6 months of research have led to a list of mentalities

Niniane Veldhoen and Matthijs Rotte have finished their research on mentalities. That is, they have delivered their paper before the deadline (Friday, 13 June 2008, 17.00). In believe that 6 months of research have led to a list of mentalities which is a very useful tool for further research. Niniane and Matthijs are among the first to graduate in the readership.

Nininane and Matthijs’s theme is ‘A matter of mentality’ and I am proud to say that the two have done a remarkable job. All that is left for them at this moment is undergo their ‘defense session’, as we call it at the faculty. On July 4^th, they will have to defend their writings. An ‘assessor’ will ask them difficult questions after they have presented their case.

I have agreed with Niniane and Matthijs that I will not publish the list – and include an analysis and give some remarks – until they have done their defense (it could influence the assessor as my judgment over the work high that I am very happy).

One thing I can publish here is Nininane and Matthijs’s improvement of the IMAB model. There has been discussion about it with Harry van Vliet questioning whether the current model is depicting a linear system. The outcome of this discussion is that the parts of the system are valid but most certainly not linear; The individual parts – Identity, Mentality, Attitude and Behavior influence each other.

I wish Niniane and Matthijs good luck on the 4^th of July and hope to do a lot more work with them.

GRATIS. A taxonomy of the ‘FREECONOMY’.

Scanning my way through the march issue of Wired magazine, I came across an article called ‘Free. Why $0,00 is the future of business’ by Chris Anderson, editor in chief and esteemed author of ‘The Long Tail’. Somewhere in 2009, Chris will publish his next book ‘Free’ and already I can’t wait for it to read it. Chris has a remarkable talent for unveiling and connotating latent and lingering economical issues. I recommend reading the article for those who study cross media as I believe that earning logics and cross media walk side by side.

So, what’s the crux of Chris’ new observations? Well, roughly Anderson distinguishes a taxonomy of the ‘freeconomy’ with six entities; freemium, advertising, cross-subsidies, zero marginal costs, labor exchange and gift economy. This line up is easily explained.

Freemium is one of the most common earning logics online. Anderson refers to the 1% rule in which one percent of the users of a site or service, pay for the other 99%. Just think of all the premium offers like FlickR or, in the Netherlands, Hyves. You may want to pay for extra services but basically, the service is free of charge. Anderson states that this logics look pretty much like the tool of sampling but at the same time there is a difference. This is that the freemium is about a digital full service and sampling (perfume, candy bars) are miniature products. We can use FlickR forever.

Advertising is nothing new. However, today we distinguish different logics in advertising. Not anymore does the advertiser need to pay for a space in a medium. Now advertisers pay per action (pay per page view, pay per click, pay per transaction; affiliate marketing). And further on in time, paid inclusion in search results, paid listing, pay per lead, pay per post (product placement) and pay per connection. These tools try to infiltrate in social media and social networks.

Cross-subsidies is an old marketing trick. You give away something for free but only if you buy something else. Think of getting a free ticket to a movie if you buy a big bag of popcorn. Ryanair, another example Anderson mentions, offers flights from London to Barcelona for $20. The costs are $70. How do they do it? The answer is simple; Ryanair charges for everything else (catering, credit card handling fee, priority boarding, advertising exposure per flight hour and subsidies from more expensive flights. Smart thinking. People obviously believe that they only pay those $20 and spoof of the other $50.

Zero marginal costs is the earning logics that deals with stuff like P2P. The music industry will never have control of its output anymore, no matter what legal regulations it pushes on consumers. Music, like any other type of digital content can be distributed for neglectable costs. This type of industry will just have to find new earning logics. A couple of years ago, I met John Perry Barlow, one of the then internet gurus and former songwriter of The Grateful Dead. He told a story about illegal recordings of the cult band. Kids would record the concerts. Of course, the quality was awful. The record label wanted nothing of the sort and intensified security at the gates of the concert halls. The outcome was that the concerts were running empty. Then the band decided that recording was allowed. The results were spectacular. More people came to the concerts and more records were sold. I guess Grateful Dead were one of the first bands to recognize that their earning logics were based on something else than the dictatorship of the labels.

Labor exchange is about value creation of services. You, as a user, create value to the owners of a certain site (Anderson talks about bots and porn but also about Google’s free directory service 411. The value created is either (or) improving the service itself or creating information that can be useful somewhere else. So, if you are into free porn, be sure to know that your data are used (maybe to spam you with doubtful Viagra offers).

Gift economy is Anderson’s sixth entity in his taxonomy. Anderson talks about altruism and that is correct. There has always been altruism, regardless of what level of capitalism we have currently. Sharing was the magic word that we believed in when WWW (and even before) was first unveiled. And still we cannot comprehend the value creation of this tool, let alone measure it. Perhaps our research group should dig into this (taking Erik Hekman’s efforts to determine parameters for value creation into consideration, I guess we are already doing it).

Professor Michael Rappa at MIT has listed business models on the web. His comprehensive list shows similarity with Anderson’s taxonomy. His list consists of

·         Brokerage

·         Advertising

·         Infomediary

·         Merchant

·         Manufacturer (direct)

·         Affiliate

·         Community

·         Subscription

·         Utility

I strongly recommend the reader to have a look and start converging the ideas of Anderson and Rappa. Of course Anderson talks about free – gratis – services and products a consumer can obtain through digital media. Some of Anderson’s earning logics are consumer driven (empowerment, permissive marketing; pull) and Rappa’s conclusions are more producer driven. Let’s see if we can observe even more earning logics currently not unveiled yet.

 

 

 

 

Ben is back

If you have lived in The Netherlands for more than five years, you might be acquainted with the brand called ‘Ben’. Five years ago, this mobile operator was a strong consumer brand as a fighter operator, focusing on young people. To many, the campaigns are still known. Kesselskramer, the creative communication agency, did the black and white (with light blue as the only support color). Ben means ‘to be’ in Dutch. It is also a name. This brand name really was bull’s eye as it proved to be extremely campaignable. I was sort of sad that it disappeared – I was one of Ben’s dedicated followers – but did not think too much of it as I was living in Finland and using the local operator Kolumbus at the time.Now, for the audiences, Ben is back. And guess what, same campaign, same colors, same magic, provided by KesselsKramer.

Ben’s business concept has changed since then. Now you can only get prepaid subscriptions through their web site and it’s only prepaid. Ben targets everyone who is basically only interested in using the cell phone as a phone, so only verbal communication and SMS. Interesting. Anyway. Ben’s campaign is fantastic and quite crossmedial. Check it out at Ben’s site and click ‘Ben benieuwd’.

Research Group Crossmedia Contents now officially in business

Last Thursday, Dr. Harry van Vliet, lector with the Research Group Crossmedia Content of our faculty was inaugurated and gave his ‘public lesson’ (maiden speech) ‘Idola of the Crossmedia’. Finally, our research group is now official and, along with my colleague research fellows, I congratulate Harry with his appointment. Here is a brief excerpt of his speech. 

The possibilities to consume information have expanded considerably over the last few years. The Internet and mobile phones are the best examples. More and more, different media are used next to each other. The same television show can be seen on television, via the Internet and on your cell phone. This phenomenon we call crossmedia. The Research Group’s assignment is to put into practice new insights in the field of crossmedia. It is a broad field mainly because digitization has a fundamental impact in many sectors. The research group – as part of the Lecturate (readership) of crossmedia – chooses four fields of coverage: media, cultural heritage, e-learning and marketing. Besides this, there are three more generic questions that are leading in our research: the question of the added value of crossmedia, the question of user experience in crossmedia and the question of crossmedia literacy. The research group conducts research on the tangent place of the application areas and the generic research questions with a direct line to education. 

If you are interested in the research group, please visit http://www.crossmedialab.nl/. We’d appreciate your input (sit on-line since 10 January 2008. (picture by Jan Willem Groen)

Branding to Community*

Do your profile in Hyves.nl (the Dutch look alike of MySpace and extremely popular among – mainly – teens with around 5 million users). Fill in all questions including the one about your favorite brands. When done, a universe of new friends unfolds. For instance, if you are into Vespa, you will find that over 12.000 other Hyves users share your passion. You can pick your choice to share your brand passion with those you choose. That’s nice!It is also nice for Vespa, the company. Vespa can target its dedicated followers to present them a suitable proposition and anchor the brand in the lives of teens.What more can a brand whish for than such a loyal community of fans? Hyves, as a prime brand, in this case facilitates the relationship between a brand and the brand user(s). And exactly that seems to be an emerging role certain brands appropriate; facilitation of relationships between brands and brand users in social media. Such a facilitating brand must bear certain requirements in mind, specifically those of trust and transparency. The Hyves user knows that personal data appear in the public domain of the social network. So, Hyves must create a framework of trust. Hyves does so by offering a package of options and services that limit the level of publicity of personal data. Only by allowing others (friends) specific rights, one may read personal data at different levels.A propos, the true power of a facilitating brand like Hyves does not necessarily lie in the relative trust of the site but more in the role of social brand. A social brand facilitates contacts between people in text, audio and video, both directly (synchronic, with one push of the button) or per tiding (posting, email, voice mail; a-synchronic). A brand is social if it promotes the dialogue, the participation and the relevance of usage for its users. Many of these facilitating social brands have a crossmedial strategy because they, for instance, incorporate chat, instant messaging and email, thus turning these media into social (sharing) media.Social media marketing, when done the right way, has an enormous impact on brand awareness and popularity. This impact can be brought about by inserting dialogue and participation promotional tools and by offering tailor made and therefore relevant propositions to the users. Not many brands make use of this relatively cheap method of marketing. If we analyze social media and compare the results with mainstream (traditional) media, we can convert the brands that make use of social media. With this type of research we can also conclude the effectiveness of social media. This effectiveness is called ‘share of voice’ (SOV).In SOV research we measure how many times brands are mentioned by users of social media and how they are mentioned (sentiment; negative, neutral, positive). Apart from this, we also measure the success rate with which the brands have incorporated different social media and vice versa (users making use of the facilitating social brand in social media.The parameters that are used in such research are dividend in different categories, i.e.:
·         The blogosphere with YouTube as latitude for online video
·         Popularity of social network site with MySpace and Bebo as latitudes for photo sites
·         Popularity of social bookmarking, user generated content and other content with Digg, Magnolia and Delicious as latitudes[1]Content is the key word. It is, when talking about social media as a communication tool for users, generated by those users (user generated content). On the other side, social media techniques (and technologies) become a communication tool from brands as well. So we can say that brands that provide content create social media. Some nice examples are Dell’s http://direct2dell.com/, the Disney-related blog http://blog.mousekingdom.com/ and Starbuck’s http://www.itsredagain.com/. Social media do have a considerable impact on brand awareness and popularity. For the brand user, the emphasis is not on overall attribution of brand value as such, but more on the product itself, the applicability and the buzz environment. Also, most social media are niche products, primarily adapted by early adapters. Traditional media focus mainly on the final financial effect (brand equity) of the investments in the brand. Social brands understand that by being a ‘friend’ who is talked about, the value not only increases in terms of economic capital but also in terms of social capital.

Kees

* Harry van Vliet (Harry’s site) has invented the term “Branding to Community”. He first used the term in the text for his public lecture, upcoming January 10, 2008.

---

[1] This design of research is taken from Immediate Future’s Share of Voice ranking (2007)

Tagtopia

Training back to Amsterdam, the evening sun filled the sky with perfect orange, reflected in the greys, blues and whites of the Dutch autumn clouds. A perfect picture. I returned from Utrecht, the city where I teach stuff. I had attended a workshop organized by SurfNet on social tagging. Can we tag the sun? What’s the use?

Earlier that day, the organizers asked the group of soulfully engaged cross-media innovators to come up with a creative idea on how to use social tagging. Harry van Vliet, my lector, and I came up with a pretty nice idea. We called it “Tagtopia”. Here it is.

We are with the Research Center Cross-media Content at the university of applied sciences in Utrecht. We study topics like social tagging and many others, as long as these topics fit into the domain of cross-media. Our school has an intranet (Sharepoint). There’s a lot of criticism about this Sharepoint and for us, the main point of interest is building an e-learning environment, momentarily not supported by that intranet. We will build a tag-engine that will give the user, in this case students, all contents related to a subject, person and activities (in relation to that specific subject). Simple and efficient. And, probably, useful.

What’s the use of tagging? We live in a world in which we want to know. Public annotation is a big thing. The Internet is our door to knowledge. It provides us with all we always wanted to know but never were able to find. At least, we are able to find information easily and rapidly. But being informed is not the same as knowing.

Clouds and the sun always enlighten me. They remind me of Utopia, the perfect state (or status). Combine that with curiosity and what do you get? Hunger for information. And I believe that tagging things help.

During the workshop, Harry remarked that there is no such thing as social tagging. Tagging is typically a-social. That’s a good point. Social implies an activity done to serve more than one. It is me giving something to somebody else. Tagging is something you do for yourself. Social tagging is a tool to recall; I want to find back what interested me yesterday and quite franckly, I don’t really care wether others are helped with my tags or not. Social tagging is not about sharing. It can be used as such but what you tag depends on your own private semantics and ontologies. Therefor, in the pure sence of the word, there is no social tagging. There’s just tagging.

It’s like me tagging the sun. I got fasinated by the brilliance of the momentum and tried to describe it; orange, blue, grey, white. And also Dutch, perfect. Others may have enjoyed the scene as well but they have seen it from their prespective. They are not me and I am not theme. Phisically, even the angles of approach were different. So they have actually seen something else at the same moment in time. So they must have tagged the moment differently. Interesting.

Brand to community by using hubs in social networks

The days marketers could target audiences through planning, developing products and executing advertising campaigns and smart media strategies are coming to an end. More and more this marketer must share his market control with global production networks, powerful retailers and the Crossmedia industry. And above all, he must share his market control with the empowered consumer who influences his peer group and social network, the so called hub. Hubs provide social networks content, advice, news, opinion and entertainment through social media like Twitter, Myspace, YouTube, Second Life and many others. According to Forrester Research, these social media double their impact and reach every six months. Innovative brands like Dove, Adidas and Tampax have been offering, and will continue increasingly, engaged and influential consumers tailored propositions and images online.Brands increasingly mix user generated content with professional content thus creating integrated platforms where brands and consumers meet. The question for marketers raises how to do this right. Perhaps the solution is publish control. This is the marketer’s control over what is published. This way, the brand becomes a facilitator, not a dictator. Support hubs and reward them through social network tailored reward systems.Also support the development of so called Rapid Response Methods for the value web of the brand, retailers, manufacturers, Crossmedia organisations and other actors in what was formerly known as the value chain. Have these actors participate actively and interactively with all, including of course the consumers.Also develop customer care programs (these are more than CRM) and crossmedial interaction models based on trust and transparency by means of personalized experience possibilities. Traditional marketing tools like reach and frequency and traditional target audience segmentation models (social and wealth classes, gender, geo market profiles, etc.) are becoming less relevant. Consumers are tormented by the overkill of information and will not be dictated any more. Along side, consumers claim more and more power in the process of question and demand. The innovative marketer will have to come up with new measuring tools like share of voice measurements and rankings in social networks (how many times is your brand mentioned and with what sentiment?), NetPromotor and Buzz tracking to measure the effect of marketing investments in social networks. These monitoring systems provide possibilities for all actors to hook into the communication of all actors in order to actualize and keep the relationship alive.  One main issue of attention in this is the mentality of the consumers; what their attitude (philosophy) towards life is in general and the brand specifically. It is in fact the kernel of the marketer’s investment in such value webs. This raises some questions that need further research.

1. What is the change in consumer behavior and mentality regarding brands, content and interaction?
2. How have innovative brands tapped in social networks and their dynamics?
3. What are the dynamics and communication patterns in social networks and how do we tap in?
4. Under which conditions are consumers prepared to have a social media facilitated relationship with a brand?
5. What are examples of the mix of UGC and brand content and what is their impact on the behavior of the actors?
6. How do we develop innovative target audience segmentation models to successfully tap in with social networks?
7. What are the innovative Crossmedia interaction models and formats (that need to be developed)?
8. How can we identify hubs in social networks?
9. What are the requirements in developing interactive Crossmedia platforms?

 I’d apreciate input on these issue.

Kees