New Zealand pulls the social media wool over Tourism Australia’s eyes

New Zealand pulls the social media wool over Tourism Australia’s eyes: "

Another week and another Facebook brand crisis. This time the brand that’s been hijacked is Tourism Australia and making matters worse, it’s been duped by arch rival Tourism New Zealand, according to Australian trade publication B&T.

Yesterday (April 1 down under) Tourism Australia launched a $150 (AUS) million advertising campaign called “There’s Nothing Like Australia” in which it aimed to tap into that whole user-generated content thing by inviting people to visit a dedicated microsite and “upload a photo of your most unique and memorable Aussie holiday experience.”

All very social I think you’ll agree, (even overlooking the fact that nearly every tourism authority does this type of campaign and no-one can upload anything until April 15). But Tourism Australia appeared to forget the first rule of social media marketing – you have to be where your social media community is rather than expect them to come to you. That left cheeky Tourism New Zealand to jump into the social void and establish a Twitter account titled “NothinglikeAus“, a similarly named Flickr account and a Facebook page called “Nothing like Australia… Welcome to New Zealand” which featured this message: “love from your friendly neighbours, New Zealand.”

Not to be outdone some other individual quickly set up a parody blog called Nothing Like Australia.net featuring spoof Tourism Australia ads, including one of the late Steve Irwin tangling with a crocodile while holding his baby accompanied by this tagline: “There’s nothing like taking your child to work.”

Within hours New Zealand’s prank was over. The Facebook page was removed, the Flickr accounts sits dormant while the Twitter account points back to Tourism Australia. On its own site Tourism New Zealand wrote: ‘‘So, April 1st is almost over… Thanks to Tourism Australia for having an great sense of humour. We’re looking forward to handing over this page to them real soon. Cheers to everyone for sharing the fun. ~ Love NZ,’’ the Sydney Morning Herald reported. The independent parody blog remains however.

Ultimately all this publicity may well be good for Tourism Australia but for the moment the war of the word of mouth seems to have been won by the Kiwis. As one Tweeter posted: “LOL-I’m actually enticed to visit New Zealand after their latest stunt.”

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Is Murdoch mad or can paywalls promote publishing profits?

Is Murdoch mad or can paywalls promote publishing profits?: "

The great thing about the internet is that we can find out just about anything about just about anyone. Facebook, Twitter and suchlike may have tapped into the voyeur in all of us, but on a more reasonable level, the web’s early moniker of the ‘information super highway’ has never been so apt. When I started out as a journalist less than 20 years ago, if you wanted to find out about the subject you were writing about, you had to trawl libraries for hours and the nature of journalism meant that cuttings services were vital for research purposes for newspaper content. The internet has of course changed all that and made things such as the Encyclopaedia Britannica redundant – even though Microsoft tried their own version in the form of Encarta. If I want to know who is playing for my team on a particular matchday, when Nelson Mandela was incarcerated at Robben Island or which hotel is worth staying in for my next overseas trip, the internet can help me. As time has gone on, newspapers have embraced the internet and added original online content not available in their printed newspapers, together with advertising and competitions that encourage more users. But, especially with the recession squeezing advertising budgets and revenues, it has become harder and harder to monetise the internet even as a big brand. The only thing that newspapers have is information, and there are so many outlets to get it that if one closes down or starts making its access less user-friendly, there are always others to take its place. Rupert Murdoch has had a huge part to play in the media landscape over the past 20 years or so and he rarely gets it wrong (although the London paper was one notable mistake). So when he announced a few months ago that he would start charging for content on his websites, everyone else sat up and took notice. Charging £1 a day or £2 a week is actually not a huge price to pay for content, but with so many other outlets available, will the Times and Sunday Times suffer? The titles have already accepted that they will lose a lot of readers but argue that in order to maintain journalistic standards and ensure the industry survives, this is the only option. But the landscape is changing. Will new revenue really mean less celebrity tittle-tattle or will it simply provide more funds to pay existing costs, with Times Newspapers said to be losing almost £2m a week? I suspect those who expect more investment in proper journalism, more investment in staff training and more investment in the investigative stories that struggle to get funding in these days of instant news may well be disappointed. Points of difference may be in the ‘name’ writers and columnists who current readers buy the papers for anyway rather than invest in hordes of new writers. Any additional revenue will have to go into cutting losses while the public’s lamentable demand for throwaway news and gossip will continue. Try teaching your audience to be interested in something else is surely a hiding to nothing, especially when you can get what you want elsewhere. Unless all other papers follow the paywall route, won’t those left standing simply be left picking up the casual traffic that the Times has already conceded that it will lose? A fine journalist and great friend of mine debated these very points with me today and highlighted how the music industry had to monetise its product online to have any chance of survival. I agree with the analogy even though music is an individual talent which cannot be copied without infringing copyright or succumbing to online piracy. Where newspapers differ is that information, unlike music, cannot be protected in the same way. Journalism will continue to struggle, putting increased demands on writers, until a robust model for monetising print media is devised, perhaps like a Google-style clicks system that are automatically charged at a universal rate by your internet service provider. Sadly, I don’t think paywalls are the answer.

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March 2010: My Search and Social Media news round-up

March 2010: My Search and Social Media news round-up: "

There is so much going on in Search and Social Media that I thought I’d start to cherry pick stories which I find particularly interesting every month to share them with you. These are entirely my choice and I am in no way saying that others are of lesser interest! If there is a story which you think I should have included in this round-up, please let me know.

YouTube launched auto-captioning for videos

YouTube (owned by Google) launched “auto-captioning” earlier this month. Also called speech-to-text, auto-captioning “simply” makes it possible for speech in video to be transcribed into text. Auto-captioning has been trialled by Google since November 09 and has now been rolled out to everywhere.

The benefits of auto-captioning

The most obvious benefit you can think of is for the deaf and hard of hearing. Speech-to-text is a fantastic step towards making video content accessible to them.

But let’s go a bit further. As video content is more widely used every day in education and business training, auto-captioning is going to make it easier for users to search through a video for that exact footage they need to look at.

Last but not least, video captioning is going to make video content indexation by search engines possible. Since Google launched Universal Search we knew that videos were becoming very important, but with auto-captioning, videos are going to become as important as well optimised web pages!

However as auto-captioning is based on speech recognition, one can guess that it’s not a straightforward challenge to tackle. Recent experiments of auto-captioning have been posted on YouTube in the last weeks, and these are not too convincing. Some results are even plain hilarious..(check this one for example http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l9NHag5JvrE)

Nonetheless, backed by universities such as Stanford, Berkeley and Columbia, I think the YouTube auto-captioning project is certainly one of the past month’s most exciting news items. Let’s just give it a bit more time.

Microsoft and Yahoo! given the green light to join forces

Okay, this is not exactly breaking news and was announced at the end of February, but is definitely worth mentioning in this round up.

The European Commission decided that Microsoft and Yahoo! could go ahead in joining forces to provide search services. In the same movement, the US Department of Justice approved of the deal, which it sees as good for competition in the market place. Not that we really expect this long-awaited “marriage” to switfly break Google dominance, but still Microsoft Bing and Yahoo! together represent over 10% of the search market in Europe. By this agreement Bing will now become Yahoo! search engine. As for advertising revenues, Yahoo! will keep content advertising revenues and Microsoft the pay per click ads on Bing.

Microsoft and Yahoo! should be completing their integration outside the US by the end of 2012.

Google pulls out of China

On March 23rd, Google announced it had moved its Chinese Search market operations to Hong Kong. This decision followed consistent disagreements with the Chinese authorities in the last few months over auto-censorship requirements, as well as alleged hacking into human right activists’ googlemail accounts in January. Google is still available to Chinese users, but now Google SERPS for “sensitive” searches are being censored directly (and thus openly) by Chinese firewalls.

Many find it strange, however, that it took Google over 3 years to decide that auto-censorship was no longer acceptable.

The other side of the story is that since it started its operations in China, Google has tried hard to make its mark on the Chinese search and paid search market, but not done so well. The last figures delivered by ComScore (November 2009) for the Chinese search market placed Google second with 15% market share behind the towering Chinese search engine, Baidu (71.3%). Google is also said to have been consistently operating with comparatively low margins in China.

Could there be more than ethical reasons for Google leaving China? Commercially speaking the winner will be Baidu, the Search Engine supported by the Chinese government, but politically speaking? With Google no longer practising auto-censorship, will the true nature of the Chinese democracy become absolutely obvious to at least 15% of Chinese Internet users?

Is Digg Re-inventing Social news sharing?

Digg, the social voting site launched in early 2005 is ranking content (articles, videos and images) based on the number of votes received. The site also offers selective access to content by categories (technology, business, science etc). The model worked great until mid-2007, but with the rise of new social sharing platforms such as Facebook, Youtube and Twitter, Digg lost momentum and was on the decline. But with the overhaul of the site announced on March 13th, will Digg make a strong come back whilst profoundly changing the social news sharing landscape?

The new Digg will be all about personalisation. At the moment we share content with our friends in different places. The idea behind the new Digg is to enable users to aggregate in one place all content recommended by the friends that they follow on Twitter and Facebook. Digg will also suggest content based on users’ location and interests.

Finally, the new Digg should become a major promotional platform for online publishers. The site will offer an array of posting and commenting possibilities which should potentially boost the number of users. Digg also plans to develop revenue share, analytics enabled, with online publishers.

Digg will roll out these changes in the next coming weeks and months. Content publishers keep an eye on Digg!

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Controversy and comedy: Four Lions

Controversy and comedy: Four Lions: "

Funny, satirical, Chris Morris’s brains behind it…I can’t wait.

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A Bridge Too Far

A Bridge Too Far: "

The other morning I was woken from my slumber by REM’s Shiny Happy People, provoking what can only be described as a Fred West style assault on the radio alarm clock.

Today the first words to enter my transom from the badly bruised and nervy alarm clock was a reminder that Chelsea had crashed out of the Champions League in front of their home fans. Slowly, but surely the alarm is working its way back into my good books.

There is nothing good about Chelsea Football Club nor its oafish fans and I should know. For most of my life I lived in Worcester Park which is a Chelsea stronghold, often tripping in the grooves in the pavement made by the years of knuckles dragging against the ground. In two pubs The Huntsman and the ghastly Tone’s, the latter decked out in memorabilia and the location for fan interviews in a feature length documentary about Chelsea, a bad word about ‘Wisey’ or Zola (Gianfranco not Emmanuel) could quite easily result in a glassing.

Yet where did they come from? They weren’t there when I was growing up in the 1980’s and Chelsea for much of that time weren’t even in the top division. Look carefully at their fat, bald or shaven sweaty heads. That isn’t dandruff you can see but filings from where they’ve emerged from the woodwork at the scent of money and success.

Chelsea weren’t even in contention before being fuelled and revved up by the billions of a Russian oligarch. Instead the Champions League has become something of an open wound that now festers with the failure of every season. With every departure from the tournament there is also recrimination usually directed at some refereeing decision and a UEFA or Sepp Blatter conspiracy. If truth be told there have even been times they have deserved to win the thing, on the cusp of doing so, only to throw it away spectacularly.

Level with Manchester Utd on penalites in Moscow, the fulfillment of that ambition and struggle seemed to come to ferment in the perfect scripted ending. Up stepped John Terry, Mr Chelsea, as he was known around Worcester Park, Cheam and the Kings Road, cut him, they say, and he bleeds blue (though that has most recently proven to be not blue but the murky green of greed, avarice and money – much of it the ‘hush’ variety) representative of all that is Chelsea and all that is ugly about football.

This was every football purists nightmare. The man Chelsea loved unquestionably was about to take the kick to win them their first ever Champions League in a moment the fans of CFC would treasure for the rest of their lives and the last thing they would see to make them smile on their mortal passing. This was about to be the defining moment of their lives.

He missed. He slipped, hit the post and fucking missed. Man Utd scored. Chelsea lost. Within seconds, without prior forethought, I was straight in the car roaring down to Tone’s in Cheam. There, as expected, were about 100 Chelsea fans sobbing into their pints and walking into walls, blue and white flags on the ground soaked in beer and spittle. I mingled. Felt their pain. Not dissimilar from when a killer joins in the search party knowing that there is no life to be found except for a grisly body. Sure enough it was only minutes before they started fighting amongst themselves and I left them to it with the sounds of howls, breaking glasware and recrimination in my wake.

Last year I caught the last minutes of the Chelsea – Barca semi-final poolside from Bellagio in Las Vegas. Having completely forgotten about the game, the heart sank at the scoreline. As the final seconds ticked away with Chelsea leading Barcelona 1-0 and having been denied in all probability two cast-iron penalities. Even in these opulent surroundings and 100 degree heat, I found myself dragged back to Cheam, to Tone’s and pictured the scene, just as I could see them signing and celebrating at Stamford Bridge. Chelsea weren’t just winning, they’d dominated and battered the best team in the world into submission. This year was, at last, going to be their year and we all had to brace ourselves.

And then up popped Andres Iniesta. Barcelona mustered one shot after 94 minutes of football. It flew into the top corner. Goal. Game over. Out Goodnight. She Who Loathed Football, sat in the sun in her bikini, glared at me disapprovingly over her mango prosecco as I pounded the bar with my fists. All I needed was a few more seconds of those uncomprehending, wounded, twisted pie-fed faces, the faces who’d been taunting and celebrating seconds before. Then I was done. Back to the pool, back to the sun and a fresh round of cocktails ordered, knowing that we can rejoice for another year.

Now they’ve not even made the semis. Not only taken apart and humbled at home in the first qualifying round, but at the hands of their own beloved ‘Special One’, Jose Mourinho and his Inter Milan side. ‘Mr Chelsea’ left the pitch, face snarling like a Rottweiler with a finger up its posterior, spewing bile and spitting feathers. Immediately followed the post-mortem, ingraciousness and high-pitched wailing of another UEFA conspiracy. The rest of the right-minded football world looked on from Shepherds Bush to the San Siro: shiny happy people.

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Tell brands what you think of them on Brandkarma

Tell brands what you think of them on Brandkarma: "

Brandkarma is a new website that aims to 'help everyone make better brand choices and influence brand behaviour for good'...

Launched as a personal project by Publicis Mojo's Craig Davis, the website feeds in news stories about brands but essentially relies on the input of its users to rate how well brands are performing. Rankings from the perspectives of the customers of the company, employees, suppliers, investors, and of how the brand is performing environmentally are all featured.

These ratings (called 'doos' on the website) are then represented by 'karma flowers', offering a quick visual of what people are saying about each brand (Febreze's karma flower shown top). More detailed comments and news can then be read and shared with others via Facebook and Twitter etc. As users engage with the site they are also rewarded by travelling up a 'doo' ranking system.

Brandkarma needs the input of its users - if enough people engage with it, it can potentially become a powerful influence on brands' behaviour. However, the site can be a teensy bit confusing to new visitors, so the makers have created this handy guide explaining how to use it. Visit Brandkarma at brandkarma.com.

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how to get people to build your product and market it for you

how to get people to build your product and market it for you: "

Google challenges people to ‘model their town’ using Google SketchUp, then uses the models on Google Earth. I believe this is what Adrian would call creating value streams for all parties. Smart.

Read more here

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