This week just gone I posted on the Tahato Crisp Launch as a Multiplayer Mobile Game, or we could try Roku’s Reward

Here we have Chris Billich from Infinita, who I had the pleasure of meeting in Tokyo a while back when I was there on a mobile marketing learning journey, giving us his unique perception on Japan.

The presentation is insightful pointing to our near future as mobile our remote control for life.

Last year I sat with one of the anointed Glitterati of the US Digerati who was extolling the virtues of “social meeedijaa”, but only from the context of online. In the end I could not take it any more and I pointed out that surely mobile has an incy wincy part to play in all this social malarky – non? Especially when we see mobile penetration rates going through the roof some countries stand at 140%+

Au contraire, this particular geek looked at me and claimed that, whenever social  meeeedijaa was mentioned, naturally mobile as concept and reality was included within that context – you know based upon the last 2 hours of conversation I had listened to I did not agree. Yet our man was and is not the only one.

And this perplexes me – when the UK has 120%+ mobile penetration, yet at the same time there is a significant number of the British population that cannot even get online, you begin to wonder whether media and marketing companies have taken leave of their senses, by not taking mobile marketing communications more seriously?

Apparently only 7 media companies in London take a serious approach to mobile in their media planning. Yet it is the only media platform, that has over, once again, a 120%+ penetration.

And it more than that; mobile is our remote control for life and will increasingly will become so. And that is why the Social Media and Mobile: my remote control for life bootcamp is worth a day of your time. This is a one day interactive bootcamp that will help you understand why ignoring mobile, or thinking that mobile marketing is either sms push marketing (a numbers game mate), or an iPhone app is plain silly.

And why is that, well because we are still faced with the same challenges: how do we find our customers, how do we make our customers sticky, how can we increase trade with our customers and serve those customers whilst at the same time, reducing the cost to serve?

In a world which is not awash with cash, right now I reckon answering those questions  makes an enormous amount of sense.

I will run the day and we will use case histories to help all attendees reflect on your current marketing and business challenges and where you can begin to identify new opportunities and possibilities.

The case histories are wide and diverse, and are a means by which we can collectively work through new solutions for all attendees. I promise it will be a fun day. And whether you know a little or a lot – you are all welcome. And remember when mobile does a play a role in marketing and you get it right a 29% response rate is not unusual.

Don’t expect to be passive.

More information here

This is what you will get out of the day

1. Achieve a comprehensive understanding of how to drive business success – through using the mobile as a remote control that can sell car tyres, or become an extension of a retailer that delivered €83m in one year, and repeatedly delivers a 29%+ response rate.

2. Open up your collective minds towards the possibilities of mobile marketing and, in particular, help to develop solutions on what relevant mobile marketing looks like.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/21829813@N05/4209204594

Right on the heels of Foursquare’s API release, the location-based mobile application and game is announcing another big rollout to cities across the world. Just one month after releasing Foursquare () to 15 new cities in the US and Canada, Foursquare is ready to bring their highly addictive game and business-friendly service to 50 more cities. That’s actually twice as many cities as the service was in before today, bringing the total to 100 different cities worldwide.

Never heard of Foursqaure? Here you go. This is all part of the new rules for customer engagement the journey to co-creation, and shared collective experience and joy. What are the lessons for brands in the 21st Century I wonder?

Social social everywhere, but why?

The Figaro Social Media conference looks like its going to be a good event, as it blends some interesting topics and issues together. Both commercial and non-commercial. The challenges of understanding how to conduct successful communications in the networked society, which is underpinned by the social relations between people – not companies is of pressing imperative.

There are some great speakers of particular interest to me are:

Anna Rafferty – Managing Director, Penguin Digital: The Importance of Listening

Dorothea Arndt – Head of New Media, British Red Cross: Creating conversations and driving engagement with your brand through social media

Euan Semple – Thought Leader: What’s the point of social media?

Euans’ message is particularly apposite:

The trouble with “the next big thing” is that everyone thinks it’s big, and everyone thinks it is a thing. Social media is neither. What it is a different way of relating to one another adopted by individuals, whether they represent organisations or not, and carried out between individuals. It is low key, direct, and personal – the antithesis of mass media, interruption marketing. And yet can be very powerful.
How can you avoid being yet another “newbie” rushing in and getting it all wrong? How can you work out what to do, where, and why, in such a way as to make the most of your time and energy?

The event takes place @ the Cavendish Conference Centre on the  03.11.2009

Register (here)

http://www.flickr.com/photos/sicoactiva/2092062723/in/photostream/

Mobile Marketing is increasingly moving towards the centre stage of the marketing industry. Many claim to hold the elixir of “how to do” mobile marketing, there are however only a few who really have that knowledge and that insight.If there in one Marketing Masterclass on Mobile that you sign up to I would recommend it is this one.

Pekka Ala-Pietilä former ceo Nokia and co-founder of blyk

Welcome to the Big We – that is 3 billion people that have a mobile device, a number that surpasses TV sets and the fixed Internet, by a country mile. Nokia research tells us that 5 billion people will be connected with a mobile device by 2012.

We are inevitably moving towards the Mobile Society, where our mobile devices become the remote control for our daily lives. Because any communications technology that allows us to better connect, communicate, share knowledge and information, and get stuff done will be widely adopted – which it is.  Our mobile devices are so precious to us that; people who lose their wallets statistically take 24 hours+ to discover the loss, for mobile it is 24 minutes.

As mass media struggles to adapt in an evolving media landscape, there is growing interest and great anticipation of how as; marketers, brands, businesses and advertisers we can use this extraordinary mobile medium to meaningfully connect to our audiences.

This one-day session will immerse you in what you need to know and what you need to do. It will enable you to grasp the fundamentals of how you make successful communications campaigns, how you use data, and utilize new metrics, and will demonstrate that mobile already delivers an ROI unheard of in any other medium (when you do it right), and finally how you make money. Anyone that is interested in being a successful marketer over the next 5 years has to book their place on the SMLXL / JMA Mobile Marketing Masterclass presented by Figaro Digital.

28th October 2009 @ The Hospital, Covent Garden

Full programme details (here)

Registration (here)

Figaro Digital have demonstrated an impressive ability to deliver compelling seminars with quality audiences.  With mobile rapidly becoming a hot topic, the ability to learn from the experiences  of major brands is both timely and relevant.

Alex Meisel chairman Sponge & the Mobile Marketing Association

learning to manage communities can be a tricky business

I picked this up from a Jay Rosen tweet

Managing Online Communities: What Computer Games Can Teach Journalists

What does MMORG’s have to do with journalism? The answer according to the article is, everything.

MMORPGs don’t have much to offer in terms of developing the traditional journalism skills. These games can’t teach students how to vet sources, how to interview, how to copy edit, how to hit the streets and find stories.

What they can teach journalists is how to build, foster and interact with an online community. As news organizations and journalism schools struggle to find their way in the shifting, interactive landscape that seemingly appeared out of nowhere, the answers to many of their questions lie in the history of computer gaming.

The article mentions Richard Bartle, (website), (blog) one of the foremost experts on gaming and players. The article argues that it’s Bartle’s expertise where we can begin to learn about communities. Importantly Bartle made some key observations on player types,

The player types — Achievers, Explorers, Socializers and Killers — lay the foundation for not only what elements need to be present within a game community (although this can easily be extrapolated for any community) but also what precautions and rules need to be in place in order for these communities to thrive.

This “simple taxonomy”, as Bartle refers to it, enables community managers to begin to quantify the actions within any system and subtly shift the environment to encourage different actions, ones that are more conducive to community building. Community designers could, as Bartle said, tinker with what the players could do, change the rules of the world, create a more interactive environment or build more direct action. (Bartle, 1996)

The article goes on to mention the seminal work of Dave Weinbrger, Lawrence Lessig and Howard Rheingold

While each of those works examines communities ranging far outside the basic taxonomies, they each seem to agree on four basic principles for building communities and four basic rules for managing those communities. And that though these key thinkers were looking at different aspects of community, engagement, communication, technology etc., They did seem to come to a common point of view on some fundamental principals,

The four principles — Good Content, Simple Navigation, Simple Interfaces, Decentralized Controls (King, 2008) — align themselves with the Bartle’s Taxonomy in this way: The content is for achievers and explores, the navigation is for achievers, the interface is for socializers and the decentralized controls allows for the thwarting of killers.

The four rules — No Free Riding, Rules Compliance, Rewards, Ad-Hoc Growth (King, 2008) — not only offer guidelines for punishing Killers, but also for encouraging Achievers, Explorers and Socializers.

Which brings us onto community management – the community, a community, needs rules and it needs managing, the interface needs to be designed to encourage persistent interaction, for all key game player types. Just shoving stuff up online and hoping for the best, will not deliver the results one hopes for, I think is the key observation here.

Brad King author of the article makes therefore his summary,

In other words, the company treated the players as equal partners in the game process. They weren’t considered as an afterthought. They weren’t considered incidental to the process. They weren’t there to be the recipient of corporate-speak. They had a voice within the organization, a way to redress concerns and a way to provide constructive feedback that changed the way the developers upgraded the system.

That the game still continues, 12 years later, with more than 100,000 players is a testament to this system.

I rate this article highly, it has certainly helped me. It also in my opinion should be read by anyone wanting to study how to truly engage, one audience. All the hype about Social Media is such a poor substitute, to the key insights which underpin how and why people interact with each other in the networked participatory society.

Suggested reading:

Advice for regional news groups in the networked economy

Newsbrands of the 21st Century [1]

citizen journalism: truth, trust and power

SMLXL newsbrand / journalism archive

http://www.flickr.com/photos/7236030@N03/2106087852

As Jenkins explains,

A transmedia story unfolds across multiple platforms, with each new text making a distinctive and valuable contribution to the whole. In the idea form of transmedia storytelling, each medium does what it does best – so that a story might be introduced into a film, expanded through television, novels, and comics; its world might be explored through game play or experienced as an amusement park attraction.

The consequences of such transmedia manifestations is; the creation of deeper context, and a more sustained form of emotional and intellectual engagement that translates into commercial success. What the  Wachowski brothers recognised, was that we experience the world as a blended reality, and that blended reality also embraced a more participatory culture. The success of The Matrix was premised upon the idea of co-creation and collective intelligence. “Echo replies to echo, everything reverberates’” said Braque.

The filmmakers plant clues that won’t make sense until we play the computer game. They draw on the back story revealed through a series of animated shorts, which need to be downloaded off the web of watched off a separate DVD. Fans raced, dazed and confused, from the theatres to plug into Internet discussion lists, where every detail would be dissected and every possible interpretation debated.

The Matrix comic

The Matrix online

Would not such insight inspire brands and businesses to understand how to truly engage their; customers, audiences, stakeholders? The Matrix is a…. Film? A comic? An online game? A…. Brand? And what do great brands do? They tell great stories, and they deliver great customer experience and engagement.

You can live a life or you can live a FantaLife

A few years ago, SMLXL was commissioned by The Coca Cola Company to globally look at their brand Fanta. How would SMLXL re-energise Fanta? How could we use the idea of Engagement and not use just traditional practices of brand communications. Our view was that Fanta had to have a point of view on life for young people. So we created FantaLife: an advanced living course for young people to get more out of life.

You can live a life or you can live a Fanta Life

Which we thought was far more engaging, than the tempting colourful sensations of life. I had not read Henry’s book then, but based on the communications work I had undertaken, and our research of how companies, brands and organisations are able to engage their audiences creating great experiences for them. We could prove such an approach enabled those companies to be highly profitable. This seemed to us @ SMLXL, rather obvious.

Fanta Life Challenge: What are you doing with you life?

From live events, to mobile communications, a TV series, to what we described as Fanta Beach: we created a world in which young people could have a great deal of fun. The premise and promise of Engagement is about deep context achieved through co-creation, collaboration and Transmedia storytelling. It has by default socialbility woven  into the entire fabric of the marketing communications. But its not social media. This is something that Ridley Scott has also understood: Crowdsourcing Blade Runner in a read-write participatory culture

Check out the Purefold project with RSA films

Fanta paid us handsomely for the work, then they made a couple of TV spots and some billboards and ran them internationally. I was somewhat bemused, and I still am, that companies on one level compete so aggressively, and must by law maximise shareholder value, are unable to innovate to do so. And, in so doing they hurt themselves. Social media now becomes another silo of the marketing silo bucket and the cycle continues. OK Fanta is an orange drink that Coke bought off the Germans after the Second World War – but in my view one we were proposing to imbue the brand with real meaning, based upon our deep insight of how young people want to engage, want to co-create, what to explore the world in a more existentialist way. TV ads, on their own, will not crack that code.

Fanta beach: a transmedia story

Brands need to be multi-dimensional – like Apple, or The Matrix to survive the participatory culture of the multi-dimensional universe. SMLXL has developed a Masterclass on Engagement – do get in touch if you would like to know how to truly engage your customers in; the physical, the mobile, as well as the virtual life.

In the meantime, Fanta Life is still there waiting to be executed! But perhaps Coke doesn’t want to be as famous as the Matrix?

The Matrix was first released on March 31, 1999. It earned $171 million in North America and over £250 million in the UK and $463 million worldwide,^[10] and later became the first DVD to sell more than three million copies in the U.S.^[11] The Ultimate Matrix Collection was released on HD DVD on May 22, 2007^[12] and on Blu-ray on October 14, 2008.^[13] The movie is also scheduled to be released stand alone in a 10th anniversary edition on Blu-ray in the Digibook format on March 31, 2009, 10 years to the day after the movie was released theatrically.^[14]

SB: Right now there seems to be a lot of confusion between social media and the definition of community. The idea of community is right now as fairly elusive one and is being bandied about like it’s some sacrosanct term. Community built around consumption is, for me fairly transitory. It reminds of an unruly mob during the time of the Paris Commune. We’re  not going to get a whole lot of sense out of this right now.

Then there’s these dire warnings coming from people like Forrester, that brands will be excluded from consumer choice because somehow they are now being defined by communities and no longer by the brand owners themselves. I think this is both disingenuous and untrue. Forcing brands out of their hands via social media created communities is only part of the story. While even as early as 2005 Tomi Ahonen and Alan Moore warned marketers, in their prescient work ‘Communities Dominate Brands‘, that if they didn’t cut loose the shackles of the traditional advertising agency and TV network model they would lose their brands. I’m seeing many of the same warnings again this year, particularly in the wake of the great financial crisis. But what real, if any, changes have we seen to this paradigm? No brands have fallen by the wayside because they didn’t have a social media strategy or because they continued advertising in traditional media.

JB: Brands may not fall by the wayside as such, but brands will become stronger because of their consumer engagement strategies. For example, the well known Dell Hell scenario certainly impacted on that organisation negatively, but by engaging with the community they came back stronger and more relevant to their client base. If they hadn’t done that who knows where that organisation would have been.

Some brands come to social media like Dell in a ‘reactive’ fashion knowing they now need to engage with consumers due to a negative event/issue. Other brands initiate the online engagement strategy ‘proactively’, understanding it will add value to their knowledge base, understanding the client better, product development and customer service.

SB: Ahonen and Moore predicted the consumer and their connected communities, would select the products and brands that are engaged in the most relevant dialogue with them. Somehow this would become the centre of a new modern and sustainable marketing model. While I think there are some massive shifts occurring,  I don’t think we’re quite there yet with this because I’m not sure anyone understands these kinds of ROIs yet.

Metrics, metrics, metrics. I can’t count so I am unable to help, but the fact is one can see where commerce is to be made, if one digs around a bit. And the big question is what is advertising and marketing in the 21st Century? When we live in a search economy, a participatory culture, where 25% of al media is made by us and there are 3.5 billion mobile phones of the planet. Networked economics?

Some called Tomi and I polemicists – I like to think we highlighted something critically important for brands, business and organisations. Remember our subtitle was, “business and marketing challenges for the 21st Century”. This went way beyond in my view the social media paradigm that so many are so now engaged in.

And here’s an article on education and AR

Slightly different from AR but connected to the education theme is a post Henry Jenkins made in June of this year, he writes

From the Learning Games Network (LGN) comes an interesting inspiration for user-generated content. A recently established 501(c) (3) non-profit organization, established by former MIT CMS Director of Special Projects Alex Chisholm, the MIT Education Arcade’s Eric Klopfer and Scot Osterweil, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Kurt Squire, LGN was formed to spark innovation in the design and use of video games for learning. In addition to bringing together an integrated network of educators, designers, media producers, and academic researchers who all have a hand in creating and distributing games for learning, they’re also bringing forth opportunities for youth to contribute to conversations, research, and development. It’s a no brainer for today’s students to share their perspectives in a more participatory role as the future of education is shaped.

Henry outlines two intiatiatives that are co-creation and collaboratively based. One is a film project the other called Design Squad, allowing students to work together on gaming design and iteration.

And here is an interview on augemented reality learning Henry conducted with Eric Klopfer, here is an excerpt

In early February, a powerful demonstration of augmented reality took place at Boston’s Museum of Science. Eric Klopfer, an MIT professor of urban studies and planning, along with a team of researchers from the Education Arcade (an MIT-based consortium devoted to promoting the pedagogical use of computer and video games) conducted what they called “a Hi-Tech Who Done It.” The activity was designed for middle-school kids and their parents. Participants were assigned to teams, consisting of three adult-child pairs, and given a handheld. For the next few hours, they would search high and low for clues of the whereabouts and identity of the notorious Pink Flamingo Gang. Thieves have stolen an artifact and substituted a fake in its place. Thanks to museum’s newly installed Wi-Fi network and the players’ location-aware handhelds, each gallery offered the opportunity to interview cyber-suspects, download objects, examine them with virtual equipment, and trade their findings.

Each parent-child unit was assigned a different role–biologists, detectives, or technologists–enabling them to use different tools on the evidence they gathered. As I followed the eager participants about the museum, they used walkie-talkies to share information and to call impromptu meetings to compare notes; at one point, a hyperventilating sixth grade girl lectured some other kid’s parents about what she learned about the modern synthetic material found in the sample picked up near the shattered mummy case. Racing against time and against rival teams, the kids, parents in tow, sprinted from hall to hall.

I was with one of the teams when they solved the puzzle. A young girl thrust her arms in the air and shouted, “We are the smartest people in the whole museum!” What a visceral experience of empowerment! The same girl said that everyone else in her family was smart in science but that on this occasion, she felt like a genius.

Here is an interview with Eric

http://www.flickr.com/photos/yasminespics/2976422239/

When the world is your playing field, and the game is afoot, having what you need when andwhere you need it at your fingertips makes the difference between winning and losing writes the makers of the movie.