Mis-application

This week, Facebook announced that it had raised £51m to expand its server capacity, to help the social networking website cope with yet more explosive growth rate in user numbers. Growth is certainly something Facebook does well, and despite ongoing concerns over privacy it now has more than 70 million active users and is the sixth most-trafficked website in the world.

Ensuring longevity with users in an increasingly crowded marketplace was always, and still is, a major concern for all social networking websites. In May of last year, and whilst other social networks like Bebo, Friends Reunited and Myspace stood relatively still, Facebook took the bold and innovative step to launch the Facebook platform from which software developers could create their own unique applications to sit alongside original Facebook features.

Tremendously successful applications like iLike (which allows you to add music to your profile, has 299,183 daily active users) and Scrabulous (the word game, has 623,732 daily active users) were born, and subsequent growth has been exponential. Nearly a year on from this decision there are, of today, 24,814 applications. This helped reinvigorate Facebook, giving it a different dimension to other social networks and adding a further stage to its phenomenal development. But at the same time, I think this growth has also been chaotic, and from a user perspective it has created a far more crowded interface. These applications are everywhere and nowhere at the same time.

What made Facebook so successful in its early stages was what it enabled users to do. In their own words ‘Facebook is a social utility that connects you with the people around you’, and it did this brilliantly. However, increasingly these applications can get in the way of the core Facebook brand. It can even be likened to Google putting anything on the homepage other than the search engine itself.

Facebook does need to innovate and to continue to develop its social network to keep users engaged, but it must ensure that this innovation is not only focussed but authentic. Facebook must stay true to what made it stand out from the crowd in the first place.

13 May 2008, posted by Richard Houston

The big idea is dead

Blogger Seth Godin says the big idea is dead. As author of a book called The Big Idea, I have to say...Actually, I agree.

Godin writes: ‘The secret of big-time advertising during the 1960s and ’70s was the “big idea” [but] today, the advertiser’s big idea doesn’t travel very well. Instead, the idea must be embedded into the experience of the product itself.’

The television drama Mad Men romanticises this great age of advertising, when Madison Avenue first realised that you could talk about anything. Not deodorant but closeness. Not lipstick but possession. Mad Men shows marketing people becoming philosophers: everything is superficially deep, and deeply superficial.

David Ogilvy called for big ideas in his 1983 book, On Advertising: ‘You can do homework from now until doomsday, but you will never win fame and fortune unless you also invent big ideas. It takes a big idea to attract the attention of consumers and get them to buy your product...Research can’t help you much, because it cannot predict the cumulative value of an idea, and no idea is big unless it will work for thirty years.’ And this thinking influenced branding as well as advertising, through to the end of the last century.

But now, sceptical consumers buy reality, not image: products, not advertising. Yes, you need an idea to drive your reality – to determine what kind of products and services you’ll make. But pure idea is dead.

www.sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2007/12/big-ideas-meatb.html

www.fastcompany.com/blog-post/ogilvy-vs-godin-big-idea-advertising-dead

30 April 2008, posted by Robert Jones

Cashing in on crowdsourcing

Consumers are increasingly becoming sick and cynical of the age-old ad game of ‘push, push, push’. Today’s consumer, or consommacteur, doesn’t want to be a demographic or a subject of research and testing. Today’s consumer wants to be an active participant, a resource that generates and contributes ideas. Welcome prosumerism. 

This willingness to participate and connect has enabled more brands to succeed from crowdsourcing – reaching out to consumers and inviting them to collectively design, develop and sometimes produce products and services. We know this model well and have seen its success for companies like Craigslist and Wikipedia.  With crowdsourcing came newly engaged and empowered consumers, incentivized by the opportunity to take part. 

In comes Kluster. Its premise is to incentivize participants to help solve a given need (a new product, a new marketing campaign, etc.) in a market-like environment that has real cash rewards. What sets it apart from similar companies, such as Innocentive, Ideablob, and Crowdspirit, is that participants don’t have to create the winning solution to cash in. The cash prize is distributed to everyone who supported the idea, based on how much they contributed to it, how early they got behind it, and what percentage of their given points they invested in it.

You might stop and ask: will customer-driven really lead to greater levels of customer satisfaction? I suppose it really all depends on the class of talent that platforms like Kluster can engage. From my perspective, the real truth of the matter is that consumers have been given the opportunity to shape the way in which they consume – and there’s no turning back.

25 February 2008, posted by Eliza Blank