inspiredworlds.com

Ad:tech started in Sydney today. It’s a 2 day expo, with similar events held in San Francisco, Paris, London, Chicago, New York, Singapore. It’s basically for online marketing companies, for those involved in advertising technology. The official line is:

“ad:tech is an interactive advertising and technology conference and exhibition. Worldwide shows blend keynote speakers, topic driven panels and workshops to provide attendees with the tools and techniques they need to compete in a changing world”

I arrived there around lunch time.  I had my express check in pass (thanks ad:tech!), so got buzzed in pretty quick. The first stand lo and behold was Next Digital/Commquest! Which is my company – more on this later.

I was in a rush because I was supposed to go to the Yahoo search masterclass. In the corner of my eye, I saw a guy from my media buying class who’s a dedicated search guy. However, when I got there, the seminar was over. Disappointed, I trudged back and went to the Yahoo search stand and asked them what it was about. I also asked them for notes of the presentation and hopefully they can email it to me. Hit me up if you would like a copy of the notes.

Overall, ad:tech didn’t actually look that full. Maybe its because I expected it be at full capacity. Or perhaps, there were seminars going on. There’s paid seminars, with 3 different tracks but to go to them you need to have a conference pass which costs $1k. I’m just going to the free stuff =) You can check out the different stands, talk to people, and listen to the free seminars. It reminds me of a big careers fair!

Next Digital has got prime position, near the front door and we’ve decked it out in a hospital theme with hospital bed, flasks of weird liquids, IV drip, and doctors walking around with stethoscopes. The theme its “Digital Health Check”, and we’re offering free audits of digital marketing strategy, websites, etc.. We are taking appointments and doing followups. Kate Kendall, editor of marketing mag called it  best stand at expo. Have a look here:

Next Digital was giving a talk after the Yahoo one, so I briefly saw my director Mark Edwards, speaking about digital strategy.  Its a small seated area with about 30 seats and people were standing in the back, 3 rows deep! He had some really good content, however the sound quality was quite poor.The mic and the speakers weren’t loud enough. For the guys standing in the back like me, you couldn’t hear him clearly. As the stands are right next to auditorium area,  there’s so much background noise. It’s a shame and it something the organiser’s will have to look at for next year. Perhaps move the speaking stage a little bit further into a quieter area and turn up the mics!!!!!!!!

I spoke to a couple of interesting people /companies at the stands. Vincent and I walked around and spoke to the following stands. I’ve provided a short commentary on each one:

Fox Interactive 

Websites : Myspace.com, Rottentomatoes.com (movie review site), ign.com (similar to gamespot.com), Askmen.com.

We were talking to Sharon May-Tanous, Group Sales Manager, and she showed us a new feature on myspace.com. There’s this function called “Myspace recharge” where u can recharge your phone by buying credits / topups. Very cool. I’ve always advocated that social networks should do more in the transactional & ecommerce space, given that we spend so much time on there. According to Nielsen research, time spent on social networking has overtaken personal email. Myspace are also releasing a new visa credit card as well, targeted towards younger people. Its going to work like a prepaid debit card. It will be an interesting move for them.

They had a very cool stand with lots of monitors. If you look at the above sites I’ve listed in the heading and click through, you’ll realise that their are Australian versions with localised content. That’s something that they are trying to push, localisation. Rottentomatoes.com is mostly made up of American movies and reviews, so its good a move to have some Aussie content in there too. 

I told her I didn’t use Myspace anymore and she got a bit grouchy LOL. I’ll stick with Facebook, but I’ll check Myspace.com for music related stuff. FYI, I’m name dropping here, but I met Brett Brewer, one of the co-founders of Myspace at the Digital Tipping Point a few weeks ago. He’s sold off myspace to Rupert Murdoch and is now CEO of a social networking advertising company called AdKnowledge. He’s a very cool guy, down to earth, and I guess I’ll have to hit him up on myspace?  

Netpartners – Content network advertising / traffic broking

This area is new to me. I’m still new to search marketing and online advertising, but I understand the basics like clicks, CPM, CPA, conversions and al that jargon. But there’s this whole new area regarding content network / affiliate marketing, etc.. It’s to do with advertising on 3rd party sites, publishers, etc… I spoke to Alan Wan, Affiliate Manager, he explained to me what it was about and I think I got the gist of it. Netpartners is a Hong Kong outfit, mainly targetting US and UK markets. I have to do a bit more research in to this area regarding affiliate marketing. At ad:tech, there were a number of stands, I would say 1/3 selling these services. It was pretty funny, because he was talking English to us and as we were winding down our conversation he asked if we spoke Chinese! Vincent and him started talking, and then I joined in, but I don’t think he understood me very well since my Cantonese is pretty bad and heavily accented. 

Post Click - affiliate marketing

We spoke to the BD manager there. I’ve actually heard of them. Post click specialises in niche affiliate marketing. I’m still getting the hang of this term – its advertising on a network of sites. e.g. you would like to advertise to websites in Indonesia targeting students coming to Australia. They would go represent you and negotiate, and source sites for you to advertise on. They must have relationships with traffic brokers (a new term I learnt) and work out how much you have to pay for CPA, cost per action which is for lead or conversion generation if someone clicks on an ad. Post Click most likely takes a set up fee and a slice of the action e.g. CPC of 1 cent (cost per click of $0.01). 

Girls.com.au / Femail.com.au

I’m not sure why but we wondered over to this stand. We were just curious, and it was right next to ours. They’ve got 2 websites which are online magazines targeted towards females. Girls.com.au has a demo of 18 – 35, skewed towards younger females. Femail.com.au has a demo of 25+. These mags have been running for about 10 years online and has similar content to Vogue, Cleo, etc.. The opportunities are for advertising towards a very specific demographic. 

They also own female.com.au and redirect all the traffic to femail.com.au. however, they are not going to switch over to female.com.au because of the search engine rankings – its already been optimised (SEO baby!!).

CABO Networks – Pay for performance marketing

I spoke to Jurgen Cautreels, who’s over here from Miami. These guys have offices in Miami and Sydney, that’s TWO awesome beach places. They do stuff related to traffic marketing, lists, and email marketing. 

iAD & Pureprofile

I’ve lumped them together even though they are two very distinct companies. Only because they have both presented at our offices. I like iAD, but I feel that their technology is way ahead of its time. When they came into our office and explained their product, they left a lot of us dumbfounded, including me. If you can’t explain to a bunch of people that are pretty technology savvy, your going to struggle with other people as well. Even their blurb in ad:tech is hard to understand – something about a multi-function device, etc…

Ad:Tech on Twitter & Blog

If you are keen to follow with the latest adtech updates, check out twitter. People are twittering using the following hashtags:

#adtechsyd

#atsyd

For the 3 different seminar tracks, there’s also:

#atsyd1 

#atsyd2 

#atsyd3

There’s heaps of ad:tech tweeting going on, and I’ve been following the conversations via twitter and tweetdeck (i’ve got my search groups on for each hashtag!).

You can also check out ad:tech brain blog, I’ve been reading and commenting on it over the past month or so. 

See you there

If you are going to be there, look for me at the Next Digital /Commquest stand in the late afternoon. I’m going to be there in a white coat, and also checking some of the other stands and seminars. 

I’m out like day 1 of ad:tech, 

Matthew Ho aka inspiredworlds

Like all working professionals, I get bombarded with emails every day. Its that dreaded feeling in the morning, when you open up your inbox, and there’s a bunch of emails waiting for you already. Before you get started at work, you are dealing with these new emails. Not to mention the ones that constantly keep coming into your inbox. At the end of the day, you feel that all you’ve done is answer emails and have done nothing productive. I found a great set of tips from NY Times on how to manage your inbox. 

Check it out here.

Their tips were: 

• Archive
• Check your inbox 3 times in the hour (i.e. every 20mins). I try to do it every 30 mins, but sometimes i just can’t help but keep it open
• Turn off auto-notifications (this is the worst feature! keeps you hooked into email)
• Respond immediately, if the response is going to be less than 2 mins
• Longer than 2 mins response, flag it and come back later

I’m out like letting your inbox control you!

Matt

Did you notice something different when you visited a Google website a few weeks ago? I noticed it straightaway, the favicon had changed. I wasn’t sure what exactly it was, but the logo had changed next to where the URL address is contained.

The new symbol looks like this:

New Google Favicon

A favicon simply means “favourite icon”. They started using them a long time ago, to give important branding and visibility to websites. To many users, it is a symbol that they can recognise and trust.

For example, a colleague and I were setting up a webex (web seminar) using our preferred provider, Webex. We couldn’t exactly remember the website, so we typed in a few addresses. The URL’s were all pretty similar, but we immediately recognised the right address because the favicon for Webex showed up. We didn’t even look at the address, we knew it was the right one because we saw the favicon. That’s how powerful that little symbol is. That is the reason that a favicon is so important for distinguishing one website from another.

This was the original new Google submission by Andre:

Original submission

Then they added some brighter colours and it became the one we know today:

Google Favicon

Check out the Official Google blog for some more info.

A lot of websites don’t have them, but they are actually quite easy to design and install. For me personally, if I use a website quite frequently, I will start recognising that symbol (like the webex example above). There’s heaps of favicons out there, some are just miniaturized versions of brand’s logo:

Favicon gallery

My top icon would have to be the RSS symbol. I’m not sure you could call it a favicon since so many websites carry it (it’s really unique to a website) but it is just so recognisable now. Whenever I see it, I know immediately if that website has a feed and I can add it to my reader account.

RSS Icon

Coincidentally, the same day the Google favicon changed, Woolworths released a new logo. Did anyone else notice that? Honestly, I think the new logo sucks. All the so called branding experts were lauding it saying how good it was. Apparently, Woolies wanted to further distinguish itself from its main competitor Coles,  since they are the “fresh food people”. So they went with an unpeeled apple look to denote this “freshness”.

Accordingly they stated:

“The new identity introduces a new icon incorporating a stylised ‘W’ with the addition of an abstract leaf symbol representing fresh food. It is also reminiscent of one of the most famous of all Woolworths logos used in the 1970s and it represents a person – as in “The Fresh Food People” and the Woolworths focus on its customers.”

It’s actually been 21 years since they updated the original logo. I’m sure they spent a mint upgrading it, with hundreds of design concepts, creative, branding experts, consultants for a logo which is really just a green apple that looks like a W. Might as well have taken the Apple logo and turned it green.

I’m out like outdated logos,

Matthew Ho.

At work, I’ve been given a new responsibility – Yammer Evangelist. Yes, I know you are thinking, what is Yammer? And what the heck is an evangelist.

In short, Yammer is a text messaging application similar to Twitter or Facebook status updates. I’ve spoken about Yammer previously on this blog. It is geared more towards organisations / corporates because it allows for closed networks. Whereas Twitter is open to the world.

Much like Twitter, it allows you to write a short message and have a profile page. But the advantages of Yammer is that it is a closed group only open to those you invite or on your company’s email domain. For example, our Yammer is only open to Sydney employees of Next Digital. The advantage of Yammer is that you can broadcast to the group and get responses immediately. You can obviously do this over email as well but often there are too many emails flying around and some people are included and some are not. Also, its hard to keep track of conversations. Yammer groups the conversations together, and you can see the replies in a threaded view.

You can call me MC Yammer

Yammer kicks ass because it reduces email clutter. It enables conversations to develop and it keeps responses short (KISS principle in full effect). While twitter only allows for 140 characters, Yammer has no limitation. You can also add attachments to Yammer posts, using browse function or you can drag and drop.

Other cool advantages of Yammer:

• Ability to create subgroups: We have a group for basketball team, and this is where the real action happens. We discuss practice discussions, admin, jerseys, who’s playing, etc..It allows for collaboration and dynamic discussion.

• Follow and unfollow people: Yammer actually will suggest to you who you should follow. You don’t have to follow everyone in your company’s network. By following certain people, those conversations will be prominent and reduces all the clutter/  spam out there in the Yammesphere. The suggestions from Yammer will get smarter over time, but they are supposedly based on the organisational hierarchy and reporting relationships, and who your colleagues are following.

• Create a profile: similar to a company intranet, you can fill out your bio like education, career history, who you report to and who you work with. Not many people in my company have filled it out, but hopefully that will change.

• Desktop app: Yammer is web service (like Twitter or facebook you can login). But those cool cats out there like myself have downloaded the desktop app and I keep it open all day. I guess its similar to Tweetdeck for Twitter or MSN browser. It uses Adobe Air, which is very slick.

• The conversations are searchable and taggable. If you use a hashtag before a word e.g. #basketball , it will recognise that as a keyword and will tag that conversation. I can choose to follow all conversations that have #basketball. This is quite useful if you have a bunch of people talking about a specific client or an activity. Conversations are easily searchable using Yammer’s search engine.

• Sync it with google chat in gmail. So if I’m using gmail, and I want to post something, I open the Yammer chat box and post from there.

• Send posts & recieve posts via SMS – I have set it up but I don’t want to pay for it and I’m not sure if I want work stuff sent to my phone. But the option is there.

• Creating a more open and collaborative culture within the workplace. People are posting one to many conversation points, and getting more opinions. I think its less inhibiting than sending out a group email. A lot of times, if I’m sending out an email to the whole office, I ‘ll look at it several times, edit and think will this be ok? Whereas a post on Yammer is a microblogging service, 140 characters is not going to kill me. I’m going to get a lot more useful suggestions asking an office of 30 people in the open then a small select group of people.

The Yammer Formula

I believe that Yammer has taken Twitter’s model and corporatised it. It could be one of the few Twitter type services that actually can make money. I don’t see how Twitter itself can make money off the service it provides. But Yammer charges for customisation, secure domain access using https (hypertext transfer protocol over secure socket layer) thus encrypting it like a bank website, full admin access, etc…. It charges something like $1 per user, but larger groups are offered as a discount.

I think Yammer will work effectively in our office because its not that big. We have roughly 25-30 employees and only a 1/3 are active users. Once more people start getting more active, it will be even better. It will be interesting to see how it run in a much larger environment like say our Melbourne office which as 150 people. In general, experiments like this work better on a smaller scale and there is inherently less clutter to begin with and you know everyone on the network relatively well.

The role of the Yammer Evangelist

I’m still yet to get a really good definition of an evangelist that sticks in my mind. But I believe the purpose as described to me, is to encourage adoption of Yammer, become the guru/troubleshooter and answer people’s question, and lead in it use. I also have started sending out posts on how to optimise its use as well and to stay up to date with what’s happening by reading the blog/website/other sources and participating in external discussions.

Bringing the balloon pants into fashion

I’ve actually read everything on the Yammer website as well as all the blog posts, so that part shouldn’t be hard. I’ve also commented on TechCrunch’s article on Yammer’s $5m capital raising as well as an article in the NY Times blog. You get a lot of interesting feedback from other users in external companies. For example, someone said you should encourage staff to post 2-3 times a day, and its a good way to see what everyone is up to. I might see someone working on a particular project which I read about last week, and then if I have a question I will shoot them a yammer post or IM (instant message them).

I’ll post another update in a month or so and discuss further developments.

I’m out like email clutter,

Matthew Ho.

p.s. Yammer also won TechCrunch top prize in 2008

I’ve been on Twitter for more than a minute now. I signed up around May 08, but didn’t use it much. I posted up a few updates and couldn’t see the value of it. However, I decided to give it another try this week and I’ve been hooked.

I posted previously about Twitter and how my company uses Yammer, a Twitter spin-off. Basically, Twitter allows you to text 140 characters about what you are doing. To be honest with you, when I found this out I thought it had really little value.

However, in the past week I’ve used it for different purposes and this is where I see Twitter as having value:

1. News Service

I decided to follow a couple of news services just to try it out. So I followed @Digg_2000 for stories with more than 2000 diggs and @NYTimes, so I’m getting constant updates about the major news stories. There’s also a couple of other social media gurus out there, like @guykawasaki, @joywayng (Jeremiah Wang of Forrester research & author of Groundswell).  I get to hear their constant thoughts, articles they want to share interesting people & companies that they are meeting (more on this later).

Another pertinent example was highlighted this week. By now, you’ve heard about the plane crash in the Hudson River caused by flock of birds. The first place this was reported was Twitter & the pics were on Twitpic.  Janis Krums, who was on a ferry going to the rescue of the plane wrote:

“There’s a plane in the Hudson. I’m on the ferry going to pick up the people. Crazy“.

Twitter was updating furiously with news like this about the Hudson plane crash. I went to the Twitter search engine and looked up “plane crash” and every few seconds someone was saying something about it. It  gives you an ear to the ground.

Due to the availability of the internet on phones, people can immediately micro-blog on their phones and post to the internet via applications like Twitter and post the pics. Twitter allows citizen journalism, for ordinary people to report on stuff straight away and for it to be spread like a viral message.

2. Customer Service

Telecomms

I noticed from reading a couple of blogs, that @Comcastcares was using Twitter to respond to customer complaints. Twitter can be used as a public forum, and if you use it to complain about service or product, and if you have enough followers, you could be quite damaging to their brand.

So in a wise move, companies like @Comcast, @BigPondTeam, etc… are using it to get in touch with people that are bitching about their service. They get in touch with you and DM (direct message) you, to find out how they can help.

Atlassian – Confluence Wiki

I have experienced this from a different angle by praising a product. I posted the following:

“inspiredworlds is building a wiki on confluence (Atlassian product). It’s so easy to use!“

Then two people posted a response. One of them was @mattnhodges, in their customer service or marketing team, who previously has sent me an autoresponse email about the Wiki when I was evaluating the product and after I purchased it. Through Twitter, I’ve been able to ask questions and get responses and useful links. Another person associated with Atlassian, also posted a response and when they wrote a response to another customer about a sharepoint extender, and I got some useful info there as well.

Docstoc v Slideshare

During the week, I have been evaluating two websites for sharing documents. So I posted a general question: “Docstoc v SlideShare, which is better?“.

To my amazement, the next day when I logged in, @Serena from Docstoc had responded with “docstoc of course. DM me if you want tips about how to optimise your use”. That’s incredible customer service. Admittedly, I decided to go with Slideshare, even though it crashed a few times during the week, but at least I had that option and it made me more curious to check out Docstoc.

Monitoring how brands use it

To monitor this customer service usage, I have decided to follow a number of other brands to see how they will use it, and will post about that experience. I imagine its easier now for customer service, because they are not that many people on Twitter. But imagine if the whole Facebook crowd decided to join twitter, how much noise, clutter and compliants will be on Twitter?

However, I believe that Twitter does attract a certain type of person – someone that wants to be heard, slightly ahead of the adoption curve, tech – savvy, that can influence others. So that is why companies are providing quick responses on Twitter.

3. Brand building / Marketing

A lot of brands are on Twitter. I like that, because I get to follow my favourite brands and apps and find out what’s happening. For example, I’m a huge Chicago bulls fan, and @chicagobulls will post updates during the games and their thoughts:

“Duncan is clogging the middle but the Bulls are hitting shots. Hanging in 36-33 in the second.”

I’ve also signed up to hear updates from @WordPress, @Googlereader, @shareaholic, @yammer_team, @blogger. I like these products and brands, and I want to hear from them. In a sense, I’m giving them permission to enter my world. I don’t just follow anyone, I’m quite picky because otherwise you get too much clutter.

These brands have reciprocated by adding me as their “friend” by following me. So they are interested in what I have to say – perhaps to provide better customer service (as noted above). For example, during the week I posted how “It’s official, I’m a shareaholic“, and in response @shareaholic posted on their tweets:

@inspiredworlds Welcome!

Consequently, I’ve posted in reply that they should add Yammer as one of their new features. And then the @Yammer_team added me. How cool is that? Obviously, these guys are paying attention to what is been said about them.

I believe this is an area where brands can use twitter – to hear what customers are saying about them and to also build up the brand and stay in constant contact with their customers. How cool is that when a brand mentions you in their tweets? Admittedly, the novelty factor does wear off. It’s allowing me to be closer to my favourite brands.

One problem is “twitter squatting”. Some cunning people have snatched up some valuable online real estate. For example @jetstar is not jetstar. I don’t even know if @chicagobulls is even the real thing. So there’s no way to know, just have to look at the page, check their links, number of followers, and make an assessment.

4. Professional Networking

I’m relatively new in digital marketing with only 8 months experience in the industry. So it’s important for me to network with people and meet the who’s who of the industry. I can go through people’s lists and add anyone I would like to know and generally they reciprocate and add me. It’s not as intimate as facebook where they get to see all your personal info and pics. All you are getting in twitter is 140 character updates.

So I’ve added in a couple of the big names in the industry overseas, as well as people locally that I meet.  People also have “tweetups”, where they have real meetings with people in twitter. I mean, even speakers from the Future of Digital forum I attended, I’ve added them in Twitter. You can add someone in twitter and when you meet them, you can say “I know you from twitter!”.

5. Find out trends & buzz

I’ve covered this off above. If you want to hear what people are thinking about, just use twitter search. You will get live updates about what people think about brands, what’s being discussed out there.

6. Thought Leadership

As mentioned above, I’ve tapped into some of the key minds in the industry. And they also share a lot of useful links, which I’ve then read and commented on. They also talk about people they have met in the industry, company meetings they are going to, trends they can see and so on.

7. Microblogging

Twitter is so easy to use and update. This post I am writing now, has taken at least an hour. In between finding the links, going back through my emails and twitter updates. Microblogging is blogging in small lines of text, perhaps one or two lines. You  don’t have to think too much when you twitter because you are concentrating on writing just one line. And you can update it again a few seconds or minutes later.

It could possibly over take blogging. Evhead, the CEO of twitter who previously sold Blogger to Google wrote about it on his blog. Twitter gives you smaller bite sized pieces to snack on and feeds our voracious hunger for constant updates.

Other thoughts on Twitter

I believe that the use of Twitter will continue to grow as it offers a differnet purpose to facebook and has commercial value as noted above.

With the advent of aggregator services like Shareaholic, Fring, Xummi, Friendfeed, it allows you to manage multiple social network services at the same time like Twitter, Facebook, Myspace, Digg, Delicious. So belonging to multiple networks is possible and will grow in popularity.

Their are also a couple of innovations out there like Brightkit, which allow multiple people to “tweet” under one account, manage multiple accounts and to time your updates. I thought there was no way @guykawasaki could be pumping out so many updates throughout the day, but they must prerecord them and have several people tweeting all the time. Brightkit is free now to manage one account, but charges for multiple accounts.

I’ve also come across Ginx, which Pierre Omidyar the ebay founder has started. It allows you to share links, and then share comments about it, with the twitter page taking up the top part of the page. It’s eerily similar to sharing facebook comments about a shared link, where the option to comment is just above the page or even like Digg.

One of the biggest problems I have with social networking is the multiple logins and passwords you have to remember. Concepts like OpenID (having one identification) for all websites will allow one login for all.

Twitter will not replace Facebook, but it takes one of its most popular features the status updates and builds on that. Status updates combined with tiny URL’s, will allows for greater sharing and social bookmarking. Along with the popularity of internet on mobiles, instant messaging, the time is ripe for Twitter.

I’m out like the era before Twitter,

Matthew Ho.

[Updated: Dave from BrightKit - Thanks very much for including BrighKit in your article.  One thing.  We don't charge for multiple accounts.  BrightKit is entirely free right now while it's in public beta.  If you wouldn't mind changing that, we'd greatly appreciate it.  Thanks!]

I read about 5 – 6 different Google Blogs such as the Official Google Blog, Adwords Agency Blog, Adsense and the Gmail Blog. It’s necessary for me to keep up to date with what’s happening in the world of Google. The great thing about Google is that they have a lot of different departments blogging and keeping the dialogue open with the general community at large. They’ve got 100′s of blogs and I think it’s great. As soon as something new happens, these guys blog about it and it’s really setting the standard for other organisations.

One of the more interesting blogs I have come across is the Google Public Policy Blog. It’s probably not as well read as the other blogs but I would argue that its just as important. An indicator of how popular a blog is the feedburner counter (i.e. how many people subscribe). It’s only at 5,475 compared with 529,000 on the official Google Blog.

Its important to hear about Google’s views on public policy and government. As an organisation, it has really become monolothic and huge like almost overnight – its only really a decade old. Compare this with other other organisations of similar size which probably took decades to build  i.e. 30 – 100 years . It is a very influential organisation which interacts with millions of people on a daily basis through search, email, video, RSS, advertising, maps and so on.

Google is so dominant in the field of search it is without peer. Hence, when they tried to do a business deal with Yahoo to display ads, people were jumping up and down like mad. It has to deal with a lot of issues such as its monopolistic practices, anti-trust,  influence on the U.S government through lobbying on access to more bandwidth access for the community, net neutrality, green energy, etc..

The blog could be no more than a mouthpiece for Google’s lobbying efforts to Washington. But from what I have read, it has a lot of interesting information on its views and thought policies. I probably find this more interesting than most people as well, since I’m a qualified lawyer who now works in digital marketing.

On a related note, the interaction between law and the internet continues to evolve. One of the big issues at the moment are the legal issues around user generated content (UGC). I’m probably in a unique position because I’m one of the few people that subscribe and regularly read the Law Society and other legal publications and also marketing publications such as B&T. I can see that its attracting a lot of attention because the talk is heating up in these magazines and on the web. UGC is stuff that users of social media generate, e.g. facebook and youtube videos, flickr photos, etc… The legal issues are around ownership, copyright, defamation, privacy and it will be interesting to see how it plays out.

I’m out like a decade,

Matthew Ho.

Today, I went to the AIMIA conference on “The Future of Digital 2009″. It was pretty interesting.  My company, Next Digital was the main sponsor and my general manager Stephen Lord was one of the key speakers.

There were a lot of companies represented like Microsoft, BBC, Communicator, News Ltd, ABC etc…. I figured if I was going to make it in this industry, I had to attend events like this, meet people and hear what people had to say.

John Butterworth, the CEO of AIMIA (Australian Interactive Media Industry Association for you noobs) gave a quick overview of the digital future. In 2008,  digital spend was $17.9 BILLION (yes BILLION!) and  25% of business revenue was generated through digital. After that, he said “Look around you at the 100 faces here in this room – this is the future of digital”.  It was exciting and also a bit scary at the same time! And hey, I was a part of the 100!!

The Agency – Stephen Lord, Next Digital

The next speaker was Stephen, who spoke about the agency perspective. He gave a brief overview of the major digital events that happened in 2008 such as:

• the iphone and the apps store (converging mobile and web)
• online viewing overtaking tv spend for the first time
• twitter coming of age and how the events of Mumbai were microblogged. At work we use yammer and its great! Its like a corporate twitter
• political parties using digital channels  – Obama’s heavy use of digital (YES WE CAN!!!!!)
• cloud computing  – one of my favourite topics

If 2008 was the year that digital spend increased, then 2009 will be about measurement and ROI. It’s true.  People are spending an increasing amount of time online and in front of the computer.  In fact people even do two of the activities simultaneously -  engaging in multiple media channels. Look at me now – I’m blogging as I watch House in the background! Digital spend will only increase as marketers direct more of their budget into digital as it is more accountable that TV, radio, print, etc… (did someone mention a recession?). But most importantly, this is where the audience is, hence marketing dollars will follow.

Digital will reach a tipping point – a point where more dollars spent won’t equal more results. Hence the search for accountabiliy and better measures. What are we measuring now as digital marketers, bloggers and media planners? Page views, bounce rates, CTR’s (click through rates)? Puh-lease!!!!!! That is so old school. None of these really tell you anything. So what if your page achieved 1,000 unique views, CTR of 18%. It doesn’t mean jack. We have to find new measures to determine engagement, influence, involvement, and stickiness. The metrics we use have not kept up pace with a constantly evolving digital world.

The thing about digital is that every user leaves a digital footprint. It is a captive and active audience and we need to understand how to better measure that. In the past, we were hunters / seekers of information (early to mid 90′s). Then we become do-ers, and now we are in a stage of feedback 3.0, where people are having true conversation in the digital sphere.

The Evangelist – Michael Jordahi, Microsoft

The next speaker was Delic8 Genius, aka Michael Jordahi, a developer Evangelist for Microsoft. So what exactly is an evangelist? I had a discussion with Peter about this on the way down since he knows a few. In fact, I met another Microsoft one from the UK, a pretty cool guy. An evangelist is someone that encourages people to adopt new technology, that engages with people about it, explains how it works, gets people to sign up for licenses and so on.

He actually was a really good speaker, like he had drank 3 redbulls before he got up. Pretty funny guy, and very passionate about Microsoft Surface, bordering on a sales pitch. I didn’t mind, because of the energy he brought and I really like the concept of Microsoft surface. FYI When you go to a lot of marketing presentations/industry events they tend to end up like sales pitches.

He gave us an overview of how we had from old school user interface (UI) to GUI to NUI (natural user interface). He compared them to reading a book vs watching a movie vs playing an interactive computer game.

He had a lot of interesting stuff to say, such as how we are no longer restricted to computers, keyboards, and mouses. Examples like Microsoft surface, Toncidot – this little cube you can move around to replicate real world movement, this sphere type device, holograms, etc… He even brought out October’s Esquire magazine cover which had a digital cover.  His view of the future was technolgy and social interaction (real not like facebook or myspace) becoming one.  His opinion was the natural surface and augmented reality was the future (I actually have no idea what he meant by augmented reality) but half the crowd was nodding.

The client – Paula Bray, Powerhouse Museum

I can’t believe she got up and held a deck full of powerpoint slides in one hand and navigated the actual preso with the other slides. I just thought it was going be dead boring and she did didnt do anything to prove me wrong. She was representing the Powerhouse Museum and started going through their website, some of their interactive display thingys. I rolled my eyes (and I suspect half the audience did too). HOWEVER, the next part of the presentation started to get real interesting.

She spoke about how the Musuem developed glassplate negatives of historic shots of Tyrrell. I don’t think anyone actually understood what Tyrrell was about but that wasn’t the point. They had all these old historic shots and so did the National Library. So they put them on FLICKR, the photo sharing website.  They were generating some pretty impressive stats re number of views. Then they decided to put their collection on the creative commons license, which allows anyone to use the image and it kinda of exploded. They let go their collection and people were helping them out by providing meta tagging, geo tagging (locating them on google maps), people started to mashup the pics with Google street view and so on. The craziest thing was that they started to upload pics of how Sydney looked in the past and how it looked now. Then it snowballed because people started contributing their current pics, and even going to the trouble of finding the exact same shot.

In fact, the best thing was when they were searching for Mosman Water falls and wanted to find out exactly where this thing was. They posted a query on FLICKR, and someone answered the query in 30 mins and directed them to a real estate website.  Paula, went out to the property, discovered the waterfalls in someone’s backyard and took pics to compare and share. It was pretty amazing, the find and the altrustic of this John Doe contributor on FLICKR. So they got in contact with him and tried to find out more about him, got him to come to the musuem (he hadn’t been in a decade), so now he takes his family regularly there and writes about the musuem on his blog.

To think that a government institution, a public musuem was prepared to do that was pretty amazing. The philosophy was to create a musuem without walls. They let their collection go out on a commons license (IP lawyers hide yourself!).

The futurist – Jen Wilson, Lean Forward

Let’s just say she was interesting. Every speaker had an agenda, and her’s was mobile. If I could describe her in a few words it would be “mobile evangelist”. Accordingly, the future for her was “mobile”. Not phone, but mobile, a point she distinguished.  About a year ago, I wouldn’t have thought so either. She gave a view of the world as everything going mobile – your camera, your car, your kitchen sink, etc…

In fact, she was probably the most interesting speaker because she really was talking about the future and was saying things I hadn’t really heard before. Of how mobile was breaking down the digital divide. For example, fishermen in Kerala using mobiles to arbitrage in the local fish market by calling into the port and finding out which fish markets were low and then supplying those markets.

I think she could have spoken all day and night about mobile.  Then she had a little rant about the “evil empires” ala how Google and Microsoft want to control everything…..Oh and did I mention that during the entire conference she was texting on her iphone? I only discovered later when I googled the conference and her twitter account came up, she was updating her twitter account every few mins!!!

That’s been one long recap of the AIMIA conference.

I’m out like the future of digital,

Matt Ho.

The share market rebounded today! Yay! Give me my share of $10bn handout, Krudder!

I’m currently reading the Sensis e-business report titled “The Online Experience of Small & Medium Enterprises”. It’s very stat heavy, and gets boring after a couple of pages. Basically, its an annual report that looks at the usuage of the internet, computers, email, etc..  by SME’s. There’s also some comparison with last year’s stats and overview of consumers/household usuage.

Nothing suprising in there, but handy to know. Yes, 98% of businesses use a computer for email and 14% of individiduals keep a blog (I help make up that 14%!!!). Since I have a few blogs do I constitute more of that 14%??

If you want to read it, click here and the other Sensis reports can be found here.

We had two interesting work presentations recently, one on banner advertising and another on interactive video. When I get some time, I will write briefly about them.

And I’ve also come across WordPress MU – “multi user”. It allows an unlimited number of blogs and users to form a network. This could come in handy to create a network of blogs.

Currently, I’m looking into free wiki’s out there - if you can recommend one, please hit me up in the comments section.

I’m out like $10bn handouts,

Matt.

As stock markets crumbled under the weight of the credit crunch, billions of investor’s dollars have been washed away like sand on a beach. Shudders were sent through the European stock market today, as another bank brinked on the edge of the financial precipice. The financial earthquake has destroyed all in its wake and looks to consume another victim in its destruction. Australia’s central bank cut interest rates by 1 basis point, but this did little to alleviate the market’s fear of a global meltdown. The infamous American $700 Billion Bailout was passed a few days ago, however, stock markets moved together in the only one direction they knew: DOWN!

The Iceland stock market halted all stock trading today, as its second largest bank was taken over by the government. The Tokyo stock market tumbled to its lowest point in 4 years. The American government pondered whether they should buy short term bonds in an unprecedented move that would cross the line between sound economic policy and lending directly to the market. The European central finance ministers got together to discuss a bailout, but no resolution was made as political maneuverings show the fractured nature of European states. The markets looked worse today, than they have ever looked before. Like a stranded boat in the open ocean, the financial waves thrashed relentlessly as its sailors/investors looked for help – yet no miracle in the sky came to rescue them.

I believe that most Australians do not understand the magnitude of the situation, even though there is almost daily news about it on the front page of the newspaper I read every morning. Being so geographically remote from the rest of the world, it has its advantages. Sometimes. We are immune to a lot of the news that has engulfed the world. Our stockmarkets are still relatively stable compared to overseas, but it is only a matter of time before we are subject to the same market forces engulfing the rest of the world.

Or are we?

We are all part of the financial ecosystem, whether we like it or not. For those of us like me who are earning a wage (or those that are retired with their savings), we have 10% of our salary compulsorily put into superannuation. Thus we all have a stake in the financial crisis – some more than others. Those with direct investments in shares, derivatives, bonds, and other financial instruments will have a much greater exposure.

As I opened up my superannuation statement today, I read the financial return: -6.6%. Six percent, fantastic! Then I realised the minus sign in front. Ahhh, a negative return! Even better news. It not as bad as my new superfund, which made -8%. So for that, I should be thankful.

Unfortunately, a lot of superfunds to balance the risk and return, invest in overseas shares as well as domestic shares. As overseas equities take a beating like Rodney King, it will only have a flow on effect on to our domestic market. In fact, it already has. Why do you think the Reserve bank cut the cash rate – to relieve the pressure on mortage owners and to stimulate the economy. Many of the managed funds (not just mine!) have been posting negative returns. If any of them posted a positive return this financial year, I’d questioned their earnings statements (profit and loss statement).

The interesting thing is that superfunds and private equity firms, still have mandates to invest. Money is still flowing in from compulsory superannuation – where do you think our 10% goes? Money needs to have a home, except the banks are too scared to lend to anyone for the risk of default (see Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, et al). American banks have cut back their lending to a daily basis and money has shifted into safer and more secure assets like fixed term deposits and shoe boxes at the bottom of your bed. The thing is, what could be more secure than short term bonds? The smart thinking was that you would be paid in interest and when those bonds matured – even that’s too risk now. Better to buy a big safe and toss all your money in there. At least it will still be there when you wake up.

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Enough doom and gloom.

Instead of pondering on what has happened and all the negativity around it, I have discussed some measures below that would help the global economy at large.

1. Reduce or eliminate capital gains tax (CGT) on shares

I had a lively debate over the internet with my friend in the US who suggested this to me. Since no one is buying shares anyway and everyone is selling, could this be a viable option?

Governments around the world introduced capital gains tax to prevent people from shifting their income into capital for the tax difference. For example, in Australia prior to 1984 (or whatever that date is), people that earned income were taxed according to their tax bracket – as they are now. If that income was deemed to be of capital nature, it was not taxed at all. So smart people with money, simply shifted their income to capital, made gains and were untaxed. Thus capital gains tax was introduced to capture this missing link in the tax landscape to prevent the arbitrage between capital and income.

Whilst, I do not fundamentally believe that reducing or eliminating CGT on shares will have the required effect, it does have some sway. When the economy is in such a dire state, we need liquidity in share markets. People need to buy and sell. We are stuck with the present situation where people are selling and no one is buying. Thus, there is no liquidity (i.e. turnover) in the market.

Margin loans are been called like bluffs at Texas Hold’em, and everyone is losing to the house. Banks have mortgages and other assets which they cannot unload. Eliminating CGT on shares and possibly other assets like real estate, would encourage trading and a greater flow of money into the economy. Yes, some sharp people out there (with tax accountants at their disposal) would shift their income to capital, but is this a bad thing? These are the people with money at their disposal and we need them to do something with it!

The problem with introducing such a financial incentive is that once you unleash it, it is very hard to claw back. Could you imagine the political backlash that would occur if you gave people a tax break and then took it away?

This measure alone cannot be effective in restoring stability into financial markets, but has some merit.

2. Introducing tax breaks for entrepreneurs, greater tax rebates for R&D and innovative practices

I have grouped these together because fundamentally they are similar. We are just trying to encourage a bit of risk taking and expansion of activities that help drive our economy. I can’t speak for other countries as I am not too aware of their tax practices, but from an Australian perspective, surely more than can be done in this area.

Yes, we should encourage entrepreneurs to open more businesses, to think of more ideas, to be able to benefit from their financial losses. They need to fail faster, so they can learn from their mistakes. It is ideas and people that start billion dollar corporations, franchises, improve people’s standard of living and create value. We don’t have enough of them.

Similarly, we need business practices to be more creative and more open minded. Although Australian businesses do punch above their weight in the international arena, I do not believe that the government has enough financial encouragement for new R&D. From memory (and this was a while back), I think the rebate was 125% and the way it works is that for every $1 dollar you spent on R&D, the government reimbursed you with $1.25. I do not see why more money could not be given back to businesses that are becoming world beaters, that are making new production methods and so on.

I have used tax as my first two examples, and this is because the taxation is a natural solution to stimulate economic growth. Tax does several things, and the one good thing it does is that it acts as an automatic stabilizer (inset – see your yr 12 economics textbook).

3. A change in the way we do our accounting and lending practices

Although I have been harping on about tax for a while, it does not solve the core of the problem. The root cause is that some bad decisions were made, assets were overvalued, and some people got a bit too greedy. The problem began with mortgages made to people which were beyond their means, hence the so called “sub prime” crisis.

Banks and other financial institutions have overvalued these assets. Obviously some lax lending practices were involved as well. The bailout is necessary (though financial pundits of free market forces may disagree), but it sets a dangerous precedent. Will banks change their practices? Will anything be learned?

Surely, banks and other corporate institutions need to be more open about their valuation practices. Mark-to market accounting must be adopted i.e. valuing assets at their market value rather than at their historic values. Investors have a right to know if the value of the assets are sinking faster than quicksand.

But fundamentally, more must be done around changing the thinking behind our accounting practices. Accounting standards should at their purpose focus on disclosure rather than measurement. Investors need to know all the financial risks involved. And I believe more investors (especially unsophisticated investors) need to be encouraged to understand how to read financial statements and disclosures.

The problem is that is so much information hidden in financial reports and off balance sheet assets, and continuous disclosure does nothing more than flood more irrelevant information into the market place. There is not space to discuss changes in lending practices, so more on this another day I’m afraid.

4. Increase production of shoe boxes

If all the above fails, and the Bailout does nothing to alleviate concerns in the market place, there is one practice that has stood the test of time. Find a box, preferably of small to medium size, depending on the amount of cash you intend to hoard, and stuff it in a box.

Place it safely under your bed and sleep soundly, for you have avoided yet another day, another financial disaster.

Matt.