RealWire “Releasing influence” – our new animation goes live

Following on from our Online Media animation from the start of this year we have just finished the second part of our “trilogy” – “Releasing Influence“. *Please note this animation is more self promotional in nature*.

The first part of the film follows on from “The Online Media” and describes how news releases have the potential to achieve influence in this world. The second describes how RealWire can help senders of news to do just that and also how our service helps them to understand the impact they have had.

The last of the three should be ready in a few weeks time and will deal with the importance of delivering relevance to recipients of news.

But for now here is the video. Would love to get people’s feedback.

Google isn’t people Google is an algorithm

The title of this post is a comment I made in my presentation at 3i and have used a few times since. (I suspect I heard or read this somewhere once so if anyone knows the who, what and when please tell me so I can attribute).

I was reminded of the quote when reading last week about Eric Schmidt’s comments regarding Twitter and the concept of Twitter as a search engine. Drew Benvie is also carrying out a Twitter search experiment which has resulted in some discussion today. Those with more knowledge of these things than I will probably be able to point out many other reasons but IMHO Google’s success in search was based on five (probably pretty obvious) key factors:

– a simple interface
– low time to get started
– quick
– relevant results
– high coverage of topics

So how does Twitter compare? The table below is my (basic) attempt to summarise a comparison of the two against these five factors. I have added the last two to highlight the key differences as I see it between the basis for the responses.

Conclusions?

For those active members of the Twitter community (like @drewb for example) I think that:

– the potential for increased trust due to the basis of response being real people and;
– for the same reason (potentially) increased relevance of the “results”

are likely to mean that they use Twitter more frequently to answer some of the questions they would have directed towards Google in the past.

However I suspect that these early adopters are the sort of internet sophisticates that already use a wider variety of means to find information – Social bookmarking, Blog searches etc.

For those occasional Twitter users, and those outside of the community altogether, Twitter has a way to go before it will be a significant search competitor to Google in market share terms for the key reason of time investment.

So for the majority of the world’s 1.5bn internet users I suspect that the ease of getting an answer from Google will continue their hegemony of the search market for the foreseeable future – however long that is these days!

Spotify – mixer tapes made easy

Last Friday I spotted a tweet by Sally Whittle about a Spotify playlist she had created. I fancied some music to fill my afternoon and I was curious to see if I could get this whole sharing playlist thingamajig to work. Well I did and its brilliant! And Sally’s playlist was tops too :-) So I had a try myself and it was great fun. Sally has subsequently started a playlist meme and this has been continued by Jed.

Following my post last week about Twitter being fan mail for the 21st century this got me thinking how much easier creating this playlist and sharing it was than when I was a teenager.

Creating mixer tapes was an art and one that took a lot of time and effort. Every track had to be recorded from source (records in the main for me!) to the tape. So creating a 20 track playlist like mine cost money (the tape) and took around three to four hours allowing time for selection and recording. Remember you had to work out the order first, no ability to just move things around on a screen. Oh and I also had to own all the music!

Whereas on Friday it took me about 10 minutes and cost me nothing and I had the entire Spotify catalogue to choose from. True a few of the tracks I thought of using weren’t there but given that new ones are being added all the time this will get better and better I suspect.

I once had to create a five hour series of tapes for an 18th birthday party for a friend of mine. Took me an entire day. Would have taken about an hour I reckon on Spotify!

I realise that this isn’t really new in that the ability to create playlists from digital content speeded up the process a long time ago and that if you aren’t too worried about the legal issues you don’t need to “own” all the content. However the key differences with Spotify are first of all it is legal and second it is the ability to share your playlists so easily and so widely.

However the slight downside of this is that making a tape back in the day was such an investment of time it was a way of demonstrating how you felt about that special someone :-) Plus it couldn’t be shared very easily – yes you could copy it but it took time – so it was likely to remain personal to them. Post Spotify I suppose there is a danger that creating such playlists is now no different to a quick visit to the petrol station to buy a bunch of flowers when you’ve forgetten someone’s birthday!

Anyway it’s still bloomin’ great and though I haven’t been formally tagged in this meme I am going to be cheeky and join in so I tag Stephen, Mat and Shannon. Look forward to a lot of great tunes.

The “@”. Fanmail for the 21st Century

I spoke to a few digital marketing people at Sony this week about Twitter. How it works and how it is being used by celebrities and music artists in particular. It got me thinking about how fanmail has changed and the potential implications for pop stars.

When I was growing up in the 1970/80s a fan letter to a pop star was something that took a lot of time and effort.

First of all you had to have an idea of where to send it. If the address of the record company wasn’t on the sleeve such research would probably involve a trip to the library. Next you would probably need to hand write the letter. Then put it in an envelope, walk to the Post Office, buy a stamp and put it in the mail. Then wait…and wait…and wait…and wait some more.

If you were really lucky then perhaps, after what would seem like an inordinate amount of time later, you would get a two line letter back from some faceless person saying thank you for your letter to XXXX. Please find enclosed a picture of XXXX or something similar.

The sender would be over the moon and would probably dine out on this story in the schoolyard for weeks – their friends clamouring to see a glimpse of the picture. Oh and of course i you were really lucky it would be a SIGNED picture – WOW!

Now fast forward to February 2009 and I am an up and coming artist using MySpace and Facebook to connect with my fans and build up a community around my music. I am able to publish new material, announce things like new tour dates in advance and give them an insight into what I am up to. Fans can chat to each other and build their own networks based on their shared interest in my music. That schoolyard has got a lot bigger.

However if a fan writes on my Facebook wall they probably accept that it is more of a promotional tool rather than me personally and might more readily accept that I won’t be responding individually to everyone. In a sense the site itself is a 21st century multimedia version of the standard picture fans got in response to their 1970s letters.

But a true fan still wants a SIGNED one. Something personal just for them. Now let’s say the artist joins Twitter. Its easy for them to do (assuming their name is available), after all they only have to type up to 140 characters a few times a day maybe, and all from their mobile. Not a great deal of time to invest. Next thing they know they have 5,000 followers, then 10,000. The artist themselves only follows a handful of fellow music industry people and their “real” friends.

Then those followers start @ing them like crazy. Because the difference to the 1970s is that now the fans’ required investment is really low as well. It takes them seconds to @XXXX from their own phone and they know it goes to XXXX directly. Suddenly in this world fanmail goes through the roof. What do they do? Ignore them? But that might lead to some really upset fans. Respond to every tweet? Very time consuming. Delegate responding to someone else? Yeah but now it’s not authentic and will the fans respond badly to this?

It’s all too soon to tell. But what one can see is that in the 1970s the volume and expectations of fanmail were low as it took a lot of time to send a letter and it was to someone so remote that any response was fantastic.

On Twitter the potential for volume and expectations to be high are real and artists need to consider the potential issues around this before diving into this exciting new world.

3i Online Media Presentation video

Last November I presented at 3i‘s offices in London to a group of their portfolio companies. Others who spoke that day included Deborah Saw of Citigate and Philip Stafford of the FT – so I was definitely not top of the bill :-) .

The video below is an extract from my session giving an overview of the online media world. It’s sort of an extended remix of our recent animation. Not as pretty, clearly, with me in it and longer at 15 minutes. For those online experts out there I doubt there will be much that is new, but for anyone else it might be worth putting the kettle on and settling down with a cup of tea/coffee – after all you can always pause me after 30 seconds :-)


Online Media Presentation from RealWire on Vimeo.

Corrections: For anyone that watches I have subsequently established that Earth Times doesn’t only publish articles regarding environmental topics. Not sure if this is a change in recent months or whether I imagined it and Facebook did exist at the 2004 presidential election but didn’t have quite as many members!