Most active users on Twitter spend their day with an eye entirely focussed on their updates. That is partly why information spreads so fast on this platform. It’s not only the technology, it’s also the people and their willingness to be connected as well as their aspiration for ubiquity. These people don’t care about their contacts’ personal lives. They are on Twitter to share their views and receive/spread information.

- Facebook is for connecting with your friends
Facebook has broken into the mainstream for some time. Not every Facebook user is willing or able to micro-blog their lives: many of them can’t have access FB from work, many others just aren’t web addicts. What they expect to share on Faebook is ‘intimacy’.

The meaning of a Facebook friend and of a Twitter follower is simply not the same. So until Facebook introduces a new contact type - someone you don’t know personally but whose updates you are interested in following - the distinction may well be what is going to keep Twitter from being redundant.

What is your view ? Do you like the changes coming ? Would you replace Twitter with Facebook as your micro-blogging platform of choice (if you use one) ?

Photo credit: TCM Hitchhiker

Were you one of those kids who saved the world - ok other worlds - playing Fighting Fantasy and other gamebooks of that kind ? If so you will know how I feel. If you haven’t, well, you just don’t know what you have missed. For the least geeky of you, here is how a gamebook is defined on Wikipedia: ‘a book that allows the reader to participate in the story by making choices that affect the course of the narrative, which branches down various paths through the use of numbered paragraphs or pages‘.

Well, this is finally turning into an advertising technique, it seems. The system is pretty simple: at the end of the video the viewer is presented with a choice of narrative branches that they may follow by clicking on a link to other videos. The roll-out of annotations made such campaigns possible on Youtube. Clearly there is nothing revolutionary technologically speaking (you could already do this via flash if you hosted the video yourself) but the existence of annotation makes it a lot easier and enables a more powerful distribution via mainstream video hosting platforms. In other words, it is easier to make it viral now.

As a brand, it is a great way to immerse viewers in your universe and expose them to your products. In a way, the benefits are similar to those of product placement, except the film is yours so there is no real need to be subtle about it.

Here are two cool examples of ‘gamevideos’ or whatever they are called:

Samsung - Follow your Instinct

Found this one through Goojet’s Cedric Giorgi

Twix - Get the girl

You can also check out this example in flash

If you have a minute, take a look at the matching commercial:

You can never integrate your campaigns too much can you ?

Do you know of any other current ad campaigns using gamevideos like these ?

There are only three things I want to be able to do with my music online:
- Listening to the music I like
- Discovering new artists and finding out more about them (recommendations, random findings, news and artist information like bios, discography etc.)
- Sharing this with the people around me and whoever is interested

I have tested a lot of services out there, yet there are only three I have really stuck to until today: these are Last.fm, the Hype Machine and Blip.fm. They all do a really good job in their respective fields.

Last.fm

This is my music home, keeping track of what you listen to, letting you discover new artists and find out more about them. You can also stream personalised radios and listen to on-demand music (but the experience changes dramatically from one country to another depending on the agreements in place). The community is central to Last.fm’s model (UGC and collaborative filtering).

Hype Machine

The service is the ECG of the music blogosphere. It is both a search engine and a trend monitoring tool for mp3 blogs. Hype Machine is excellent to get an update on the up-and-coming and find interesting posts on music you like. Also, since it parses all music blogs without distinction or filter, it has less of a tendancy to turn into an echo chamber for one particular genre unlike most music communities.

Blip.fm

They do one thing only but they do it well: a twitter for music. This is the simplest way I have found to share tracks and playlists with my network. So far, I like it better than any other music micro-blogging service. Blip.fm supports scrobbling and - of course - Twitter. I also use it on this blog (in combination with a couple of Wordpress plugins) to create posts directly from my blips (or see ‘Blip Music’ in the sidebar).

The ideal online music service

Now the problem is that - scrobbling aside - the three experiences remain completely separate. Different network/friends, different profiles, unconnected yet complementary features. Consequently you have to browse back and forth from one to another which is pretty annoying.

Here is - in a somewhat complicated way - how these services could (in my dreams) plug into each other and offer a smooth, integrated and powerful user experience:

The basic idea is to use Last.fm as the main platform, Hype Machine to bring stuff in and Blip.fm to bring stuff out. Hype Machine will open a window on the outside world and bring more life into Last.fm’s content. Specifically, it could add trends from the blogosphere to the Last.fm charts and personalised content to users based on their Last.fm profile.
Blip.fm would add very simple yet efficient sharing capability to Last.fm’s playlists and profile elements (artists, groups, events). This would work both within the Last.fm community and outside. Throw in Facebook Connect support and we have a deal.

Why this is won’t be happening anytime soon

- Legal status
Having worked at Last.fm, I know how constraining the licenses can be on the user experience. From that perspective, the legal status of both Blip.fm and Hype Machine is not exactly crystal clear . Meanwhile, Last.fm ties itself in knots to comply with the DMCA as well as various label demands.

- Monetisation
The other issue with services like Blip.fm and Hype Machine if run legally - ie if they pay people at some point - is monetisation. You want to make sure the streamed tracks bring traffic and subsequently ad impressions / subscriptions / purchase. And even with monetisation mechanics in place, it is going to be really hard for Blip.fm or Hype Machine to break even when all you can do there is stream on demand music (ie each user costs you).

So that’s it for me. What else do you think would work here ? What is your dream combination ?

What I find fascinating about StumbleUpon is that at best, it is a great way to set your browser and your mind to discovery mode, while at worst, it remains one of the best ways to waste 5-spare minutes on the web (along with Blocky). It lets you occasionally break out of your bookmark list and get a sense of what is really out there. It is just as exciting as wandering about in a city you have never been to on Google Street View.

I liked the service from the start but I had never invested more than a few minutes in it. So I thought it would be fun to have a real non-stop 60min stumbling session and take notes. Am I going to find crazy stuff or is it going to be quietly underwhelming? Here are the results:

What about the content?

First observation: it is clear that SU’s content divides into 2 main categories:
1- stuff people find interesting and recommend
2 - people pushing their own stuff to get traffic
You can tell most of the content that belongs to the second category as it tends to be more specific than the rest (ie a blog post or a site sub-sub-section vs homepage) but also less interesting. It is not special, it is there because people are trying to pimp it. But here is one advice: if you want to use SU as a marketing tool, make your page very catchy otherwise the impact will be null.

Being a pretty picky person, I was surprised at how many sites I actually liked (around 25%). Add another 25% of either hopeless or very irritating content and you get an overall interesting half. And by interesting I mean something that provokes any kind of reaction. The other 50% is just insignificant. I am honestly not sure if this is a good ratio. I wouldn’t expect 50% of the web content to be exciting to begin with but when you consider Stumbleupon’s mission is to apply collaborative filtering to the mess, shouldn’t the service only expose you to the immersed yet interesting part of the iceberg? Maybe this due to the self-promotional content mentioned above.

Quality of sites stumbled

Now looking at the content itself: I got a lot of writing and music-related sites (that’s probably because my pre-existing favourites featured some too, in about the same proportion). In contrast, many categories I had checked in my preferences hardly ever made it. No gaming, no shopping, no ecommerce, no history. So despite the existence of profile settings, there seem to be a cold-start issue of some kind when you have no prior bookmark in a given category.

Sites stumbled by categories

Top 5

- Don’t Click it: a cool design project that shows you how clicking as a way to validate an action is just a convention.
- One Word: one word, 60 seconds. Write what comes to your mind.
- Musician Tutorials: resources for musicans
- ArtLung - How to tick people off: a Matt Groening kind of humour
- Courtroom Quotes: hilarious

Flop 5

- Age Project: yet another ‘hot or not’
- Vacuum Tube Audio Page: now I am sure this is fascinating when you are actually fond of Vacuum Tube Audio…
- A user’s Last.fm personal station: I love Last.fm but I must confess I am not genuinely interested in just any personal user station out there.
- Techcrunch’s unchecked Last.fm / RIAA Rumor: Interesting. How very up-to-date. I have been a Techcrunch reader for some time but please spare me Erick Schonfeld’s latest scathing attack against Last.fm… Seriously, it’s not the first time.
- The Movie Box: a movie website. Simply one of the least appealing I have seen in a while.

Biggest surprise

- David Shrigley

Would anybody like to reiterate the experience and compare results ?

With the economic meltdown, it is tempting for companies to cut out activities that don’t have a traceable impact. This is more than reasonnable, it is even a necessity. But when this translates in all the efforts and budget being solely dedicated to acquisition, it is throwing the baby out with the bath water.

I was reading a post by Valeria Maltoni and this metaphor came to my mind:

Companies doing the above risk becoming this annoying guy you find at the bar: he has had a few drinks which makes him feel a little too confident. He thinks he can get a girl if he simply tells her she is gorgeous and grabs at her. No approach, no seduction. Just a high probability to fail. Well ok, he will not fail if he picks this particular girl who just came to bag a man. But even so, it does not mean the guy is good, it means he got lucky (it could have been just any other guy, right?).

In the mean time, most of the girls will probably feel this way towards him:

The moral of this story is that when the economy looks up again, those who kept engaging in conversations and building up power of attraction (ie brand) will better off than those who pissed off everyone because they looked desperate.

Many people say it is when things get difficult that you know what a company is made of. So if you were about to devise your marketing strategy, what would you rather do: get the easy girls and destroy your reputation or keep your good manners for all to remember at the next party ?