broadstuff

Harking back to last week's post on Trust being the Social Networking Thing of 2007......PR agency Edelman released a Trust Performance Indicator at a conference in London on Monday (video here).

Others have commented on this presentation already, but the one thing I haven't seen commented on much - the thing that hit me immediately - was the precipitous drop of trust for nearly everyone between 2006 and 2007. For example, the most trusted - Doctors and People Like Yourself have gone from 55% and 56% respectively to 45%, midrangers like Lawyers and Company Employees from 41% and 32% repectively to 28%, and the digital scumbags - thats PR people and Bloggers - from 16 and 10% respectively to 9% and 6%

The truth table in question is posted up over here on Ian Delaney's site.

What has brought about this decline in trust ? I wasn't there, so if anyone was it would be intereresting to know why people thought this may have occurred.

Oh...except for this lot - five years after Wall Street’s stock research scandals, trust in “stock or industry analyst reports” in the United States is 47%, up from 26% in 2003. In 12 countries, stock or industry research is either the most credible or second most credible source of information about a company.

Strange times.......when Sensible Party people are trusted less than Stock Analysts its probably time to hide your money under the mattress....

I usually read all these feeds with my morning coffee, but with the snow today.....

The BBC is to launch a virtual world, operated using the same Larian engine as used by Ketnetkick, the game for dutch speaking kids in Belgium, run by VTR. Its aimed at the CBBC audience (Tweenies to Twentysomethings.....

In terms of complexity Ketnetkick falls somewhere between Habbo Hotel and Second Life, but according to the BBC it would "not have the financial aspects of other online worlds such as Second Life."

So, no flogging virtual furniture as per Habbo, or virtually anything else as per Second Life (and definitely no flogging Avatars one assumes)

That should have the people trying to run competing commercial services grumbling anyway!.

Lets see if it will tear my lot off the Sword n Sorcery genre.....

(Poststuff...Be interesting if they would open it up like Second Life has done, and I found this blog by Ben Metcalfe about it)

Worried about Avatar Envy? Want to feel your Analog Roots again?

Here is a tongue in cheek piss-take on Second Life, called Get a First Life

Membership is free (initially anyway), and there is no server lag. Oh yes, and you get to fornicate using real genitalia.

Thought for the day: Penguins, spoons and you -- what's life like among the flightless?

A tonic for the troops on the digital front lines.................

Amazing what a bit of surfing at lunchtime can do....following on from my earlier post about Mobile TV Virgins, there is this excellent summary of a thread running on Mobile Monday London's Yahoo group of the issues surrounding mobile location based services. to quote:

So in summary then it seems that the issues with LBS are:
- It is typically too expensive to request a location, thus business
cases are
unviable.
- There is little comprehensive location aware data, leading to user
frustration
- The "Find me the nearest" use case is unlikely to take off
- There are no common standard APIs from the operators which increases
costs,
either through more complex code, or the use of aggregators.
- Chicken and egg situation with low usage = low awareness == low
usage.
- This also means that users need to be educated and reminded that
such a service
is available.

On the up side:
- friend finder type services are popular with their user base
- A-GPS provides a better location, and should be available on local
device APIs, removing
some of the costs(?) from the business case.
- good apparently for walking your dog
- Mapping and transport are "low hanging fruit".

Personally I like the idea of having a location aware access to
sources like wikipedia
and the like (eg wikimapia) that will access content based on where
your "pointing" your
phone. If this could become fast and reliable, it may become
indispensable.
Lastly I also like the idea of being able to 'tag' a place and send
details in a message,
this, as Jan and others pointed out, has several good use cases.
Reminds me a bit of the application that, uploads pictures to a web
site. However when
it does it also sends any bluetooth device tags it finds, as
"context". So you can see
if anyone else took pictures. To also send the geotag makes sense,
and there are a plethora
of sites, now, that let you upload photo/info about places.

Thanks to Steve Devo...

Like Steve, I am interested in the way a Mobile could be part of an immersive environment, where different layers of relevant data (history, shopping, transport...) appear on your phone as you move

But its sad how that cost thing always seems to come into Planet Mobile stuff.

Better beware though, Google is already trialling location based services based on IP address, and it can't be too hard to do it via WiFi cell.....

Seems like Virgin's Mobile TV offering, UK's first, has been less that exciting in its takeup. see here (its from a Groaniad article). Quote:

Despite an aggressive GBP2.5 (US$4.9) million ad campaign, fronted by former Baywatch star Pamela Anderson, Virgin Mobile, the first to market in the U.K. with a broadcast TV service to mobile phones, has failed to gain much traction, according to this article in The Guardian. In fact, it quotes industry insiders as saying Virgin Mobile has signed up “significantly” fewer than 10,000 customers for its Virgin Mobile TV (VMTV) service.

Yet another Mobile promise being broken then.....we at Broadsight have been fairly sceptical of Mobile TV as it is touted today, as we feel it needs to be put in an ecosystem, much like iTunes did for music - but early research seemed to indicate it was quite well received.

So what gives? Quoting some mo' moCo

To remedy this problem, Virgin Mobile plans to offer a wider range of handsets later this year and introduce new services such as allowing people to download and store TV programs on their phones to view when they are out of coverage. But these measures won’t drive results if rival operators are right. They maintain VMTV’s problem is its limited range of channels. VMTV, backed by BT, uses the digital radio spectrum to broadcast TV, allowing viewers to watch five channels – compared to O2, which offers users 16 channels.

Ok...its in the details...but how is O2 doing then?

Well, I Googled, Dogpiled and Technorati'd away to find some mo' news but computer says no....all that came up was the breathless stuff from a year ago. Anyone else have any news?

It used to be said that if your taxi driver started giving you stock tips, it was time to get out of the market.

Is it time to get out of blogging? Check this out.

I first found it here btw, where you can also find This Brilliant Videoon Powerpoint powered Philosopy!

Post-thought - after all, the Revolution will be on YouTube as we all start communicating via Video and making our own "massclusive" Reality TV

For those of you who don't slum it down to the moshpits of UK TV content, there has been a small furore going on this week in Sleb Big Brother (Bigot Brother?), a UK "reality" TV show.

But, to me the interesting thing is not so much that there is a Big Brother full of sleb slappers, but that there are so few of these programs available - its just studio generated "user generated content" after all.

In the emerging democratic user generated content world, we can all just switch our webcams on and record everyday life in various other places of bad behaviour - miles of fun on the Monday morning rush hour train ticket booths, for example. Or the fascinating Saturday Night closing time at the Boozer. Or the Scoble Show when the batteries run out in mid shoot.....

Some of course argue that it has all gone too far

Actually, it hasn't gone nearly far enough - if the internet is anything to go by so far, there are going to be alt.video shows that will make all this hooha look like a Girl Guides outing - take this example on NewTeeVee for example. And the mainstream media tutting all the way to the videobank.

Now, I think the big opportunity going begging here on Reality TV is user generated advertising - why have oriental tattoos on your derriere when you can be Branded with a Real Brand! You could sell different parts of your personal real estate at different prices too....based on the exposure they get

And why slag off other contestants when you could slag off other competing products for cash?

And of course, as you viewers voyeur the sleb slappers, your online service provider is watching you - every search you make, every click you take, they'll be watching you.

I suspect this will be a part of the Future of TV. Goodbye BBC, hello CC.TV.

By the way, re recent discussions of the dangers of blogging as a PR tool, it is an object lesson to read Ms Jade Goody's own discussion group here......the Vox Populi!

Note - as of Sat midday it looks like some of the more, er - colourful - voxii of the populus have been removed from the Jade Goody website as she and her PR team shift into Penance Mode. Thus guaranteeing more career and ratings enhancing headlines....

O Tempora! O mores!

Attended my second Social Media Club in London (SMC London) meeting last night, got there (and home later) without incident despite the apparent total collapse of the London transport system in the Hurricane. Thanks to Fleischman Hillard for the effervescent hospitality and Lloyd Davis for being the facilitator.

The format this evening was a bit like a Bar Camp, after all giving a short intro then various people electing to host topics of interest, and groups formed around them. What was really interesting was at the end of a period of talking, we all got together again to discuss the big takeaways – that worked very well, we all got an insight into what else was going on.

The stream I attended was about the use of Social Media outside the better reported, English speaking blogiverse. This was sparked off by some of us wanting to learn more about the work of Global Voices who monitor and translate blogs from across the world into English. Some takeaways were:

- Blogging (and internet access in general) in the third world is often driven by who can access blogging media – and these are quite often the wealthier people interested in reinforcing the status quo in some countries, so getting the vox populi voice is quite hard
- Conversely, the vox populi in many developing areas are using mobile devices as their main way of communicating and accessing social networks (and many other) functions. What particularly caught my ear was that the Chinese are developing mobile devices with relevant functionality for these usage patterns, which are very different to the mobiles that OECD manufacturers build – and that the techniques and technologies developed in China and Africa are starting to spread to other areas – so watch out companies like Nokia, Motorola etc.
- Pictures and Videos are far more transferable across cultures, rather than text in languages that other people probably cannot understand. A picture speaks a thousand words - and in a thousand languages. Less clear on the transferability of sound, though I had a very interesting side conversation on how companies need to think about signature audio as well as picture and text cues - hence the title of this post alludes to Kaa's song in the Jungle Book....

Another stream was about something that is a big bugbear of mine – Trust and the gaming of social media system (see here for a post of mine on the issue). Fascinating takeaways here were the sophisticated “how to’s” for gaming the systems currently in operation. Here are five that apparently are increasingly commonly used today – how many are you aware of?

- MySpace - false profiles, tied in to false Flickr photos and YouTube videos, initially these were “user generated falseness” like LonelyGirl, but now often built by PR agencies for the purposes of co-ordinated advertising, pimping products or bands, or swaying opinions in niche areas (because many niches are small, a fairly small co-ordinated snow-job can be disproportionately influential)
- Digg – there is now a growth industry of Corporate Diggers, using it as a (fairly unsophisticated) board to pimp their paymasters’ products
- Facebook – similar plays to MySpace starting – find niches and bias them by weighting them with co-ordinated content, typically with the intention of pimping product and/or influencing opinions.
- Online “shock teams” – finding conversations and co-ordinating the responses as a corporate marketing tool.
- Online Video sites - undergoing the same evolution as Digg, where a small number of co-ordinated videos and voting can easily get huge numbers of people watching the (advertising / influencing / product demo / political sermon) clip being pimped.

(I’m not sure I got all the subtleties here – others feel free to comment / condemn / correct etc)

Quite scary stuff – it is clear that a growing amount of fairly antisocial activity is occurring in the major (still fairly naïvely structured) social media sites. I include email Groups as social media sites, they are just an older instance...and there will be others after blogging and RSS pass on.....

When the idea of ensuring trust came around, the view was that most Social Media networks were still lousy (compared to real life social nets) at allowing us to read the cues of other users to decide on how trustworthy they are, and how trustworthy their content is. Ways of doing this will be important in 2007 – both bottom up and top down – for Social Media sites to remain trusted.

Funnily enough, I don't yet see Trust Retention in the canon of things to do in Social Media Optimisation ("be real" is about as close as it gets), probably because the gaming of sites is fairly new.

I think Trust in Social Media is going to be a major issue in 2007, and I suspect a lot of these sites will reap some very unpleasant harvests when people start to realise what is going on. Trust, once lost, is very difficult to regain.

An aside - I came home to find a storm in one of my Yahoo Groups - Mobile Monday London - because it seems SpinVox's PR agency (Porter Novelli) had spammed the group with a product announcement, but the address had been spoofed to make it look like an ordinary Yahoo member (yes, one can find these things out.....for now anyway).

There was another stream loosely based on whether Social Media is global and scalable – can MySpace go global, or will it devolve into many niches, with a social net for every arena (Old Hands may recognise the evolution of individual email ListServers, into various Group system before all of them were hovered up pretty much by Yahoo Groups). Anyway, some takeaways:

- Niche Sites / Microcasting struggle to get advertising revenue, for example the blogs have low “authority”, so they will lose out in any funding battle. Seems to me a bit like magazines – niche publications are either subscription or published by enthusiasts, and advertising is “local”. Local will mean different things in global social media advertising niches I suspect
- There was an interesting observation on Content – the majority belief was that Content is still king, but “Content” increasingly means a lot of historical content as well as the “now” stuff that most mainstream media systems are built to deliver.

(There were some other points / subtle corollaries but my brain was full by now….)

The last discussion was on what we as members wanted from this club – re-reading what I have written above I realised this is what I want – good company, fascinating discussion, great insights - and cold beer

Postscript - Ian Delaney has blogged on stream I forgot, that of "attention lifecycles" - I captured some of it in my trust area above but go here for more good stuff.

First thing this morning(1) I see another "bog off to the back of the beta queue" email from TVP(2) / Joost (3), and the good news that it has a competitor in Babelgum ( good review of this on GigaOm). All my PR, VC, Analyst and Media friends have Joost invites - we just do this stuff for a living, so what would we know - or is that why we haven't seen an invite?

(Joost's DRM is unmentioned by nearly all of the media reviews for example - only the Register's review of Joost makes an aside to its use of its own DRM - now that could be very important in its take-up vs. clear-content plays, or in a DRM-draconia bake-off)

The thing is, putting Web TV on a Social Net based broadband service is fairly standard stuff now. Yes, you can tweak the user interface look and feel - (a good, fast user interface is critical, the trials we did at BT 10 years ago showed that) - but so can everyone else, and fairly quickly. And everyone is using targeted advertising as the way to make money - so much so that I wonder whether its time to go contrarian and look at ploughing the subscription furrow, as the Web-TV-TiVo is sure to emerge. But, at the end of the day its all about content. And that means things like DRM approaches start to become important, owning an end-to-end value chain like iTunes will be far harder in the Web TV world.

In an earlier post I referred to Porn driving adoption in previous new Media services...I wonder if Web TV will go that way...in which case I fancy an Italian outfit's chances, or maybe the dark horse here is actually a video Eroshare....(4)

As an aside to the content context, I don't know which is more intriguing in Web TV stuff right now - the object lessons in alpha PR beta-hyping or the technologies themselves.....can't be Edelman doing Joost's PR I assume ?

There are of course the inevitable doomsayers who believe that p2pTV won't work (contention, limited bandwidth, ISP limits to capacity etc) - there is a sanguine article by mega-uber blogger James Enck over here on this issue.

Haven't had the same beta issues with TIOTI et al by the way....oh, and could you also give an invite to these guys while you're at it.

Postscript - saw this article on Wired about Joost, most detail I've seen to date.

1. Been away for 2 days you see.....and OK, not quite first thing
2. The Venice Project
3. Joost is a Dutch / South African good ole boy's name...Joost van der Westhuizen, the Springbok rugby player for example. Seems kinda like calling your service Mike, or Bobby - or Robrt if its Web 2.0....(or Randy, if its a Porn TV service....). Maybe the BBC online WebTV service should change its name to Auntie after all?
4. The medium is the massage after all

Just had a look at GigaOm's NewTeeVee and there is this article with a video from Barack Obama's launch of his bid for the US presidency....

I'm using my laptop's 3G card right now, and a sign comes up on the video clip that says:

"This player requires a faster connection to enable smooth playing of this video.

- the connection speed detected will cause a potentially unviewable experience"

Uh oh....a paltry 384 kB/sec won't hack it any more in an IP TV/Video world - is this "no signal" signalling the end of the 3G video dream?