List of Posts

Posts Tagged ‘Clickz’

What makes users create content? Wednesday, January 28th, 2009

Christine Beardsell has produced a thoughtful piece on ClickZ looking at what motivates people to participate online in brand-related user-generated content campaigns. Although money is a great external motivator, she says it can be over-used and diminish internal motivation factors. Based on her experience observing user-generated content communities at interactive agency Digitas in the US, she outlines 10 different ways companies can most successfully motivate user-generated content:

  • Make it easy
  • Make it fun
  • Give me cash
  • Give me access
  • Make me a star
  • Create something useful
  • Let me influence
  • Give me a challenge
  • Be altruistic
  • Surprise me

The key question companies need to ask themselves when considering a user-generated content campaign, Beardsell writes, is “Why would anyone want to participate in a brand-developed experience when there are endless unbranded community outlets for people to be a part of?” The answer to that question is to create “a balance between both intrinsic and extrinsic motivations, passions and reward.”


Online content strategy - in a nutshell Tuesday, December 30th, 2008

Heidi Cohen has written a terrific piece on ClickZ explaining why an integrated content strategy is a must in 2009 for companies looking for effective marketing spend. The article is well worth reading in total and saving/printing, but here are some highlights:

When creating a communications strategy, “your content must address consumers as people. You should supply them with relevant and engaging information without sounding like sanitized marketing-speak.” If you get it right, you will 1) extend your brand; 2) drive traffic to your site; 3) diversify the ways you engage with potential customers; 4) make it easier for people to find your site via search engines; 5) provide product support; and 6) build community. 

Heidi outlines nine content formats to consider, including online video, podcasts, webinars and Twitter. She also discusses three ways to stretch your marketing resources online and five metrics to track (hint: page views are not on the list).

Attention potential clients: this is a preview of what we’ll be talking to you about next year. Thanks, Heidi!


More on Twitter - paradigm-shifter, or flash in the pan? Tuesday, December 23rd, 2008

Finding Twitter more fascinating the more I explore it.

Have installed TweetDeck to manage the firehose of activity.

Waiting to hear back from Mr Tweet, who will tell me who I should be following (how many of them am I already following?)

Am starting to think in <140 character bursts - am annoying the heck out of my wife!

OK, enough of that, back to proper blogging mode… as the media declares the death of MySpace and the rise of Facebook, has the digerati (or is that twitterati) already moved on to Twitter as the next big thing? Not everyone thinks so. Sean Carton has written a thought-provoking piece on ClickZ comparing Twitter to Second Life (which is so early 2008 (or maybe even 2007)) “and other now-embarrassing fads.”

He quotes stats showing that ‘only’ 200,000 people are using the service, and that 1% are super-users (he uses the word ‘addicts’) who account for 34% of all ‘tweets’.

He writes that, “the people writing most of the glowing reviews about Twitter are probably its most avid users and are therefore part of a hermetically sealed group that lacks perspective. People who write about technology online are paid (well, ‘paid’ might sometimes be a relative term) to write about online technology and to be the first to use it. Pumping a new technology makes them look smarter and raises their street cred because it gets others to use it and makes them (and I’ll even include myself in the ‘them’ here) look like they got the scoop before everyone else.”

Not surprisingly, this has sparked a lot of debate, with strong arguments on both sides. As one commenter writes, “In 12 months, this will look like the most ridiculous thing posted on ClickZ in 2008. Citing Twitter’s April, 2008 usage numbers is absurd in this context. Usage has increased by at least 1000% since then (reported and estimated by several good sources). The examples of real business being done on Twitter, major company heads using Twitter to reach out to their customer base, journalists relying on Twitter for sources… These are not ‘let’s take on a fake identity and chat to other cartoons’ like Second Life. Twitter is becoming the new email, and you miss the boat at your own peril.”

The next comment on the list: “Consider me in peril because Twitter is useless.”

TechCrunch has just published a post which backs up the observation that Carton’s numbers were low, while Denise Zimmerman on iMedia has written a good guide to ‘Becoming a Twitter all-star’. There are many more salient postings, such as the one I heard about on Twitter this morning but which has already been washed away in the flood of postings, where the writer said to treat Twitter like a river - you step into it on occassion, get wet and splash around, and get out again; the point is to not worry about all the water flow you miss when you’re not in the river.

To extend the analogy, I think you also have to make sure you don’t wade too deep that you get in over your head and drown. Here’s to a strong swimming stroke for 2009!


Digital business model - but who profits? Monday, November 17th, 2008

Vin Crosbie from ClickZ writes that media and digital publishers have been ignoring the obvious  business model for online publishing all these years - aggregating all content and allowing users to choose what they want to read/view. Think iGoogle, on a wider scale.

Traditional publishers toyed around with this concept years ago, but as Crosbie points out they never picked it up and ran with it because it would mean collaborating with their competitors (I wrote about this a couple of weeks ago in a post that was inspired by another piece Crosbie wrote).  He calls it “not mass media, but individuated media on a mass scale.”

I understand what he’s getting at, but, frustratingly, he doesn’t go into details about how people actually make money out of this approach. One reason traditional media companies didn’t go down this route is that they correctly realised that if they just shift their traditional advertising models to the web in a format that shares profits with all the players, none of the players is going to make anywhere near the same revenue as they used to. To me, that’s where the digital business model is still missing - what do you make money out of besides banner ads?


Digital transformation still slow Saturday, September 27th, 2008

Rebecca Lieb, writing on the ClickZ website, rightly observes that it’s high past time that the advertising and media industries fully embrace digital solutions. She writes, “It’s not just old-timers on the traditional agency side of the equation who are stubbornly resisting the shift to digital. It’s an issue across the media landscape. Their reluctance was perhaps somewhat understandable in the go-go ’90s and in the sober, austere, bleak era around 2002. But now?

“Still, I’m seeing traditional publishers cut back on digital endeavors (and digital staff) in a desperate and futile effort to sustain their flagging, dead-tree legacy brands. I’m seeing digital executives going to senior management with requests for back-end tools, such as content management systems and social media software, only to learn their corporate overlords have no idea what all that stuff is, much less what it’s actually used for or how it can benefit the business.

“And I’m seeing some of those print publications flatline. Friends who have been print journalists for decades are panicking in the face of cutbacks, early retirement, consolidation, and plain old extinction.

“But they’re not learning digital skills. A critic friend stays up nights over the fact his paper is due to shutter at month’s end. When I inquired about his online skills, he replied that even the most fundamental elements of a story, such as hyperlinks, were determined and executed by the online editor. He doesn’t know how to do any of that stuff.”

I’m happy to report that not everyone in the advertising and media industries in Australia over the age of 30 is a techno-Luddite. But a lot more needs to be done to encourage them to embrace digital formats and produce new ways of communicating ideas that capitalise on these new formats, rather than continuing to produce digital creations that are still rooted in traditional thinking.

Gen Y is not reading newspapers anymore. They’re watching TV without ads, via DVD or DVD recorders, They’re staying away from websites that throw pop-up ads at them. Those of us who grew up with traditional forms of communication are still in the majority - but we won’t be for that much longer. As Lieb says in the headline of her article, “Digital or die”.