To pin or not to pin?

Amnesia Razorfish, an agency of many facets and faces, has joined the Pinterest train. Why may you ask? Well because it’s the big man on campus, socially media speaking.

Plus we get to pin cool stuff like this:

Freddy Mercury riding Darth Vader.

According to Google Ad Planner, Pinterest drew 38 million unique visitors globally in March, which is up from 23.7 million in February and 3.5 million in September last year.

The Los Angeles Times reported how Pinterest is ranked the third-most-popular social networking site behind Facebook and Twitter and the trend is set to rise.

There are articles dedicated to fighting or nurturing Pinterest addictions and Repinly is a page created for the sole purpose of monitoring the most trending Pinterest topics (Food & Drink for now).

So it seems that every marketer, trend observer and media analyst wants a piece of the Pinterest pie, with twitter streams full of answers to the power in a pin.

However for brands, Pinterest is not always the miracle solution for reaching target audiences and, particularly in Australia, the site is yet to prove itself to cautious digital strategists.

For now, these Australian based statistics, found using Google DoubleClick Ad planner, show that while Pinterest is a creative and connected platform, it may not be suited to everybody.

March Pinterest demographics

Pinterest in Australia attracts an older audience, with 34% of users in the 45-54 age bracket.

Of these users, an overwhelming majority (62%) attended ‘some college’ and based on the ‘Audience Interests’ below, the types of colleges become clear.

The most interesting statistic shows that where globally women comprise 72% of pinners, in Australia men are leading the game taking their 52% cut of people pinning.

So what does this mean? Are Australian men less averse to the pictures of cupcakes, Martha Stewart-esque home renovations and wedding dresses dominating Pinterest?

This ostentatious display of everything girly is responsible for the Pinterest inspired site, Gentlemint, that with its mustache logo and promise to be a ‘mint of manly things’ abhors anything with glitter or kittens.

Just like Pinterest, Gentlemint is invitation only and once accepted, men can pin images on “one of the more manly websites on the planet”.

So, what’s on Pinterest that Australian men go gaga over?

Kristie

@kristiebeattie

Advertisement

Is Pinterest the Next Social Commerce Game Changer?

Social and search continue to be essential inbound marketing channels. And while Google’s generating a lot of discussion around its new social network, Google+, another website is actually driving more inbound traffic: Pinterest.

Read full article and view infographic…

@danKrause

Razorfish Outlook Report 11 (vol 10)

Our new global Razorfish Outlook Report 2011 (vol 10) is out people.

If you’re not familiar with the report it is compiled by Razorfish in the U.S. and provides an in-depth analysis of emerging trends in media, technology and creativity.

A major theme from  this year is collaboration, content and relationships defining a new approach in media.

The year in digital media is reviewed here and other hot topics include:

Game Mechanics

How the Social Cloud can Accelerate Brand Interactions

Forget Mobile, Think Multiscreen

The Importance of Agency Collaboration

The Report is also available in presentation format here and you can follow the conversation on Twitter using the hashtag #orv10.

Happy reading.

A little Google+ experiment

A Google+ experiment where you can meet some of Australia’s most provocative characters, just  add them your circles.

Web Vigilantes being banned from social media sites.

Cyber crime and Twitter scams make good headlines but somewhere underground there are a few concerned citizens that take a vigilante approach to dealing with these scammers and fraudsters. For instance http://www.419eater.com/ bait scammers using highly creative methods to engage Nigerian conmen, waste their time and then attempt expose them. There’s also the Salty droid who names and shames would-be conmen who utilize Twitter and other channels to exploit consumers. But it turns out that life of a digital freedom fighter is not easy.

Here’s the problem : Many scams consist of intelligent, organised individuals and groups. They syndicate and they collaborate, and they actively wage a reverse war on the people trying to expose them. Ironically scammers are using the same processes created to report spammers to shut down the people trying to expose them.

Sadly YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Vimeo accounts etc belonging to web vigilantes trying to alert people to scams are being shut down faster than than those belonging to the scammers. How do I know this?  Read on:

The Sad Story of the SaltyDroid

I’m not sure how I first came across the Droid on Twitter but I became interested in the Droid’s outspoken ‘attacks’ on certain individuals. Some of the people it was targeting had HUGE followings on Twitter, some with high profiles and. SaltyDroid had no qualms in confronting them directly in public view and alerting other users. I have no reason to doubt that SaltyDroid’s only purpose was to expose people it believed were engaged in unethical practices (such as this one which was exposed). 

I noticed a few months ago that SaltyDroid (which had a few thousand Twitter followers) just ‘vanished’. The blog was still alive and kicking so I wrote an email to find out what the story.

Me: “What happened? Where did your accounts go?”

Salty Droid: “I lost. I’m basically banned from the Internet.  Twitter, Facebook, Vimeo, Bluehost, Youtube, etc. Everywhere I go the scammers file false complaints and horrific lies about me.  The web companies all default to caving in and banning you rather than risking "trouble".  Most of them, and especially Twitter, do it with zero notice, process, or chance to respond. It says sad things about the state of free speech on the all important fringes … IMO.

I don’t have time to fight the web companies and the scammers … so I just gave up on the web companies.  I’m on a special free speech server where some really great people take special care of me … and otherwise I’m silenced.

And the Twitter bannings are not as bad as the death threats, the private investigators, the plots against my personal life, etc.”

 

The Droid also let me know that although he began his pursuit anonymously it wasn’t long before a syndicate of scammers found him at which point the he decided it would be safer to unmask the droid. Revealing himself as a lawyer it  gives the whole saga an even bigger sense of irony.

In summary, it’s easier for a scammer to have a web vigilante shut down than vice versa. The Droid is now absent from all social networks and yet the people being named in his blog continue to tweet freely etc. In an age where consumers are able to interact so easily with anyone from close friends to complete strangers there is no easy and quick way of distributing warning messages to others in the case of genuine scams. That’s a service SaltyDroid was attempting to provide before being shut down in social media circles. The internet at present sometimes appears lawless and wide open territory for the scammers, and the presence of government and local authority is limited, and at best slow moving. I’m not condoning Salty droids methods or even agreeing with all his posts but freedom of speech is important so I certainly don’t want to see people prepared to take on these issues disappear especially with the bad guys roaming free so easily.

Beware wolves in birds clothing: Currently I know of one major Twitter account belonging to a convicted spammer in Australia with close to 100,000 followers. This person appears free to be able to act on Twitter regardless of their history. Sadly the only way you are likely to hear the name of this person is via someone like SaltyDroid.

What can you do?
1. Send this link on to people in the industry.

2. Copy and paste this story – reproduce it in your own blog.

3. Help Re-activate or read the Saltydroid: If you know someone who works in Twitter or Facebook etc ask them to reinstate the banned SaltyDroid accounts eg:  http://twitter.com/saltydroid

4. Support freedom of speech but don’t be a web vigilante. Salty Droid is a lawyer in real life and is better equipped to deal with bad people on the internet. Report web crime here:
http://www.ic3.gov/default.aspx – USA
https://www.scamwatch.gov.au/content/index.phtml/tag/reportascam/ – Australia
http://www.met.police.uk/fraudalert/ – UK

Above: Clearly Charles Bronson wouldn’t have lasted long in Facebook or Twitter.

Cheers,

@eunmac

Disclaimer to be quite clear: The opinion above is that of the author only and does not represent the views of Amnesia Razorfish etc.

Share pretty pictures with Instagram

Last week saw the launch of the free micro-photo-blogging (coined) iPhone/iPod app Instagram, which allows to to quickly share pictures from your iDevice to share with friends through Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Flickr and the application itself. In that time, it has reportedly been downloaded over 100K times.

Instagram works like a streamlined Tumblr, managing the photo snapping, titling and even location tagging through the Foursquare API. In addition to making the whole photo-sharing thing quick and easy, Instagram lets you apply one of a whole bunch of image filters that make your shots look all arty/old and suprisingly not naff.

The shot above is one I took fairly recently.

Check it out!

The Death of Social Media?

Most morbid social media campaign yet? The gist: Take a photo of yourself DEAD and you could end up in next year’s horror movie Redd Inc. According to the company there have been a few ‘inadmissable photos’ so far.

Above: User generated death.
http://www.reddincthemovie.com/Submissions/Art/Fake-your-own-death/Page2/Art225

 

 
The website: http://www.reddincthemovie.com

It’s making the news… Article about it in the Daily Tele.

Project launch: The Fresh Start Project

“We wanna make this digital” is the cry of many a client when they enter their ‘digital’ agency with a shiny new TVC and poster under their arm. Too many agencies will take a client’s TVC (and money) and make it ‘digital’ simply by putting a browser around it or sending it’s animated cousin off to Double Click.

I’m proud to say that’s not what we do here at Amnesia Razorfish. When our client, realestate.com.au, shared their really nice ATL spring campaign with us, we got really fired-up by the challenge of making this campaign come to life in the digital space. We didn’t want to simply TELL consumers that realestate.com.au helps give people a fresh start, we wanted to actually GIVE someone a fresh start. Some one that really needed a fresh start.

Say hello to The Fresh Start Project from realestate.com.au.  The aim of the campaign is simple. Build a a new home, for a family in need, through people’s use of realestate.com.au. As users interact with realestate.com.au they collect ‘bricks’ which they can donate to the 1 million brick target. In partnership with Habitat for Humanity Australia, the house will be built. There’s no augmented or virtual reality here. Sure – it won’t cause world peace, but it will make a real difference to a real family in real need. And that’s why I love this project so much. Hope you do too.

Visit the site >

Criticker is the social thinking man’s IMDB.

The IMDB business is almost 20 years old (true, just 10 days to go) and although we all love it the site hasn’t changed much or matured beyond its web 1.0 status. Yes it has 57 million visitors every month but it’s not without flaws. Indeed I think there are some interesting lessons to be learned in how to utilise social and crowdsourcing from the little movie recommendations site Criticker.com especially when it comes to movie rankings – read on:

 
Aliens – only 8.5/10 ? Pffft come on it’s a 9.1 easy!

So here’s the problem (and I will bet this has happened to you at some point): You watch a movie, love it only to find IMDB users gave it a crummy 6.5 out of 10 (or vice versa – a crap movie gets a good score on IMDB). The issue of course is that movies are rated by everyone INCLUDING people who also hate the sort of movies you love. In short IMDB does nothing more than merely aggregate the mass opinion of everyone. In the real world we make many choices based on trusted opinions, not just those of the many.

Enter Criticker…
Criticker calls itself a ‘movie recommendation engine’. How does it work? It calculates ratings by analysing movies that YOU like/dislike then it finds OTHER PEOPLE with the same likes/dislikes and then gives you a Probable Score Indicator (PSI) based on the result. In short it ranks movies based on scores from people just like you.

The outcome is that when you search for a movie, your Criticker predicted score is much more likely to be the score you would actually give it. Here’s an example: The film I searched for here is Clockwork Orange. My PSI (probable score) on Cricketer is adjusted to 79/100 (that rating is based on other ratings of people like me). On IMDB it is rated en masse at 8.5/10. The reality here is that Cricketer is much closer than IMDB (I’d probably give it a 75).

Social web 2.0
I’ve been using Criticker for 18 months, I’ve scored about 230 movies and I find the more data I give it, the better it becomes at predicting my scores. Bottom line – this is a truly intelligent and useful crowdsourcing tool and it works. I love it.

BTW: Here’s my profile on Criticker… feel free to hate the movies I ❤ 😉
http://www.criticker.com/profile/eunmac

Oh PS: If you like it, pop them a donation – this is a startup run by a couple of movie buffs and they need support.

YouTique – The YouTube boutqiue from French Connection

Don’t you just hate it when something you’ve thought of and presented gets made and launched by someone that isn’t you or your client. Say hello to French connection’s YouTique:

@handypearce

Have you ever wondered what a tree would say if it could talk?

… no.

Today I feel ashamed of the the industry in which I work. Although I love this idea and the experimental spirit of the project, it somehow feels wrong. Is nothing safe from the internet? Leave the trees alone is what I say.

@handypearce

Kitty criminal – the viral story of CatBinLady

“I was walking home from work and saw this cat wander out in front of me. I don’t know what came over me, but I suddenly thought it would be funny to put it in the wheelie bin, which was right beside me.”

Happens to the best of us, eh? This is how 45 year old Mary Bale from Coventry in the UK described the bizarre lapse of judgement that has catapulted her to global interweb fame in the space of a few days.

Lola the cat’s owner, Darryl Mann, heard her piteous yowling inside the wheelie bin outside his home fifteen hours later. Unluckily for Mrs Bale, her random act of kitty cruelty was captured on Darryl’s security cameras and promptly uploaded to YouTube by his wife, Stephanie. It wasn’t long before the resourcefulness of crowds tracked her down, and now she’s news from the Washington Post to the Sydney Morning Herald.

Her name, address, manager’s phone number have been posted online; there are at least 8 Facebook pages denouncing her villainy (not counting ‘Death to Mary Bale’, removed by Facebook). The Sun newspaper in the UK has published a Flash whack-a-mole game (renamed Whack-cat-woman) allowing users to smack Mary’s wicked head as it pops out of wheelie bins.

Back on YouTube there’s a video entitled ‘Cruel Cat Dumps Woman In Bin (Revenge of Cat)’ in which the tables are turned – a man in a Sylvester the Cat suit dumps an old lady in a wheelie bin.

Mary’s even got a fake twitter account in her name, CatBinLady, which has her tweeting pathological random acts of weirdness as she goes through her day: “Just kicked the head off next door’s gnome. For a joke. Who’s laughing now though? Not me. Not me.”

In short – she’s gone VIRAL! In just days.

While notorious Mary is barricaded at home, pilloried by the world’s media, menaced by crowds outside her house and expecting to lose her job, you’ll be pleased to hear that Lola has recovered from her ordeal purrrfectly.

Crust Free Pizza Fail

When talking about Twitter accounts which do it well – which engage users, spark conversation and create evangelists, I’m usually not one to go past @Crust_pizza, who do it right.

Their Twitter account has risen to huge popularity using the Weekly #crustfreepizzafriday competition which – every Friday – is practically viral.

Their day-to-day content is targeted at the younger audience, with videos drawn from the vein of Funniest Home videos, music tracks which they’re into, movie trailers, in addition to a sprinkling of corporate news like store openings. And, perfectly, they respond to customers in realtime.

However, today they tweeted this:

What, did they put the Work Experience kid on Twitter for the day?! More on this, after the jump.

Life Beyond Social: The Next Big Thing?

Now the wheels are finally in motion on the Social Media train, I find myself becoming increasingly keen to focus on the next big thing, and the approach to make it all a reality.

But first thing first: what IS the next big thing?

For me, the next significant phase in marketing is a [much deeper] convergence of the real and digital worlds, in a way that will not only amaze, but adds value to our every day activities.

OK, before I go off into crazy ideas land, I’d like to say that Real:Digital Convergence isn’t a diversion from Social Media. It’s a build on it.

Social Networking has enabled us to locate and connect with many more like-minded people than would be possible for the majority of us in the real-world. And thanks to that, we’re able to efficiently distill the masses of information on the internet, through [explicit and implicit] recommendation from those like-minded people, on what’s worth a look/read/buy and what’s not.

R:D convergence simply extends the ability to do the same distilling of information [to aid fast & informed decision-making] in the real world.

So now to the fun part: what it could look like.

Sixth Sense
If I were a VC, I’d be backing MIT labs’ Sixth Sense, which conceptualizes R:D Convergence exceptionally well.

I imagine being out shopping, seeing a product that I like but am unsure about, and using a ‘reviews’ gesture to project the latest reviews [from my social networks and beyond] on the product or my hand; and a similar thing when out looking for a good restaurant to eat at. Of course, you could do this research at home, but this doesn’t work for spontaneous decisions. A critical success factor of this then, would be the speed or returning the relevant information, and displaying it in a way that makes it quick and easy to absorb – you are, after all, out and about and unlikely to have the time to read a novel to inform that spontaneous decision.

I then drift off on thought-tangents, thinking about the introduction of unique product/service codes (perhaps in place of bar codes, and on business cards) that are instantly recognised by your Sixth Sense-style device: simply give it the reverse-review gesture and up pops the ‘what YOU will love / hate about this product/service/company’ [based on a personal profile, built on your internet behaviours, previous reviews, diggs, likes, blog comments, etc]. You can later tell it how accurate it was in guessing, which teaches it to adapt for later reverse-review requests. Ooo, this would be good!

Augmented Reality
And then there’s the combination of real world image recognition [eg, building outlines etc] combined with mobile + internet capabilities (location + web content/data] to provide a situation contextual internet… and it’s already starting to happen, with early Augmented Reality applications starting to appear: check out this Real Estate AR app from Holland.

Truly Interactive Advertising

In a similar vein, I see new forms of advertising developing too, along the lines of an ‘integrated sponsor’ model. For example, in TV, the products and services (whether a car, clothing, furniture, or even fast-food) used in the program could be clicked to get info on that product, including the ability to ‘[Facebook] Like’ the product, and even purchase it direct from your screen.

In this model, the retailers loan the products for the TV program rather than paying for traditional advertising; the production company no longer has to buy the products in, and; the consumer gets an opportunity to have a richer experience and the ability to build stronger association with their favourite shows, by ‘owning’ the lifestyle it represents, as well as benefitting from fewer interruptions during the show. The retailer also could benefit from increased exposure [no ad skipping] and measurability [click-thru; ‘like’-ing etc].

OK, I’m going to stop there before I get tangled up in my own thoughts. But I’d love to hear your thoughts on this – what do YOU think the next big change in marketing will be?

@jbewes

Moshtix Needs To Sing Their Sorry Song

Update 17/05 at bottom of post, after jump

Splendour in the Grass went on sale today, and Moshtix had a pretty good go at ruining absolutely everything. Quick summary for the uninformed:

• 8:45am Everyone in Australia who loves music preps their computer
• 9:00am 32,000 tickets go on sale
• 9:01am – 2:14pm It all goes horribly wrong, site outages, mass complaints, Aussies take their complaints to the social space, Moshtix disable comments on Facebook, realise their mistake some hours later and switch comments back on
• 2:15pm All tickets are sold out, thousands of people are filled with rage

After the jump I’m going to lay out a few examples of the kind of negative sentiment Moshtix have been receiving over the course of the day, and then lay out some blunt advice for what I’d like to see them do now. Yes, there will be swearing.

US Library of Congress Archiving All Public Tweets – Even Yours

Due to an issue with the their official blog, the US Library of Congress posted the following note in Facebook earlier this morning, and gave followers of @librarycongress a heads up tweet. I’ve posted the note here, to prevent you from having to login to Facebook if you don’t want to/work does not allow. Speculative thoughts at the bottom.

Have you ever sent out a “tweet” on the popular Twitter social media service? Congratulations: Your 140 characters or less will now be housed in the Library of Congress.

That’s right. Every public tweet, ever, since Twitter’s inception in March 2006, will be archived digitally at the Library of Congress. That’s a LOT of tweets, by the way: Twitter processes more than 50 million tweets every day, with the total numbering in the billions.

We thought it fitting to give the initial heads-up to the Twitter community itself via our own feed @librarycongress. (By the way, out of sheer coincidence, the announcement comes on the same day our own number of feed-followers has surpassed 50,000. I love serendipity!)

We will also be putting out a press release later with even more details and quotes. Expect to see an emphasis on the scholarly and research implications of the acquisition. I’m no Ph.D., but it boggles my mind to think what we might be able to learn about ourselves and the world around us from this wealth of data. And I’m certain we’ll learn things that none of us now can possibly conceive.

Just a few examples of important tweets in the past few years include the first-ever tweet from Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey (http://twitter.com/jack/status/20), President Obama’s tweet about winning the 2008 election (http://twitter.com/barackobama/status/992176676), and a set of two tweets from a photojournalist who was arrested in Egypt and then freed because of a series of events set into motion by his use of Twitter (http://twitter.com/jamesbuck/status/786571964) and (http://twitter.com/jamesbuck/status/787167620).

Twitter plans to make its own announcement today on its blog from “Chirp,” the Official Twitter Developer Conference, in San Francisco.

So if you think the Library of Congress is “just books,” think of this: The Library has been collecting materials from the web since it began harvesting congressional and presidential campaign websites in 2000. Today we hold more than 167 terabytes of web-based information, including legal blogs, websites of candidates for national office, and websites of Members of Congress.

We also operate the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program http://www.digitalpreservation.gov, which is pursuing a national strategy to collect, preserve and make available significant digital content, especially information that is created in digital form only, for current and future generations.

In other words, if you want a place where important historical information in digital form should be preserved for the long haul, we’re it!

This raises a few questions, like… who has access to the data? Who will be using it, and to what end? Does it include all the location data? It’s the US Library of Congress, so is the data only available to US citizens? If so, then what about my tweets, can I at least see those from here in Australia? I can imagine market research organisations clawing their eyes out and selling whatever souls they have left in storage to gain access to this wealth of raw opinion and conversation.

So, who has been archiving all the data from 2006? I always assumed Twitter would be keeping it somewhere, but the fact that they only give us access to 3200 of our tweets at a time made it seem less likely. Does that mean the Library of Congress have been keeping track of them all this time? If so, then why just announce it now?

More importantly, as someone who prefers to keep a back-up of my own personal Twitter stream – so that I might look back on it in later years with fondness – will I, the individual have access to this? Do I even need to bother to keep an archive of my tweets any more? Give us your thoughts, people. Is this benevolent, or kind of scary? What’s the value of what’s essentially a snapshot of the thoughts, emotions, events and opinions of the last four years – as expressed by individuals?

@tali3sin

[Source: Original Facebook Note HT @barrysaunders]

Stickybits

This looks exciting.

It’s a network that allows you to attach photos, music text, PDFs, zips, etc to any barcode. Use existing barcodes or generate your own through the site. Think we may be seeing a whole lot more of stickybits.

@handypearce

Official promotions roll out across FourSquare

As I am sure anyone with an iPhone is currently aware, the latest darling of the social app scene is a little location based game called FourSquare. FourSquare allows a user to “check in” to locations and through doing so you can become the ‘Mayor’ (most frequent check-in’s in a designated period) and earn ‘badges’ for completing certain combination of check-in’s.

There has been a lot of conversation around the potential use of FourSquare by local businesses but until today the only Sydney based use I had seen was a cafe that gave a free coffee to the “Mayor.” However earlier this morning I was visiting Sydney creative agency Lowe Sydney and when I went to check in I was presented with an interesting little tab in the top right corner (fig. 1)

Fig. 1

When you select this tab you are then taken to a promotion screen for a local business (in this instance the Baroque Bistro Patisserie) and you are presented with the opportunity to earn a gift if you check in 3 times. (Fig. 2)

Fig. 2

This is a brilliant use of location based data to target users and bring a point of difference to a business. While FourSquare doesn’t have a large enough user base to work as a reach medium, it is perfect for small businesses working to increase their repeat business. Were I in area and assuming that Baroque do reasonable food and drinks this incentive offer could very well be the differentiator in where I go to get my morning coffee, after all if their coffee is just as good as the next place why wouldn’t I go there and get a free French Macaron.

From a glance it appears that the process of implementing one of these specials is a reasonably straight forward matter of filling out an online form.

The one feature I would really love to see added to the promotion page would be a ‘tell your friends’ feature, so that even if you’re not checking in there, you could push a ‘shout’ to your friends via FourSquare/Twitter/Facebook and share the promotion with others who might find it interesting.

I personally will be paying very close attention to see what kind of traction this gains with Australian businesses.

– @JoelyRighteous

@Westpac Twitter Account is “So Over it Today”

Maybe one of the best brand tweets ever by @westpac, but sadly it appears to have been deleted. Some are calling it social media marketing genius whilst others suspect that Westpac may not have stocked the kitchen cupboard with enough TimTams today.

Here it is, preserved in screenshot glory:

Substantiated by a Google Search below:

Anyone know the real story – let us know in the comments 🙂

The Internet Built My Cable Organiser

Something that has always bothered me about my MacBook Pro is the power cable. Sure, it has those nice little hook things to wrap the “small” end around, but what if you use the extra long power cable? You know, the other that it actually EARTHED so you don’t DIE? That can only be wrapped loosely around the power pack so it can later uncoil and suffocate the contents of your laptop bag.

Happily, I saw the PowerCurl on an Apple blog the other day and ordered it immediately.

Even more interesting than the product itself is the site that birthed it.

Quirky is a “social product development” community. Users can pay to submit an idea for a product which is then evaulated and refined by a larger community. If the product gets enough love, then it goes into manufacture with a percentage of profits going to all the users involved.

Check out  the “quirky in 30 seconds” video:

So I’d like to thank Jeff Scholen of Atlanta, Georgia (and a cast of several dozen others) for the PowerCurl.