New Yorkans. How about a chat and a drink?

März 15th, 2010 • Comments Allgemein
Tags: Underway

I will be in New York City for a week. Vacations that is. Maybe you and me are in contact via twitter, via Blogs or whtever? So how about a live chat (I mean real)? I’d be happy to meet people connected with me face to face. Just send me a message or leave a comment if you’re in NYC and want to show me your favourite hangout.

Social Media. How we forgot about Fun.

März 13th, 2010 • Comments Allgemein, Social
Tags: Creativity, Experiments, Facebook, Fun, Funny, Ideas, Social Influence Marketing

Everybody who works in digital marketing, especially in social, talks about fast little concepts. My team likes to call this ’speedboat strategies’. And it’s based on the concept of unconventional or adaptive marketing – launch many cheap, engaging ideas and kill the ones which don’t work. Play with the ones which are fast enough and make them better. That’s basically the broad marketing approach for a time which does not believe in big ass TV commercials anymore.

Social Influence Marketing plays an important role here. Not understood as execution of tools but as the brand’s reaction to a user who acts and reacts 24/7. And in fact it’s not strategy creation in the first place that challenges us. It is its execution. Social effects cannot be properly planned. They can be initiated, they can be encouraged…but they cannot be put in conventional marketing plans and KPI’s. It’s dynamic, that’s the good and the bad thing about it.

But let’s be honest. There is one thing called strategy. And then there is another thing called Fun. I love to talk to clients how they might be able to open up one day, what they might be able to gain, etc. But just starting a social process and watching people have fun with it, is just glorious. This week I started two of these processes. And both were cool.

• Facebook Fanpage 1: Keine Sonderbriefmarke für Dr. Helmut Kohl (“A special stamp for Helmut Kohl”) – Yes, that’s a weird one. A colleague of mine got a Friend Request you get by one of these guys from first grade on Facebook. He accepted and got an invitation 5 minutes later to a public pledge to the German Parliament to print a special stamp for our former chancellor Helmut Kohl. This bizarre movement even made it to Facebook and Youtube in order to recruit 50,000 people signing up for this pledge (to make the parliament start the process). Personally I don’t like Helmut Kohl. But what’s even more important is, that there are unresolved claims of corruption and a very arrogant old chancellor who still believes he has unified Germany on his own. That’s why I started the Fanpage “No stamp for Helmut Kohl” with 340 Fans in 2 days and it is still growing. Not big but funny.

• Facebook Fanpage 2: Postfits. Two colleagues of mine had a good idea yesterday. They took Post-It notes, drew something on it and attached them to their heads. The result – they looked like Pirates, Piggies or whatever. Simple and stupid fun. So we created Postfits (Post-It + Outfit = Postfit) and asked for user pics. Just for the kicks of it. By now we have had a lot of fun, a lot of cool pics by many people and 200 Fans in 24 hours (and all of them had a good laugh). Check out Postfits here and join the party.

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My Perspective. The New Rules of Relationship Management.

März 7th, 2010 • Comments Allgemein
Tags: Adaptation Marketing, Altimeter, Brands, Business, Monitoring, Reports, Social, Social Business Design, Social CRM, Social Influence Marketing, Strategy, Tools, World

Altimeter Group has just published its new report entitled ‘Social CRM. The New Rules of Relationship Management.’ It assumes that companies are simply overwhelmed with social interactions. They need tools, but they need tools to deliver on certain, clearly defined objectives. This report tries to give an overview on the tech-related maturity of SCRM tools and their relation to company objectives. Most of you will find it f*****ing boring. I don’t.

About half a year ago I posted an article entitled ‘Social CRM. Ready for action?‘. I tried to give a rough overview on the relevance of a new approach to brand-customer-relations in an era shaped by interactions among users via social software.

Of course I am not the first one to reflect the outcome of a world gone social for CRM. People like Esteban Kolsky (read his articles ‘The Roadmap to SCRM‘), Wim Rampen, and a few more CRM guys try to define the role of SCRM for today’s marketing. And now there is a new report by Altimeter’s notorious Jeremiah Owyang and Ray Wang – Social CRM: The New Rules of Relationship Management.

What’s it SCRM?

Social CRM extends the classic definition of Customer Relationship Management. According to Paul Greenberg…

CRM is a philosophy & a business strategy, supported by a technology platform, business rules, workflow, processes & social characteristics, designed to engage the customer in a collaborative conversation in order to provide mutually beneficial value in a trusted & transparent business environment. It’s the company’s response to the customer’s ownership of the conversation.

SCRM accepts the fact that there are millions of people virtually interacting . They are chatting about your brand, recommending your sneakers, or rate your restaurant online. This is where SCRM starts off…

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How True. It’s not about Digital, Stupid.

März 7th, 2010 • Comments Allgemein
Tags: Agencies, Cool, Philosophy, Prediction, Trends, Truth, World

I found this convincing mission statement by Sidekick Studios UK on Neil Perkin’s (fantastic) blog. It’s just a well written piece of PR for a digital conference in the first place. But it is so right.

Facts and Figures. The world of google.

Februar 26th, 2010 • Comments Allgemein
Tags: Brands, Business, Cool, Diagram, google, Strategy, Tech, visualization, World

Twitter is crowded with marketing people. And what do marketing people really, really like? Right, statistics. Among loads of animated short movies which stage facts & figures from the web, we have seen a lot of wallpaper-like statistical info visualizations lately lately. First I thought “Nice”, until I found out that pretty much everyone nowadays puts his facts and figures into these kinds of banners. Anyway, I think this visualization is one of the better ones. It was created by Pingdom and tries to integrate many interesting facts about google in one place. Interesting!

Let’s call it reality. Why agencies will pretty likely stick around.

Februar 8th, 2010 • Comments Allgemein
Tags: Agencies, Brands, Business, Debate, Experimental, Future, Prediction, Strategy, Trends

Bud Caddell from NYC’s Undercurrent has published a great rant about the question on how the agency of the future looks like. As usual it is a great text to read but it ends with a plea to share our opinion. And that is what I do now.

Hi Bud.

I would like to share my opinion with you and I appreciate the time and effort it took to write such a long article about the agency of the future. First up, it’s a good perspective to start a discussion. But before we talk about the question what the agency of the future might look like, let’s begin with the essential question what an agency actually is. At this point we encounter the first logical problem. You won’t find a global definition of “Agency” on Wikipedia. But you will find a definition of “Advertising agency”.

An advertising agency or ad agency is a service business dedicated to creating, planning and handling advertising (and sometimes other forms of promotion) for its clients.

If you scroll down a little bit further you will find the chapter “Types of advertising agencies”. It separates different types of agencies – such as Inhouse, Interactive, Search Engine etc.

Simply stunning!!! This little chapter alone demonstrates the disadvantage of 99% of the world’s agency models. It is not at all focused on the core business needs of their clients but on the output the agency founder once planned to generate – SEO, Social…you name it. But do we still have a clear understanding about what we are supposed to produce? In a small poll on my blog last week I asked if there is still such a big line between traditional and new jobs in the industry. The answers ranged from ‘Absolutely. Traditional agencies haven’t got anything to do with digital ones’ to ‘Not at all. The future model is integrated’. Or, to put it another way, there is no average ad guy who has got a precise understanding about what he is supposed to produce anymore. Pure confusion, no matter where you look.

The problem

Agencies are just normal companies in the first place. And then there was the web, this fantastic engine that made all these fantastic concepts of crowdsourced products, E-Learning, brand fandom and LOLcats possible. But, the web is half as old as I am. And 7% as old as the Top 3 ad networks nowadays. Companies such as Ogilvy, JWT, or McCann have been around for decades. They produced innovation at a certain point in time. But unfortunately they cannibalized their own concept. Customers drowned in messages and meaningless awareness campaigns while more and more products hit the markets.

It may sound a little bit cheesy, but my dad told me about his childhood days in Germany last weekend. There was not too much choice when you were a kid in Frankfurt in 1960 – there were only a handful of products, few toys and most of the time you played soccer outside with your friends. According to a study from earlier this month modern kids spend enough time with screens of all kinds to make it a full-time job – 53 hours per week!

What I say is, the crisis of the agency business is the crisis of our society. We just have anything we could dream of. And it’s not a question of traditional versus ‘new’ agencies. It’s not a question whether I drown in traditional or digital messages. It’s just a problem that we possess anything and nothing seems special enough to us anymore. We are not not thrilled by brand campaigns anymore. We aren’t thrilled by anything anymore. We just struggle to stay alive in a sea of stuff.

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Code Monkey. A Hymn for the Industry.

Februar 3rd, 2010 • Comments Allgemein
Tags: Funny, Jobs, Music, Truth, World

Jonathan Coultron is a singer and songwriter from NYC. His song Code Monkey has been around for some time but it took me until today to find it on thesixtyone.com. And it’s a fantastic song – a hymn for a whole industry. Check it out here and sing along

Apple iPad. Endorsed by Print Publishers Worldwide.

Januar 28th, 2010 • Comments Allgemein
Tags: Apple, Burda, Industry, iPad, Media, Murdoch, Print, publishers, Strategy, Tablets, Tech, Tools, Touch, Trend, World

What a week for Hubert Burda! The Grandsigneur of German Publishers, ‘Chairman of the Board and Publisher of Hubert Burda Media, President of the Association of German Magazine Publishers, and co-founder of the European Publishers Council’  must have had a great night last night.

Why? Because it seems to me that he, as one of the most conservative protagonists of paid content on the web, has finally won.  Earlier this week he had opened Burda’s annual digital conference DLD in Munich. A digital conference which looks like all the industry meetings you know from around the world…except that it was hosted by a brand which publicly asked to disappropriate google because of their online media market share. Sounds ridiculous? Well, it is.

Burda described Google as a “killer application” which delivered almost half of all traffic to local journalism Web sites and yet managed to keep almost one-third of all Internet advertising revenues in Germany for itself. “All of that without making any investment of its own in the expensive business of journalism,” Burda noted.

Burda called for amendments to copyright and even suggested that Google should pay for the use of news it had not produced itself. Of course, the search engine wanted nothing to do with this suggestion. (‘Der Spiegel‘, Sept 09)

Actually your failed business model is not my problem

Earlier, in summer 2009, Burda and other publishers had managed to channel their whining about antiquated business model into the Hamburg Declaration of European Publishers. It demanded a ‘fair share’ by search engines like google. Google reacted with an offer to deny robots the access to the publisher’s pages. The conflict went hot. The web manned the battle stations when Silicon Valley started fighting against Munich. Well, and of course it could get even more bizarre when Rupert Mordoch started to ‘threaten’ google to block them from his newspapers and rumors about a Murdoch pact with Bing versus google made the headlines.

Burdoch’s ‘new business model’ was the old one…translated into digital: Making readers pay for stuff they read online.

In the new business model, we will be charging consumers for the news we provide on our Internet sites. The critics say people won’t pay. I believe they will, but only if we give them something of good and useful value. Our customers are smart enough to know that you don’t get something for nothing.

Similar to the music industry publishers never condescended to think about alternative business models. While print advertising revenues worldwide dropped like they were hot, no alternative business model was even explored. The direction was clear: Save mainstream print media at all cost. No matter wether there simply is no need for so many general interest magazines anymore, we do print…with a digital touch to make it look cooler.

The web’s response was unambiguous: Twitter founder Biz Stone commented the Burdoch’s closed payment model will ‘fail fast’ and it would be impossible to ‘put the genie back into the bottle’. Others compared the old men’s inflexibility to the disaster of the music industry etc. In autumn 2009 both, Burda and Murdoch, demasked themselves as dinosaurs – powerful but inflexible, free from creative power and about to make the same mistakes so many others had done before.

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New Year. What I am going to do by year’s end.

Januar 19th, 2010 • Comments Allgemein
Tags: 2010, Ideas

I have to admit, I posted quite a bunch of articles about 2010. And in fact, this is my first one which does actually really take place in my new year.

Since mid-December I was busily engaged in a pitch presentation for my agency. My 2009 christmas did not deserve the name holidays. But since Wednesday things go back to normal. And that’s good. As these are in fact my first couple of (Gerald) days 2010, here go my more or less professional new year’s resolutions:

• Stop smoking (yeah, I know)
• Get rid of 30% of the feeds I subscribed to
• Use the time before the bus arrives to stare at people instead of my iPhone
• Throw away the word social media, finally integrate it into digital strategy
• Keep on keeping away from quoting pseudo-critical prosaicness by digital juggernauts
• Use digital magic more often for political purposes which I support
• Draw at least three pseudointellectual diagrams which explain everything and get at least 5K retweets each
• Invent one huge viral hoax which does not harm anybody
• Convince a lifestyle brand that neither clubs nor partys nor DJs nor nighlife will differentiate them
• Still not pay a dime for this hot new Apple product simply because it’s by Apple

Oh, and of course I would like to tripple my average readers by year’s end. But as I am simultaneously trying to tripple my engagement in sport as well as quality time with friends I should stay a little bit realistic. Anybody got a cigarette?

2010. The year of realistic self-assessment.

Januar 5th, 2010 • Comments Allgemein
Tags: 2010, Business, Future, predictions, Trends, World

2010. Another year which will be the year of mobile, of social media ROI, social media CRM , social TV, social commerce, the year of tablets and a lot of other technologies my sister or my dad don’t know anything about. In fact, I believe if it will be the year of anything special at all then it will be another year of failed prophecies.

No doubt, the advance of smartphones and the invention of mobile apps paves the way for the use of the mobile web. The progress made in social technologies opens new possibilities to explore new services in this sector. And hey, that’s great. But let’s please do one thing in 2010: Let’s turn it into the year of realism.

Just because we are in control of the air superiority in our self-invented communities, does not mean it’s relevant for anybody else than the usual suspects. Yes, I love Foursquare. But in my hometown Frankfurt maybe 200 players have registered…in a city of 600K. That’s not exactly what I call reach. Plus, the realities in the use of digital technologies vary to enormous degree even among the U.S., Japan and Europe…and we are not even talking about the 75% which we call ‘the rest of the world’ (like India and stuff).

If I have one professional wish for 2010 it is this. Keep on playing, keep on dreaming…but stop using superlatives when ever you like a certain smartphone or social service. One of the happiest tech moments in my life was when my family had a Skype video call with my step brother’s family in Australia during christmas. They waved, they laughed and they were happy to see each other over such a big distance. And hey, that’s cool, isn’t it? When I saw this scenery, I had the feeling that this (almost old-school piece of tech) had a sense – it simply made people smile and connect – in a very simple way. What a great invention: Skype.

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