12 months and 92 posts later it’s time for me to take a bit of a hiatus from this blog. My objectives for this blog where to:
My personal and professional interests are leaning in a new direction that I am spending the majority of my time. This hiatus may last a couple months or indefinitely depending on where this new direction takes me.
For those that have taken the time to read the ramblings I have posted over the last year I thank you for your interest. For those bloggers that consistently create original and compelling content that builds an audience I now have a deeper appreciation of the effort it takes.
Wow! For over 23 years and $140MM Pepsi has been investing in high profile Super Bowl ads. Not this year. Pepsi is moving it’s spend to Online Social Media buys. Is this a good move? I don’t know — but definitely will keep an eye on this to see how it pans out. For those that read my posts you know that I favor interactive media that creates a dialog with your audience over mass communication. I’d rather pay for a consumer relationship than an impression. It looks like someone at Pepsi may share in that view.
Is this another nail in mass media’s coffin? No, there will always be a need for making the first impression and TV is still the best option to make that first impression. However, expect TV to radically change over the next 5 years. Necessity drives innovation and with more dollars moving away from TV expect TV to quickly innovate. TV will become more socially enables. Allowing for brands to create relationships with the consumer over the TV.
The World Stops Turning
This week ABC announced the end of the run after 56 years for the soap “As the World Turns”. Each of the over 13,000 episodes was scripted by writters, filmed by photographers, directed by directors, produced by producers, and acted by – well let’s just call them actors. Lots of effort and cost that happened everyday year after year. Given the much more cost efficient reality TV and talk-shows it’s become difficult to justify soaps. But what does that have to do with Internet Marketing?
The internet is a medium for applications and content. Both costly to produce. Our history is ripe with examples of the lower cost UGC or “bot” created content trumping professionally created content. Remember when the Yahoo search results used to be produced by paid humans? Then Google’s “bot” produced search results without costly professionals deciding what to return for search results. So when devising how to produce content think through how to produce that content without paying for it. “As the world turns” has taught us the lesson that paid content will eventually always be trumped by a lower cost alternative.
What’s next — It won’t be long till professional quality scripted content will be created by the fan base. Think of “LOST” living on past the fifth season but now written by the fans. Sounds far fetched? It is already happening. Fan Fiction has been around since Sherlock Holmes was first written. So let your fan base become your cheap content producers — and you might quickly realize that your fan base produces better content than the professionals!
With FourSquare everyday tasks are Social
FourSquare is getting a lot of press lately. The service is a cross between location tracking, reviews, social network, and game play. As you travel around your city you enter tips and reviews of the places you frequent. Leaving virtual notes for others to find. The more notes you leave the more points you earn. Points turn into badges that add the element of game play. It’s a compelling concept that may have some legs, but most likely this is an early example of things to come. The big picture is that Social Game Play will be applied to everything. Some ideas:
Expect a lot of Social Game Play to seep into all facets of our life. From major things like retirement investing to simple entertainment like BeJeweled.
I like companies with “Play” in the name. I also like companies that have started to crack the micro-payment model in the US. Playdom just announced a funding round that raised $43M while Playfish made off with $275M from EA. This amounts to some interesting validation of the Social-Causal Game / Micro-Payment Space. Details are sketchy but it looks like these guys are pulling in $40M to $60M a year in micro-payments fueled by their Facebook and MySpace games such as Mob Wars and Social Life.
We’ve seen excitement with this kind of thing before — remember the Beenz and Flooz craze? But this is different. This is a new low risk / high engagement way for consumers to pay for casual games — and soon other things too. Why ask the consumer to pay $20 once up front for a game or service while you could ask them for $1.00 at a time 5 times a day for everyday they use the game/service. Expect this new payment method to be proven and profected in the game space then move into consul and handheld games, online video, social networking, news, and maybe to TV.
There are a couple factors at play that make the micro-payment model compelling to producers and consumers. But two overlooked factors are environmental trends and the decline in consumerism. The next generation may feel completely comfortable with sending a $1 virtual rose bouquet on V-day rather than spending $40 of on handful of flowers that were cut from the ground to whither and die just for that special someone.
