Red Beans and Rice - a blog by Sven Lauwers

Notes of Think Digital Conference by IAB

Sven Lauwers — Sat, 30 Jul 2011 22:36:48 +0000

Invitation of this conference dropped rather unexpected in my mailbox,
so I first was a bit reticent to go, but anyway I went.

Organised by IAB (Interactive Advertising Bureau), place was The Egg,
a nice but typical conference location.

First to kick off was Alex West with the Holy Trinity of the Mother Agency.

According to him Twitter has platformed due to the lack of an emotional connection
with its users. He especially was interesting because of some great examples of ads
with an emotional connection. Don't they all try to do this?

The 574clips.com campaign for handmade New Balance shoes.

Phygital-When physical meets digital, you get phygital and it is in this phygital world
that the future of marketing lies. Combining the digital with the physical world.

Rubberduckzilla for Oasis drinks.

Anna Sui from Target put buildboards into bags

http://www.greendiary.com/entry/recycled-times-square-billboard-to-turn-into-1600-bags-by-anna-sui/

Polarbear from planestupid.com

The IKEA Kitchen Party

Next in line was Ogilvy‘s Rohit Bhargava (@rohitbhargava) with the future of brand evangelism.
He proclaimes that due to the fact that everything is 'share-able', the accidental spokesman he
calls it will gain power in transmitting (brand)messages.
Something marketeers don't like; because they no longer control the message.
The accidental spokesperson becomes the brand evangilist.

Great example is the story of Jarrod Fogle; a guy who lost a lot of weight by eating a 'Subway Diet'.

http://www.subwayfreshbuzz.com/jareds_journey/

Rohit will soon release a book about 'The new global currency: relationships and affinity.

http://www.likeonomics.com.

An important insight on 'How to lend your influence to brands.' for those who want to monetize their influence.

After a coffee-break we had a talk from

Ciaran Norris - Director Emerging Media at Mindshare

He talked about the changing way of people interacting through social technology.
The social technology landscape is explained by Forrester's Ladder.
Also called the Social Technographics, a way to analyze your market's social technology behavior.
A top to bottom graph reflect behavior:

Creators 24%
Publish a blog, uploading en creating video, audio, write articles

Conversationalists 33%
Updating social networks and post on Twitter

Critics 37%
Posting ratings/reviews, commenting on other blogs, contribute to wiki's

Collectors 20%
Use RSS feeds, voting for websites, tagging on webpages and photo's

Joiners 59%
Having a profile on social networks
Visiting social networks but no engaging

Spectators 70%
Reading/watching blogs, podcasts, videos, online forums.
Reading Tweets

Inactives 17%
None of the above

He proclaims that traditional media is not dead at all.
Citizen journalism is only for a few, the rest of the people don't care because they have no time.
The foresters ladder is falling over according to him.

Why?

Because Real Time Search becomes more and more important.

Some examples:

The Coca-cola Party in Israel
For 3 days each year, teenagers from around the country come down to the Coca-Cola Village
to socialize and party, it’s like the Israeli version of America’s Spring Break.
This year, Coca-Cola decided to up their game. Each of the 600 teenagers received a RFDI wristband,
which allow communication through electromagnetic waves.

Billboards with location check-in so you get more info.
Cheryl Cole billboards with Facebook Places check-in.
In a new outdoor campaign across the UK for British singer Cheryl Cole who has a new album
coming out and a concert tour, fans who check into the billboard will be taken to her
Facebook page and get a chance to win two free tickets.

Heiniken app playing football during real match and guessing what will happen.

Next up was Kevin Slavin
Chief Creative Officer at Starling NY
Area code Founder (Zynga NY)

He gave a brief history of Audiences, Synthetic and Real thru time.
Laughter From Nowhere or canned laughter.
The Story of the mechanical laughter during TV-episodes:
a way of remedying the isolation of watching TV alone, because you have
a social experience where you're laughing along with other people and cued by them.

So how will people behave and interact in the future while watching TV?

Some examples:

Interactive Sopranos Game, bit like the Heiniken Football Game.
What will happen next?

The hills - Social Tv
The Hills Backchannel is a multi-player social game you play while watching
The Hills. Respond to what’s happening on the show by creating comments in
real-time. Score points when other players click on your comments,
and when you predict the most popular comments.

Backchannel tweets were even used for ads during Superbowl.

A great insight came next by Eric Phu
Vice-President of Tribal DDB Great China

He gave some very impressive stats about China.
To round it in a nutshell - it is huge with phenomenal charts

Need to knows about China
- BFN 'Big Freaking Numbers'
- 1.35 bill people now, which will double in 20 years.
- Internal markets are as big and diverse as VS and European markets combined.
- Social Media is the best way to get in touch with your consumers.
- Has no legacy with 'above the line' media; is virtually ineffective in China.

Check out Baidu, Chinese version of Facebook, which will get ground
in the rest of the World

An also entertaining talk came from Jef Vandecruys.
Global Director Digital for AB-Inbev NY

He explained what Inbev does with it's social media approach.

Why should I go digital?
The wrong reason why you should do this is because your competitors do.
The right reasons are KPI, growing your brandfans with 50%.

Targetgroup for Inbev is
-Youth aged 24
- Drink most beer
- Early adopters, which they focus on
- Communicate also digital

Inbev measures everything around brand-impact, event successes, consumer connections
How much consumptions before, during and after events.
Socail Media Is an ROI for them.

Don't drive traffic by shouting campaigns but by word of mouth and ambassadors.
Do great and interesting things for your brand-fans.
More traffic thru Social Media than thru Google.

Use Social Media channels as a bridge between several ad campaign waves.
So you don't have to start your next campaigns from scratch.
So you keep contact with your consumers.

Going digital with a local focus works better than a worldwide roll-out
because you have cultural differences.

Earned media is much more powerful than paid one.
Your followers are much more spontaneously.
Be the talk of the town (local influence).

Some things to know for brand managers:

Social Media is a long term strategy and commitment.
Educate and communicate with your employees internally within your organization.
Create tools and guidelines for your employees to use.
Try out and fail (often).
Build data for analysis.
Measure, measure, measure.
Always ask what the consumer wants.
Stop measuring traffic but measure influence instead.

Put digital in the beginning of the story not at the end!

Olivier Blanchard
The brand builder

http://thebrandbuilder.wordpress.com/

Specific focus on ROI of Social Media.
There is an investment that has to be covered.

The basics for ROI are simple:
Or using Social Media as a cost reduction tool
Or using Social Media as a revenue increasing tool

Some parameters:
- Reach - costumer acquisition, new or converting customers
- Frequency - looking at the buy rate of customers (increasing the buying rate)
- Yield - increasing the average buying behaviour

According to a Altimeter group study (Brian Solis btw.)
Only 1 percent of the social directors come from CRM, most come out of marketing.
Strange...

Roi of a fan nobody knows.
We have fans and now what?
What are you trying to accomplish?
How does social media fit in those plans?

Conversion is Gold, followers convert into customers that's the goal.

Social media is a risk so mostly underfunded in companies.
A wrong decision of a CEO.
But on the other hand the CEO needs some prove by ROI.
Most CEO's fear Social Media and the ROI because of long term benefits,
no short time results.

Cost reduction like customer support on Twitter it takes out the hated Callcenters.
Drive more sales

Not only focus on customer acquisition but also on customer development by
creating advocates for life for your product so they become brand evangelists.
Only acquisition with likes and followers is not enough.

Converting or attracting new customers is more expensive than
letting existing customers buy more or more frequent.

Combine social media with product design.

So, finally I have to say a rather interesting conference about
Social Media from the business perspective.

Will keep an eye on the next Think Digital Conf.

Sven

How to create Seductive Interactions

Sven Lauwers — Fri, 22 Jul 2011 21:49:42 +0000

According to a BBC study people of today, due to addictive web browsing, have a attentionspan of about….9 seconds.

Ignoring stuff is the mastery of people of today, so yelling even more is not the way to get messages across.

This means we only have this brief moment for people to fall in love with our ideas.

You can have the best product or idea, it doesn’t mean anything if it doesn’t get noticed.

The first pitch people are looking for in increasing attentionspan is making usability greater for a product or idea…

But in fact the primary source for getting better attention is increasing motivation (make the first 9 seconds fascinating).

Some psychological insight can help us:

What do we know about people?

- we’re curious

- we’re also afraid of change

- we seek out patterns

- we like to order and organize things

- we’re intensely self-centered

- we’re lazy

- we’re highly visual thinkers and learners

- we like to be the hero of the story

- we respond to our name and other first person cues

- we don’t like to make choices, but we like choice

- we like to be in control (and we like to be guided)

- we find novelty and surprise interesting

So in order to grab attention use (some or all):

- Incremental levels

- Challenges

- Visual Imagery

- Pattern recognition

- Points (together with levels)

- Social proof (people follow the lead of similar others – the bystander effect)

- Duration effects (Perception of time is subjective and can be influenced)

- Authority (People defer to experts)

- Reciprocity (People repay in kind)

- Scarcity (People want more of what they can have less of)

- Sensory integration (People respond better when more of the senses are engaged)

Brains pay attention to what brains care about, not necessarily what the conscious mind cares about.

What does the brain find interesting?

- Surprise, novelty, the unexpected

- Fun, playfulness, humor

- Varying visuals

Check out this great talk of Sally Hogshead at TedxAtlanta – How to Fascinate.

Resources and insights thanks to Stephen Anderson

A Book Apart

Sven Lauwers — Wed, 20 Jul 2011 20:24:06 +0000

Brief books for people who make websites.

A Book Apart publishes highly detailed and meticulously edited examinations of single topics. We produce brief books of about 100 pages—the perfect size in terms of subject depth and coverage for topics like HTML5, CSS3, content strategy, responsive web design, and more.

Essential readingstuff for those who want to create great websites.

A project of Jeffrey Zeldman, Jason Santa Maria and Mandy Brown.

Jay O’Callahan: The Power of Storytelling

Sven Lauwers — Sun, 10 Jul 2011 20:12:25 +0000

Jay O’Callahan has the rare distinction of traveling the world telling stories. Here, he introduces us to the power of storytelling – that most human, and ancient, art form. Through the lens of a tale about NASA putting a man on the moon, O’Callahan illustrates how storytelling taps into our imagination, engages those around us, and inspires amazing achievements.
Thanks to the Behance Network.

Inspiring Creative Mornings by Jim Coudal

Sven Lauwers — Sun, 10 Jul 2011 18:26:50 +0000

Jim Coudal is a truly inspiring character. His company decided to shift from the standard model of selling their creative services to clients, to a model of creating products which they own and have full control over. And they’ve been very successful at it. Coudal Partners is proof that you can indeed create your own reality.

Highlights of The Next Web Conference 2011

Sven Lauwers — Fri, 20 May 2011 17:16:58 +0000

As my experiences of conferences are mostly defined by US ones,I was curious about The Next Web here on my homeland Europe.
As our Dutch neighbors are pretty much in line with progressive thinking I was pretty excited and curious when I booked my tickets.

Even though every speaker reflected on valuable information I will mainly focus on a few highlights that I consider are worth talking about, considered afterwards.

Generally speaking there was a nice balance between speakers and some new startup material.
Settings were great; first day at the Felix Meritis House, the rest at Westergasfabriek in Westerpark Amsterdam.

Day 01

Started off with, for me, some unknown speakers.
Olivier Fécherolle - Chief Development and Communication Officer at Viadeo.
Viadeo is basically a social, LinkedIn kloon, network for professionals and operates already in a handful of countries.
Their main focus are the new upcoming continents, for what it's worth I think those countries are already upfront, like: Russia, Asia, South-America, etc.
They already house about 90 mln users, not bad.

Next up
Stephanie Kaizer: Founded in Europe Gaming - how to satisfy Monsters in Europe.
A social game exclusively designed for Facebook with a lot of influences of Farmville.
Nice insight in how games are build, how they are tested and analysed.
As I become more and more confronted with the importance of gaming during conferences, especially during SXSW they got a large part, there must be something in the loop for games.
I must admit that gaming is not my specialty but they will get my due attention from now on, I want to grasp is also.

A surprising interesting talk came up next from
Rudy de Waele - Dotopen: Mobile Trends Africa 2020.
About the emerging market of Africa in the Mobile world.
Stats, drawn from real-time cell tower activity in Africa, show that the worlds number one in growth of data-use is Africa, trailed by China and the rest of Asia.

Mario Sundar (LinkedIn's social media guy) was next with the future of global networking.
He focused on the fact that companies should implement a social media guidebook for their employees.
He was especially influenced by and great fan of Social Media Strategist Scott Monty from Ford Motor Company.
He stated truly so that the biggest forgotten Social Media Market are the employees itself.
They are the ambassadors of your company.
Interesting but nothing new to discover.

Finally Alex Hoye (Angel investors and serial entrepreneur) on Old School VCs Face the Squeeze – A Sea Change for Entrepreneurs & Seed Investors.
He spoke about his experiences from the perspective as an Angel Investor.
He furiously defended the European AI's, especially Seedcamp and TAG (The Accelerator Group) in their quest to combat against the US Valley AI's like YCombinator.
I had the impression he was scouting for new Startups, of course where else can you do that otherwise.

Between session we were treated on great handmade notes by @wilg, kind like the ogilvy notes at SXSW this year.

Day 02

Missed the talk of
Steve Rubel: The laws of attention
Summary notes can be found here http://now.thenextweb.com/user/wilg/view/9348703

Hooked up for
Mike Lee: The Future of Technology
Mike, dressed as a pirate to grab attention and with a lot of success by the way, lives in Amsterdam for many years now and is actually a developer from the Valley;
West-coast again...
Shortly the most important issue he stated was; that to converge people you need to focus on the experience you give to them. I completely agree with that.
Every product needs a 'Hook': Design, Story and Interest.

Next up was:
Eboman goes Wikivideo
For me too technical, but it seemed revolutionary, according to the sounds of the Video wizards.
Curated live video streams, should look into that also.

Time now for:
Dave Winer: World domination through Blorking. Say what?!
Dave is especially known from his blogs and is a crusader for open communication.
He wants to take out the companies that have a hold on the communicationtools now.
A customized way of communicating: Blorking (his invention).
Will have to see how that will look like...

A very emotional talk should come up:
Mark Randall: How losing 650 million taught me the secret to happiness and success.
Founded a software company but at the moment of cashing in 650 mil his best friend and business partner died.
He evangelizes that the main engine of what we do may not be the money but instead should be meaning and purpose in what we do, sounds obvious but done so little.
He states that 'Success without joy is not really success at all'.
He gave an historical overview of the evolution of education and how it completely turned us into uncreative creatures.
For the moment education can not keep up with the fast pace of change so it is up to the tech people to narrow the gap between education and reality of human needs.
We have to use technology to make education scalable, equalize society and make quality education accessible to everyone.
A lot of his ideas are also spread by speakers like Seth Godin & Daniel Pink.

Last speaker of the day was:
Tammy Camp: Shoot for the Moon: A Path to Innovation and Inspiration.
She makes the difference between fantasy and dreams.
A fantasy is selfish; What can I get.
A dream has purpose; What can I give.
Her presentation was hastely made and combined a lot of material and insights from other influencers, but which presentation doesn't?

Day 03

Started of like a rocket:
Wikileaks panel with Alexander Bard, Andrew Keen and Rick Falkvinge. "Privacy is for losers - open is the new closed”
A debate that started with their bio but went over Politics, Sociology, Privacy and Copywrites.
Some other speakers jumped in like Dave Winer and Robert Scoble, fascinating.
One of the most stunning issues I learned was that every 10 years a global sociological study is being performed amongst the worldwide youth to measure their future interests.
The first study was performed in 1979 and saw materialism amongst youth as most important and so the Yuppies in the 80's were predicted.
In 1989 its analysis saw the rise of ecological attention of future generations and this topic held on until 2009.
In 2009 it showed the green movement is dead and there is a steep rise of interest in integrity, in other words we want to be more individual and only want to share our personal things
with people of our inner circle and leave the transparency we practice at the moment.
We can build a Integrity economy by taking away the fear from people.
We repackage info and want to share it only with our friends.
Who are you, what is your identity? My addressbook was the anwser...this is hidden/secret info for most people.
According to Alexander Brad we evolve towards cults and sects by doing that.

Rick Falkvinge http://www.falkvinge.com/ is from the Swedish Political Piracy movement who, amongst many things, wants to liberalise the copywriting laws and wants
to peacefully undermine the existing authorities who rule our communication behaviour.

Intermezzo
As a surprise we got a skype-interview with the CEO of Skype Tony Bates, to bad the skype communication was not that great, nice promo for his own product.
He spoke about the most significant trend: the explosion of smartphones and mobile apps.
The second significant trend is that the world gets smaller and smaller thanks to the communication revolution,
so small companies can now can focus on international trade from day one.
When he was asked of what he wanted to have invented instead of Skype his answer was 'Twitter above all'.
Nice insight but not revolutionary.

Finally a nice presentation came from Howard Lindzon from StockTwits.
He believes that now or during crises it is 'Never been a better time to start a Web Business.'
He started the StockTwitts app to monitor your on-line stock and social integration.
He failed to invest in Twitter, Zynga, Foursquare; well everyone can miss opportunities he said...
Recommended to buy Apple Stock NOW, if you haven't done that it already you definitely leg behind.

The Howard Lindzon's 'Secrets to succes':
Make fever mistakes.
Go faster when you know you are right.
Attitude is everything.
Punch a banker, hug the developer
Underpromise and overdeliver always!
Know your key metrics and bright spots; make analysis.
Social Web is OK, but Social 'face to face' is just as important.
Local is the new Global.
Go vertical not horizontal.(smaller instead of broader)

Howard is definitelly influenced by
Fred Wilson and Brad Feld of Techmeme.

Some Startups:

droam.nl - new on-line dataroaming player, not to expensive, but sadly for the moment only for the well serviced and obvious countries.
zmazz - pay-engine for smartphones anonimously
kuvva - own curated backgrounds

Personally I believed that the app 'openmargins' - a social annotation tool was the best together with Onavo for compressing your datatransfer
so you do not use as much G3 transfer.

As I experienced it; The Next Web conference did in fact deliver and gave me some great new insights worth thinking about.

But I can not relief myself of the feeling that they are mostly influenced by West-coast Valley thinking and should also consider that there are
East-coast (NY) influencers to consider in their speakers line-up.

Will definitely come back next year.

Sven

“How much can I get away with?”

Sven Lauwers — Fri, 25 Mar 2011 16:01:50 +0000

There are two ways to parse that question.

The usual way is, “How little can I do and not get caught?” Variations include, “Can we do less service? Cut our costs? Put less cereal in the box? Charge more?” In short: “How little can I get away with?”

The other way, the more effective way: “How much can we afford to give away? How much service can we pile on top of what we’re selling without seeming like we’re out of our minds? How big a portion can we give and still stay in business? How fast can we get this order filled?”

In an era in which the middle is rapdily emptying out, both edges are competitive. Hint: The overdelivery edge is an easier place to make a name for yourself.

Insight by Seth Godin

The Surprising Truth about What Motivates Us.

Sven Lauwers — Tue, 08 Feb 2011 19:24:17 +0000

Most of us believe that the best way to motivate ourselves and others is with external rewards like money, the carrot-and-stick approach.

That’s a mistake.

The secret to high performance and satisfaction-at work, at school, at home-is the deeply human need to direct our own lives, to learn and create new things.

There is a mismatch between what science knows and what business does, and how that affects every aspect of our lives. While the carrot-and-stick approach worked well during the twentieth century, it has become obsolete for today’s challenges.

Today, the three elements of true motivation are autonomy, mastery and purpose.

In his new bestseller book Drive, the author of the bestselling book A Whole New Mind, Daniel H. Pink exposes the mismatch of motivational approach and offers smart and surprising techniques to put the three fundamental elements of motivation into action.

Two questions that can change your life from Daniel Pink on Vimeo.

Is it Urgent, or is it important?

Sven Lauwers — Mon, 07 Feb 2011 19:07:54 +0000

In this age of distraction, prioritization is a constant challenge. We could easily spend all day just reacting to incoming communications, without ever doing anything to move the needle on the “important stuff.” In this short video, Behance founder and CEO Scott Belsky discusses the need to distinguish between what’s urgent and what’s important.

Do you know the traps of thinking about Happiness?

Sven Lauwers — Wed, 26 Jan 2011 19:19:53 +0000

How do we think about Happiness?

Do we all feel the same?

How do we remember our lives?

When we talk and think about Happiness we have to avoid a few traps that will otherwise lead us to misconceptions.

There is a clear distinction between our experiences (What happened in reality) and our memory (How we look back on things)

Watch the story by Daniel Kahneman, widely regarded as the world’s most influential living psychologist who won the Nobelprice in Economics for his pioneering work in behavioral economics — exploring the irrational ways we make decisions, on TED.