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• FusionCharts v3 - Interactive Flash Charts & Graphs
  FusionCharts is a flash charting component that can be used to render data-driven & animated charts for your web applications and presentations.
  (tags: flash chart visualization dashboards)

It has been far too long since I actively did anything on this blog, mostly because real-work is taking over. Because of this I am looking into new publishing processes, and emabrrassing or not my first choice of publishing tool is Microsoft Word 2007. Let's hope their XML-RPC stuff works out and I can start getting back into things....

There have been many reports recently of consumers discovering the the 'cool' new blog created by a superfan is actually an agency crafted site designed to create WOM or some other form of consumer buzz. The latest of which is Sony with a site created by a supposed PSP fan who created a blog to get himself a PSP for Christmas.

Sounds very much like this strategy a boardroom discussion about how to create product buzz in the run up to the holiday season - leading to the idea of a blog. Unfortunately, the strategy perhaps did not go quite as well as planned when a consumer created this YouTube video in a response to the blogger uploading his pleases to YouTube (readers viewing through RSS will have to click through to the site to see this).

The lesson? Be honest in your advertising strategy.

It's finally here! Yes four years of waiting is over, or perhaps I should say forty years of waiting *might* be over for us brits looking for the next world cup win after 1966...

This world cup is making huge in-roads into the use of digital media and technology, so I thought it's probably worthwhile having a look at these, and the impact this has on use of digital technology and the impact for the general population.

One of the biggest pieces of news we're hearing at the moment regards how people are watching the world cup, and in the four years since the Korea/Japan there have been some considerable changes in our TV viewing patterns. Firstly this will be the most watched sports event in history to be seen on flat screen LCD and Plasma TV's (that is until the 2008 Olympics and the 2010 world cup of course..); this is interesting of course because since 2002 flat screen technologies have fallen in price and increased in popularity to the extent where shops in Singapore generally don't sell CRT TV's anymore. Why is this interesting? Mostly because when homes adopt digital television sets they will be able to plug these sets into other devices - namely the PC / Mac - in other words when a family buy's a LCD / Plasma TV they are preparing themselves for new opportunities that were previously unatainable with CRT sets.

Secondly the TV scene becomes much more interesting when we see that companies such as the BBC are using the 2006 World Cup as a pilot for its new High Definition TV services. Whilst I've not personally been able to see any HD TV yet I am assured that the quality is quite out of this world. Now I won't dwell on this issue, because it's been widely discussed by others, is the issue of video quality in general - you see as more and more experience HD TV in it's 'real life' detail this will surely have an effect on how we see internet video? It's a hard call to make, as we spend increasing amounts of time on sites like YouTube, watching online movie trailers and downloading episodes of Lost to our iPods then will consumers be making comparisons to their HD TV at home? Will this be a renaissance in home TV viewing? Will this have an impact on TV advertising? Possibly. Though I'm sure it will be an adaptive model - just like the comparison between reading a newspaper and reading news on a website - we'll just get used to it.

So what else about the World Cup? Well other things we are seeing is the explosive digitisation of boradcast news and journalism related to the world cup. We have Baddiel and Skinner re-living the glory days of Three Lions via their Podcast; we have BBC journalists blogging direct from Germany, we have the general public blogging about the world cup (see the Technorati World Cup chart below).

Anyway, enough of this - England are playing Trinidad & Tobago tonight, so I must start getting ready for this match. Come on Engerlund! Rooooney!

Poor AT&T in the US, it seems that they have been talking the talk but not walking the walk. And the blogging world is not impressed. Let me explain what has happened. I read on Sean Coon's blog via AdRants that SBC have recently bought AT&T (might be old news but to me its new, but I live in Asia..) and the new outdoor campaign claims that "Blogging. Delivered." - a fair thing to say, and similar to the old "Internet. Powered by Cisco" campaign.

But the blogging community have picked up that a search on the AT&T corporate site for "Blog" does not yield any results. Oh dear.

This is bad for a two reasons as I see it, let me explain:

1. Integrated Marketing failure. At the very least AT&T should have put some kind of digital content in place to tie the atl into their brandsite, for most brands this would be the minimum requirement of a big brand campaign such as this.
2. Look at your target audience and realise what you're talking about. Blogging right now is still fairly niche, it's cool, but niche. Those involved in blogging are early adopters, which means they are more likely to be online, digitally savvy and ready to voice an opinion. Lets say for example the campaign had suggested "Email. Delivered." - the same comments would have applied, but would have largely been ignored, because hey - everyone sends email right? Caveat: of course this campaign may be multi pronged, and this message might exist..

Of course it's difficult for an agency to pick up on something like this in the planning stage - most likely for the atl agency it sounded brilliant - think of the conversations: "hey, brief was to demonstrate AT&T deliver internet traffic, how can we crystalise that?" "dude, blogging is cool right now!" "yeah, blogging powered by at&t" "nah, cisco did powered, how about delivered?" "agreed". It's another example where what may seem like a small mistake in the campaign strategy could well lead into a PR disaster for AT&T - from most likely an innocent mistake in the planning..

Still - think about the fun that could come from this - vis a vis the Mastercard ad parodies:

Creating the billboard campaign - $25m

Forgetting to add website content - $0

Getting flamed by bloggers - Priceless

Feeling a bit evil today!

Journalist Jim Rossignol has posted a fantastic article covering the gaming culture in Korea. His experiences about gaming in Korea from the media coverage of gaming, to the rapid growth in broadband penetration and gaming cafes really goes a long way to shedding light on one of the toughest Asian markets to get market insights from.
The confusing, hidden society of Korea for outsiders, means we are often making assumptions about one of Asia's leading digitally connected countries. Jim's article explains a great deal about Korea and why gaming is so important to this market.
Thanks for publising the article Jim!

I'm pleased to announce my first guest writer on the blog. Nic is an old colleague of mine, who brings years of experience of internet marketing in China and Asia Pacific who has decided to voice his opinion on Ajaz and Web 2.0.

Click to read more ...

WebSideStory have just announced the launch of a corporate blog aimed at "communicate more effectively with both customers and prospects. The focus of this blog is not to push press releases, but to provide useful information about digital marketing optimization, including tips and tricks, success stories, and interesting user trends". Well, actually it launched late September - but I think I'm close enough to say that it's just launched. I was actually hoping for a lot more from the blog of one of the world's leading web analytics vendors, articles so far on the site sound more like sales pitches for WSS solutions rather than real useful industry analyst commentary on Web Analytics, Search Marketing and Content Management (the three key areas of the WSS portfolio now).

Click to read more ...

Seth Godin is back in town with a new Web 2.0 project called Squidoo. A free Squidoo e-book (pdf format), is available on the Squidoo Blog talks about the history behind the project, what it is and where it is going. It's a very interesting story that I'll try to summarise and form an opinion on the new service.

Click to read more ...

Brilliant!

I'd missed this myself, but Ian McKee recently discussed the reason for the price eBay paid for Skype and the true nature of their marketing mix since the launch of Skype not so long ago

Quote:

Ebay spends over US$2 Billion to buy Skype, a tiny Luxembourg based business that has never spend a dollar on traditional advertising, but has a product that is so interesting that its users recommend it to each other – to the tune of 60m users in 2 years at last count.

Surely the writing is starting at appear written pretty large on the wall …..all the marketing in the world will not keep you afloat if you have a product that is only adequate.

So in the Advising Vs Word of mouth debate, I think this delivers a knock down punch – here is proof that

• word of mouth can overpower huge traditional advertising budgets
• word of mouth will deliver huge value ($2b in a few years) and traditional advertising is not required.

Absolutely spot on, I'd spent all my time fixated on the technology, but had never really thought about how Skype actually got those 53m subscribers. To this end, I'm starting to think of WOM (description on wikipedia) as another form of disintermediation.