Weekly digest 25th May

Short and sweet this week because we’re all tired of hearing about Facebook’s IPO. Well, aren’t we?

Last week’s poll results… and this week’s poll

Thanks to the handful (literally) of you who responded to last week’s poll. 100% of those who took part answered that they did not trust Facebook to keep their information private…

This week, I’m asking you to help me with a bit of research. So… here’s the question: Do you have a television set in your home that is connected to the internet?

It’ll take you 10 seconds to answer, so please take part here:

http://poll.fm/3q5oo

Facebook launches a Camera app

The $1billion purchase of Instagram starts to make sense as Facebook have now launched their own camera application that is eerily similar to Instagram. Facebook Camera, which is now available in the App Store for free, dramatically improves upon the photo capabilities offered by Facebook’s main apps.

It’s currently only available for iOS owners (sorry all you Androiders) and will allow you to upload multiple photos and apply filters in much the same way as Instagram users will be familiar with. This really highlights Facebook’s swift move to mobile and Mark Zuckerberg has made no secret of prioritising mobile integration. Worryingly, he hasn’t yet worked out how to monetise the mobile users and until he does, investors will be concerned that Facebook’s already sliding share-price won’t pick back up to IPO levels.

I find it interesting that Facebook have clearly decided that they have too much functionality and too many strings to their bow to attempt to harness them all in one application. I actually think this is a good idea. Due to the limited screen size available to mobile applications, navigation needs to be extremely intuitive and therefore the site architecture not too deep. Splitting the Facebook offering into separate apps enables them to keep the user experience simple and highly targeted.

Even really bad television is social…

Watching television and movies precisely because they are so bad is not a new phenomenon. However, now it is becoming something of a sport on Twitter and you can join in using #hatewatching.

Negative social buzz may not be a good thing, but “hate watching” is an entertaining activity — driven by short and imaginative Twitter wit — and by extension it could drive a little viewership on its own under the umbrella “all publicity is good publicity.” That certainly seemed the case during the premiere episode of The GC, with social buzz driving increased ratings during the course of the show. However, ratings have since dropped indicating that such negative-driven spikes in viewing will not be sustainable. In the end, content is still king and quality is important.

Health warning – while “hate watching” may seem a harmless activity, it can also lead to disillusionment and anger if channelled in the wrong way. Steer clear of Michael Bay movies and anything starring Danny Dyer and you should be fine.

This week’s pretty picture…

Weekly digest 18th May

Is Facebook a fad? And do you trust it?

According to a recent poll, half of Americans think that Facebook is nothing more than a passing fad.

An Associated Press-CNBC poll conducted between 3rd and 7th May this year found that half of all Americans considered Facebook to be nothing more than a passing fad.  In addition, 50% of those polled thought that the likely asking price for shares in the upcoming IPO was too high.

Take a look at the infographic at the bottom of this page for a response to this. If you think Facebook isn’t worth its $100billion valuation, it might make you think otherwise.

Respondents were split (43% in favour, 46% against) when considering whether Facebook would have long-term success.

59% of all those surveyed did not trust Facebook to keep their information private; just 13% showed significant trust in the company.

And 83% of people claim to hardly ever or never click on an advertisement on the site, along with 54% who don't feel at all safe buying goods or services from Facebook-hosted links.

DO YOU TRUST FACEBOOK TO KEEP YOUR INFORMATION PRIVATE? Take part in my online poll here:

http://poll.fm/3pk9e

Shazam gets off to a good start with ITV

Last Saturday saw the launch of Shazam-enabled advertising on ITV in the UK. It has been hailed a great success by the “media discovery provider”, with around 50,000 viewers using the Shazam app to tag adverts during special commercial breaks in the Britain’s Got Talent final.

Viewers who had the Shazam app on their smartphone were invited to enter contests to win tickets to summer festivals from Pepsi MAX and an Olympic Ceremony package from chocolate manufacturer Cadbury by tagging adverts.

Here’s a quote from Simon Daglish, Group Commercial Sales Director at ITV: “We’re thrilled that the first UK Shazam-enabled ads achieved this level of interaction in Saturday’s amazing Britain’s Got Talent final - proving there is a real appetite from consumers to go deeper with quality content including spot advertising. We’re very excited about talking to all our advertisers about this exclusive new opportunity to drive real-time engagement with their brands.”

This needs to be put in some perspective though. While 50,000 sounds like a good figure, the BGT final averaged an audience of 11.9 million. So actually, the engagement rate with the Shazam ads hovered around the 0.4% mark. When you scale that down to normal schedule ratings, the figures start to look pretty small. When you then transpose that to the far smaller New Zealand market, they become smaller still.

Mediaworks have been running a similar project with local suppliers Pluk. They have so far had around 50,000 downloads of the app, however engagement rates have remained extremely low.

My feeling is that these second screen advertising extensions will only work in the context of value-added second screen engagement around our own shows. Globally, second screen solutions already exist that allow viewers to engage with shows while they’re live on the air and then serve up advertising extensions timed to coincide with the linear advertising on the television screen. This makes much more sense as a consumer proposition and is a huge motivator for broadcasters to get some control over the second screen.

Background…

I’ve realised that not everyone will know of Shazam so I thought I should explain. It is basically the audio equivalent of a barcode reader. As a smartphone application, it is able to recognise the unique audio patterns of millions of audio tracks, from songs to pre-programmed tv shows and adverts – in fact, anything with a unique soundtrack that has pre-programmed into the Shazam database - and then serve up content specific to that pattern.

Everything you ever wanted to know about mobile use in New Zealand…

I had to share this site with you…

http://www.ourmobileplanet.com/en/graph/?wave=wave2&age=all&gender=all&active=country

CBS launches “CBS Connect”

Social TV continues to mature and become the main web strategy for major TV networks. CBS.com has just launched CBS Connect, “a new social hub connecting fans with each other and CBS stars.”

The site will be a single destination where they will aggregate content from Twitter and Facebook across all of CBS’ programming. The new platform is aimed to allow fans of CBS shows to connect even further with the stars of the shows. This is CBS taking their social TV offerings to the next level and they’ll be using Skype, one of their launch partners, to hold live chat events.

This is yet another example of a global broadcaster reimagining the way their viewers interact with their programming. I was involved in a similar project with ITV, aggregating social conversations around key shows into a system we launched as ITV Live. The idea was to use social media as a conduit between ITV and the viewer, strengthening the relationship and closing the gap between the two. The stronger the bond, the more brand loyalty and advocacy, and ultimately the higher the ratings.

I’m currently working with Tom Cotter on putting together a proposal for something similar here. TVNZ has utilised a social stream aggregator in the past with Grandstand (around the Rugby World Cup) and while that wasn’t perfect, a catch-all solution that covers conversations across all our programmes may have more traction. I’ll keep you updated.

In the meantime take a look at CBS Connect here.

Facebook add apps and negative sentiment feedback to their Insights tool
Earlier this week, Facebook introduced app ratings and negative feedback metrics to their in-built insights tool. The idea is to give developers and brands a better understanding of how users respond applications within Facebook.

Interestingly, Facebook already use these metrics to decide what apps will appear in users’ newsfeeds and also what will be promoted in their recently announced App Center. Having transparency of these metrics will empower brands to tweak and improve their apps to gain more reach within the Facebook platform.

The new app ratings dashboard in app insights will show how users have rated an app on a scale of one to five stars. Admins can view ratings as absolute numbers or relative percentages across different demographics, including age and gender, country and locale.

So for the first time, we’ll be able to produce applications like “Shortland Street Lookalikes” and “The Revenge Game” and know exactly what different demographics thought of it. I’m all for being able to learn as we go along, so this can only be good news for us.

While we’re talking Facebook apps, Method Studios are currently putting the finishing touches on our new Facebook competition entry form. This will allow us to run a competition entry application within any of our brand pages to capture names, email addresses and (if required) even photos and videos. It should be a fun and rewarding way of engaging our viewers. If anyone wants any further details, feel free to give me a shout.

New Zealand are ahead of the game… again
Once again we appear to be Facebook’s testing ground. Following the rollout of Timeline, which happened in New Zealand a month before the rest of the world, we are now privy to another Facebook development that can’t be accessed anywhere else.

Controversially, NZers now have the ability to pay to highlight your own personal post. In the same way as page’s sponsored stories, users will now have the ability to pay a small amount (likely to be $0.80) to ensure that their post makes it into all their friends’ newsfeeds.

It calls into doubt Facebook’s long-term promise never to charge users for using their platform. Opening up a pay option means that users may soon be competing with each other to spread their news among their social circles. And that may make the platform untenable for users unwilling to part with their petty cash.

My hunch on this (purely subjective) is that this will never see the light of day in other territories. Facebook recently drew up a document entitled “35 things that could destroy our company”. Spreading updates to newsfeeds based on how much a user spends on it could well be one of these things. I do wonder if Facebook are on the brink of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.

The below infographic seems to be a far more sensible approach for Facebook to take to justify its IPO valuation…

Interesting picture of the week

Weekly digest 11th May

The future of TV is multi-screen

I’ve been working recently on pulling together some top lines around the future of TV. The real buzz term at the moment is Social TV and there’s general acceptance that this will be the next stage in the ever-accelerating changing face of television.

However, while people seem to accept that Social TV will be the content proposition of the future, nobody really seems to understand what it means. Simply throwing Twitter hashtags on screen or incorporating a throw to Facebook won’t cut the mustard for much longer.

Over the past couple of years, we’ve witnessed a massive convergence of screens – think how different your television, personal computer and mobile phone used to look just a few years ago. Now you can watch videos, listen to the radio, email, Skype, browse the internet and most importantly communicate with others on any of those devices.

And it’s the proliferation of communication technologies across all these screens, being driven by the explosion of social media, that’s changing the way audiences consume television programming. More than ever, we need to think of a television programme as an event. It is this event that will drive conversation, engagement and ultimately create meaningful entertainment, and it is therefore this event that we need to ensure is alluring, remarkable (in the true sense of the word) and ultimately shareable.

Here’s a great quote from Twitter’s director of media partnerships: “Twitter lets people feel plugged in to a real-time conversation. In the future, I can’t imagine a major event where the audience doesn’t become part of the story itself.”

That’s probably the most important thing to recognise. We no longer tell the whole story through our programming. We now start the conversation through the “event” we broadcast in our schedule. That’s just the start of the storytelling. Our audience then brings its own values to shape, contextualise, socialise and customise the story in their own unique way. They now are a crucial part of the story, whether we like it or not.

So viewers now have a different relationship with the programme they’re watching. We need to think about what this relationship with the storylines, characters and elements looks like. Equally, we should be thinking about the relationships being forged between viewers themselves. And finally we need to think about what those relationships specifically look like on each screen.

How does the show develop a relationship with its audience on mobile, tablets, online and on-air? Only by cracking all of these screens will we be able to innovate in an ever changing landscape.

As Brian Solis says: “It takes vision. It takes creativity and imagination. It takes innovation. Most importantly, it takes the architecture of experiences to engage, enchant and activate viewers across multiple screens.”

Although… not everyone agrees

While the two-screen experience (TV and handheld or laptop) is the predominant platform for social TV interaction now, Jordan Bitterman (the head of social marketing practice at the global digital media shop Digitas) thinks that viewing and social interaction in the future will be integrated into one screen.

This is an interestingly contrasting opinion considering the swathe of consensus for a multi-screen future. It will be fascinating to see how producers utilise the dynamic potential of internet enabled television though. There is no reason why interactive engagement mechanisms can’t be integrated into a single screen experience. I just wonder whether broadcasters and content producers will be able to persuade digital natives to aim their full attention at just one screen. Without incorporating all screens, there’s the risk of a broadcaster losing their audiences to competing content/communication across other devices.

The BBC launches a second screen strategy

The BBC is going to use companion screen apps to enhance the enjoyment of programmes but also introduce audiences to what can often be a wealth of programme related information and interactivity online. The broadcaster will launch its first companion screen app this September in the form of a play-along game for Antiques Roadshow, a gentle Sunday night affair where the public bring family treasures for experts to analyse and value. The BBC is harnessing the fact that most viewers already try to second-guess the experts with their own valuations. You will be able to play the game whether you are watching live or on-demand.

It’s interesting that the BBC have chosen a programme aimed at an older demo to with which to launch this functionality. Traditionally we think of second screen engagement as being the preserve of Generation Y or C, but it’s clear that the Beeb don’t buy that. Time will tell whether they’re right or not and I’ll keep you updated in September.

The BBC clearly believe that show-related companion activities on smartphones, tablets and even the PC are a way to explore new creative opportunities. Ownership of the applications themselves will lie with the production teams - this is crucial. The production department will drive the format, while the technology development team will help them realise their vision.

The future of television will not be dictated by a social media strategy. It will be shaped by programme producers with a genuine desire to create meaningful experiences for their audiences.

Interesting picture of the week

Weekly digest 4th May

The GC trends on Twitter

No doubt about the most talked about show of the week. TV3’s ‘The GC’ has become New Zealand’s most talked about show on Twitter, with six of the country’s top trending topics and even making it to the global list. Over 10,000 tweets were sent about the show which, if nothing else, goes to show that Twitter is a viable platform here. Much of the conversation has been negative in tone so without sentiment tracking, it’s hard to know what value TV3 would have got out of this chatter. TVNZ is about to launch with a social media monitoring tool called Brandtology which will empower us to monitor the sentiment of conversation around our own launches giving us more insight into social engagement than simple volume.

Interestingly, the high volume of conversation on Twitter has also been mirrored on Facebook, with The GC page has receiving almost 10000 likes so far. However, that’s only about a thousand more than the “Cancel the GC” Facebook group. Speaking of which, image of the week has to go to this artistic impression of the experience of watching the show…

LinkedIn buys SlideShare for $119 million

The world’s largest professional network LinkedIn has bought one of the world’s largest professional content sharing networks. LinkedIn currently has 161M members while SlideShare attracts 29M unique visitors per month. Together they’ll have the power to connect professionals to each other through either social interaction or content.

TVNZ can utilise both these platforms to strengthen our trade and employment brand as well as to strengthen connections with other brands. On an individual level, SlideShare is a great way of discovering and spreading professional knowledge. If you don’t use either platform, feel free to give me a shout and I’ll happily take you through them.

Facebook is all action

Facebook announced on Wednesday that their long awaited “action links” are now available. This gives developers the ability to create custom actions within Facebook beyond the “like” button. So now we could have an “add to playlist” button or a “watch this” button around our video content.

If we want to get playful with this, there’s nothing stopping us using other verbs like “hate” or “eat” – you can see how these might fit with our soap villains and recipes (I think it’s that way around). Regardless of the creative application, there’s definitely scope for us to use this to place our content in more of a genuine social context.

Social media is an extension of entertainment and used to listen, rather than speak
A recent Hollywood Reporter study in the US suggested that 88% of people consider social media sites to be entertainment. Among Generation-C respondents (Connected Generation of digital natives) the two favourite pastimes are viewing social networking sites and listening to music, finishing ahead of watching TV shows, movies, or video clips, or instant messaging.

Multitasking also seems to be the method of choice when people do choose to watch the telly, with 79% of those surveyed reporting that they log onto Facebook while watching television. Overall, when asked how they participate in social media, 67% reported listening to and reading what others say, while just 33% said they express thoughts and opinions.

15% of Twitter users seek journalists and reporters, compared with only 9% of Facebook users, and actors are sought on Twitter by 41% of users, versus 32% of Facebook users.

This backs up my belief that people choose to engage with brands and causes on Facebook, whereas on Twitter they seek a more personal connection. That makes Twitter a great fit for harnessing the power of our on-screen talent and work is going into this in a news context as we speak.

NBC makes politics a game

In America, NBC and msnbc.com launched the NBC Politics iPad and iPhone app and while it features political news and video (which are really mandatory offerings), an interactive game lets users take on the pundits and play their own election scenarios.

Political junkies start with a blank battleground map or pick from NBC’s current projection or past election results. The name of the game is to predict which states will fall — or will likely fall — to Obama or Romney, to total 270 electoral votes for the win. Users can test out different scenarios, play along with NBC News experts and create personalized outcomes with the chance to see their map on-air or online. They can then share their maps with their friends and there are rewards available for those who come closest to the real outcome.

The NZ market may makes such offerings unviable in the political arena, but this is a great example of a network thinking outside the box and creating content that is specifically tailored to the platforms on which it will appear. Social content needs to be involved, fun, shareable and remarkable, not just a straight duplication of traditional broadcast content. NBC have done that brilliantly with this app and we should think about how we can do the same around our key properties.

Interesting chart of the week