Archive for September, 2008
Sports Copyrights and Twitter
Monday, September 29th, 2008I was at the University of Washington Football game the other night, and texting commentary back and forth with a friend on the other side of the stadium. It dawned on us that we could just as easily be twittering the game to a specific network of people who wanted to follow the game on 15 second intervals. This made me wonder what the “broadcast rights” would be on this media.Now it’s easy to argue that we are looking too many steps ahead. But sports leagues are not in the habit of letting people broadcast any info from their games without receiving huge licensing fees. For example, I could not do play by play from my cell phone and run a live audio feed from my web site without being visited by a few attorneys pretty quickly.
So as more and people use Twitter as a micro-broadcast medium, you have to think the sports leagues will take notice. After all, if I had 100,000 people following my Tweets from a Seahawks game, the NFL might want a piece. Especially if I was charging a fee for this subscription, a charge for “Premium Tweets,” if you will.
Now, since the leagues tend to take their time when making technology decisions, we probably have a little while before it becomes a major issue. But the legalities of Twittering live events is definitely something to watch moving forward.
Experience Wii Uses YouTube In a Clever Way
Tuesday, September 23rd, 2008Here at Spring Creek Group, one role we play for clients is to make sure their videos and other assets are easily findable across all the major video syndication channels. On a future post, we’ll detail out why it’s so important to manage this channel yourself, as part of your overall media strategy.
Everyone is well aware that YouTube is a great place to post this video. But while most people are merely re-purposing content, YouTube also lends itself to the marketer’s imagination, especially if the right client finds the right creative partner. And with that as an introduction, we invite you to check out the channel developed by Experience Wii, to promote the new game Wario Land: Shake It.
Editor’s Note (October 20, 2008) – At the Federated Media Summit, we actually heard from Hashem Bajwa, the Digital Strategy Director at Goody Silverstein, who I believe led the team who created this page. Hasem said that there is no ‘rate card” for something like this. You basically go tell YouTube what you want to do, and how much you have to spend, and then you negotiate from there. I think you’ll see more of this “arbitrary pricing” form of advertising investment based on shifting budgets, unclear metrics and a flexible inventory of real estate.
The Economy Goes Thump. How Does This Affect Social Media?
Thursday, September 18th, 2008You can’t escape the news dominating MSM, Blogs, Twitter and even Facebook. The Financial system we have grown up believing in, has fallen apart. The companies who have all the money, have run out of it. Insurance companies need insurance to bail them out. The American taxpayer will pick up the bill.
These are not words that making marketers happy. Less money in the consumers’ pockets means two things – Lower company revenues, and smaller marketing budgets.
So how does this affect Social Media?
We may be biased, but we believe social media is going to take on an even greater importance. It’s cheaper to keep a customer than find a new one. And if there is less “new” money in the marketplace to go after, then keeping a current customer becomes even more important.
Retention and Advocacy will become even bigger buzzwords in the Marketing Director’s vocabulary. And Social Media is uniquely tailored to service these goals.
With Facebook, blogs and other Social Media outlets, companies have an opportunity to find their most loyal customers and turn them into mouthpieces, opinion makers and thought leaders. A company does not need to run broadcast advertising that says, “You love us, don’t leave us.” It needs to invest dollars to make sure the happiest customers are loud and strong enough to find those on the fence, and bring them back over.
Customers are going to have less money to spend, and will have to make decisions on where to spend it. It’s easier for them to stop paying for something you have no connection with. Don’t be the unconnected company.
Using Social Media to Launch a Product
Tuesday, September 2nd, 2008It’s the day after Labor Day, so that means the furious 10-12 weeks of PR flurry has begun. Everyone is back from their vacations, and replaced their beach reading of self-help business books, romance novels and spy thrillers with Time, Newsweek, and the WSJ. In return, reporters have switched from Op-Ed analyses of Olympics, Conventions and other personal indulgences to rewriting Press Releases. Basically everyone has between now and the week before Thanksgiving, before the December freeze begins.
So it’s really no surprise that Google jumped their big fall announcement to the front of the line. The launch of Google Chrome could be their big contribution to web and technology community. But instead of the traditional PR launch of dropping a Release on the line at 9am Eastern, Google added Social Media to their PR mix.
Starting over the weekend, Google “accidentally leaked” a cartoon explaining all the features of the product. No screenshots, just drawings explaining everything that was coming. With this leak out there, everyone knew to check in with the Mega-bloggers like Mashable and Techcrunch to see what the Google guys had released out to Arrington and crew ahead of time. Plus, they used their own blog to supplement the leak.
Backing up all of this is a complete Wikipedia entry published before the product even hit the market. In fact, the Wikipedia entry announces the date and time of the Press Conference. It shows how far we’ve come in Social Media when we are getting our product news from Wikipedia before the bits even ship.
Obviously not everyone has the power to consciously tell the WSJ, NYT, etc…that they get 2nd dibs after the blogosphere. But it does show a slightly different model for using Social Media as part of a large PR blitz.
