Category Archives: Social Media

Anatomy of An Insight: National Day Proposal

Too seldom I am able to highlight Singaporean ads here. Therefore I was delighted when I stumbled upon the new Mentos National Day song by BBH Asia-Pacific. The first Mentos National Day song about boosting the birth rate of Singapore was probably the most shared ad last year in Singapore. For Finnish person who has built his ad career mainly on rap songs and nationalism, this new song is even better:

Insight: Singapore & Finland are similar countries. Small, but highly successful countries which both are high on different international rankings (such as level of education). Singaporean media also regularly highlights news from Finland and has articles about the international rankings.
Based on my experience living in both countries, the mindset of the people is also somewhat similar. Both Singaporeans and Finns are obsessive about what other countries are talking about them. Which will mean that last year´s view counts might double as every Finn wants also to see what is talked about them.

Craft-wise this is definite improvement over last year´s campaign. Song is better (Lonely Island has been on heavy rotation), animation more sharp and the video is filled with more puns to find (also in Finnish). The chorus is nice nod to either strong Heavy Metal –heritage of Finland or to musical mish-mosh of this year´s official national day song.

Although the planner in me has not yet found the connection between Mentos and birth rate in Singapore, that was not as big issue as last year. The concept is already familiar enough. If (and hopefully when) Mentos does new song next year it is already an annual tradition and no one really thinks about why Mentos does National day song urging people to have sex.

Good example if you invent something which works, stick with it. Usually it works next time as well.

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Why Yahoo Bought Tumblr?

“F*ck yeah”

Ended David Karp (founder of Tumblr) his announcement about upcoming Yahoo-acquisition. He is not the only one amped up about the deal. Internet has been buzzing about the Yahoo´s recent acquisition of Tumblr. On theory marriage of Tumblr & Yahoo looks rational. Will it be that on practice?

What will Yahoo get from Tumblr?

1. Reach (especially to the young target audience)
Currently Yahoo has over 700 million unique visitors/month and Tumblr with its 300 million unique visitors and over 100 million blogs might help it bypass the 1 billion-visitor threshold. Yahoo is buying growth.
Tumblr user base is also the youngest among the different social media channels. It is stronger than any other social network within 13-18 and 19-25 demographic. As the buying power of teens and tweens increases even more, this target audience becomes more and more lucrative for marketers. It is therefore important to reach them young and maintain that relationship.
2. Gateway to Social Media & Mobile
Like many of its peers, Yahoo has been struggling with social media & mobile. It actually has a more impressive track record with screwing up potential social media opportunities (Flickr-which has been rewamped today as well, Geocities, Del.icio.us) than utilizing them. By buying Tumblr, Yahoo will get healthy social media which has been designed to be mobile-first from the beginning.
3. Street Credibility
Yahoo has not been a flavor of the month in recent years. Tumblr acquisition is exactly the kind of bold move that shareholders love. It is also the most prolific action Marissa Mayer has yet announced after taking the helm of the struggling company last year. Will it be the right move? That remains to be seen.

What will Tumblr get out of the deal?

Coherence & Monetization
Being the most user-friendly blog platform has its benefits, but also certain challenges. Tumblr is also the world´s most NSFW blog platform filled with porn, politically incorrect gifs and one-off-jokes (not even saving the founder David Karp). How Tumblr will maintain its characteristic quirkiness, but become “brand safe”? Currently adult sites are the leading category of referrals for Tumblr. Yahoo, as a household name, will give more legitimacy for Tumblr and probably help to clean up its act.
Tumblr has also been struggling with monetization and its business model throughout its whole existence. Whatever you say about Yahoo, you cannot dispute their skills and strengths on traditional ad sales. With Yahoo sales teams with interactive advertising (Tumblr) on their toolkit, it will be quite interesting selling point. The challenge is to find ad solutions which are seamless and enhance user experience.

What next?

Based on the statement from Marissa Mayer, it is quite improbable to see radical changes with Tumblr in the immediate future. The model for the Yahoo/Tumblr-coexistence will probably follow Instagram/Facebook –route where Instagram has remained relatively independent from Facebook. Many are likely to draw parallels between this acquisition and the quite ill-fated Geocities-acquisition from 14 years ago, but I am not that pessimistic. Tumblr definitely fills certain problematic gaps within Yahoo´s current strategy.

The crucial questions are whether the synergies that look obvious on paper come to fruition in action and was the price right?

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Google Reader and the Missed Opportunity of RSS Feeds

Google Reader is now officially announced dead. Slowly it has been dying for quite a while.

I am one of the apparently very few relics, who have been using Google Reader actively for years and years. Personally it has been the most useful Google tool for me right after search and Gmail. Without using Google Reader (and other digital fossil Del.icio.us, which is still alive but struggling), writing of my first book would have been much more tedious process.

Looking from the business perspective and reflecting the overall downward trend of success of RSS feeds, the decision to kill Google Reader is a no-brainer. Everyone gets their news and blog posts either from search or from social networks, who needs separate place to go for their internet content?

Well us professionals and hobbyist, for instance.

I am passionate about few things. Other half is a work related and others are hobbies (basketball, hip-hop music, literature and movies). Google reader was my starting point for getting my daily fix on those high-interest subjects. Additionally I also use social networks and Google search to find stuff, but for me those are not the primary sources of information. When sharing is the only currency, it will be eventually lead to dumbed down content. Just watch any of the titles of your average web publication.

So farewell RSS feeds, the social media sharing is the way to drive traffic these days.

The demise of RSS Feeds, can be summarized to one word: complicated.
Starting with the name: RSS sounds like some kind of disease. Then there was the ease of use, or lack thereof. Although you did not have to be rocket scientist to get yourself RSS feed reader, it required still more commitment than the normal internet user wants to have with their platforms. The adding of the RSS feeds was not intuitive enough and the logo did not really reach adequate awareness. If following and subscribing would have had button something akin to Facebook like, the situation might be totally different.

Personal blogs have been largely replaced by tweets and Facebook status updates. The promise of RSS Feed Reader is still valid. You get the news you are actively interested to one place. People have not stopped consuming content in the Internet, more the other way around. The way to consume it has shifted more towards social, but there are some users who want to have also more curated experience for their content. Those users are not necessarily lucrative target audience.

Like Rob Fishman points out in his excellent article in Buzzfeed, Google Reader was the closest to functioning social network Google has ever been (excluding maybe for YouTube). I am deliberately excluding Gmail, as the nature of it is more 1-to-1 connections. As the “success” of Google+has shown, building it over Gmail was not necessarily the wisest decision. The mass using Gmail does not necessarily convert to more public sharing of social network, although it might make business sense on the paper. If Google would have invested to Google Reader and pushed it organically towards more social experience, they might have really successful social platform in their hands.

I was actually really active in Google Reader back in the day and sharing content like there was no tomorrow. That lasted until it was connected to Google+, which made it too overbearing. I was not the only one. Google Reader really never got a chance to truly try to strive in the marketplace on its own. Like former Google product manager explains in Quora, the Reader developer team was stretched thin and utilized mostly in other failed projects. Google Reader –based social network would have been the social platform, which is still truly lacking in the marketplace. The social network that is built around your user interests and passions. Maybe the new MySpace is trying to fill that gap, at least with music.

I will not shed tears for Google Reader. The decision makes definite short-term business sense. On the long run however, we will never know. Disappearance of Google Reader might have surprising effects on the digital content ecosystem. Although it has not been major traffic driver for the sites, it might alter and shift the readership radically of certain content providers.

Killing Google Reader and betting with Google+ are probably smart decisions. The real question is, are they wise decisions? Meanwhile Google Reader remains as an artifact of the potential social media success Google is still desperately trying to achieve. Until 1st of July, that is. As I am writing this, I am moving my Google Reader subscriptions to Feedly.

Old habits are hard to kill.

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Anatomy of An Insight: Oreo Separator Machine Series

I do not eat cookies.

But if I would eat them, they would definitely be Oreos. The 101 year old brand has been so on fire lately with their marketing activities. And their latest effort “Oreo Separator Machine” does not disappoint:

Product Insight: Oreo ads are great example of really simple but effective product insight. The product has two parts: crème & cookie. Those parts are so distinct frome each other that you are almost forced to select which part you like more. That difference can be polarizing as well and has been cause for endless arguments. Also the eating of the Oreo has own ritual for its users. The right one is of course this: Taking the top cookie off, eating it, licking the crème and finishing with the bottom cookie (mastered with Finnish Oreo knock-off Domino when I was child).
Majority of Oreo advertising has been about dramatizing either the interplay of its different parts or the ritual (typical example being this year´s super bowl ad for Oreo).

Creative leap: The great creatives in W+K combine couple of existing trends in these spots: D-I-Y tinkering (popularized by Mythbusters or Top Gear for autophiles) and Rube Goldberg Machine (Machines doing simple tasks in complicated ways. Lately popularized by Honda Cog, OK Go-This Too Shall Pass & Red Bull Athlete Machine).
These trends are combined with product insight and end-results are highly entertaining videos of how far people are going to separate the crème and the cookie:


Collaboration: These spots would not be so great, if the people doing separator machines would not be so entertaining. Nowadays doing great work is more and more about finding the new and surprising collaboration partners and giving them the brief and tools to do their own thing:


Continuum: In principle this series could last for quite long, as long as there are innovative collaborations and interest from the audience. Currently we are in fourth installment which ups the ante by involving robot butler Herb to the mix:


These ads are also refreshing, because they go against the old rule that you should not play with your brand if it is food. I think that if you get almost 4M views in YouTube for single product-centered video, the playing with food is not only allowed, but also highly recommended.

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Mastering the MIM: Marketer´s Guide to Mobile Instant Messaging

SMS is dead.
Long live MIM.


WhatsApp has been a major contributor of 25% decline of SMS in Spain
. Chinese WeChat has over 300 million users. Over 90% of Korean smartphone users use Kakaotalk. These are just a few examples of the rising trend of the mobile instant messaging (MIM).

Instant messaging as such is not a new thing (remember ICQ?), but there are certain reasons why it has had its resurrection now:

1. Phones are increasingly more about data than talking
In developed countries nearly every new phone sold is smartphone. Smartphones are increasingly more about being smart than phone. There is app for that, now also for the basic phone features (talking and texting).

2. That data is getting faster

New 4G LTE (Long term evolution) phones will enable high-speed data for mobile phones. This opens new opportunities for what kind of content we can exchange in MIM platforms.

3. Facebook is so huge that it is already mass broadcasting

If you are average Facebook user sending your status update, the odds are that the message will be seen by your family, friends and colleagues plus countless of people you do not even know about. This is great, but serves more of people´s need for vanity and instant recognition. The most meaningful conversations happen with the people you know. Same phenomenon has been also reason for the success of Path.

4. There is always need for 1-to-1 communication

Some might argue that Facebook message does the trick. However the challenge is that Facebook is already flooded with so many messages, it is not that reliable way to catch people (at least not all of them). Phone has been relevant for so long because you can be quite certain that your message is received. Although Facebook has increased the number of “friends”, it has not really increase the number of “real friends”. The amount of those real friends is limited and many of interactions with those people we want to keep private.

5. World is getting smaller

Majority of MIM applications work internationally. The bread and butter of Telcos profit margins has been charging for international calls and roaming. MIM applications do not have those international boundaries. You want to communicate with your friends no matter where they geographically are.

6. World is getting more visual

Although SMS-messages have been relatively cheap, telcos are still taking quite big premium with multimedia messages. With MIM applications you can send whatever data possible and the because of the point 2 the alternatives are actually increasing all the time. Basic SMS- type of messaging is just the beginning for MIM applications and there will be probably lots of innovations in what kind of communication there will be.

What are opportunities for marketers?

Many MIM applications are still quite in infancy regarding their business model. Opportunities for marketers also vary greatly between different platforms. For example paid application WhatsApp is totally ad-free and there has not really been marketers using it (expect for personal use). On the other end of the spectrum is the WeChat, which is currently almost like Wild West with Chinese brands flooding there.

MIM applications are interesting part of mobile strategy for marketers. They provide straight access to consumer´s main screen: smartphone. As the smartphone is always within you, that is the straight pathway to consumer connecting digital to retail. That is the connection which every marketer wants to master. It might be that clever way to utilize MIM is the key for cracking that task.

But why anyone would want to have 1-to-1 connection with brand?

Compared to Facebook where your brand page reaches only fraction of your fans, MIM application has almost the hit-rate of 100%. This is creates a big responsibility for brands. You cannot flood your fans with messages such as “Like if you are ready for the spring!” or “Tell us in one word: (Our Brand) make me ______”. You are truly invading personal space with your message so it needs to add some real value for the consumer. In Facebook you are more likely to get away with stupid brand messages, although they are definitely not recommended in there either.

Here potential routes for marketers to utilize MIM:

1. Daily Deals & Promotions
Deals and promotions are always appreciated by the consumers. With MIM you can connect it phones and also create the sense of urgency to redeem those deals. Of course, provided that these deals are good.
2. Daily tips
MIM provides opportunities also for content marketing. It could be daily practice tips for sport brand. It could be song of the day for music service. Of recent campaigns Oreo Daily Twist could work in Whatsapp. The most important thing whether deals or content, is the expectation management. You have to be really candid about what kind of messages you send and how often. You have one change to lose trust and none chances to get it back.
3. Extension of loyalty card
Having own MIM circle for the valued customers could be great idea for rewarding your best customers with VIP treatment.
4. Rapid Market research
Combined with promotions or deals, MIM also provides vehicle for doing rapid market research and gather intelligence for your loyal customers.

It is too early to tell whether MIM will be the secret weapon that connects digital and retail. One thing is certain though: MIM cannot be left out of consideration for your mobile strategy.

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6 Seconds of Fame: Idiot´s Guide to Vine

I heard it through the grapevine, that Vine has been all the rage in the social media circles last couple of weeks.

Here is brief summary what it is all about:

What is Vine?
It is basically Instagram for short videos. Twitter mastered the microblogging with 140 characters and now it is aiming to do the same with microvlogging and six seconds. Vine currently works only in iPhone and best in conjunction with Twitter. Vine was launched on the end of January.

What it supposed to be?
“Posts on Vine are about abbreviation — the shortened form of something larger. They’re little windows into the people, settings, ideas and objects that make up your life. They’re quirky, and we think that’s part of what makes them so special.”
Dom Hoffman, co-founder & GM, Vine

How it works?
Go to Apple app store and download the Vine app. Then you (preferably) log on with your Twitter handle to the app. After that start shooting. The process is super simple: press what you want to film with your thumb. Then edit what you filmed to 6 second video. Share it on Twitter.
To use Vine is really intuitive and simple, but to make something worthwhile takes probably more than just six seconds.

How does it look like?

More examples can be found here.

What Twitter has to do with it?
In a way Twitter missed the Instagram bandwagon, so Vine is natural leap from photo sharing. It tries to benefit from the overall rise of visual storytelling in our current digital culture. It´s a little bit Instagram, little bit YouTube, little bit funny GIFs and working solely on your mobile. Twitter wants to strengthen it dominance in the short-form messaging and Vine is at least some sort of answer.

What brands already use it?
General Electric, Taco Bell, McDonald´s, Marriott Hotel, Urban Outfitters to name a few. Also porn industry has found it, like all the technological breakthroughs.

Give me some examples!
Not showing you the porn ones, but here are three Brand vines:

What brands should use it?
If your brand is already strong on Twitter, Vine is quite natural extension to your Twitter presence. If your company is not that active in Twitter, Vine probably is not the first social media channel you should invest in.

Where it can be used?
There are couple of good listings about potential use cases of Vine for brands, but currently I think the most prominent ones are the following six:

1. Flashing your brand´s digital cojones: Like with all new applications, there is currently the short timeframe when your brand can appear to be on top of the curve. Half-baked Vine executions will probably fill Twitter in the following weeks.
2. Improving your customer service: Short how-to guides about the products.
3. Spicing up the internal marketing: Employee presentations made more interesting and faster.
4. Even faster way to convince investors: Quick elevator pitch for your company.
5. Enhancing your rapid social media responses: Wheat Thins message to Questlove above is a good example of that.
6. Making your product catalogue come alive: New ways to showcase products (like Urban Outfitters has done below)

Hot or not?
Some might argue that Vine is a novelty app, but so is Instagram. That novelty had $715 million price tag. It remains to be seen will the 6 seconds be as revolutionary as 140 characters were. Vine has potential though. It is certainly something new. With its strong social, local and mobile dimensions it might just be the new killer app.

Now I am just waiting for Harlem Shake Vine edition.

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Advertising should be like Harlem Shake

The biggest meme of the year thus far has been the Harlem Shake. Originally Harlem Shake was a dance coined in Harlem in 1980´s. It was inspired by Ethiopian dance called Eskista.
Last summer EDM artist Baauer did his song by the same name. It was played in the clubs, but nothing major happened.
Then it was quite quiet until YouTube-user called Filthy Frank did his version:

This video inspired other one, which created the current form of the Harlem Shake video:

Currently there are over 4000 Harlem Shake videos uploaded daily to YouTube with over 40 million views. The mainstream media is also quick to catch to the new Internet craze:

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Harlem Shake is great example of what kind of content spreads in YouTube.

What marketers can learn about Harlem Shake?

1. Make it short
Attention span for the content in the Internet is getting shorter and shorter.
Who has time for a three minute music video?
Or a 500-word blog post?

You have to be able to tell your message in 30 seconds or 140 characters. That is all the attention you will get.

2. Make it stupid
If you want to make viral hit, you have to hit the lowest common denominator. YouTube videos are majorly consumed in coffee breaks. People want then to escape their boring routines. They want entertainment, not education. Harlem Shake fulfills that need.
You can watch quite many Harlem Shake versions within your lunch break.

3. Make it easy to participate
The concept of Harlem Shake is simple.
First the video starts with one guy (usually masked) doing usually quite boring dance move. After the breakdown the scene turns to total mayhem with more people. And that is basically it.
No difficult choreographies or difficult lines you have to remember. Just gather as many people you want and go crazy. This makes it also ideal for offices and workplaces to participate. Easier than have the whole office running marathon. Engagement has to be made as easy as possible. Harlem Shake provides a blank creative canvas where people can create their own interpretation. If you want to make it big and difficult, you can do it. But also if you want to make it quick and dirty. Harlem Shake just provides you the form and leaves you with the actual creative execution.

The Harlem Shake is interesting phenomenon from music and marketing perspective. Baauer´s label Mad Decent has been quick to ride the bandwagon and compiles the new versions to their Tumblr-blog.

Is it new Gangnam style?

That remains to be seen, but traditional popular culture mechanics were turned upside down in this case. Harlem Shake will be hit because of the consumer-generated meme*. With Gangnam style the pattern followed more the traditional music video route (the dance was in music video).

*And if the meme is machinated by Mad Decent, it makes it even greater case example for marketers.

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Will Facebook Graph Search Replace Google?

The big news in social media front this week has been of course Lance Amstrong coming clean (sort of)  in Oprah. Despite that, maybe even more important discussion item has been the new Graph Search by Facebook. Graph in the name means demographics. In a nutshell it is a search engine, which will show results based on their “social stickiness”. You can search for the items your friends like or find correlations with things you are liking and what other people with similar taste are. If you are planning for vacation, you can see who of your friends have visited or are living in your destination. The graph search is living on the notion that you trust more your friends, family and real people than brands, media or even the experts. What remains to be seen is do you trust more social search than search algorithm.

What are the implications of Facebook Graph Search?

1. Revenge of Facebook Places
Graph Search challenges firstly Yelp & FourSquare, secondly Google. The graph search creates definite incentive to start checking more with the Facebook places compared to other location services. It will not challenge heads-on Google´s search function, but definitely will be challenger for Google in certain categories. These categories will be restaurants, hotels and events, to name a few.
In this way Graph Search continues the typical Facebook strategy of finding up & coming services and then incorporating it to Facebook user experience. However, Graph Search is much bigger concept and also first proper challenge towards its main competitor Google.

2. Privacy debate lurks ahead
In a typical Facebook fashion you expect that there will lots of brouhaha over privacy. Some of it is because the overall liberal stance Facebook has for the privacy issues. Other part will be about Facebook users overall sloppiness with privacy issues. Majority of users do not have any idea to whom they are actually sharing and they suddenly wake up that updates and pictures might be public when there are updates to Facebook platform. Whatever changes happen in Facebook, it is always a privacy issue.

3. The more you give, the more you get
When implemented right, Graph Search will also boost other Facebook usage. When you realize that the more people will share their experiences, pictures, likes and statuses the more accurate the search will be. This creates positive pressure to use Facebook more. If you have not liked anything on Facebook , you will not get recommendations. And when people use Facebook more, the more FB can sell ads to show. Also if Graph Search starts to challenge also LinkedIn, there will be sudden surge to update your job details to Facebook.

4. It is just a matter of time, when ads will come as part of Graph Search
In the current beta phase, there are no ads showing in the search bar. With pressure to monetize and bring more shareholder value we will definitely see some kind of ads in the near future. Then it also starts to make sense to the companies as well.

5. This is just a small step from Facebook, but very crucial step to the right direction.
This is the most important launch from Facebook in a long time and first serious attempt to really dig deeper to the Facebook database. The amount of data and social connections will beWhen it will be really launched we can see how the social search really catches on with its users. One form of social search is already appearing when people pose questions to FB status updates. Graph search might in some ways replace that behavior and make finding recommendations easier. So although Wall Street was not particularly delighted about the new announcement, this function will definitely be interesting. Also to make Graph Search to function on full scale, requires apparently much more work.

Maybe more of a philosophical question, but also as it core and crucial to the success is the following:

Do I trust more the social recommendation than expert recommendation?

I trust my social circles in many of the issues there are. However, with certain issues I want to get views of experts. The amount of likes does not always tell the relevance to the searcher.

It will be the battle between hyperlinks and likes.

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Do You Still Want to Hear About Social Media Trends 2013?

Although everyone and their mother has already given their point of view about current social media trends, here are couple of more predictions.

Good folks at Kurio (Finnish Digital Marketing Think Tank) asked me and 17 other Finnish “social media experts”(stated by the report, I prefer to just be “the planner guy with funny glasses”) about social media trends in 2013 and conducted interesting study about the results. They identified nine emerging trends in social media for the year 2013. The report is in Finnish, but the main trends can be read below. All the finnish-speakers should definitely download the report below.

Big Social Media Themes for 2013  (my comments in italics):

1. 2013 is the year of Mobile (this has been my favourite prediction for at least five years. The main difference is that this year I am actually believing it)
2. Multichannel story-telling is the way to create modern phenomena (Or put it this way: If your marketing activity is not multi-channel/channel-agnostic/holistic/360/add your favourite buzzword by nature, it will be doomed to fail)
3. Lack of human resources is the main constraint in social media (The problem is two-folded, there is definitely lack of people actually working with social media. But there is actually even bigger talent problem: there are lots of “social media experts”, “community managers” but not enough actual strategic thinking about what we should do with and in social media. Social media without strategic thinking behind it is irrelevant at best and purely dangerous at worst.)
4. Big Data (Like the report also points out: we have lots of data & information, but do we have talent, resources and capabilities to turn that information to action?)
5. Content: Interesting, current and value-adding (Which starts the discussion about what is the good content? I still believe that good content is either 1)useful 2)funny 3)on some rare instances both)
6. Picture tells more than 2013 words (Despite the revolt against Instagram, people will rather share more pictures online than less in 2013)
7. Social cannot be just a digital or marketing function, but should be thought holistically (Definitely true, but also the most difficult to achieve. On some instances to make the change requires totally new management, who understands the possibilities of digital and social media. On other instances it requires adequate mix of sticks and carrots to ensure the competitive advantage in digital age)
8. Social media channels are starting to resemble more bought media (The pressure to monetize is already showing with different social networks, especially with Facebook)
9. Users are more and more critical towards marketing activities in social media (You might fool a customer once, but not twice. The opportunity to fool once has already passed)

Download the report (in Finnish).

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