Smarties 8 Colours of Fun and the online narrative

One of the latest project TCO have been working on is the Smarties 8 Colours of Fun campaign. One of the most important choices was how to structure the content. It was initially going to go out as episodes following all 8 artists at once, we made two changes to this, we put out episodes following one artist and child at a time and decided to release all the content at the start of the campaign.

Twelve months ago, I would of done the opposite. However one thing I have picked up on in the last few months is that stories told over time do not work online.

R.I.P The Online Narrative

You need to give the audience everything at once. Don’t think that they will come back to look for additions to your story, even if you have them hooked (via Facebook Liking, Youtube Sub or Twitter Follower). This has been supported by the fact that there has been a high number of cross over viewers from one video to the next, this out weights the number of views that could have been brought through the number of new subscribers.

If you are not following the campaign, become a fan at Smarties Australia

All you need to know about Apple iPing

This is a guest post by TCO's Community Manager Michael Goldstein - follow his brain at @MickeyG77

Background
Before the internet people were living in a musical dictatorship run by the Radio. Because it was the only source of new music what they decided to play was what the public heard, and eventually, bought. This is why genres were so defined and strong, because people simply didn't have other options of musical discovery.
Then the internet came and changed all that, all of a sudden we are exposed to thousands of genres, it's no wonder that most people proclaim to 'love all types of music' on their Facebook profiles.

So with a plethora of music floating around, the question of how to organise all these tunes has been largely ignored. There are a myriad of blogs claiming to host the newest music, as well as Hype Machine which is organised by 'Hype' not taste and has been criticised by musical aficianados as a fast food musical outlet.

Facebook is one of the most popular places to share new music, with news feed's littered with poor quality YouTube clips of buzzbands. Twitter too has musical links shared till kingdom come to sites such as Soundcloud. However none of these platforms offer truly integrated music sharing and purchasing options.

What is Apple Bing?
The Apple Ping is Steve Jobs' latest software innovation that catapults Itunes into the social networking world. It's almost a hybrid of Facebook, Twitter and Itunes, a social site that revolves around music.

Users will be able to show off their musical taste and get credit for their online musical finds. Music lovers will no longer rely on a random and sometimes un-reliable feed of music from a blog, but can source musical inspiration from their friends. This site has the potential to totally remove the need for FM radio as not only will people, as they do now, discover music before it hits the airwaves, but they will also be able to purchase a high quality copy of it.

Logically it makes sense, people share so much music already online, this should be a seamless, streamlined way to do what people already love doing.

But will it work?
Apple does have the assets for a successful social network, 160 million Itunes users and the status as one of the most respected brands in the world will make it easy to attract users. They are also not trying to wipe out or even directly compete with Twitter and Facebook, both of which serve separately defined purposes. Interestingly this is where Ping's biggest problem lays, whether people have the capacity for three seperate social networks, is an interesting question that time will answer. The key to the success of Ping is how seamlessly it can integrate with other social networks, it could be a question as simple as how many steps it takes to move between networks, or a more complex psychological evaluation of social networking values.

Rising Talent of Youtube

In February, I covered the rising talent on the 5 Rising Stars on Youtube Australia. When I saw the Justin Beiber cookie cutters, I also noticed a few new additions to the list.

Here is the new additions and a little on what they are doing.

6th Most Subscribed – Jayesslee (81k Subs)

Australian Korean Twins Jayesslee, sing covers and are good looking that is about it, probably helps that they are Hillsong as well – there is strong community support online for Hillsong artists.

13th Most Sub - Keshen (45k Subs)

Keshen does animated lego videos which are really high quality it is no wonder that he has such strong support. Great videos.

Dillonp23 (39k Subs)

Dillonp23 makes me think that there is a way to game subscribers because the content is pretty weak to say the least. His two latest videos have less than 9,000 views combined yet he has 39,000+ subscribers.

If you haven’t noticed they have changed the face of Youtube in the last week. It looks like they are trying to segment the content into four fields ‘Shows' (another names for channels), ‘Movies’, 'Music' and 'Videos'. This is going to have some massive effects on how videos and vloggers find their audience, so stay tuned for a post on it when I have some more time to analyse the effect.

What you need to know about Facebook 'Places' in Australia

The basics
The way it will work will be similar to other geo-locating social apps such as Foursquare where you can notify your friends of where you are via digitally 'checking in' to physical locations. The difference with Facebook is that you can also tag your friends who are with you, making Facebook Places a more social geo-app than Foursquare.

Limitations
Places requires users to have Smart Phones, with only 5% of Australians accessing Social Networking site on their phones, I think we should proceed with caution in regards to the uptake of this functionality.

Edit:
According to Nielsen Internet and Technology Report 2009, 43% of Australian Internet users owned an Internet capable (“3G/Smartphone”) / which can mean Nokia N95 or iPhone or Blackberry at Dec-2009. Hat tip Sam Granleese

Also as Nic Hodges points out, that number of people accessing Social Networks from phones is closer to 18% (using Nielsen latest stats as a guide). That sounds about right to me.

Businesses and Facebook
You can also integrate a Facebook Page to Places (click here for tutorial), allowing you to further spread company presence and also show how popular your company is in the real world rather than simply online.

Side Effect
One side effect is that it may take away from organic growth for Pages which has recently been going crazy for brands. The early word from the States is that the organic growth will look to decrease by half as they give more priority to Facebook Places in the Facebook Newsfeed.

Word from Facebook Australia
In terms of a launch date in this market, the word from my mate at Facebook Australia is that the US has not given them an exact date for roll out however they are working with a local Retailer to roll out an execution. My hunch is that it will be in the next month.

This post was collaboration between TCO’s Community Manager Michael Goldstein (Mickeyg77) and I. If anyone knows a launch date, please share.

The Justin Bieber Cookie Cutter

I am genuinely surprised at how easy it is to copy this formula of success that Justin Bieber has created, Cody Simpson and Jordan Jansen are two Australians who are following the exact formula of success as Bebs. Launching their careers on Youtube, uploading covers to the site, they have the same look, same style of music (Cody has even taken the next step of collaborating with a popular rap/hip hop artist Flo Rida. Even the style of video is the same.

Cody Simpson


Jordan Jansen


I thought that it would not be as easy to replicate such success, but both artist have over 60,000 subscribers on Youtube and are currently in the Top 10 Most Subbed Australian Youtubers?!?! Wow!

Forgetting the Distribution Strategy.

There has been two great pieces of online Australian created branded content that have caught my eye recently. It has got me really excited that we may be seeing a second coming for branded online content. However I am worried we may be falling into the same trap that we did 2 years ago when the first bubble burst.

Burn


Walking Tours of Melbourne


Marketers have been wary to reinvest in online content with one major problem....scale. Spending $100,000 to get a few thousand views of content is not equitable.

I think this problem is due to the creators of content not having a distribution strategy in place when they create the content. I think for projects to kill it these days they need a solid content distribution strategy that has a mix of seeding and paid media making sure that the content flies online. Aden picked up on this as well with the latest Bacradi project which was amazing content with little to no content distribution strategy.

Cannibal Trolls

According to Wikipedia 'A troll is someone who posts inflammatory, extraneous, or off-topic messages in an online community, such as an online discussion forum, chat room, or blog, with the primary intent of provoking other users into a desired emotional response'.

E.g All the comments that lead to this....


However there is a new species of people called Cannibal Trolls. They are people who lure trolls into their trap and make them waste their time baiting who they think is an innocent victim when really they are thriving off the attention. The best example of this is Angry Ginger kid. He is very measured with his response and knows exactly what he is doing when he is provoking this response.


I think we have seen this recently on Mumbrella with Jothy Hughes with his baiting of all the usual Mumbrella commentors with his 'Guaranteed Model of Publicity'.