A free iPhone App offers a map of all the spots across town and an augmented view to help people find spots near them. The campaign brings London’s rich history to life through a simple experiential event.

So far so good… I obviously had to check out the website www.youarehere.com. First impressions where really disappointing and the online element just didn’t achieve the same level of engagement as the rest of the campaign. From a design perspective the ‘page’ is cluttered and content hierarchy is unclear. I was expecting a whole microsite around the campaign with more photos and content – maybe real stories from people associated with each photo. In fact it’s just a poor landing page – they may as well had not pushed the URL on all the posters as heavily. It’s a shame because there is a really big opportunity to add a further level of engagement online through user interaction and social media. I’d have liked to have seen an online platform for discussion and information exchange – helping to paint an even richer background to each of the spots and events, from local peoples knowledge.

I just wish the online element was stronger, or even just more clearly sign-posted. Don’t get me wrong the iPhone App is simple and fun, but trying to find it in the App store was difficult. Maybe I was having a stupid moment! I tried searching for ‘Museum of London’ first – nothing. Then ‘You are here’ – nothing again! Finally I realised the small print on the landing page which read “Just search for Streetmuseum on iTunes”. OK I downloaded it but this third campaign title was a little hidden and why they couldn’t highlight the App name more if it was so different (especially on the posters), or even hyperlink to the iTunes store (like I have).

Overall it’s a real shame because the thinking behind the idea is beautiful, the offline execution is done brilliantly, and the iPhone itself is good fun. In summary ‘must try harder next time’.

Understanding online

What are your thoughts on Benn’s idea’s?

Barack Obama and his support

The digital agency behind Barak Obama’s online election campaign, Blue State Digital, has been appointed by the Communication Workers Union to help it in the fight against the privatisation of Royal Mail.

Blue State Digital is developing campaign elements that it hopes will help persuade the government to reverse its plans to partially privatise the public company.

A spokesman for the CWU confirmed that the agency have been tasked to use tools that will “drive the protest message quickly and effectively”.

The agency, which is hoping to woo the Labour Party and win its digital business, will be running online petitions and developing a social networking strategy.

The CWU is also looking to build its email database.

Blue State Digital’s appointment comes as another player enters the bid to buy a 30% stake in the beleaguered publicly owned postal company.

De Post La Poste, a Belgian private equity backed postal group, will now make a bid alongside buyout firm CVC Capital Partners.

Dutch postal company TNT and DHL, a subsidiary of Deutsche Post, are also in the running for the 30 per cent share.

The government’s plans, which are being overseen by business secretary Lord Mandelson, to sell the stake off to the private sector have been met with heavy criticism.

Workers, trade unions as many as 100 Labour backbenchers have all condemned the move.

Yesterday, in an interview with The Observer, business secretary Lord Mandelson accused the CWU of using “scare tactics” that could cost workers their pensions and their jobs. Mandelson said that the strength of opposition will not prompt the government to back-track on its sell-off plans.

Hmm. I wonder if we should push the Buy British angle and encourage them to get their digital marketing through Neoco?

(creds to Brand Republic)

The recruitment agents weapon of choice

I’d like to think that I am nice enough, eloquent enough, and straight talking enough to always get my point across. I can in most cases deal with people well and I like to think that I can strike up a good rapport with them should I choose to do so. Now, obviously, the work place is an environment where one must try to be a) as informative b) as polite c) as honest as possible and for the most part this comes naturally. That is until recruitment agent’s call. Have you ever been in the situation where you are asked a question and you politely respond, only to be asked the same question again about 10 minutes later?

Don’t get me wrong some agents I love and they are on my list of lovelies, others are quite nice as I can say no thank you, I have a PSL that I’m happy with, and they get the message and call it a day, filing me forever more under no point in trying so don’t bother (YAY). Others however, and this is the big companies I’m talking about, decide to get every single member of every feasible team in the agency to call me at 10 second intervals to offer me all sorts of candidates, mostly IT (don’t get me started on that one, as when on earth was a digital marketing agency and IT company the same thing), and they keep going until I am frankly looking for their address on the web, some sort of weapon, and dialling for a cab to come over and recreating a scene from the film ‘falling down’.

This is such a regular occurrence that it poses the question what are my rights? If this was a stranger calling me at home, or an ex calling me over and over this would be harassment and I could take out an injunction. I have called back numerous times asking to be removed from databases only to be called or email again about 2 months later. I have been told that if these people are contacting me on behalf of a company then I literally have no way of stopping them other than being incredibly rude and frankly why should I have to be.

It is not only unbelievably annoying but it is such a waste of our time, as the poor receptionist has to make polite excuses all day and I still get emailed and have to respond.

We are a small but perfectly formed agency and therefore our recruitment needs are NEVER going to be huge and if they were I am certainly not going to be brow beaten into dealing with a supplier. Instead of investing time in sorting through endless, pushy agencies, Neoco has invested in building a ‘friends and family’ network so we can fulfil our needs from a relevant and reliable pool of skilled people, many of whom have come through our really popular, year round internship programme.

I appreciate that you have targets but unless you want to be one of mine, please please please do yourself a favour and think twice before you call me. My lovelies know who they are, so if your not sure then chances are you aren’t – so please call it a day.

IAB Engage 2008

This year’s IAB Engage Conference was yet again packed with impressive speakers. Digital Marketing professionals and advertisers came together on Wednesday to discuss issues from piracy to measuring engagement, from integration of TV and online advertising to the extreme possibilities of the future – we’ll be sending our robots to shop for us within ten year apparently, and our dreams will soon be infiltrated by product placement via our personal contact lens screens!!

The Keynote speakers, Yahoo! founder Jerry Yang and Rt. Hon Andy Burnham MP, were less controversial and engaging than some of the others guests but their presence was a testament to the high profile of the event. A real highlight was a presentation by Orange brand director Justin Billingsley who certainly made the case for making digital the starting point for any marketing effort.

As impressive as Orange’s campaigns are, it is clear that their creative ideas only work because they are based on a simple principle. Namely that digital marketing should aim to entertain, answer, or add utility before it aims to advertise. This is a great way to make sure brands are working with consumers and not at them and it’s exactly how Neoco approaches its work.

The theme of the conference was “who’s in control” which framed the discussions perfectly. More than one speaker argued that marketeers have the power to make the difference – good news for us! Recent Neoco campaigns, however, are a testament to the success of putting consumers in control. For my part, I can’t help thinking control is the subject of so much debate because it’s basically a redundant concept but perhaps that for another blog piece…

Proof that people involved in global online communities are much happier.

Online communities are not social networks. Social networks are not online communities. Bold statement. Let’s break it down a little further to explain. Everyone would accept Facebook as an example of a strong social network. Looking at Facebook, we can see it is all about ‘me’. Facebook for me is about my details, my friends, my activity (the feed), comments relating to me (the wall), my groups, events I’m attending… well, you get the idea. So where social networks are about ‘me’, online communities are about ‘us’. A good example of an online community is Wikipedia. Wikipedia is created and maintained by contributions from lots of people. Contributions that do not directly relate to themselves; unless I’m Bill Gates or similar, I’m not going to have a profile presence on Wikipedia. Even if I was Bill Gates, I would be using Wikipedia different to how I use Facebook. So two separate entities that use very similar tools (online user generated content) to create and communicate their content.

An analogy of the above is gardening… let’s imagine that a social network is the same as your own little garden. You are free to plant what flowers you want, put up a nice white picket fence, maybe one of those horrible water features. Whatever you do, the garden is yours and your friends can only come in to the garden and look at your work. An online community is like a communal garden. Using the same gardening tools, the community plant flowers, dig holes, put up fences, but no-one can claim ownership over the garden or any piece of it. The garden as a whole is the creation of the community.

Interesting fact:
If the UK population of adults all set about the task of rewriting everything on Wikipedia…
it would take less than five minutes

Another good example of an online community is Trip Advisor. Most people have used it at some point or another to help with their travel plans or check out a hotel review. Trip Advisor shows that for an online community to grow it cannot be owned by the brand. The brand must be part of the community. This is not to say Trip Advisor is at the whim of it’s own population but that the brand must respect the community and what they deliver. The brand must realise it is part of a larger whole. Recent stats show over 100 users spending over 40 hours a week updating Trip Advisor – more hours than most people work in a week! These are unpaid people who do this because they want to make Trip Advisor the number one travel website – the same goal as the brand itself. They do not do this because they want to generate Expedia more money! (Expedia own Trip Advisor). This shows how it is easier (and I use that term loosely) to engage online communities than social networks, as on social networks people are there for themselves. In the community, people want to contribute and basic community practice is to associate a ‘credit’ with their level of contributions to date.

Interesting fact:
25% of Expedia’s total turnover comes directly from Trip Advisor…
despite the fact it recommends many other travel service providers

Consumer communities are a form of marketing. It’s a different form of marketing with new rules and etiquette. It’s always best to consult marketers who have a wealth of knowledge regarding community marketing – conveniently Neoco can help. Neoco are an integrated digital marketing agency that have delivered a wealth of community and social marketing across digital channels. This article is one of the many insights we produce and deliver to our clients on a regular basis. Let us know if this was helpful or if you have any questions.

The possibilities are endless, and could open up a whole new set of opportunities for viral marketing. Check out the instructional video, or check out the example below:

[youtube=http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=CYlUcXs5xGQ&feature=iv]

It is interesting reading the history of Friends Reunited to see just how dramatic the rise of the school-friend catch-up site was. Launched officially in July 2000, by the end of the year it had 3,000 members, a number that had increased to 2.5 million a year later. By 2005, Friends Reunited had been the centre of a TV show (The curse of Friends Reunited), resulted in libel payouts and attracted 15 million of us to the site. Looking back, it seems crazy how a site that demanded payment to actually contact anyone could become so popular.

When ITV bought the site at the end of 2005, there was every reason to believe that the site would continue to grow in popularity. Facebook was, at the time, a high school network, only opening up to key companies in 2006. However many of the features which have come to define modern social networking sites, including the ability to make friends and communicate with these friends for free, were not a part of Friends Reunited. It seems that over the next year or two social networks moved on whilst Friends Reunited stood very much still.

My experience of the new Friends Reunited site was generally positive, albeit this was when I recently deleted my profile (having not been able to unsubscribe from emails without logging into my profile, I thought that having gone to the effort of figuring out my username and password that I may as well just go the whole hog and delete my entire profile). The new design is very much in the “web 2.0” mould; stripes, gradient-background titles, uncluttered.

The new features also go some of the way towards replicating the key features of modern social networks. It seems that it is now possible to join up with friends, and all monetary barriers have been removed (it’s free!). From the new-look homepage it looks like there’s a news feed feature and more of a focus on sharing pictures.

But do people need another social network? I personally don’t know a single person who uses Friends Reunited regularly, and this is going to be a huge barrier to wanting to use the site. Whereas most people I know do use Facebook. Now I don’t even like Facebook (I’ll save that for another day) but I think the key thing here is that if I do want to contact one of my friends, Facebook is currently the place to do it – simply because of the number of people who do use it.

I think another problem with Friends Reunited is that it’s lost much of the original purpose and focus. The original idea was simple – log in and find out what your friends are doing. Right now I’ve been there and done that. I don’t actually care anymore what everyone from school is up to; and the people I am vaguely interested in are all on Facebook.

In place of the focus of the original site, Friends Reunited now offers an expanded set of features, including Genealogy (Genes Reunited of course!) and dating.

So has the horse already bolted? Alexa traffic graphs seem to suggest that interest in Friends Reunited did increase markedly after the new launch (June 2008), although shown over a ten month period traffic is still definitely decreasing.

Compare this traffic with Facebook and Bebo and you start to get the impression that the founders of Friends Reunited got a good deal, and maybe ITV should have kept their money in their pocket! (Hint: Friends Reunited is the blue line that runs at a parallel to, and infinitesimal above, the x axis).

It will be interesting to see if the redesign can have a long term impact on Friends Reunited, or if the horse really has well and truly bolted.

This Thursday, the internet’s regulators will vote and ultimately decide whether the strict rules on top level domain names, such as .com or .uk, can finally be relaxed.

If the plans are agreed, it will have a huge impact on the address system, as companies will be allowed to turn their brands into domain names. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (Icann) oversees the domain name system and has been working towards opening up net addresses for the last three years. They have said that any string of letters will be allowed to be registered as a domain, but there will be an independent arbitration process for people with grounds for objection (who hopefully won’t treat every possibility with rejection as they did .xxx – although I’m guessing they are going to). However, hundreds of new domain names are expected to be created by the end of the year, rising to thousands in the future.

While there are clear reasons as to why these plans have come about:  a) the Internet has changed so much since the original address system was established that this system is dated; and b) existing domains are running out; I can’t really see many existing brands and companies actually using them. Maybe in the future once a few others have tried and tested the new domains they will start to catch on, but to start with I think most brands will stick with what they’ve got. After all, brands know that consumers are familiar with their current addresses and that their consumers know exactly where to find them. For example, if I want to visit a site for a brand, say Nokia, the chances are I’ll type in nokia.com and that’s where the site will be. I don’t want to have to start guessing at nokia.nok, mobile.nokia or nokia.nokia (which looks stupid anyway!). Also, changing domain names to turn your brand into a domain will have implications for your SEO. Well established and search engine friendly sites are not going to benefit from starting from scratch – especially taking into account Google’s 6 month sandbox period.

However for some sites, I think the .brand domain will work really well – .ebay is a domain that it’s suggested will be introduced and this make a lot of sense for them. Individual store owners/sellers could then have their own address at .ebay, so for example, my clothes range could be on sale at laurawear.ebay. This system would also work well for other huge sites that have individual pages or subdomains – Facebook members could each have their own address at .facebook.

Another interested point is that the plan would also allow for the new domain names to be internationalised, and so could be written in scripts for Asian and Arabic languages. And again, like most things these days, it will all come down to money in the end. Icann are still working through how much the application fee to register a domain name will be, but it is expected to be at least several thousand dollars. And, in cases where there is a dispute over a domain, there will be an auction and it will go to the highest bidder.

I guess we’ll just have to await the outcome on Thursday to find out whether the rules are relaxed, but hopefully they will be because it will be interesting to see how brands react to the new possibilities.

Nokia has bought Plazes for an undisclosed amount. Plazes is a German location-aware social network site,  which basically lets users know where their friends are.

As discussed at mashup*’s Being Digital last week, location is a really hot topic right now, with everyone in the industry having a go at creating a location/mobile/social network mashup (although most do seem to be getting it all wrong!) and this will no doubt increase even further with the iPhone 3G. Predictions can easily be made that whoever is able to master this and create a useful service with an easy to use interface – and most importantly, of course, monetises this – is going to reap in the rewards. Nokia’s acquisition shows that they too are on the path to creating a location-aware service.

While many users are looking forward to use location based services, it appears that many aren’t keen to expose their location and trade in their privacy, and this will inevitably raise concerns for the success of these services. Apparently, Plazes’ CEO Felix Petersen was caught somewhere else than he was supposed to be – and I’m sure many of us wouldn’t like to be put in the situation where our partner/friends/family/colleagues can see where we are all the time. Think about that sneaky ’sick’ day at work when you have tickets to an event that you can’t just can’t miss! Or when you want a quiet, relaxing night in at home, so you tell your friend that you can’t babysit because you are going out. Or when you tell your partner you have to work late, but you go out with your friends instead. (By the way, I don’t do any of these things…they are just examples…)

Whatever users think about location-aware services, they are definitely something that we are going to be hearing a lot more about over the rest of 08.