Living in a digital world

Just when you’ve sussed Facebook – Yahoo and Google start thinking about the ‘Next Generation’

News broke this weekend that both Yahoo and Google are working on their own ‘next generation’ social networking services.

Yahoo is apparently sticking to its usual approach of not commenting on such developments, but ‘leaks’ describe their oddly named ‘Mosh’ as a “new cool social network product” within Yahoo.

If it goes ahead then this will presumably replace Yahoo’s current 360 social network service that never seems to have got off the ground – as well as ending talk of Yahoo’s looking to acquire Bebo or Facebook. In fact, it could be that last year’s failed negotiations with Facebook, which reportedly saw Yahoo’s offer price go up to $1.62 billion, are what has led to their decision to build instead of buy.

Meanwhile, Google is being far more open about its activity with Google Operating System reporting that the company is sponsoring a project called ‘Socialstream’ at Carnegie Mellon University’s Human-Computer Interaction Institute, to “rethink and reinvent online social networking”.

No details of when, of even if, Socialstream is planned to be released. However, descriptions of the project suggest that Google is looking towards enabling the easy consolidation of feeds from existing social networking sites, rather than creating a stand-alone competitor.

This looks like smart thinking – as it could enable Google to come-out a winner at the end of the next few years of site battles and consolidations, no matter which individual social networking sites finally prevail.

July 10, 2007 Posted by Bryan | Uncategorized | Leave a Comment

15,000 visit Secondfest virtual music festival

According to Aleks Krotski of the Guardian over 15,000 visitors attended the Secondfest virtual music festival held over the weekend 29 June to 1 July. The MySpace Secondfest blog reports a consistent 200 to 250 people on the festival site at any one time, rising to 300 for the Pet Shop Boys on Sunday evening.

Despite a combination Second Life technical hiccups (understandable given that nothing on this scale has been attempted before) and the bandwidth limitations that continue to plague most home broadband services at peak times, my visits to the festival over the weekend still proved fun and surprisingly immersive. The streaming music quality was good and the only time that lag became a major issue was on Sunday evening when Pet Shop Boys fans flocked to the main stage. Even then the music and video quality was mostly fine – it’s just that you couldn’t move around at all (just like being at the main stage at a real festival).

Overall, the event was a very interesting example of the potential to create a highly memorable online branded experience within a virtual world. Throughout the weekend, market researchers were encouraging visitors to share their views on the event and it’ll be interesting if Intel or The Guardian share any of their findings from this.

Meanwhile, to get a feel for what the experience was like, and perhaps fuel some fresh ideas for how more brands might connect with consumers in this way, I’ve posted a few snapshots from the festival on Scribd.

While you’re there, do take a look around the Scribd site too. It’s a great social network which essentially provides a YouTube for documents, enabling very easy sharing of documents in a wide variety of formats, complete with tagging, rating and commenting.

July 10, 2007 Posted by Bryan | Uncategorized | 4 Comments

Must agencies and creative teams change?

Bob Greenberg and Anne Benevuto of R/GA have initiated a serious conversation about the need for agencies to adapt to a changing world. Their analysis is very simple, but the solutions they require are extremely challenging.

PDF links to their thoughts: Bob on whether agencies can keep up with brands like Nike. Anne on the challenges of complexity.

They point out that brands once simply said things to consumers. Eg, ‘agencies created campaigns to tell consumers that… Pepsi tasted better than Coke.’ Then brands started wanting to have relationships with consumers – hello DM and early attempts at integrated agencies. Now though, we’ve entered an age of massive complexity where brands want consumers to have experiences. But hey, what kind of agency structure can deliver experiences and interactions?

Basically R/GA’s contention is that “by definition, the interface is the locus of a brand’s relationship with a consumer, the place where the two come together, shake hands (hopefully), and actually do something to each other: negotiate the price of airline tickets; download Arcade Fire’s Neon Bible; perhaps even find a dance partner.”

This interface is the place where people do things, say things, listen to things and create things. R/GA argue that the creative skills required to deliver that complex experiential interface is a new, large, amorphous creation they call the ‘Creative Hydra’ – a many-headed creature that is spawned by bolting on additional elements (tech lead and interaction designer/IA) to the traditional creative team of a copywriter and art director.

The tech lead isn’t just a geek that defines what’s possible or puts limits around the creative solution. In the new environment they’re an inventor and the inventions they imagine for particular marketing briefs may well lead to the ‘creative idea.’ Often their invention is the idea.

The interaction designer understands how consumers function in this new environment and and how we can best engage them.

But how do you write a brief for this larger team. Where and when do each of the members best engage with each other? Who is responsible for maintaining or guiding the consistency of experiences across the wide array of brand interfaces?

Here are some additional thoughts on the R/GA argument from Ogilvy and Tribal.

July 10, 2007 Posted by riksta | Uncategorized | 1 Comment