I highly recommend going and checking it out.

Cheers

I had an interesting think over the past few days about telcos, the role they play, and what the future may hold for them as a business. With internet hotspots increasingly being used as a value-add for so many other businesses (coffee shops, hotels, fast food), it’s not unreasonable to argue that one day in near future, the abundance of internet connectivity would allow a user to be near constantly connected to the net, and make it possible for them to route all their conversations through Skype or any other VoIP service.

The obvious place for telcos to go is into the financial provider space, as we carry our mobile phones with us everywhere, and use it for so many other forms of transaction, it makes perfect sense to combine small payments into the mix (obviously, this is already quite successful in places such as Japan and South Korea).

But let’s say, whatever the reason, telcos in Australia decide not to follow that path, what then? Do they continue to fight in an already over-saturated market and just churn customers over from one another? It hardly seems productive to incrementally grow market share by fighting price wars while staying parity on features and service offer.

So here’s my idea to the telcos that they can feel free to use (attribution would be nice though =P).

You’ve got the backbone, you’ve got the network, you’ve got pretty damn good almost-everywhere coverage to the internet. Start building your SIM-cards into more things. Start working with OEMs and Brand-name manufacturers to get your service into more devices and expand your market.

The year is 2009 going on 2010. Why the hell every single digital camera doesn’t have a SIM card slot is beyond me. I should be able to have 10 Optus SIM cards with my plan that I can chuck into multiple devices. One in my phone, one in my camera, so all my photos get auto-uploaded to the net from wherever I am. One for my car, so that I have mapping, traffic and news information live to my vehicle (and status reports sent back). One for my laptop (rather than that silly USB dongle), one for my PVR or DVD player. One for any device that is portable and can have a good excuse to connect to the net.

They should be working together with manufacturers to expand the range of devices that are connected up, and move away from being a provider of “mobile phones” and to essentially that of a internet provider with more availability and flexibility than a traditional ISP.

Perhaps wishful thinking on my part, but it just seems silly that they haven’t started getting SIM card slots as standard items on everything yet. Imagine how wide they could open their market.

A collective of what’s been searched throughout the year, what topics are hot on people’s minds, and how it all compares.

Not surprisingly, Channel Ten’s Masterchef seems to have made a big impression this year, as well as the death of Michael Jackson.

Also interesting to note, is that “Currency Converter Calculator” is one of the fastest rising searches. Looking through the Google Trends charts and the finance charts, seems as soon as the Aussie dollar hit US$0.70 – the search started becoming more popular. Good for imports I suppose.

Click through to see all the results for yourself.

Cheers.

Probably one of the funniest and most straight-talking Browser Compliance notices I’ve ever seen.

It reads:

Hi, if you are coming to this site via Internet Explorer 6, you might not be getting the best experience possible. Honestly, I can’t even begin to think about what your entire experience on the internet must be like? (…probably like riding a bike on the highway while cars blow by you on their way to Costco to get gallons of mayonnaise and 60-inch plasma TV’s). How will you ever be able to use this website?????? You wont. You’re an asshole and your browser is an asshole. So look, I’m going to be honest: I kind of hate you. BUT we c-a-n make this work. Here is what I am going to need you to do: fire up your Toshiba ShitBook© that weighs about 45 pounds, wipe the Cheeto dust off the screen, download Safari, delete Internet Explorer from your computer, punch yourself in the face, and get me a pulled pork sandwich.

See it for yourself at the bottom of Tyler Thompson’s site (Creative Director – Squarespace)

There’s been a lot of back and forthing on the internets about whether this campaign was total spam, or whether it was just so awesomely virally successful, that none of us want to admit it.

I’ll try and cover this off as logically as I can in my furore.

1. Is the idea bad?

No. Hell no. The idea is great, I mean, who wouldn’t want to win a $10,000 shopping spree at the expense of Westfield! To enter all I need to do is click a button?!?! EVEN BETTER. I have to admit, I was tempted to click on the button to, you gotta be in it to win it and all that jazz. The campaign idea is a great one, it’s using a widely accessible platform, at the right timing, with some good media spend behind it.

2. Is the execution bad?

No. Well, ‘no’ except for one thing. You see, the execution on a whole is fantastic. The app is built well, the competition mechanism seems pretty solid, it all fits together quite nicely and everyone involved should pat themselves on the back for a job well done.

Except for one thing.

Why, oh why on god’s earth did you have to make the entry requirement a pro-forma status update? Yes, it does contravene the Facebook policy, but the real question is why is it against the Facebook policy.

Here’s my thoughts (Facebook hasn’t commented on any of this, so this is all my assumptions based on my knowledge of Facebook functions).

Most competitions of this nature (the ones that convene to the Terms of Service that have been put in place for a reason) require you as the user, to become a Fan of their Page. Becoming a fan of a page puts you within the FacebookDM reach of the brand’s page (i.e. they can message you through Facebook whenever they like) and allows the brand to go through the demographics of their fans, as well as specifically target Facebook ads to not only fans, but friends of fans.

So there’s heaps of benefits to the brand involved, yeah?

From the user perspective, if a hundred of your mates decide to all become fans of a particular page, then Facebook does you a solid and aggregates that information into a single Newsfeed line item.

The same happens for Events (so if 10 of your friends are going to a party, it’ll say “Damian, and 10 other friends are attending blah blah”).

Same happens if y’all join a group.

You know when it doesn’t happen. When you update your status, Making a Wall Post, or Uploading Photos. Unsurprisingly, these are all activities which are specifically sighted in the Facebook Terms of Service for competition mechanisms.

In the rules of the promotion, or otherwise, you will not condition entry to the promotion upon taking any action on Facebook, for example, updating a status, posting on a profile or Page, or uploading a photo.

View the full guidelines on Promotions here
http://www.facebook.com/promotions_guidelines.php

The point I’m getting to here, is that there is NO reason that Westfield and M&C Saatchi/Mark couldn’t have run the same campaign, with all elements the same, but made the condition of entry not a status update, but rather becoming a Fan on the Page.

If Westfield have (as they’ve stated) “worked closely with Facebook” on this Application, then Facebook needs to be much clearer to users (who helped guide much of the new Terms of Service) about when Facebook will happily break the rules for advertisers. And if they haven’t, then Westfield needs to fess up that it may have made a mistake, and may need to revisit how the entry mechanism works.

For what it’s worth, I think the campaign is a great idea, and was executed well, with a very good promotional incentive. I just think it would have succeeded just as much (if not perhaps more) if it didn’t use Status Updates to enter, and didn’t piss off so many people by doing so.

Cheers.

Note: Yes, I realise I am a marketer, and that much of this may seem “ironic” coming from somebody working in this industry, but I definitely think we as marketers needs to understand that there are lines that we’re not supposed to cross. Social media is still developing, and doesn’t have the legislative framework that surrounds SMS or email marketing, but we do have a very clear set of Terms by which we’re asked to adhere. We should try not to cross those lines.

Most of the news I read on a daily basis, is delivered to me through RSS feeds that I keep on top of using the wonderful Mac application NetNewsWire. It syncs with Google Reader, and makes it really easy to flag articles, post them to my delicious, and in general keep on top of everything.

But sometimes, I do have to read SMH or News.com.au – and it really frustrates me to have to attempt to read a thousand word article (including all it’s errors) when it’s been jammed in-between hundreds of links, photo galleries, ads, ads, and more ads.

A few days ago, I discovered Readability, which I have to say is quite possibly one of my favourite tools at the moment.

The premise is simple, you drag the bookmarklet to your toolbar, you go to an article, click the bookmarklet, and suddenly, everything but the relevant text is gone. Couldn’t be easier.

I hope you enjoy it as much as I do.

As such, I thought it only appropriate to share this excellent composition from CollegeHumor.com

It’s a little sound ditty created entirely from Windows95 and Windows98 sounds effects.

Additionally, I will attending the Windows 7 launch party, and will be sure to share some photos, video and thoughts after the event. Stay tuned.

This is really the kind of stuff other brands just simply dream of.

Below is an impressive little Hiphop piece which is about a dude who fell in love at an Apple store (and the video appears to be filmed in the Apple store, although the audio seems to have been dubbed after the fact).

Enjoy

Google have partnered up with The Wharton School and a bunch of others to put together a really interesting little site with tonnes of content on the changing nature of marketing and the future of advertising and all that kind of thing called Fast Forward.

The videos are alright (a little bit dry if you ask me), but there’s some interesting stuff in the Trends tab worth checking out.

Interesting to see Google consistently moving further and further from their core of just providing ad space, and into the broader field of marketing.

Microsoft is far from being the first company to try and capitalise on the desire of brand managers and marketers to know what’s being said about them in the social space and across the web, but they may be the first to actually have the resources, know how, and influence to be able to do it really really well and get some major market traction.

AdAge seems to have spoken with some peeps at Microsoft and gotten some decent details on where the product is currently at (Proof Of Concept stage) and when we can get our mitts on it (first testers will receive access at the end of this month, by invitation only).

Microsoft’s own advertising blog mentions the product, and it seems Looking Glass will collect information from Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr and a bunch of others. Sentiment tracking on the data seems to be included in the plan, but little detail is available as to what other features and filters will be accessible. So it seems for the moment it’s a wait and see kind of thing.

I for one am looking forward to see what Microsoft develops in the space, as there’s a need for some of the big dogs (Microsoft & Google) to get behind doing some Social Media monitoring stuff to add some validity and measurable value to the space.